THE OTHER SLEEPLESS NIGHT as I tossed and turned, I caught the azaan (adhan) al-fajr, or first call to prayer of the day. Something odd struck me about it this time: it seemed actually pleasant, not the cacophonous and drawn out caterwauling I had grudgingly become accustomed to. I sensed that Kiki was awake, so I mentioned how different it sounded to my ears. "Oh, the government made them all use the same call to prayer. It happened a couple of months ago." And she rolled over and went back to sleep.
But this news, far from answering my curiosity, actually troubled me. Was this some sort of homogenization effort by the government to make Cairo more palatable to the likes of me? Did I ask for this? Was there really a problem here that needed solving?
The next morning I quizzed Kiki further about it. She remembered reading it in the English-language Al-Ahram Weekly a while back, she was sure I could find the story online. (Which I did and so can you, here from AFP and here, a few weeks later, on NPR.)
Truth told part of the problem of the azaan is that each mosque has a different call, of differing quality, played over systems with varying levels of sound quality. The fact that they aren't synchronous, one of the points made by a Ministry official, seems much less important than these other factors, certainly when taken together. I'm certainly not in any position to tell whose version is better than another. It certainly suggests what's patently untrue, that Islam as practiced is uniform or homogenous.
Maybe part of my unhappiness is the sense that future tourists like us won't be sharing one of those quintessential hazing experiences of the Muslim world. Kiki and I still recall, fondly I suppose, in the summer of 1990, finding an acceptable hotel in the seaside town of Tabarka, Tunisia, to bed down in ... only to be rudely jolted out of our beds early the next morning by the deafening azaans from three nearby mosques. The hotel was situated at the aural intersection of all three.
Maybe the biggest problem, at least in the case of the azaah al-fajr, might be that the 'approved' version might be too beautiful to rouse you from your slumbers; for in the words of the azaan,
الصلاة خير من النوم (Prayer is better than sleep).
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