Is it even remotely feasible to get Cairo’s 4,000 mosques to all sing the same tune?
This is exactly what Egypt’s religious ministry is aiming to do, launching on Thursday an ambitious project to, neighborhood by neighborhood, unify the timing and sound of the Islamic call to prayer across this sprawling city of 18 million.
The project was originally meant to start in Cairo’s northern suburbs on Wednesday, the first day of the holy fasting month of Ramadan, but system glitches and a communication breakdown delayed it by a day.
“Egyptians have a problem with timing,” said Sheik Salem Abdel-Galil, the official at the Ministry of Religious Endowments who has done more than anyone to push this project forward.
“Our goals are to accurately set the time of prayer so that it is called at the same time from each mosque, and to control the quality of the voices that call the prayer,” he said.
Like pretty much everything in this densely populated, traffic-choked city, the call to prayer, or azzan, in Cairo is a chaotic affair of wildly different voices ringing out at different times.
Even though it is technically a requirement for the caller, or muezzin, to have a beautiful voice, many who perform the call simply do not.
The US$175,000 project will equip each mosque with a receiver that will broadcast a single call to prayer from a downtown studio.
Abdel-Galil said every one of the city’s mosques should be on the system by the end of Ramadan.
Cities in Syria, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey have all successfully enforced some sort of unified call to prayer, but in Cairo there is the additional challenge of thousands of unregistered mosques.
To take advantage of tax breaks, many landlords convert a small room at the foot of their buildings into a mosque, also known as a zawya, which often makes up for its small size with massive loudspeakers.
Ashraf Tawfiq, a resident of the northern suburb of Nasr City, said the small zawyas in his neighborhood still did their own calls to prayer, but the larger mosques had all switched over to the new unified chant, which he said was beautiful.
“There was an awkward moment when the mosque’s muezzin began his own call to prayer, but then he was interrupted by the unified call coming out of the mosque’s sound system,” he said.
For many of the muezzins, however, it means a loss of livelihood and prestige as they are in some cases downgraded to little more than mosque custodians.
“People in the mosque here compete to make the call and find joy when making it, and we will be depriving people from this rewarding practice,” said Sheik Youssef Salah, who leads the prayers in the lower-income neighborhood Imbaba.
“Our mosque will definitely lose some of its spirit and it will detract from the personality of our great city,” he said.
In the Middle Ages, Cairo was known as the city of a thousand minarets and famous for the diversity of its azzans.
Religious conservatives have also said the project is wasteful and against Islam because it tampers with an age-old ritual.
“The Prophet Mohammed never ordered people to unify their calls to prayer in [his home of] Medina, so we shouldn’t do the same in Cairo,” said Sheik Youssef al-Badri, a conservative famed for his religious-inspired lawsuits.
Abdel-Galil dismissed the critics as narrow minded, saying that Egypt was a difficult place to change because of its conservative mindset.
“These are the same people who once said television was an anti-Islamic innovation and now they use the television to spread their extreme messages,” Abdel-Galil said.
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