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Adhan / Call to Prayer
The Muslim call to prayer, the adhan, sounds five times each day across Jerusalem as throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world, sung by a muezzin traditionally from atop the minaret of each mosque. From the muezzin's throat, though seemingly from the sacred Earth itself beneath his feet, each verse pours forth and rises soaring into the sky - Allah hu akbar, "God is great" - then falls back to Earth and comes to a sudden, echoing silence; the next verse then rises and falls into silence in turn - Ash-hadu an la ilaha illa-Allah, Ash-hadu anna Muhammedan rasulullah, "I bear witness that there is no god but God, and Muhammed is his prophet...." First the call of one muezzin is heard, floating over the rooftops from some distant minaret, perhaps that of the Aqsa on the Temple Mount; then the call of another, nearer one; then another, and another, until like a ghostly choir their voices fill the air over the Holy City. In the morning, their cry is the cry of the East and the rising sun, the cry of Asia. In the evening, it is the cry of the West and the moonlit sea, of Africa. It is a cry piercing air and stone and shadow, a cry of the ages; a cry of clear, starry nights and immense solitudes; a cry out of the desert from Mecca, from Arabia, across the Middle East and Africa to the Pillars of Hercules and the New World's slave-ports on the Atlantic; from the Mediterranean along the eastern shores of Homer's wine-dark Aegean and over the Bosphorus into Europe; over the steppes of Central Asia and along ancient caravan routes to the borders of China, the Indian Subcontinent, the island nations of Southeast Asia and the Pacific; across time zones and international direct-dialing codes; in the skies over Jerusalem, Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, Istanbul, Algiers, Damascus, Beirut, Casablanca, Tehran, Kabul, Tunis, Alexandria, Abidjan, Karachi, Kandahar, Sarajevo, Tripoli, Riyadh, Mogadishu, Jakarta, Kashgar, Islamabad.
At home in California in the Spring of 2003, a year before I came to Jerusalem, I heard the call to prayer live on CNN from the minarets of Baghdad the first night of the war in Iraq as the city awaited the American bombs. Across the distance, the adhan rose and fell, began and ended and then began again, seeming as it hung in the air of my living room to carry within it the trembling and held breath of an entire nation. In each frozen silence I could see the faces of countless frightened children clinging to their frightened parents, praying in countless darkened basements, all live via satellite. It was not long afterward that the call to prayer was replaced by the wail of air raid sirens over Baghdad, and the first bombs of the war began to fall.
Tonight in Jerusalem I hear it again while Yusef and I sit chatting in the hotel lobby over tea, the adhan rising and falling into silence as darkness settles once more over the Middle East. From the Old City’s Armenian Quarter, the sound of bagpipes can also be heard - a lilting holdover from the British Mandate period as strange accompaniment to the muezzin's call - and from somewhere in East Jerusalem the cry of a police siren. As Yusef excuses himself to go and pray, it occurs to me that in years to come I will remember this as the sound of Jerusalem on a warm April evening in 2004: bagpipes, police sirens, the call to prayer.
[Next: Poem Fragment, Jerusalem ]

Mark C. Eades
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