My favorite souvenir from my trip to Egypt this summer is an empty bullet casing from a rifle, picked up from the cement of Tahrir Square. My second favorite souvenir is the homemade CD of Egyptian music given to me by a taxi driver whose singer I will never know but whose songs I can sing almost perfectly in Arabic after listening to it for nearly four months. After these two come the rugs and the jewelry and the bags and the scarves and the skirts and the shirts and the shoes and the books I bought. Well, someone had to support the economy this summer, and there was a noticeable dearth of tourists!
But what I would most liked
to have brought home with me was impossible to bring home. It was something in the air. It announced the morning and the evening. It filled the dawn and dusk with longing, with sadness and humility and acquiesence, with faith. It was, of course, the call of the muezzin,
the call to prayer. If you have never heard it and if you're somewhere quiet, you should click on the link now, before you read any further. I can think of no piece of music that stirs the soul more deeply, no matter how loudly the parishioners in my father's congregation belt out, "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
I first heard the adhan, the call, at sunset a few hours after my arrival into Cairo. We had just had a wonderful meal in an open air restuarant overlooking Cairo's "Central Park," the big green space that is the best place to get an overview of the city, the 74 acres of Al Azhar Park, created over a garbage dump less than two decades ago. Dusk creeps up over the park from the densely populated city at its base. Dusk rises
around your ankles, like a fog. And the music of the adhan starts at one mosque, the rich and sonorous sustained notes of the statement of faith that is required of every Muslim, trailing down the narrow streets like a tendril of smoke calling the faithful to mind. One by one, the muezzin with the nearest, most powerful speaker is joined by the others. It is not synchronized. Each muezzin seems to have his own version of sunrise and sunset and the other three times set for prayer. It is not always entirely harmonic depending where you are. Remember: There are over 4,000 mosques in Cairo.
The words are a reminder to the faithful to pray, as well as a summation of the Shahada, the statement of faith. But the power of the adhan is the power of a lament. It is the voice of the individual, lost in the world, lost in the desert, and crying out for salvation. It is the voice of all those who seek God. That is the power of the adhan. Though it is the song and sound and heartbeat of Islam, it is also the voice in the wilderness who is Jewish, who is Christian, who is you and who is me. It is the truth of our fundamental, inexorable aloneness in the world, and our fundamental yearning to be gathered in some
expression that can redeem this plight. The plaintiveness of the call reveals what no sermon ever does, that our faiths are based in our loneliness and in our desire to find the "oneness" hidden therein.
And what better than music, the most universal voice, which needs no language but a single note drawn across the night air on some stringed instrument no culture has yet given a name.
There is an old church of some lost and undefined denomination a block from my house. It's a community center now, where the elderly play games and eat hot meals, where the homeless can usually find a spare loaf of bread fresh from the neighborhood's several bakeries. Daycare and after school care fills the building and its small playground with children. It has a small square tower untopped by any religious symbol, and it is here I would like to plant a speaker to broadcast the call to prayer over my neighborhood.
How does that spiritual go? "It's me, it's me, it's me, oh Lord, standing in the need of prayer." Who does not?
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