Cairo planning to fine-tune the call to prayer

Reporting from Cairo —  Sandals in alleys, keys scraping locks, the holy men are the first ones up, opening mosque doors and clicking on microphones, their cadences crackling across the sleepy city, summoning the faithful to another day of struggle and grace.

Mohamed Ahmed is among them in the half-light. Since he was a child, he’s wanted his voice to be an instrument for God. A small, swift man in a white tunic, he’s one of thousands of prayer callers whose tenors and baritones fill the Cairo skyline with, depending upon your ear, a clamor reminiscent of the caw of migrating birds or sacred music borne from deep in the desert.

The dueling rhythms fit this city, a ramshackle clutter of emotion and humanity, where the individual battles for recognition against the screech and bustle. The prayer caller, or muezzin, is that rare distinction, a neighborhood’s singular note of repose, the first sound many hear when car engines are cold and the moon fades to a powdery smudge in the sky.

But one man’s tranquillity is another’s cacophony. The Ministry of Religious Endowments, which oversees the nation’s mosques, says when you stitch all those voices together you’ve got an out-of-tune, rambunctious chorus that plays five times a day and brings anything but serenity. The ministry has decreed that the call to prayer, which is supposed to start in unison but often sounds like an overbearing echo, must now be delivered by one muezzin broadcast over a radio system linking the city’s 4,500 mosques.

“The call to prayer in Egypt has recently become a very chaotic process involving a war of microphones and sound disruptions that do not suit the spirituality of calling for the prayer,” said Minister of Endowment Hamdi Zaqzouq. “The unified call for prayers will bring back its spirituality, because its main aim is to attract people to praying and not repel them.”

The ambitious plan is part of a nationwide drive that began this month in Alexandria. Cairo’s large mosques have embraced the idea, but this being Egypt, technology problems have caused delays. And in a country where rules can be regarded as mere discretionary annoyances, many neighborhood muezzins, the tone deaf and the melodic alike, are not surrendering their loudspeakers.

“No one came to tell me of this new regulation,” said Ahmed, sitting near stacks of prayer rugs in the Maghfera (Forgiveness) mosque below the flight path to Cairo International Airport. “I think I heard something about it last year. But if this happens, the call to prayer will lose its mystique and spirituality. People in these streets know my voice. And in other mosques and in other neighborhoods the worshipers know the voices of their muezzins.”

He paused, less exasperated than intrigued at how the new system will reach thousands of small, unregulated mosques, known as zawiyas.

“It’ll never work,” he said. “It’s too expensive to coordinate such a plan.”

Like many muezzins, Ahmed receives occasional donations but no salary. He grew up a farmer’s son in southern Egypt and traveled to Cairo in his 20s, wandering from mosque to mosque and studying the timbre and rhythm of the city’s revered callers. Maghfera has been his spiritual home for 20 years and he is not likely to let the state pull the plug on his vocation, especially now during the holy month of Ramadan.

“I’ve wanted to serve God since I was a boy,” he said. “I never wanted a prominent job or big money. For me, life is a phase, a space before paradise. The afterlife is the most important, and the best way to earn credit with God is to be in a mosque calling people to prayer. My reward will come later. A lot of young men stop by and ask if they can make the call to prayer so they can gather the goodness of God.”

He knows the fathers and sons washing themselves for prayers in the spigots of the green and yellow mosque. He has watched them grow, succeed, fail, and, for the older ones, his voice is as recognizable as a long-ago song on a car radio. It has stayed constant — a soothing tenor chanting ancient words — while this city of 18 million has grown anxious, fretful and desperate for solace.

“The old Cairo I knew,” he said, “has been swapped for another one. There are so many more mosques now than there used to be, and the number of people coming goes up every year.”

He checks the time, steps to his microphone.

Hayya ‘ala-salatt.

Hayya ‘ala-salatt. (Make haste toward prayers.)

Men and boys come from across the neighborhood, putting down tools, tucking papers away; they slip off shoes and step into the dimness beneath overhead fans. More and more arrive and soon the small mosque, smelling of aftershave and sweat, is crowded with men and the murmur of prayer. The descending planes and the traffic on the highway seem to fall silent and Ahmed, a speck of white in a colorful sea, stands in the front, hands raised, palms open.

Still spry in his 60s, Ahmed prostrates himself. The men follow, bent rows from wall to wall. A few worshipers open Korans. The soft turn of pages. A breath. A child looks toward the door light. The prayer done, the men disappear as quickly as they came. Ahmed steps outside into the breeze.

In a few more hours, the call would come again and the men would retrace their steps, following that trusted voice toward a moment of grace.

jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Amro Hassan of The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.