Hearing the Call

Kito told us the following story last week- I can’t vouch for it’s veracity but I really want it to be true:

The call to prayer gets recited from mosques five times a day from a series of loudspeakers erected on the minarets of each building. In a Syrian town, the Muezzin (who chants the call over the speakers) was getting old and blind. The elders of the mosque decided to retire him and merely place a radio to the speaker each day and play the call to prayer from the radio broadcast. This went well for several days, until the Muezzin’s grandson happened to borrow the radio to listen to a pop station, innocently replacing the radio beside the speaker.

While the others mosques in the surrounding area started their evening call to prayer, the radio came on as it was set to do and they were joined by the dulcit tones of the latest Egyptian pop sensation blaring out from the mosque. After several minutes of frantic scrambling to the radio the music was replaced by the melodic sound of a radio being tuned until the relevant station was eventally located and set.

The old Muezzin got his job back the following day.