Competition of the mosques

It is 5:01am. There is a bass voice rumbling on with a lot of vibrato coming from the neighborhood mosque. The call to prayer, judging by the dull moan in the background from all over the rest of the city, was around 4:41am. But the mosque next door seems to be on a different time table than everyone else. It started sounding at least an hour before that, I didn’t check the clock but probably before 4am. Then its call to prayer was at least 10 minutes before the rest of the mosques. It is now continuing on with more chanting. The last several evenings too they have had an hour of chanting before the 6pm call to prayer in which a man calls out something and a couple of women’s voices then repeat it. It is very repetitious in intonation and cadence, almost trance-producing.

Mosque noises have always intrigued me because, except for Friday noon sermons, they are rarely intelligible and so I wonder who it is for. Presumably they are speaking Arabic but of course since hardly anybody knows any Arabic, they could be just making it up. Apparently it is sacreligious to use an intelligible language. I remember reading about a guy in another part of the country who was teaching people to pray in the national language and was thrown in jail for defaming the religion. Perhaps it is thought that they are speaking to God. If so, it is wondrously easy to talk to God in this day and age of electronic recordings. Indeed, if God likes hearing it, one wonders why they don’t just play it all day and all night? (Maybe the neighborhood mosque is on a campaign to do just that!)

I always look at it as basically a city-wide alarm clock to waken the faithful and unfaithful alike with the hope that they’ll crawl out of the sack and do their ritual. Most people can roll over and go back to sleep after the call to prayer, which in itself is beautiful in a mournful sort of way. But this hour of pre-call to prayer and the 30 minute post-call to prayer vibrato stuff was too much for me today. That is why I am up on the internet writing this.

A few years ago a professor, who is also of said faith, was commenting on a recent spate of increased noise and said that some mosque operators seem to think God is deaf. So I gather that there is currently another competition going on between the various “denominations”. My hypothesis is that our neighborhood mosque belongs to one of the newer varieties and not to the traditional variety most common in this area and perhaps seeks to win over more adherents by showing that it is more holy via its noise campaign. Certain people might indeed find that attractive because after all, maybe holiness can rub off on you, and a person can’t have too much holiness when facing Judgement Day.