Call to Prayer

I love the Islamic call to prayer. It occurs five times a day and I find the chanting of the muezzin immensely relaxing. The first time I heard it, I was workling in Saudi for a few days, installing a Computer Aided Design system. Things had not been going well. We couldn't get the graphics on the screen properly (this was in the mid-80's when this stuff was cutting edge and difficult). We were trying to debug code when in fact it was a hardware setting on the graphics card. And then the call to prayer started and for a few minutes everytning in the world seem tranqil and at peace.

Whenever I hear a call to prayer now, I think back to that moment. These days, many mosques seem to use a recording, which isn't the same as hearing the voice of a real person singing live.*

There is a mosque close by the hotel and this video clip was taken from the hotel roof last Friday, when we were once again grappling with some software issues, whilst sitting by the pool. Different place in the world, different programing language, different appliction, same frustrations. Plus ca change....




*Strangely enough, just as I was finishing this post, there was an item on Radio 4 breakfast news about the use of recordings of the call to prayer from mosques in Cairo.