17 June 2007

Prayer is Better Than Sleep

22 April
This will be my last post on the adzan in Indonesia.
Click here for a clear, simple explanation of the calls to prayer.
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“Prayer is better than sleep” is the line concluding the Sunni calls to prayer at dawn. At times deeply under-slept, I’m ready to make a deal: at this point I’d settle for either.

Let me give you an example of what I’m talking about, so you don’t mistake my subject for, say, an objection to Islam or to prayer. Or attribute it over-much to some unfortunate, personal nervous condition. What moves me to write is the use (& abuse) of loudspeakers, not my host country's faith.

Here’s 48 & 49 seconds of two very different & moving calls, which we heard just about every night for several weeks. The sound may be a little muted. These are clips from one 9 minute recording, made at 3:30 AM during the Month of Lamentations:









Many forces created these sounds, not only faith & beauty & love of God, but also politics at the pulpit & the headless, sometimes frightening momentum of religion. A will to control plugs in a bank of speakers at 3:30 AM, as much as a good man's earnest evangelism. I say: call away! But Godspeed to the multitudes of Muslims who (secretly, justly fearing reprisals) also object to the loudspeakers.

"That Is Most Unusual"

As I’ve discovered through minaret hunts & formal interview—including my standing a ethno-musicologist with a degree in Sacred Music on my balcony on Friday at 6 pm—what we hear from the 30th floor of our apartment building can be a total aberration. It is not normal. Sometimes it's an eddy of echoing noise that is representative only of bad acoustics, an unfortunate number of minarets with competing loudspeakers, some egos & some desperately untalented voices.

To quote my appalled expert, who wears jilbab to work & had initially given my description that skeptical sideways squint you reserve for people you suspect might be insane, aggressively ignorant, or bigots: “That sounds TERRIBLE!!”

That’s all I wanted to hear. That & an Indonesian cleric's daughter (one who, like her revered father, deplores loudspeakers) remarking, "That is most unusual." Here’s another, very different, 50 second example from the balcony, taken during a magnificent sunset lightning storm on Nyepi, the Balinese day of silence:






What's Normal

Normally, the prayers are called (not 'sung') by a trained muezzin (muoy-ZEEN or muzzin) five times a day. These gently pattern the day whether or not you stop work, lay out your prayer mat facing Mecca (west), & bow your head to the ground in prayer. Soon, you don't hear them consciously. There are roughly 14 lines to the standard prayer & it doesn’t take too long to call them. (It doesn’t take, say, the hour & a half it frequently takes one neighboring muezzin to embellish them.) They are always called in Arabic.

A short iqama often precedes, summoning the faithful to prayer in advance. Sometimes they broadcast the sermons, too. Amplified Khotbah--fiery (or strident) speeches--galvanize the faithful. And then special prayers or chants on holidays. Also announcements of events, like fund-raisers & picnics, intended for the local congregation's ears. There can be a lot to say.

Here’s a short (& inadvertently funny) example of a single muezzin calling, recorded at the Jakarta Islamic Center in Tanjung Priok, on Maulid, Muhammad’s birthday. The video is superfluous to the sound recording, but in this case provided a surprise comic ending:





Many muezzins, of course, are very talented & I have my favorites. The ones I listen for. The ones I stop work & sit outside for, the ones with whom I’m moved to pray. Just because you’re singing God’s praises, however, just because you are truly faithful, doesn’t mean you’re a good singer who deserves a set of loudspeakers aimed at a city of 12 million. I've heard little children in training, adolescents with cracking voices, elderly men with head colds...sometimes its karaoke night in God's basement.

Most of the time, though, it's only & specifically the acoustics or sound system ruining what would otherwise be a beautiful, devotional a cappella (49 secs; listen for the melisma, running a single syllable's note (pitch) up & down):






To the foreigner's ear, when many calls are all going at once, it can be hard to think much less to pray.

I don't even hear it really, most people tell me breezily. Then more philosophically: The speakers should not be necessary; every observant Muslim knows when it's time for prayer. But some whisper to me later, of the broadcasting: I hate it. But there is nothing I can do.

See, there's no one in charge of this. Prayer is one of the 5 pillars of Islam & calling them from the minarets goes back to the days of Muhammad. The proliferation of competing loudspeakers, however, is not part of a unified, intentional design. It's certainly not regulated by the secular government. There's a great awareness of mosque & state not (openly) legislating one another's business. And as each mosque can make its own decisions, the cacophony we hear from the balcony this is the sum of thousands of independent choices. Is there an upper bound, as some say has been reached in Cairo? What would it take to change the trend?

"A very charismatic cleric might do it," one woman speculated doubtfully. "But he would have to be very, very powerful. And then," she added thoughtfully, "he would have more important problems to address first."

EPILOGUE:

In the city of Bandung, 3 hours south of here, new buildings are allowed to be constructed only by a consensus of de facto neighborhood associations. By one colleague's report, no Christian church has been approved for construction there in recent decades based on the winning argument that its Sunday bells would be a public nuisance, bothering everyone with their clamor while people were trying to sleep.

posted by Anne E. Campisi at 1:58 PM

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