The muezzin for the mosque closest to my home is completely incomprehensible for the fajr adhan. This is pretty sad, since he’s clearly trying very hard to do a good job. It takes him no less than 10 minutes to get the whole thing out from the (presumably) initial Allahuakbar till the Laa ilaha illa Allah. He screams into the microphone (don’t let any Turks clown on shouting Arab shuyookh, they shout here too, just at fajr time), clearly using his lungs at maximum capacity, and is very careful to introduce a not-so-subtle, whiny vibratto that hits every note on the musical (!) scale. It’s quite a performance. But if you didn’t know that it had to be the adhan, you wouldn’t really know it was the adhan.
Despite all this, I try to set my alarm clock for a few minutes before the adhan goes off so I can lay in bed and listen to it. Hey, it’s one of my favorite things about living in Turkey, the adhan! My timing’s not always spot-on, though (the adhan doesn’t begin when fajr comes in, but instead at roughly 45 minutes till sunrise), so if I don’t hear him peal out the initial, overly nasal ‘AllahuekberAllaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAaaaaAAAaaahuEK-BERrrrr,’ then I’m left in this pool of confusion trying to repeat after him but not sure if I’m getting it right at all. Is he in the middle of saying Haya `alaas-salaah? Haya `alaal-falah? No, wait, it’s the end of EsselaaaAAAAaatuhayrunnnnminennevvvvvvm! But, wait …. no, he just said Allahuekber again and stopped, so that couldn’t have been As-salaatu khayrun min an-nawm. But there’s no way that was a Laa ilaha illa Allah, so what’s going on here?
Some mornings I lay there listening, unable to make out what he’s saying for an entire seven or eight minutes, and seriously considering whether it’s possible the masjid PA system is being used to blast some odd Sufi hymn or random salawaat or something (they do that sometimes, but usually in the middle of the day a coupla hours before dhuhr).
I really shouldn’t complain, though — because progress is progress. Yes, this is an improvement! Calling the adhan in Arabic was illegal in Turkey for awhile, so for years everyone here had to listen to it in Turkish. (It’s been fixed since 1950.) Naoodhubillah!
1 Comment
February 6, 2009 at 11:16 am
Lol! This actually grabbed my attention from the first line. Funny, and good writing style too. I really liked it!