A Sound in the Dark

When our professor gave the assignment to blog about an image or a sound that affected you, the first sound that came to my mind would not go away. It is the Muslim call to prayer. Specifically, it is the pre-dawn call to prayer that would not fail to stir me from my sleep on my last trip back to Dheisheh Refugee Camp in Bethlehem. When I visited my host family there before they were living in a different house on the far edge of the Camp so I hardly ever heard the call to prayer from the house. Now they live in their old house which is in the middle of the Camp, surrounded by three mosques. Because they were so loud, they would always bring me to some sort of semi-consciousness in the cold, frosty darkness, and I would lie warm in my bed listening until the three ameens stopped calling the faithful to pray before I went back into sleep. Being woken up in this fashion calmed me down because I knew that there was nothing I could do about the loudness but I knew that they would stop, so I enjoyed the beauty of their three calls. Each ameen would start on the heels of the last, so although they overlapped, they did not echo each other. Extra-specifically, the sound that stays with me was one time when there was a movingly beautiful recitation that made me want to call my friends and let them listen. I didn't because it was so early and I was so tired but I metaphorically held my breath as I listened.

This media communicates the importance of prayer at certain times, and the role of Islam in the whole community. There are loudspeakers on the minarets so that the message that it is time to pray will reach the most people. Before loudspeakers, Palestinian Muslim villages marked their village borders by if one could hear the call to prayer from the village mosque. Christian villages used a church bell. I know some people who I know sleep though the pre-dawn call and then pray that prayer later. Although the purpose of the call is to tell Muslims to pray then, what I experienced it doing was waking shaking a foreign girl out of her night dreams for a bit.

In films, I often hear these sounds used to introduce a Muslim setting, to set the mood for mystery, intrigue, and veiled ladies with dark eyes. In an American context, I have come to associate these sounds in a movie with the "Islam vs. the West" dialogue. The call to prayer is so overused in this manner that in a film it has for me a different meaning than it has when I hear it outside a movie theater. In the Palestinian context (and often in the Israeli context), the phrase I have always associated with this sound is that it "punctuates the day" or it "punctuates my life." It is a steady place-marker. And often, it is beautiful.