The Singing Pillars of Islam

Süddeutsche Zeitung, Werner Bloch, 28.02.2009, Chars

When the airborne assault starts up, anybody still curled up in bed automatically covers their ears. It is the cry of the muezzins, the call to prayer for Cairo’s eighteen million Muslims. Five times a day, the faithful and unfaithful alike are shaken and moved in equal measure by dense cloud of sound descending upon them from all directions. There are thousands who praise God from rooftops and minarets, each of them seemingly determined to give Allah the loudest acclamation.
Because the muezzins do not start up simultaneously, however, and because the various melodies, keys and pitches grate against each other, the cacophony of the Arabian metropolis bursts into life in a corrosive cloud of sound, strange and sublime – like a defiant sign of life. But maybe not for much longer. The Egyptian government has decided that in future only thirty of the three thousand muezzins in Cairo will be allowed to call the faithful to prayer. The authorities will choose those they consider to be the best, and transmit their voices by radio.
The plan confronts the muezzins with grave problems. These Muslim officials are not just pillars of Islam, but also employees of the state: they earn 300 pounds a month, which is about 50 euro. Not enough to live on, but a basis at least for the two or three other jobs most Egyptians need to survive.
A German-Egyptian theatre production has now taken up the cause of the Islamic precariat. “Radio Muezzin”, a coproduction of the Goethe Institute and the HAU (Hebbel-am-Ufer) theatre in Berlin, makes the muezzins less anonymous, gives them a face for the first time. “The muezzins are an excellent example of the way life is structured by faith and actively practised in the mosque,” says Heiko Sievers, director of the Goethe Institute in Cairo. Explosive material for a German production in an Islamic country, especially since the Ministry of Religious Affairs in Cairo was quick to intervene. For a while, it looked like the project was going to be stifled by the censors even before the first rehearsal – but things turned out differently. Stefan Kaegi, one of the three-strong Rimini Protokoll theatre collective, refused to be discouraged by cultural barriers and the hawk-eyed authorities. “There was a lot of fear around at first,” Kaegi recalls. “After all, the kind of theatre we produce does have a lot to do with gaining trust.” But during his talks with the imams, the muezzins and the government ministry, the director soon noticed that the muezzins were very proud to be invited to take to the stage. “They really liked the idea.”
Small, dark and almost impossible to find, the al Sawa arts and culture centre cowers under a vast motorway flyover on the island of Gesira in the Nile. Its roof merges into the concrete of the highway leading to the splendid Cairo opera house and the city tower. The centre is the venue of the performance by the four Cairene muezzins who were cast in the course of the one-year preparations. Once on stage, they are astonishingly self-assured.
Take, for example, Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali Hindawy, a gaunt old man with sunken grey eyes and a large gap in his teeth. From the age of six, he worked as an electrician. Until one morning he was in the proximity of a faulty circuit that discharged 11,000 volts in a glaring green flash. He demonstrates the incident on the stage using a cucumber that, placed under current, glows eerily. “I was blinded and as good as dead for all of a day,” he says. “When I came to, my family were standing round me weeping.” When he was feeling better, the imam offered him a chance to sing in the mosque, saying how fine his voice was. And so he became a muezzin, something he had never thought about before.
Gilt-patterned carpets are strewn about the stage, like on the floor of a mosque. Flickering on a screen in the background are short films showing the everyday life of the muezzins, their cramped living conditions, their sometimes exhausting life. The sightless muezzin explains that for a long time blindness improved your chances of being appointed a muezzin: “Otherwise they’d be able to look down from the minaret into the surrounding houses and violate the privacy of the neighbours.” His daily bus-ride to the mosque takes two hours. For the entire journey he listens to cassette tapes with fluted recitations of the Koran. He switches to the sports channel only if the Egyptian national soccer team is playing. He moves with astonishing confidence through his pitch-black world. “I don’t use a stick,” he says, “I put my trust in God.”
It is casual sentences like that, with no trace of pathos, that bring the performers so astonishingly close to the audience. Anybody hoping for a glimpse behind the masks of Islamic dogmatists is likely to be disappointed. “Radio Muezzin” shows a slice of everyday cultural life – and that is why this production, now to be seen in the HAU in Berlin, pulls off a minor miracle. “The muezzin,” explains one of the performers, “is the central mediator between God and humankind. He calls the people to prayers and gives them the possibility to pray in peace.” We learn that the prophet Mohammed said that the muezzins were those with the longest necks in Paradise. “That means: they will receive the greatest reward in Paradise for their work and their song.”
If the Egyptian government carries out its plan, then fewer than before will be able to look forward to this reward. Will the sound of the new Cairo be polished to perfection but soulless at the same time? At the very end of “Radio Muezzin”, one of the four muezzins rises from the auditorium and climbs onto the stage. Dressed in a dark suit, he very obviously belongs to mighty of Cairo. He possesses a degree in law and his father was a lawyer and famous Koran reader before him. Mohamed Ali Mahmoud Farag is one of the thirty muezzins chosen by the authorities. He seems stiff, reserved, and much more refined than the fired colleagues for whom he has little pity to spare. “I am the vice world champion in reciting the Koran,” he proudly declares to the audience in a rippling, mellifluous voice. Perhaps the new sound of Cairo will be something like that: gentle sonority with none of the colour of local life.