Fear of the Other: The Call to Prayer at Dusk
Author: Elliot Reichert
Program: SIT- Morocco
My arrival in Morocco coincided with the first night of Ramadan, a month of the Islamic calendar celebrated with fasting and pronounced piety. That first evening in Rabat, after finishing dinner at the Andalusian house that was our school, all of us travel-weary students ventured out to the terraces to enjoy a particularly excellent view of the ocean, the ancient city surrounding us, and the minarets and towers of mosques throughout the city, which rise above the skyline of Rabat like stone arms reaching for the heavens. The Hassan tower, an ancient monument of brown stone marking the mausoleum of the Kings, loomed in the distance like an ancestor watching over its ever-changing kin, offering a reminder of its magnificent past. With much to see in every direction, it was a while before I finally settled on watching the ocean, easily visible above the roofs of the houses next to the school. The sun was large and red-orange, already half-submerged behind a wrinkled satin sheet of blue and silver. In a matter of minutes I watched it sink to just a sliver, like a yolk sliding in a pan when the egg is first cracked. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the cosmology of the moment. Though it seemed that the sun was escaping us, we were really hiding from it, as the earth turned away from its light and into the darkness of its own shadow. As I held the balcony railing, I leaned back on my heels and turned my head to the sky in an attempt to imitate the monumental sensation of falling away from the sun. I've tried it before and it didn't feel any more convincing this time. If the earth really does circle the sun, why can't we feel its rotation? Why doesn't each sunset feel like falling backwards?
Cannon fire interrupted my dreaming. My eyelids burst open and I searched frantically for that last trace of sun, but I knew it had already disappeared—a pink and blue glow in the clouds was the only sign that it had ever hung in the sky at all. In that same moment, the once silent city erupted in a chorus of calls. Most that I heard poured out from bullhorns mounted on minarets, but even their amplified chanting didn't shout down the cries of our neighbors, who raised their voices from inside their houses. No two were alike in tone or cadence, and their sounds mingling in the thick, humid air sounded like the sirens of war, like an air raid warning us to hide under our desks.
I thought back to the history lesson we had been given earlier that day, searching for some meaning in this ritual which I knew from books and lectures, but which felt absolutely alien as it now ambushed my senses. Before the coming of Europeans, Rabat was merely a defensive coastal outpost, well-fortified but barely occupied. In those times, Muslims turned their backs from the sea because it bore them only trouble, building thick walls around their coastal cities to protect them from the unknown and the unwelcome. Important structures were set back safely from the shoreline, and only the wretched and the dead occupied the land at the edge of the water. The legacy of that paranoia is still apparent in Rabat—if you walk along the beach and look inland at the city, you'll see only graveyards and shantytowns. They line the shore just outside the protective embrace of the city wall, naked and vulnerable.
Was that what this call was proclaiming? Were the people of Rabat being warned that earlier that same day almost forty Westerns had invaded their city, not by sea this time but by sky? Why did these sounds, which were alleged professions of faith, seem like the desperate cries of a city afraid of the dark, a city that retreated to shelter at the first sign of dusk, leaving only the echoes of its wailing to fill the empty streets within its ancient walls?
Focusing my ears on just one voice, a faint soundstream coming from a third story window of a house next door, I strained to separate this single thread from the tangle of cries. At first, I heard nothing I understood, but meaning suddenly emerged from the unceasing flow:
'I bear witness that there is no god but God, and Muhammad is his prophet,' testified the mysterious voice in long, trailing strands of Arabic not quite sung, but not chanted either.
Despite being emblematic of one the most apparent differences between where I had just left and where I was now to live, I found the message strangely comforting. Though the promise of passionate religious devotion was a strange welcome for my secular American self, at the very least, Sunday school had taught me that the god they prayed to was merciful and peaceful, and more importantly, that his followers strove to be the same. How dangerous and unwelcoming could a country be if it dropped everything five times a day to pay respect to such faith?
Clearly, I needed to learn from Rabat's example and not turn my back to the sea. I had a whole ocean of experiences ahead of me, and hiding under my desk out of ignorance and fear would merely ruin the experience of being somewhere that was not perfectly familiar or perfectly safe. After all, why build a city on the ocean only to hide from the view?
