An Other Time

Local School Kids

I couldn't sleep the other night. I woke up in the pre-dawn hours and the air in the city, in my room, was completely still except for the blades of the ceiling fan cutting through the thick humidity. Thoughts, impressions, and images raced through my mind in some sort of tropical daze. -Then there was clarity.- It took the form of a lone voice crackling through a loud speaker, "Allah . . . . be praised" in Arabic. Off in the distance another voice invoked those holy words, then another and another. For twenty minutes I sat there listening to the morning call to prayer as it rippled throughout the city. Then, as suddenly as it had started, it was silent -save for the gentle hum of the fan overhead.

At night, after the last call to prayer, the city is wrapped in an inky blackness. Freed from the heat and sweat of the equatorial sun, the streets and people seem to come alive in the twilight hours. Wandering the crooked streets and alleyways of Old Town, ghosts and shadows move in and out of the pools of light that leak from open doors and windows. Men cloaked head to toe in white kanzus and women secreted away behind the spidery veils of their buibuis and burkas. Sipping chai, having their haircut in floursecent lit barbershops, telling stories and laughing with friends . . . it is all so familiar yet other worldly.

Time here is marked differently. The voice of the imam supercedes the incessant ticking of the second hand. The duty to pray, to kneel, to turn one's face toward Mecca trumps any 'urgent' meetings or 'pressing' business. Life is driven neither by the clock nor by the market, but by the call of the minaret.

I find myself wondering if we, in the West, are missing out on something. Is this what medieval europe was like when church steeples dotted the landscape and their bells marked the Hours? In our drive to advance, to progress, to be modern and enlightened I wonder what we might have lost.

I'm fascinated by Islam and the way in which it seems to engage the entirety of the believer. It isn't simply an intellectual exercise or rhetorical drill. Its insistence on physically participating in a set series of ritual actions, of demanding that the individual bend in the direction of the other, is a powerful tool in shaping the lives of those who participate and enact it.The prayers aren't simply uttered by the lips several times a day, rather they flow from the whole person.

I know that I don't know a lot about Islam - or life here for that matter. I know that these observations are laced with the romanticism and exoticism that is part and parcel of being a stranger in a strange land. I know that I'm too modern, too rational, too western, too judeo-christian, too whatever, to even try to comprehend what is actually going on.

Still, as the call to prayer pierces the air, I wonder what insights we could learn if we took the time to listen.