I(K) read somewhere that the recommendation in the Quran is that no one should need to walk more than 800m to their place of worship – i.e. the closest mosque. I'm not sure if it's true or not, but based on the cacophony of prayer calls that we hear at prayer time it very well could be.
There are at least three mosques in the immediate vicinity of our compound. And when I say immediate vicinity I am not exaggerating because the closest one is right on the other side of the compound wall. There are five prayer calls per day. It’s interesting that every time it’s prayer time you can hear it already from afar even if the mosque closest to us is a few minutes late with the call. You hear this cacophony of calls starting somewhere in the distance getting closer and closer as each mosque starts the call.
The first prayer, or "salat" as it’s called in Arabic, is at around 4AM and the four others during waking hours. The last one is at around 8PM every day and the most important prayer is on Fridays. So Friday afternoons the mosques actually broadcast the whole sermon and if you sit outside during that time it sounds a bit like the imam would be commenting a football match, only it comes from every direction at once so you can’t make any words out (not that we’d understand anything even if we could).
For some reason we’ve been waking up almost every night lately when the closest mosque starts the 4AM call. Maybe they have a new imam who wants to make sure everyone wakes up so he’s turned the volume up a bit?
To finish up, here’s a picture of a roadside mosque that we saw a few days ago
There are at least three mosques in the immediate vicinity of our compound. And when I say immediate vicinity I am not exaggerating because the closest one is right on the other side of the compound wall. There are five prayer calls per day. It’s interesting that every time it’s prayer time you can hear it already from afar even if the mosque closest to us is a few minutes late with the call. You hear this cacophony of calls starting somewhere in the distance getting closer and closer as each mosque starts the call.
The first prayer, or "salat" as it’s called in Arabic, is at around 4AM and the four others during waking hours. The last one is at around 8PM every day and the most important prayer is on Fridays. So Friday afternoons the mosques actually broadcast the whole sermon and if you sit outside during that time it sounds a bit like the imam would be commenting a football match, only it comes from every direction at once so you can’t make any words out (not that we’d understand anything even if we could).
For some reason we’ve been waking up almost every night lately when the closest mosque starts the 4AM call. Maybe they have a new imam who wants to make sure everyone wakes up so he’s turned the volume up a bit?
To finish up, here’s a picture of a roadside mosque that we saw a few days ago
No comments:
Post a Comment