Von MICHAEL KIMMELMAN
19.03.2009 / New York Times
BERLIN — On several recent evenings four muezzins from Cairo took to a carpeted stage at Hau Zwei, a Berlin theater, and talked about their lives and jobs. In their stocking feet, as if in a mosque, they showed family snapshots and pictures of their neighborhoods, and explained to the audience how to wash and pray according to Muslim ritual. “Radio Muezzin,” conceived by Stefan Kaegi, a Swiss director, is a one-act play, a documentary, really (performed in Arabic with subtitles), the concept for which arose after a decision in 2004 by the Egyptian minister of religious endowments, Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq.
The minister announced that the public racket caused by Cairo’s hundreds of muezzins leading the daily calls to prayer all at slightly different times and over scratchy loudspeakers across the city was simply too much for residents to bear any longer. The ministry would henceforth choose the 30 or so best muezzins, who would take turns broadcasting the call to prayer live via a dedicated radio channel to be boomed into the streets from the roughly 1,000 government-run mosques around town. Those not picked would have to find new work.
Of course there were instant rumors that the plan was actually an American-sponsored plot to gain control of the mosques and stifle extremists in the storefront prayer rooms that had sprung up throughout the city. The plan did not go into immediate effect. The goal is to enforce it next year.
Meanwhile the play, which laments the decision’s impact on the lives of ordinary muezzins, like those onstage here, not to mention on the people who would no longer hear them, had its premiere in December before a select audience in Cairo. It was too politically touchy an undertaking for Egyptians to embrace openly, according to the play’s promoters. So that single performance was paid for not by Egyptians but by the German federal government and the Berlin mayor’s office. You might say “Radio Muezzin” was as much about Germany promoting diverse voices as it was about Egypt’s silencing them. Not that there aren’t plenty of ethnic and religious troubles in this country.
Berlin alone is home to 220,000 Muslims, but the first mosque in the former Communist half of the city opened just last year, to far-right protests. Protests have greeted the building of mosques all across Germany, and the one now under way in Cologne has become a frequent lightning rod. No calls to prayers are permitted on the streets here or in many countries across Western Europe, and some opportunistic European festival directors, contemplating taking on this play, have reportedly considered asking the muezzins to publicly chant the azan, as the call to prayer is known, precisely to provoke a scandal and to generate headlines.
Even so, an abiding culture of tolerance and civility ranks high among this city’s traits, and the applause from the audience the other night was long and heartfelt. Berliners were clearly charmed.
And why not? The four muezzins, who made touchingly awkward and mostly reluctant performers, were nothing if not charming. Hussein Gouda Hussein Bdawy, who’s nearly blind, described finding his calling when he became a muezzin, gaining as part of the job the sheik’s robe and hat that he had always dreamed of wearing. Proud of his work, he didn’t even mind the roughly two-hour commute from his tiny apartment to the mosque. He spends the long bus ride listening to radio broadcasts of the Koran, he said, switching stations only to hear the soccer matches of the Egyptian national team.
Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali Hindawy, a retired electrician, the most voluble of the bunch, then recounted having been badly injured in a traffic accident. He became a muezzin, he explained, after the imam in the mosque where he spent much of his time recovering noticed the mellifluousness of his voice. Some years ago, Mr. Abdelsamia added, he almost died while trying to repair a short circuit when a co-worker failed to shut off the power first. To demonstrate to the audience what might have happened, Mr. Abdelsamia hooked a pickle to a pair of live wires onstage. The pickle smoked for a minute or two. Mr. Abdelsamia then pointed to a callous on his forehead. It comes, he said, from constantly prostrating himself in prayer.
No wonder.
As for Mansour Abdelsalam Mansour Namous, a quiet, somber man in a long robe, he described leaving his family in the Egyptian countryside, where he couldn’t find work, to become a muezzin in the city. Today, he said, he needs to supplement his meager muezzin’s income by moonlighting in a bakery. Like other muezzins he is also responsible for vacuuming and tidying up his mosque. Luckily, he said, the one he works in is only big enough for a couple dozen worshippers.
By contrast the last of the four, Muhammad Ali Mahmoud Farag, dapper in a dark suit and the youngest by far, chants the call to prayer from Cairo’s largest mosque, which accommodates tens of thousands. Soft-spoken, socially well connected and enormous (he’s a bodybuilder, and pressed some barbells during the play to prove the point), he was born into a prominent religious family. Not long ago he took second prize in a worldwide Koran-reading competition in Malaysia. He showed photographs of himself with fellow competitors in the lobby of the hotel where the competitors stayed, and outside a McDonald’s.
One of the few dozen chosen by the Egyptian ministry to broadcast the azan, he closed the evening’s performance, chanting alone. Controlled and low-key, his voice was richly ornamented.
But it was instead the cacophony of all four muezzins, with their different rhythms and accents, chanting together, as they did when the play began, that stuck in the mind. Lifted up by their devotion, they made not a racket at all but rapturous music.
How especially beautiful it sounded here, where, unlike in Cairo, even the busiest neighborhoods are underpopulated and hushed. Mr. Abdelsamia, the electrician, remarked at one point what a loss it would be for Cairo not to have the variety of muezzins’ voices ringing through the streets. Having won over the crowd, he milked the applause at the end of the play, waving his arms and even taking a solo curtain call.
That provoked the audience to clap a little louder before filing out of the theater, into the dark stone-silence of Berlin.
BERLIN — On several recent evenings four muezzins from Cairo took to a carpeted stage at Hau Zwei, a Berlin theater, and talked about their lives and jobs. In their stocking feet, as if in a mosque, they showed family snapshots and pictures of their neighborhoods, and explained to the audience how to wash and pray according to Muslim ritual. “Radio Muezzin,” conceived by Stefan Kaegi, a Swiss director, is a one-act play, a documentary, really (performed in Arabic with subtitles), the concept for which arose after a decision in 2004 by the Egyptian minister of religious endowments, Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq.
The minister announced that the public racket caused by Cairo’s hundreds of muezzins leading the daily calls to prayer all at slightly different times and over scratchy loudspeakers across the city was simply too much for residents to bear any longer. The ministry would henceforth choose the 30 or so best muezzins, who would take turns broadcasting the call to prayer live via a dedicated radio channel to be boomed into the streets from the roughly 1,000 government-run mosques around town. Those not picked would have to find new work.
Of course there were instant rumors that the plan was actually an American-sponsored plot to gain control of the mosques and stifle extremists in the storefront prayer rooms that had sprung up throughout the city. The plan did not go into immediate effect. The goal is to enforce it next year.
Meanwhile the play, which laments the decision’s impact on the lives of ordinary muezzins, like those onstage here, not to mention on the people who would no longer hear them, had its premiere in December before a select audience in Cairo. It was too politically touchy an undertaking for Egyptians to embrace openly, according to the play’s promoters. So that single performance was paid for not by Egyptians but by the German federal government and the Berlin mayor’s office. You might say “Radio Muezzin” was as much about Germany promoting diverse voices as it was about Egypt’s silencing them. Not that there aren’t plenty of ethnic and religious troubles in this country.
Berlin alone is home to 220,000 Muslims, but the first mosque in the former Communist half of the city opened just last year, to far-right protests. Protests have greeted the building of mosques all across Germany, and the one now under way in Cologne has become a frequent lightning rod. No calls to prayers are permitted on the streets here or in many countries across Western Europe, and some opportunistic European festival directors, contemplating taking on this play, have reportedly considered asking the muezzins to publicly chant the azan, as the call to prayer is known, precisely to provoke a scandal and to generate headlines.
Even so, an abiding culture of tolerance and civility ranks high among this city’s traits, and the applause from the audience the other night was long and heartfelt. Berliners were clearly charmed.
And why not? The four muezzins, who made touchingly awkward and mostly reluctant performers, were nothing if not charming. Hussein Gouda Hussein Bdawy, who’s nearly blind, described finding his calling when he became a muezzin, gaining as part of the job the sheik’s robe and hat that he had always dreamed of wearing. Proud of his work, he didn’t even mind the roughly two-hour commute from his tiny apartment to the mosque. He spends the long bus ride listening to radio broadcasts of the Koran, he said, switching stations only to hear the soccer matches of the Egyptian national team.
Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali Hindawy, a retired electrician, the most voluble of the bunch, then recounted having been badly injured in a traffic accident. He became a muezzin, he explained, after the imam in the mosque where he spent much of his time recovering noticed the mellifluousness of his voice. Some years ago, Mr. Abdelsamia added, he almost died while trying to repair a short circuit when a co-worker failed to shut off the power first. To demonstrate to the audience what might have happened, Mr. Abdelsamia hooked a pickle to a pair of live wires onstage. The pickle smoked for a minute or two. Mr. Abdelsamia then pointed to a callous on his forehead. It comes, he said, from constantly prostrating himself in prayer.
No wonder.
As for Mansour Abdelsalam Mansour Namous, a quiet, somber man in a long robe, he described leaving his family in the Egyptian countryside, where he couldn’t find work, to become a muezzin in the city. Today, he said, he needs to supplement his meager muezzin’s income by moonlighting in a bakery. Like other muezzins he is also responsible for vacuuming and tidying up his mosque. Luckily, he said, the one he works in is only big enough for a couple dozen worshippers.
By contrast the last of the four, Muhammad Ali Mahmoud Farag, dapper in a dark suit and the youngest by far, chants the call to prayer from Cairo’s largest mosque, which accommodates tens of thousands. Soft-spoken, socially well connected and enormous (he’s a bodybuilder, and pressed some barbells during the play to prove the point), he was born into a prominent religious family. Not long ago he took second prize in a worldwide Koran-reading competition in Malaysia. He showed photographs of himself with fellow competitors in the lobby of the hotel where the competitors stayed, and outside a McDonald’s.
One of the few dozen chosen by the Egyptian ministry to broadcast the azan, he closed the evening’s performance, chanting alone. Controlled and low-key, his voice was richly ornamented.
But it was instead the cacophony of all four muezzins, with their different rhythms and accents, chanting together, as they did when the play began, that stuck in the mind. Lifted up by their devotion, they made not a racket at all but rapturous music.
How especially beautiful it sounded here, where, unlike in Cairo, even the busiest neighborhoods are underpopulated and hushed. Mr. Abdelsamia, the electrician, remarked at one point what a loss it would be for Cairo not to have the variety of muezzins’ voices ringing through the streets. Having won over the crowd, he milked the applause at the end of the play, waving his arms and even taking a solo curtain call.
That provoked the audience to clap a little louder before filing out of the theater, into the dark stone-silence of Berlin.
BERLIN — On several recent evenings four muezzins from Cairo took to a carpeted stage at Hau Zwei, a Berlin theater, and talked about their lives and jobs. In their stocking feet, as if in a mosque, they showed family snapshots and pictures of their neighborhoods, and explained to the audience how to wash and pray according to Muslim ritual. “Radio Muezzin,” conceived by Stefan Kaegi, a Swiss director, is a one-act play, a documentary, really (performed in Arabic with subtitles), the concept for which arose after a decision in 2004 by the Egyptian minister of religious endowments, Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq.
The minister announced that the public racket caused by Cairo’s hundreds of muezzins leading the daily calls to prayer all at slightly different times and over scratchy loudspeakers across the city was simply too much for residents to bear any longer. The ministry would henceforth choose the 30 or so best muezzins, who would take turns broadcasting the call to prayer live via a dedicated radio channel to be boomed into the streets from the roughly 1,000 government-run mosques around town. Those not picked would have to find new work.
Of course there were instant rumors that the plan was actually an American-sponsored plot to gain control of the mosques and stifle extremists in the storefront prayer rooms that had sprung up throughout the city. The plan did not go into immediate effect. The goal is to enforce it next year.
Meanwhile the play, which laments the decision’s impact on the lives of ordinary muezzins, like those onstage here, not to mention on the people who would no longer hear them, had its premiere in December before a select audience in Cairo. It was too politically touchy an undertaking for Egyptians to embrace openly, according to the play’s promoters. So that single performance was paid for not by Egyptians but by the German federal government and the Berlin mayor’s office. You might say “Radio Muezzin” was as much about Germany promoting diverse voices as it was about Egypt’s silencing them. Not that there aren’t plenty of ethnic and religious troubles in this country.
Berlin alone is home to 220,000 Muslims, but the first mosque in the former Communist half of the city opened just last year, to far-right protests. Protests have greeted the building of mosques all across Germany, and the one now under way in Cologne has become a frequent lightning rod. No calls to prayers are permitted on the streets here or in many countries across Western Europe, and some opportunistic European festival directors, contemplating taking on this play, have reportedly considered asking the muezzins to publicly chant the azan, as the call to prayer is known, precisely to provoke a scandal and to generate headlines.
Even so, an abiding culture of tolerance and civility ranks high among this city’s traits, and the applause from the audience the other night was long and heartfelt. Berliners were clearly charmed.
And why not? The four muezzins, who made touchingly awkward and mostly reluctant performers, were nothing if not charming. Hussein Gouda Hussein Bdawy, who’s nearly blind, described finding his calling when he became a muezzin, gaining as part of the job the sheik’s robe and hat that he had always dreamed of wearing. Proud of his work, he didn’t even mind the roughly two-hour commute from his tiny apartment to the mosque. He spends the long bus ride listening to radio broadcasts of the Koran, he said, switching stations only to hear the soccer matches of the Egyptian national team.
Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali Hindawy, a retired electrician, the most voluble of the bunch, then recounted having been badly injured in a traffic accident. He became a muezzin, he explained, after the imam in the mosque where he spent much of his time recovering noticed the mellifluousness of his voice. Some years ago, Mr. Abdelsamia added, he almost died while trying to repair a short circuit when a co-worker failed to shut off the power first. To demonstrate to the audience what might have happened, Mr. Abdelsamia hooked a pickle to a pair of live wires onstage. The pickle smoked for a minute or two. Mr. Abdelsamia then pointed to a callous on his forehead. It comes, he said, from constantly prostrating himself in prayer.
No wonder.
As for Mansour Abdelsalam Mansour Namous, a quiet, somber man in a long robe, he described leaving his family in the Egyptian countryside, where he couldn’t find work, to become a muezzin in the city. Today, he said, he needs to supplement his meager muezzin’s income by moonlighting in a bakery. Like other muezzins he is also responsible for vacuuming and tidying up his mosque. Luckily, he said, the one he works in is only big enough for a couple dozen worshippers.
By contrast the last of the four, Muhammad Ali Mahmoud Farag, dapper in a dark suit and the youngest by far, chants the call to prayer from Cairo’s largest mosque, which accommodates tens of thousands. Soft-spoken, socially well connected and enormous (he’s a bodybuilder, and pressed some barbells during the play to prove the point), he was born into a prominent religious family. Not long ago he took second prize in a worldwide Koran-reading competition in Malaysia. He showed photographs of himself with fellow competitors in the lobby of the hotel where the competitors stayed, and outside a McDonald’s.
One of the few dozen chosen by the Egyptian ministry to broadcast the azan, he closed the evening’s performance, chanting alone. Controlled and low-key, his voice was richly ornamented.
But it was instead the cacophony of all four muezzins, with their different rhythms and accents, chanting together, as they did when the play began, that stuck in the mind. Lifted up by their devotion, they made not a racket at all but rapturous music.
How especially beautiful it sounded here, where, unlike in Cairo, even the busiest neighborhoods are underpopulated and hushed. Mr. Abdelsamia, the electrician, remarked at one point what a loss it would be for Cairo not to have the variety of muezzins’ voices ringing through the streets. Having won over the crowd, he milked the applause at the end of the play, waving his arms and even taking a solo curtain call.
That provoked the audience to clap a little louder before filing out of the theater, into the dark stone-silence of Berlin.
BERLIN — On several recent evenings four muezzins from Cairo took to a carpeted stage at Hau Zwei, a Berlin theater, and talked about their lives and jobs. In their stocking feet, as if in a mosque, they showed family snapshots and pictures of their neighborhoods, and explained to the audience how to wash and pray according to Muslim ritual. “Radio Muezzin,” conceived by Stefan Kaegi, a Swiss director, is a one-act play, a documentary, really (performed in Arabic with subtitles), the concept for which arose after a decision in 2004 by the Egyptian minister of religious endowments, Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq.
The minister announced that the public racket caused by Cairo’s hundreds of muezzins leading the daily calls to prayer all at slightly different times and over scratchy loudspeakers across the city was simply too much for residents to bear any longer. The ministry would henceforth choose the 30 or so best muezzins, who would take turns broadcasting the call to prayer live via a dedicated radio channel to be boomed into the streets from the roughly 1,000 government-run mosques around town. Those not picked would have to find new work.
Of course there were instant rumors that the plan was actually an American-sponsored plot to gain control of the mosques and stifle extremists in the storefront prayer rooms that had sprung up throughout the city. The plan did not go into immediate effect. The goal is to enforce it next year.
Meanwhile the play, which laments the decision’s impact on the lives of ordinary muezzins, like those onstage here, not to mention on the people who would no longer hear them, had its premiere in December before a select audience in Cairo. It was too politically touchy an undertaking for Egyptians to embrace openly, according to the play’s promoters. So that single performance was paid for not by Egyptians but by the German federal government and the Berlin mayor’s office. You might say “Radio Muezzin” was as much about Germany promoting diverse voices as it was about Egypt’s silencing them. Not that there aren’t plenty of ethnic and religious troubles in this country.
Berlin alone is home to 220,000 Muslims, but the first mosque in the former Communist half of the city opened just last year, to far-right protests. Protests have greeted the building of mosques all across Germany, and the one now under way in Cologne has become a frequent lightning rod. No calls to prayers are permitted on the streets here or in many countries across Western Europe, and some opportunistic European festival directors, contemplating taking on this play, have reportedly considered asking the muezzins to publicly chant the azan, as the call to prayer is known, precisely to provoke a scandal and to generate headlines.
Even so, an abiding culture of tolerance and civility ranks high among this city’s traits, and the applause from the audience the other night was long and heartfelt. Berliners were clearly charmed.
And why not? The four muezzins, who made touchingly awkward and mostly reluctant performers, were nothing if not charming. Hussein Gouda Hussein Bdawy, who’s nearly blind, described finding his calling when he became a muezzin, gaining as part of the job the sheik’s robe and hat that he had always dreamed of wearing. Proud of his work, he didn’t even mind the roughly two-hour commute from his tiny apartment to the mosque. He spends the long bus ride listening to radio broadcasts of the Koran, he said, switching stations only to hear the soccer matches of the Egyptian national team.
Abdelmoty Abdelsamia Ali Hindawy, a retired electrician, the most voluble of the bunch, then recounted having been badly injured in a traffic accident. He became a muezzin, he explained, after the imam in the mosque where he spent much of his time recovering noticed the mellifluousness of his voice. Some years ago, Mr. Abdelsamia added, he almost died while trying to repair a short circuit when a co-worker failed to shut off the power first. To demonstrate to the audience what might have happened, Mr. Abdelsamia hooked a pickle to a pair of live wires onstage. The pickle smoked for a minute or two. Mr. Abdelsamia then pointed to a callous on his forehead. It comes, he said, from constantly prostrating himself in prayer.
No wonder.
As for Mansour Abdelsalam Mansour Namous, a quiet, somber man in a long robe, he described leaving his family in the Egyptian countryside, where he couldn’t find work, to become a muezzin in the city. Today, he said, he needs to supplement his meager muezzin’s income by moonlighting in a bakery. Like other muezzins he is also responsible for vacuuming and tidying up his mosque. Luckily, he said, the one he works in is only big enough for a couple dozen worshippers.
By contrast the last of the four, Muhammad Ali Mahmoud Farag, dapper in a dark suit and the youngest by far, chants the call to prayer from Cairo’s largest mosque, which accommodates tens of thousands. Soft-spoken, socially well connected and enormous (he’s a bodybuilder, and pressed some barbells during the play to prove the point), he was born into a prominent religious family. Not long ago he took second prize in a worldwide Koran-reading competition in Malaysia. He showed photographs of himself with fellow competitors in the lobby of the hotel where the competitors stayed, and outside a McDonald’s.
One of the few dozen chosen by the Egyptian ministry to broadcast the azan, he closed the evening’s performance, chanting alone. Controlled and low-key, his voice was richly ornamented.
But it was instead the cacophony of all four muezzins, with their different rhythms and accents, chanting together, as they did when the play began, that stuck in the mind. Lifted up by their devotion, they made not a racket at all but rapturous music.
How especially beautiful it sounded here, where, unlike in Cairo, even the busiest neighborhoods are underpopulated and hushed. Mr. Abdelsamia, the electrician, remarked at one point what a loss it would be for Cairo not to have the variety of muezzins’ voices ringing through the streets. Having won over the crowd, he milked the applause at the end of the play, waving his arms and even taking a solo curtain call.
That provoked the audience to clap a little louder before filing out of the theater, into the dark stone-silence of Berlin.