It comes every night, just as I’m finishing dinner and taking my dishes to the sink. Today, I’ve left the window of my bedroom open to catch the new spring breezes, so it’s so loud and strong that it drowns out the television and the voices from the apartment of students next door. It’s the Muslim call to prayer, echoing across Turkey five times a day, every day. It rockets from the minarets of mosques, proclaiming the greatness of Allah, the Muslim’s one true God, and summoning men to the prayer halls for the daily recitation of the azaan. What in the old days was loudly pronounced by a man of faith is now blasted from loudspeakers, crackeling with theeffort. My apartment is situated at the crossroads of three mosques, so their respective calls to prayer grate and reverberate off of each other to make a garbled and often unintelligible mess of off-key notes. On some days, it makes me long for the quaint bells of Christian churches. Other days, its haunting melody seems romantic and fitting.
Continue reading ‘holy week 6: the uniqueness of Christ – easter in an islamic state’
