A Call Silenced in Cairo Is Warmly Received in 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.