Egypt to press ahead with adhan unification – but quietly
Is Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Endowments planning to blindside people by quietly implementing an unpopular project to unify the adhan, the Islamic call to prayer?
That’s certainly the impression I got when I recently spoke to one of the ministry officials in charge of the project to enquire about its status. There has been talk for years about how chaotic and noisy it is to have each mosque in a city call out “Allahu akbar” at slightly different times, in quite different voices, sometimes in different musical keys and different tempos. A project unveiled two years ago to have one centralised call to prayer seemed to officials to be the answer.
The official was cagey at first, refusing to be drawn on whether the plan was going ahead or had been suspended, and refusing to give an ETA for the mythical unified adhan.
But then he relented and said, revealingly: “I’ll tell you something, one day you’ll find us, without media coverage… you’ll find (a unified) ‘Allahu akbar’ from the minarets.”
That goes some way to explaining why the whole thing seems to have dropped out of sight since it was “inaugurated” more than two years ago.
Back then, the project was hailed by officials as “a civilizing step.” In a ceremony at the ministry’s neo-Islamic offices in downtown Cairo, the minister handed out commemorative shields and monetary rewards to a number of people involved in the project. Everything about the news conference suggested the project would be up and running imminently.
But there’s been no almost no sightings (hearings?) of the unified adhan, save for some experiments carried out in a number of mosques, presumably to the delight of the plan’s many opponents – which includes the parliament’s religious affairs committee.
Egypt outlaws protests in places of worship
Egypt’s parliament has passed a law criminalising protests in places of worship, a measure the government’s opponents see as part of a wider pattern of reining in popular opposition.
The bill has been touted as a bid to protect the sanctity of places of worship by a government eager to burnish its religious credentials, tarnished by unpopular foreign policy decisions and a continuous crackdown on the Islamist opposition.
However, the law passed on Wednesday is widely seen as an effort to clamp down on the protests often held in major mosques such as al-Azhar, the university-mosque that has been a center of Islamic learning for over a thousand years.
Protests are illegal without government approval in Egypt, and mosques such as al-Azhar are among the few venues available for the public to voice discontent, possibly because the government would be reluctant to be seen as violating such a hallowed place by sending in riot troops.
Such protests have enjoyed extensive coverage on pan-Arab channels such as al-Jazeera, and this seems to have irked the government, which recently spearheaded a drive to bring satellite broadcasters to heel.
Al-Azhar specifically has a history as a rallying point for uprisings and popular causes, including notably a rebellion against Napoleon, and Ahmed Urabi’s uprising in the late 19th century.
The official religious establishment is expected to back the measure; indeed the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, Mohamed Sayed Tantawi, has often been on the receiving end of criticism and derision from protesters in the mosque over his close ties to the state.
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Resident FaithWorld Expert
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