The Call to Prayer: How Time Moves You in Morocco

The adhan, or call to prayer, is a unique facet of life in a Muslim country. In the Fes medina, where there's always a mosque around the corner, the adhan is unavoidable.

At home or in the streets at prayer time you hear a soft hum in the distance that crescendos steadily until a hearty "Allahu Akbar" blares from the nearest minaret. At first it is disarming, especially to Westerners unaccustomed to or unaware of prayer's central role in Islam. But after a few days or weeks, it, like everything else in Morocco, it assimilates into your life and you either respect it as an expression of Muslim piety, scorn it as an unwelcome early morning wake up call, or simply ignore it.

The call to prayer preludes each of the daily prayers that are included among the 'pillars' of Islam. There are five in total spread throughout the day: fajr occurs in the early morning before sunrise, dhuhur at midday, 'asr in the mid-afternoon, maghrib at sunset, and 'isha at night. The call is recited by a muezzin, literally an 'announcer', who traditionally would shout the adhan from the top of his mosque's minaret or in the streets. Today, most mosques are equipped with loud speakers.

In traditional Muslim societies, prayer times used to demarcate the different phases of the day. The phrase 'ba'd dhuhur' in classical Arabic translates to the English word 'afternoon', and literally means 'after dhuhur prayer'. In this sense, the 'afternoon' did not begin until dhuhur prayer was performed. The classical Arabic word for 'dinner' shares its root with 'isha, the last prayer of the day. Remnants of this influence on daily life can still be seen in the old medina. During the week, many shops close between dhuhur and 'asr prayers, and on Fridays, the Muslim holy day, a vast majority of businesses are closed as Moroccans take the afternoon off after their communal dhuhur prayers.

In many ways, this role of the adhan represents a different psychology about time, and our relationship to it. Last night at dinner my roommates, our guests and I had a conversation about the differences between religious time and the secular time. My roommate Chris explained how in the 19th century, governments in Europe began to use churches to signal the official beginnings and ends of the workday.

In that period, church bells were the most effective means of communicating information, especially in the agrarian countryside where farms and farmers were scattered over miles. Before these initiatives, churches used their bells for purely religious purposes, signaling religious holidays such as Christmas and Easter, as well as the hours for daily prayers. Much like prayer in Islam, Christian prayers determined the pace of daily life. By secularizing church bells, these governments not only stripped them of their sacred functions but also initiated a shift in the human relationship with time.

The key issue here is control.

Who controls time? In the religious sense, God controls it. When time is sacred, it cannot be controlled by people because then it ceases to be sacred. As a result, time is something we must obey. During Ramadan, Muslims cannot eat or drink between the pre-dawn (fajr) and sunset (maghrib) prayers. Because Islam uses a lunar calendar, this means that some years Ramadan falls during winter, and others it falls in the summer. The length of the Ramadan fast may be longer or shorter from year to year, but the rules do not change.

By secularizing time, people gained control over it. A day's length was standardized; the length of an eight hour work day does not change depending on the season. To regulate something is to control it. People now 'made' time instead of yielding to it.

I think we can see the influence of these points of view when we compare cultural conceptions of time in Morocco and the United States. In Morocco, time is view neither as rigid nor controllable. People arrive at their appointments when they arrive. Shops open when they open and close when they close. This morning I asked my dairy guy when he will have cheese. He said, "we'll have it when the cheese guys make it."

In the United States, and other Western countries, most people view time differently. Because we control time we possess it, and so we can 'make use' of it. If you do not 'make use' of 'your' time then you are 'wasting it.' We emphasize punctuality as well, so that we don't 'waste' the time of our friends or colleagues. If we are busy we can always 'make' time to see someone. And we mustn't let time 'slip away.'

At dinner, one of our guests asked Chris and I if we thought the adhan would ever change to announce secular time just as church bells had changed two centuries ago. We both said no. As Chris pointed out, it's easier to appropriate an object like a bell and change it's purpose than it is to change the purpose of a whole class of people. Additionally, I said that I didn't think such a shift could be justified in a Muslim context.

Thinking more broadly, the secularization of time has broad cosmological implications. If man controls time then he, to some extent, controls the universe. Or he at least considers the universe to be controllable (I think contemporary views about science's potential to tame nature are sufficient evidence of this point). To a Muslim, God controls the universe, and anything otherwise is unacceptable. That's not to say that Islam and rationalism are mutually exclusive, but rationalism to the point of replacing God with man is.

I can't imagine the Fes medina without the traditional adhan. If it were to change, and the blaring "Allahu Akbar" were to change to a cacophonous "It's now 12:00pm", it would lose all of it's meaning. What was once a rich symbol of Morocco's religious heritage and maintenance of tradition, would, essentially, become a talking clock.