Unified call to prayer will be first activated in Greater Cairo
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For more than 13 decades, the call to prayer has begun five times a day via microphones attached to Egypt’s mosques. Many of muezzins (the person who recites the azan or calls to prayer) have imperfect voices thus creating a citywide cacophony while reciting the azan. Although each of the five prayers has a certain time at which the call to prayer should start, the calls are not usually synchronised. All this will soon come to an end after Minister of Endowment Hamdi Zaqzouq’s decision to unify the azan and end the general state of dissonance.
Zaqzouq declared few weeks ago that the call to prayer in Cairo’s 4,500 mosques would be unified by the beginning of the holy month of Ramadan, which will start on 11 August. Alexandria will be the first to apply the new system after Cairo, along with other governorates that will work with the new system soon after its success is proven.
Once the unified call is introduced, the city is likely to have one person to recite the five daily calls to prayer, have it recorded, and then amplified simultaneously by all mosques. The standard call will now be transmitted from the Greater Cairo radio station, connecting to receivers in mosques at the same time.
The project, whose cost is LE680,000, will only be applied to government-owned mosques in the Greater Cairo area. There are 70,000 official muezzins working at the Ministry of Endowments.
Excerpted from an article by Reem Leila for Al-Ahram
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