The Context of the Call.

Five times a day a call goes out wherever there are Muslims, a call to the believer to submit to the Almighty, to glorify the creator: the Adzan.  The call began when there the number of Muslims grew in Madinah after the Hijra.  The story of how they arrived at the Adzan itself is an interesting one but suffice to say that the job of calling Muslims to prayers was given to the dulcet voiced Bilal.  Since then, all Adzan callers are given the title Bilal. 

It was after the Zuhr prayers (midday) in Madinah, I decided to take a walk while waiting for the Asr prayers. About a block away from the Masjidil Nabawi via the rear gate, past Starbuck’s, I came across a small masjid. I wondered why they would build a Masjid so close to the Masjidil Nabawi and it did not seem like a new masjid too.  Then when we got to Makkah, I saw other Masjids not far from the Masjidil Haram.

Then it occurred to me that I was missing a few things. Firstly, both the present day Masjid Nabawi and the Masjidil Haram are much larger than they were in the time of the Prophet PBUH and perhaps even a couple of hundred years ago. Perhaps the Masjids were far enough from the main Masjids to have the call not reach the place because the natural human voice can only travel so far. Their solution for the problem of not being able to hear the call from the masjid was to build another one closer to where they were. 

Today, with both the main Masjids much larger than they were before and with the PA system able to carry the voice much farther than the natural voice could go, it is easy to suggest less emphatic reason for building these Masjids so close, by our present standards, to one another.  Islam is not an inflexible living system that some make it out to be.  Through the ages, Muslims have arrived at numerous creative and unique solutions that they face in living and worshipping.

Muslims in Malaysia have also come up with they own solutions to the problem of calling the faithful to prayers.  In my grand uncle’s surau in Kampung Tepus, Kelantan, there used to be an old drum hanging from the rafters and in another surau, not that far away, there was an old beduk: a hollow block of wood.  In the past, before the advent of the PA system, they would beat that drum and beduk to signal that there is a call to prayers to follow. They drum and the beduk are not in fact used to call to prayers, they are used to tell the Muslims that there is an Adzan coming up. More importantly, the Malaysian solutions are biodegradable and they will soon disappear when the wood deteriorates beyond usable conditions.  In Makkah of the Fatimid Empire, they had a more durable solution; they fired cannon to signal the time for Maghreb (end of twilight) which was then followed by the Adzan: a practice they still follow in present day Ramadan.

The problem is, today, some of my relatively over-zealous brethren often fail to see the beauty of these solutions of the past.  They see the beduk, the drum and the cannon and say, that these are not allowed because they are innovations that were not used during the time of the Prophet PBUH.  They fail to see that these devices do not call the Muslims to prayers, the Adzan that follows the use of these devices does.  The devices merely signals that the Adzan is coming next.  Ironically, they make these claims while talking into very modern microphones.

 Hazidi Abdul Hamid