This morning, the first broadcast I heard from the bullhorns of the nearby mosque woke me up at 1:50am, through the earplugs I was wearing. It seems fitting, given that my heart is restless at the moment, and as such I didn’t fall back asleep until about 4am.
The garbled 1:50am announcement is not normal for Tarakan, Indonesia. The normal call to prayer times begin somewhere between 3am and 4am, during most times of the year, but during the month of Ramadan they have been creeping much earlier into the wee hours of the morning, and tend to last much longer during the day. The nearby mosques are basically pumping loud, sonorous wailing prayers into the surrounding neighborhoods all day, nonstop. It is currently 11:16am, right between the 5am fajr morning prayer and the 12:21am noon dhuhr prayer.
But again, this is not normal. The first call to prayer typically begin in the early morning hours prior to 5am, and are quite loud even from a considerable distance and through enclosed double-paned windows. We are well within earshot of at least 7 separate mosques, some of which have their bullhorn speakers pointed directly uphill toward our home. A few months ago, the timing was a little different than currently, during Ramadan. A distant mumbled prayer began at 4am, far enough away that it was just a garbled jumble of syllables by the time it reached us. It came from the minaret-tower of a nearby mosque, one of probably a dozen such mosques within earshot of us. The blaring loudspeakers point in a 360-degree circle outwards and are elevated on a tower (minaret) above the rooftops.
I find the directionality of the speakers interesting. We are located on a hill and most of the minarets are below us. However, many of the loudspeakers point up toward the sky rather than down into the neighborhood. I assume this is in order to reach toward a heavenly-dwelling God, but I don’t know that for sure. This would make sense with the other comment I was given by an Indonesian, who explains the calls as cries toward heaven to reach God’s attention. This would also make sense with the styles of songs, chants, and prayers most recognizable to me as wailing. By the time these recordings are broadcast through the speaker systems, they arrive in our homes sounding much more like a garbled, buzzing moan or cry.
Whoever started at 4am was ahead of the game, and by 4:30 am the separate cries from numerous mosques conjoin into a sonorous, cacophonic chant/cry blanketing the city and blaring through our windows. Dogs howl along to contribute to the pre-dawn wailing. In the predawn hours it is still pitch black on the horizon, but the city lights illuminate the neighborhoods.
The distant mosques chanting prayers create a deep humming buzz that underlies the loud repetition of the dozen or so nearby ones, seven or so close enough to hear the words, and for me to recognize the familiar rhythm and intonations that I’ve grown accustomed to over the last few months. From far away, the effect is chant-like and sonorous; from right across the road, the broadcast is closer to rhythmic pounding when repeated in chunks – or to sports announcements when robotically recited. Even when sung or intoned, the quality of the tinny bullhorns at blown-out volume is crackly and garbled at best. And the guttural hum underneath it all is somedays ominous and gloomy. Other days it feels calming and mellow. Sometimes it’s one and sometimes it’s the other. Like I can’t decide if being woken up before twilight to greet the new day and proclaim God’s greatness is inspiring to me, or an annoyance. My morning “quiet time” is anything but quiet – but it’s blanketed in the hum and chorus of pre-dawn loudspeakers blaring repetitive chants and prayers.
Somehow, as if on cue (is there a cue?) at 4:45 all chanting dies down to a sweet and gentle silence for about five minutes in the pre-dawn darkness. Then at 4:50, they surge into chanted chorus again. Until 5:10, when the closest mosques fall silent again. It is still pitch dark, and hardly any roosters are even crowing. 5:15. All is silent. For the day I woke up restlessly and wrote down all this description instead of sleeping, sunrise was listed for 5:54am. Astronomical twilight was 4:42. Nautical twilight had just past at 5:07, and civil twilight began at 5:32. All that to say… I’m not sure what cues are instantiating these events. Is it the technical hours of sunrise, or the vibe of that morning?
On one hand, I appreciate the practice of marking time throughout the day by invitations to prayer. This probably has more in common with the monastic tradition of belltowers announcing the hours of prayer seven times a day, beginning with the pre-dawn vigils and the lauds at dawn. It actually shapes all public life around these five hours of prayer, which is fascinating to me.
However, of course, the prayers themselves are in a form unintelligible to Westerners, including wudu ritual ablutions, designated Musholla prayer rooms, removal of footwear, and modest attire. Even McDonalds restaurants in Indonesia have designated Musholla prayer rooms. The prayers are blared electronically, broadcast across rooftops by loudspeakers in a garbled, buzzing wail of syllables, in Arabic, which nobody here speaks, though much of the broadcast sermons and announcements and music seem to be in Indonesian. The recognizable “Allahu Akbar” introduces the call, and the subsequent verses, reminding everyone in the predawn call that to pray is better than sleep. I like to translate these more or less as the familiar song choruses I know: “Our God is greater, our God is stronger, our God is higher than any other…” or, since these broadcasts usually come at meal times, “God is good, God is great, and we thank him for our food.”
I have to confess, the volume, tone, and style of the broadcast calls to prayer can often feel abrasive and invasive to me. I’ve been shaped more by practices of contemplative prayer, soothing, calming, and mellow forms of prayer. Even in English, the shouting, harsh gravelly chanting, and monotonous repetition of prayers can often be off-putting. So I’m not sure if I’m irritated by the style of prayer in a manner I’m so unfamiliar with, or with the fact that it’s just so different from my daily rhythms of life so far. This is a sad thing for me to confess… The calls to prayer sound quite pleasant and melodic from great distances, such as when hiking through nearby mountains at dusk, or when blending together in a dawn chorus. And I do like the more ritualistic, meaning-filled way that they mark dawn and dusk on a spiritual note, and consistently invite the public to consider God’s greatness. I just get blown away by the shock and volume of it all, coming across less as an invitation and more as an assault on the soundscape of my surroundings. And the inescapability of it… you can’t find a place of silence away from the loudspeakers in public, in home, in the mountains… you have to travel pretty far into the wilderness to get away from the intensity of their broadcast. And even a little distance makes the sound of it more pleasant… like I said, we are positioned in the range of at least 7 of these broadcasting minarets… many homes are… and the effect is much like having a sports game broadcast by megaphones straight into your home five times a day.
I should also note that on the occasion that I visited a Christian community deep in the jungle, it was the church tower that broadcast Christian worship music and announcements, also beginning at 5:30am. And the tornado horn piercing the early dawn hours in Tarakan was a mystery to me for several weeks, until someone explained that it was sounded from the airport to scare away birds for departing or arriving flights. So it’s not like the calls to prayer are out of place for the morning soundscape. But they are definitely the most pronounced and invasive of the things calling for attention in the morning hours.