Egyptian Scribbles: The beauty of morning prayers

Wednesday, 10 October 2007

The beauty of morning prayers

This is a daylight picture of the mosque opposite my apartment. There's a night-time photo below of it lit up for Ramadan.

I was a little worried about the noise levels of the 5am prayers, but it was wonderful to hear them floating into my sleep this morning. It was haunting and deeply spiritual: a rhythmic call to the heavens that made god seem very present. It's Ramadan here at the moment and people's faith is very much evident - as the sun sets, everyone turns to food and drink after a day of fasting. Taxi drivers stop in the street to grab a glass of water from the pavement; families gather together around tables set up in public spaces to share their meal together. It is an incredible communal experience.

1 comment:

S. said...: When asked what I miss most about Iran, I said hear the pre-dawn call to prayers...so it was interesting that you should mention this; 4 November 2007 at 22:59

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Quotations from Books/ Legal Cases/ Articles I"m Reading

From Richard Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality":
"If one follows Baier's advice one will not see it as the moral educator's task to answer the rational egotist's question "Why should I be moral?" but rather to answer the much more frequently posed question "Why should I care about a stranger, a person who is no kin to me, a person whose habits I find disgusting?". The traditional answer to the latter question is "Because kinship and custom are morally irrelevant, irrelevant to the obligations imposed by the recognition of membership in the same species". This has never been very convincing, since it begs the question at issue: whether mere species membership is, in fact, a sufficient surrogate for closer kinship. Furthermore, that answer leaves one wide open to Nietzsche's discomfiting rejoinder: That universalistic notion, Nietzsche will sneer, would only have crossed the mind of a slave – or, perhaps, the mind of an intellectual, a priest whose self-esteem and livelihood both depend on getting the rest of us to accept a sacred, unarguable, unchallengeable paradox.
A better sort of answer is the sort of long, sad, sentimental story which begins "Because this is what it is like to be in her situation – to be far from home, among strangers", or "Because she might become your daughter-in-law", or "Because her mother would grieve for her". Such stories, repeated and varied over the centuries, have induced us, the rich, safe, powerful, people, to tolerate, and even to cherish, powerless people – people whose appearance or habits or beliefs at first seemed an insult to our own moral identity, our sense of the limits of permissible human variation."