Peace and quiet, you’re lying dozing happily in bed during the early hours of what will surely be a sunny Turkish day, and then, all of a sudden, out of the blue some nut case starts shouting from a loudspeaker at the top of a tower a few hundred yards away breaking you from your slumber. Clearly I have no real right to complain, given that it’s their country and I was just visiting, but I have a right to moan!
My real issue with this is at two levels, the first is that they use loudspeakers, and are therefore cheating. The people who do that should go to hell for laziness in the provision of the call! To my huge disappointment, even at the giant almost tourist mosques loudspeakers are used. It would seem not to be an unreasonably suspicion that they don’t even have a person at a microphone and instead use a tape recording (bought from “Imams ‘r’ us”, presumably) to make it particularly easy on them.
The second issue that bothers me is that the call appears to be in Arabic (though maybe not always, it’s hard to tell). Clearly not a problem in an Arabic speaking country, unfortunately Turkey is not such a place. During the early years of the Turkish republic, one of the changes their forward thinking leadership made was that the call to prayer should be in Turkish, not an unreasonable request, you might think. Why, after all, call people in a language foreign to not only foreigners but locals as well? Unfortunately this law was rescinded later in a concerted effort to make sure that no one has any suspicion that Allah might not be an Arabic god.