Abdul Gaffoor Mosque

Here is a photo showing the Abdul Gaffoor Mosque as seen from the window of my hotel. This mosque has an interesting history and its own Wikipedia article. Fortunately the architecture is not marred by the presence of loudspeakers mounted on the minarets and the call to prayer seemed to benefit from their absence. The prayer was amplified because I could hear it clearly through the closed hotel window but it was not heavily amplified to the point of distortion. In Indonesia, the focus seems to be on maximising volume with no thought given to the quality of the emerging sound.

The think the Islamic call to prayer should be neither pre-recorded nor amplified and should rely on the natural, unamplified human voice. This was the way it was done before the arrival of loudspeakers. It was the way it was done for the first time by the black slave Bilal:

Bilal stood on top of the Ka’aba in Mecca. It had been a difficult and dangerous thing to do, but he had a far more important task to complete. He filled his lungs with as much air as he could, then used his deep and powerful voice to call faithful Muslims to prayer.

This was an extraordinarily emotional moment for the first Moslems. Some of the history behind this historic event is as follows:

As a free man, Bilal became a close and dear friend to both Abu Bakr and Muhammad. He helped to build the first mosque in Medina. When the time came that the Muslim’s were searching for a way to call the faithful to prayer, Bilal came into his own. The believers decided they did not want a flag, or a bell, or a rattle, or a drum, or a trumpet, but a beautiful human voice.

Abu Bakr became excited. “Then there is only one voice we could use for our first call to prayer,” he said, and explained how he had found Bilal and set him free. And so it was that Bilal became the first muezzin, the first to call people to prayer in Medina. And when the Muslims returned to Mecca, he was the first to call from the top of the Ka’aba. Source

It's a pity that what is largely heard in urban areas of Indonesia nowadays is not "a beautiful human voice" but a highly amplified and intrusive blast of sound that arrives unsynchronised from several different directions corresponding to the location of the various mosques in the vicinity. How much more pleasant it would be to hear a single human voice, natural and unamplified, at prayer time reminding us of the the way it was in the beginning with Bilal standing on the Ka'aba for the very first time.