Cairo to use computerised call to prayer..

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after complaints over tuneless muezzin

Cairo is to synchronise the call to prayer across the city's 4,500 mosques using computers to put an end to out of tune and out of time muezzin.

For more than a millennium, the competing calls to prayer intoned from Cairo's thousands of minarets have been one of the city's most distinctive features.

The government this weekend begins a long-heralded project to synchronise the five daily calls to prayer across the city.

Neighbourhood by neighbourhood, the ministry of religious endowments is linking all of the mosques in the city, the largest in the Arab world, to a central computerised feed.

"Egyptians have a problem with timing," said Sheikh Salem Abdel-Galil, the ministry official behind the proposal.

"Our goals are to accurately set the time of prayer so that it is called at the same time from each mosque, and to control the quality of the voices that call the prayer."
It is proving unpopular with the muezzins – the human voice of the call to prayer up to now – as well as traditionalists for whom the clashing sounds of the chants, whether in tune or out of it, are part of the city's charm.

The muezzins fear losing their prestige or even their jobs, as they are not necessarily the mosque's prayer leaders.

"The Prophet Mohammed never ordered people to unify their calls to prayer in Medina, so we shouldn't do the same in Cairo," said Sheikh Youssef al-Badri, a conservative cleric.
Medina is the city in Saudi Arabia where Mohammed founded Islam in the seventh century and where he first instructed a follower named Bilal to calls believers to prayer.

The government of President Hosni Mubarak is often at war with independent Islamic voices in Egypt, but this move is more part of sporadic attempts to bring order to the chaos of Cairo's overpacked streets.

The first minarets in Cairo were built not long after, in 673AD – one at each of the four corners of the Amr mosque.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldne ... ezzin.html