Call To Prayer

After the 13-hour flight, passing through immigration, and the 40-minute ride from Abu Dhabi International Airport to our hotel on the Corniche, Amo and I checked in.  Too tired to start exploring the city, we decided to have dinner in the hotel's restaurant, curiously named The Hamptons.  There are certain times while abroad when you realize a bold or naïve person has named a place after another, more famous place in America.  There's a Brooklyn in Australia.  It's a suburb of Sydney.  I'll never forget seeing it on a highway sign.  No possibility of coincidence; the very unique name was originally seventeenth-century Dutch

("broken line") pounded into something else by centuries of use in New York.  What was the thought process there?  Nothing about New South Wales says Brooklyn.  It just seems funny and wrong.  To be fair I've always thought the naming of Athens, Georgia and Paris, Texas to be pretty charming.  Perhaps Europeans feel differently when they see those names on road signs.

And I don't think the namer of The Hamptons restaurant at the Hilton Corniche Residence in Abu Dhabi had anything else in mind but, you know, the Hamptons.  There are many things very fine and great about Abu Dhabi, but not much of it has to do with the delights of eastern Long Island.  The hotel beach clubs here are functional but decidedly not fabulous -- there are just too many factors, climatic and cultural, working against them -- and guide books tell you straight up to avoid the public beaches.  And the more some tourists make like they're in South Beach or Ibiza, or the Hamptons, the sadder they seem.  As for names, there's so much other inspiration here.  Or do they just get tired of naming things after pearls and desert flowers?

(The shop down the road named Rodeo Drive is more on target.  They know from shopping around here.)

Anyway this was the third dinner I'd had in a row.  I'd had two dinners on the flight as we lost part of a day going east.  The morning, and breakfast, just sort of evaporated.  I was eating dinner at 10:30 PM mostly because it seemed like the thing to do.  The quiche I ordered was pretty tasty, but I noticed that most of the vegetables on my plate had been frozen.  There had of course been nothing but frozen veggies on the flight.  Now I was starting to get concerned that vegetables in Abu Dhabi would in general be limited in availability and poor in quality.  In my jetlagged mind, this theory made too much sense.  This is a desert after all -- what if they just can't get good veg here?  I was entirely wrong of course.  Never mind.  Silly me.  That's another story.

It was at this time I found out our hotel is dry.  No alcohol served at the restaurant.  No bar at all.  There are bars in hotels in Abu Dhabi, but not ours.  We had already planned ahead, buying a couple of bottles of wine and some rum at the duty free in the airport.  But though alcohol is legal in Abu Dhabi...  Well, that's about it.  It's legal, not much more.  You begin to realize that possessing it and enjoying it is a "thing."  It's not an option in most restaurants that aren't in hotels.  You have to strategize, know where and how to get it, and go out of your way.  It all has to be licensed, signed and sealed.  Those who sell it must declare they are not Muslims.  (No one would think to lie about such a thing for profit.  Sharia, Islamic religious law, exerts tremendous authority here as in all Muslim nations.)  If you are stopped by the police with alcohol in your car, and you aren't on the way home, you can be arrested.

I had a virgin Piña Colada with my quiche.  I had been awestruck by the heat and humidity during our brief moments outside after arriving.  It was 96 degrees out though late at night.  The fruity drink went down pretty well.

We went right to bed after dinner.  We were not so much exhausted as stretched a bit thin by the flight.  And up for adventure as we were, the various enormities of suddenly living in a foreign culture were starting to weigh on us.

4:45 AM.  The pre-dawn call to prayer sounds.  Just like that we are wide awake, just like that we're in another world and no mistake.  We are situated quite low in the hotel and apparently there is a mosque right outside.  The loudspeaker on its minaret makes it seem the call to prayer, the adhan, is occurring right in our room.  It's amazing.  It's captivating.  It's loud.  You don't come out of a half-sleep, or some dream in which it was incorporated, slowly realizing what you're hearing.  No, first you were asleep and now you're as awake as you ever will be, and you're being called.

There are five daily prayers in Islam and the corresponding adhan is called out before each one:  dawn, noon, afternoon, sunset, nightfall.  In the past, a cleric would climb the minaret of the mosque and make 

the call with his voice.  That must be something to hear, and perhaps I'll get a chance to hear it the traditional way somewhere on this trip.  These days it's mostly done by loudspeaker, and can be pre-recorded.  (It's also broadcast on Muslim radio and TV.)  You can listen to an adhan by clicking here.  It was recorded in Saudi Arabia and is probably close enough to how it would sound here in the Gulf region.  But the one at the nearby mosque which we've been hearing most often is more melodic and fluid and lovely.

To my ears the adhan sounded at first rather like a prayer itself.  Its lilting tone works on the ears in the same way as Gothic chants and Om Nama Shivayas.  In actuality it's a testament.  The words are:

Allah is the greatest

I bear witness that there is no deity greater than Allah

I bear witness that Mohammed is the messenger of Allah

Make haste towards worship

Come to the true success

(The pre-dawn adhan adds the line:  Prayer is better than sleep.  Indeed!)

There are mosques everywhere here.  There are three in one intersection near our hotel, and another visible a block away.  Aside from the fact that most of the population is very devout, I think the reason for this is that in Islam, prayer is daily maintenance.  While skipping the highly ritualized prayer is tolerated, still at least one is more or less mandatory each day as a means of spiritual and moral focus.  Therefore the pragmatical need for a lot of places to pray.  There are mosques attached to gas stations in the desert.  For those who can't make it to the mosque, there is plenty of consideration.  There are prayer rooms in every mall.  Each hotel

room has a handy quibla, the direction towards Mecca faced by the devotee, on a sticker fixed to the ceiling.

And one very quickly gets used to hearing the call all the time.  We're now in a different room than on that first morning, on a different side of the hotel, and the call is not as immediate anymore.  In some ways I miss it.  But you can't go for long without hearing it as you are out and about.  For those with Western ears, nothing places you in the Arab world more effectively and totally.  You might be at an ATM, or walking out of a Subway with a sandwich, but you hear the adhan and suddenly falcons are swooping, caravans troop across the desert, a sandstorm is blowing, domes and minarets loom.  Mind you it can be intimidating too.  You wonder if you should stop walking, or hurry up, or make some gesture of respect.

While researching this I came across a blog written by a Muslim American.  She complains that news broadcasts, even NPR, will invariably use the adhan as an audio intro for any story about the Arab world, whether it involves religion or not.  Though I agree with her about avoiding gross generalizations, I can easily see why news programmers make such choices.  You hear the adhan and there is no doubt about place.  And it's hard to avoid.  Islam is so dominant in this part of the world, and one hears the call so often.  The malls, the fast food joints, the manifest desire for Abu Dhabi to be the Hamptons or Beverly Hills stand in stark contrast.  Babylon is chanted down.  

Or is it?  Is all the materialism of this place really at odds with the fervor heard in each broadcast of the call? I haven't quite worked it out yet.  But if there's one thing Arabs are known for throughout history, it's commerce and trade.  Maybe Gucci and Starbucks just fit right into that centuries-old continuum, the complex weave of intersecting trade routes and cultures here in the Gulf.  People might have been selling leather bags and coffee here a thousand years ago while that call sounded.

Aside from all that it sounds nice.  I know I'm really coming off like a tourist here.  You know, someone else's proud tradition, someone else's fierce testament, is my romantic soundtrack.  That comical truth hit me the other day when we poured some technically legal chardonnay and had a toast while the call echoed in the warm pink air at sunset.  Perhaps it was such a moment that inspired our President to call it "one of the prettiest sounds on Earth at sunset."

Amo happens to share that sentiment with him.  Amo is not a Muslim.  Nor is he.  If you find any of these statements contradictory or controversial, maybe we will stick to talking about the weather.