Cairo's Fired Muezzins, On Stage in Berlin

City of 15,000 minarets: Look closely, you'll see them everywhere--Cairo's minarets, like the early 20th century Ottoman-era neo-Mamluk Rifa'i mosque. (David Silverman/Getty Images)

The muezzin's call to prayer: that signature serenade of Muslim skies that can also turn deafeningly Wagnerian in its not-so unintended competitions. Max Rodenbeck, The Economist's Cairo bureau chief, described the phenomenon wonderfully in his book on Egypt's ageless city back in 2000 (Cairo: The City Victorious , Vintage):

It is close by at first, starting with the intimate pock of a microphone and a discreet cough or two. Somewhere in the sleeping city an answering cough stutters. And now, as the local muezzin shuts his eyes and cups a hand by his ear, that first sound takes sudden shape as syllables and words rising strong and clear. An echo follows from far off. Then another in the middle distance, quickly joined by a third, and then more and more and more voices until a mighty chorus is soaring in rounds, relaying the call to prayer clear across the valley from east to west with such amplified force that God would not need to be All-Hearing to hear it. An electric cloud of sound accumulates and holds, suspended over the city for a full minute by the loudspeakers of some 15,000 mosques, before dissolving piecemeal into the twitter of the waking birds.

Fifteen thousand mosques! David Lamb, who covered the Middle East for the Los Angeles Times and made Cairo his home for the period, back in the 1980s' days of PLO terrorism and Qaddafi lunacy, contributed his own, slightly less poetic review of Cairo's morning concert in his book from the period: "From our balcony I could count the minarets of twenty mosques--tall, graceful spindles that towered above palms and dwarfed everything in sight. Each morning before sunrise a sudden explosion of amplified cacophony would thunder from the mosques, shaking the neighborhood awake and summoning the faithful to prayer."

I'm more familiar with the muezzins of Beirut, where, when I was growing up there in the 1970s, they were far fewer, more discreet, and more often silent (given the delight of Christian snipers) than their Cairene colleagues. But those sounds in prose filled my ears as I read Michael Kimmelman writing about what sounds like a fabulous one-act play called "Radio Muezzin" and staged in Berlin. The play (conceived by Swiss director Stefan Kaegi) features four muezzin telling the stories of how they came to be muezzins, and lamenting the fact that all but one no longer are. The Egyptian government in 2004 laid off muezzins by the hundreds (possibly the thousands, judging by Rodenbeck's census of minarets). The reason? Kimmelman writes:

The minister announced that the public racket caused by Cairo’s hundreds of muezzins leading the daily calls to prayer all at slightly different times and over scratchy loudspeakers across the city was simply too much for residents to bear any longer. The ministry would henceforth choose the 30 or so best muezzins, who would take turns broadcasting the call to prayer live via a dedicated radio channel to be boomed into the streets from the roughly 1,000 government-run mosques around town. Those not picked would have to find new work.

Four of them ended up on stage in "Radio Muezzin" (though one is actually among the Egyptian government's Chosen Ones).

They held one performance in Cairo, sponsored by the German government, not the Egyptian government. That was enough for the Sunni-Jansenist clerics of Cairo. So the play migrated to Berlin, a city of some 220,000 Muslims where the first mosque opened only last year. And where "Radio Muezzin" has had a longer, happier run.

"How especially beautiful it sounded here, where," Kimmelman writes, "unlike in Cairo, even the busiest neighborhoods are underpopulated and hushed." One of the muezzins, an electrician by trade, "remarked at one point what a loss it would be for Cairo not to have the variety of muezzins’ voices ringing through the streets. Having won over the crowd, he milked the applause at the end of the play, waving his arms and even taking a solo curtain call."