CAIRO (AP) – You wouldn’t think that someone who goes around banging a drum in the streets before dawn and waking up the whole neighbourhood would be so beloved.
But many children and families love the musaharati, or “dawn caller”, a traditional fixture of Ramadhan, the holy month when the faithful fast from dawn to sunset.
It’s his job to wake people up in time to have a meal before the daily fast begins.
Across the Muslim world, the sound of a musaharati’s drum outside is as much a symbol of Ramadhan as the crescent moon and the lanterns that people set up in their houses.
He evokes the homey, communal feeling that the holy month brings for many, the feeling that everyone is facing the hunger of the day’s fast together – and enjoying the night’s meals together.
Often the job of musaharati is passed from father to son. So everybody in the neighbourhood knows him, and he knows them.
“Wake up, Mayar! Wake up, Menna!” Essam Sayed shouted on a recent night, calling out the names of individual children as he passed outside their houses and slapped the small, brass drum that he inherited from his father.
He rode his donkey, ‘Saad’, through Arab Ghoneim, an impoverished neighbourhood south of the Egyptian capital, Cairo.
The slap of his leather strap on the drum echoed around the tiny alleyways, strung up with coloured tinsel and lights. Neighbourhood kids gathered around him, petting and climbing on Saad.
In the Lebanese city of Sidon, Mahmoud Fanas put on a green skullcap and a green shawl over his clean white robe, an outfit that originally belonged to his father, who was also a musaharati. Then he set out on his pre-dawn circuit through the stone houses in the alleys of the old city, beating a drum.
“Ya nayim, wahhid il-dayim,” he called out in Arabic, “Sleepyhead, worship the Eternal One!”
But who needs a musaharati when you can just set the alarm on your phone to wake up for the suhour, as the pre-dawn meal is known?
“Life is changing rapidly. Technology is destroying our history and causing us to lose our identity,” said Fanas, who owns a toy store. He wanted to preserve the tradition of his father, “and God willing, my children will preserve it too”.
“The most beautiful thing is when I see the children happy to see me,” he said.
The job is disappearing from many places around the Muslim world. But in many older neighbourhoods try to preserve it. In Cairo, Sayed thought at one point about giving up, but people in the neighbourhood pleaded with him to continue as a musaharati.
In India, Umar Irshad makes his way through the dimly lit alleys in the labyrinthine heart of Old Delhi, once the seat of the Muslim Mughal emperors. The 59-year-old, one of the last remaining dawn callers in the city, calls out for the devout to wake up, rings doorbells on houses and bangs on the closed shutters of shops. He too inherited the job from his father.
The tradition is fast disappearing from Delhi.
But Irshad, a government employee, said he plans to keep it alive as long as he lives. “I do it to please my God,” Irshad said. – Hassan Ammar, Amr Nabil & Manish Swarup
