Stories: Call to Prayer
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| Call to Prayer
By Chad F. Emmett
I grew up in large home with five siblings in Logan, Utah. My mom was committed to having family prayer each morning. She did not, however, like having to repeatedly trudge to the far corner of the downstairs and wake and re-wake four sleeping boys. In support of my mom’s faithfulness, my dad installed an intercom between the upstairs kitchen and the downstairs hallway to the bedrooms. I still remember the morning after the installation when we were all awakened from slumber with my mom’s voice, amplified even more by the intercom, shouting: “family prayer five minutes!!” That morning call to prayer was a regular part of my teenage years.
My next experience with a call to prayer was half way around the world in Semarang, Indonesia--my first missionary city and in the middle of the largest Islamic country in the world. I arrived in the coastal town at 3:00 AM on a night train from Jakarta in November 1975. From my top bunk in the missionary apartment/branch house, I finished saying my bedtime prayers at about 4:00 AM. I had just laid down for a few hours sleep when I heard: “Allahu Akbar!” (God is most great) bellowing through the muggy pre-dawn of the city. I sat up in bed startled, wondering if I was having an angelic visitation. I had never heard such a thing (although mom on the intercom was pretty close). Semarang’s main mosque was just 100 meters down the street and, with the help of loud speakers, the muezzin was loudly calling the Muslim faithful to dawn prayer. My introduction to Islam was off to a surprising start.
Five times a day, for nearly two years I heard the call to prayer. It became something familiar and comforting. I didn’t know many of the Arabic words, but it didn’t matter. All I needed to know was that Muslims were being reminded to pray to God, Allah. I also came to realize that it didn’t really matter where they prayed. I have seen Indonesian Muslims prostrating themselves in prayer in the aisles of trains at dawn, on the forest floor of Borneo, in the vastness of Jakarta’s white domed, national mosque, and at the end of the fasting month of Ramadan, in large crowds under the expansive umbrella-shaped canopy of the outward reaching branches of saman trees in city parks and filling the playing field of a soccer stadium.
Years later I lived for a year in the Arab city of Nazareth in northern Israel. From my hilltop apartment on the northern edge of town I could look down into the central city and see three of the city’s seven mosques. I could hear even more. When it was time to pray, one mosque’s muezzin would start the call to prayer and then another and another as if in echo bouncing off Nazareth’s hills or in some new form of delayed quadraphonic sound. As one who prefers to rise and pray later than the first light of dawn, I have to admit that I was glad that the mosques were more distant and thus more muted than the mosque in Semarang, but nonetheless I was glad to be hearing the call to prayer. It was still comforting after a 12 year absence.
The call to prayer reminds me that I should, as the Quran admonishes, “be steadfast in prayer” (Sura 2 verse 110). It also reminds me that prayer is something required of all God’s children, no matter what the language or religion. When Muslims around the world pray, they pray to Allah—the Arabic word for God and a Semitic word similar to Eloh—the Hebrew word for God (Elohim is the plural form). When members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints pray in Indonesian, they too pray to Allah: the sacrament prayer begins: “Ya Allah, Bapak yang kekal--O God, the eternal Father” and primary children prayerfully sing “Aku Anak Allah”—I am a child of God.
As my wife and I now gather our two young children for morning prayer, I am grateful to have lived in many different places and among many different peoples who have taught me the importance of regular prayer. I pray that I might pass on that call to prayer so that my children might also know that God, who is great, hears our calls, our cries, our prayers.
Published in BYU Magazine, Summer 2003, p 44. |
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