Word: muezzin
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...Nasser's chief instrument of propaganda is the Voice of the Arabs. On four wave lengths, the Voice pours out a stream of stirring Arab songs, inflammatory news summaries and incendiary comment with the hypnotic insistence of a kind of political muezzin. It alleges "imperialist" plots, fictitious massacres, Zionist "conspiracies." It recommends riots in Jordan, rebellion in Morocco, revenge in Algeria. Blaring from loudspeakers in cafes and hovels throughout the Middle East, it is for a vast number of illiterate Arabs the only news they get. By relay stations up the Nile, it also aims at all Africa, beaming...
Journalist Koestler made his pilgrimage to Russia just in time for the great 1932 famine, and traveled all the way to fabled Bokhara, where the muezzin had been replaced by the morning loudspeaker ("Get up, get up, empty your bowels, do your exercises . . ."). When he fell in love with a breathtakingly beautiful employee of the Baku Water Supply Board (whom he later denounced to the police as a suspected spy), Koestler found in her pathetic ignorance of the outside world his first seeds of disgust with Soviet Russia. But he still had a long way to travel before...
...Naguib, "to throw the British out of the Canal Zone any time we want." At 11:05 on Liberation night, the time the army moved last year against King Farouk, 101 guns boomed across the brooding Nile. Four hours later, a great crowd gathered with Naguib to hear the muezzin chant familiar verses from the Koran. Then, as the sun came up, they knelt in humility with their faces towards Mecca...
Alami allows his boys to run their own life. Each house of ten students elects its own leader, who takes a seat on the Boystown ruling council. The boys tend their own gardens, conduct their own religious services. Each noon, a young voice rings out the muezzin's summons to devotions. Then the orphans bow in prayer, including always the words: "And Thy blessings on our loved ones who are dead...
Istanbul's paved boulevards and narrow cobbled streets echo with the shrill tootle of otomobiller dodging rickety, horse-drawn carts and blind beggars. Smoke-blackened industrial towers, dubbed "Ataturk's minarets," jut skyward between the graceful spires of the Ottomans. The muezzin still calls the faithful to prayer, but in place of flowing robes, he wears a Western business suit. Near the waterfront, hollow-eyed children stare from the windows of tottering wooden tenements. In the dimly lighted bar of the sleek Park Hotel, Turkish intelligence agents mingle with American engineers and Balkan refugees, drinking the latest Yankee...