it is just after five am here, and still very dark outside. i spent the last few days traveling, so my internal clock is off. i fell went to bed very early, and have been up since three making notes on john stuart mill for my ethics class.
the calls to prayer have just begun from the mosques in my neighborhood. the islamic call to prayer, or adhan, is one of the lovely things about life in bangladesh, one of my favorite things about living here. the adhan is chanted in arabic over loudspeakers by men known as muezzins. the only words i can understand are the first two: Allahu Akbar - "God is Greatest."
i often find the call the prayer beautiful and haunting, especially in the stillness and darkness of the early morning. the city is quiet in the first morning hours. there is none of the honking traffic that crowds the street in daytime, none of the commerce or the strain of manual labor. and into that stillness and darkness comes the chant of the muezzins. an unaccompanied human voice calling people to remember their Creator.
to my ears, there is something mournful, even melancholic, about the sound of the adhan. it is filled with a profound longing: a finite, mortal creature, who has no certainty of where he has come from, is liable to pain and loneliness, and who is sure to die, singing out to others such as himself, and to what he hopes is greater than finitude, stronger than death. suffering and hope mixed together. the human kind of being.
the calls to prayer have just begun from the mosques in my neighborhood. the islamic call to prayer, or adhan, is one of the lovely things about life in bangladesh, one of my favorite things about living here. the adhan is chanted in arabic over loudspeakers by men known as muezzins. the only words i can understand are the first two: Allahu Akbar - "God is Greatest."
i often find the call the prayer beautiful and haunting, especially in the stillness and darkness of the early morning. the city is quiet in the first morning hours. there is none of the honking traffic that crowds the street in daytime, none of the commerce or the strain of manual labor. and into that stillness and darkness comes the chant of the muezzins. an unaccompanied human voice calling people to remember their Creator.
to my ears, there is something mournful, even melancholic, about the sound of the adhan. it is filled with a profound longing: a finite, mortal creature, who has no certainty of where he has come from, is liable to pain and loneliness, and who is sure to die, singing out to others such as himself, and to what he hopes is greater than finitude, stronger than death. suffering and hope mixed together. the human kind of being.
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