DOCUMENTARY THEATRE

The first muezzin was a freed slave, because he had such a sweet voice. Until the Fifties blind muezzins often climbed up to the minaret in order to call to prayer – called Adhan – to all four directions of town.
In present-day Cairo most of the muezzins are employed by the State. They often sleep in the mosque and only seldom visit their family living in the village. Apart from calling to prayer they are also frequently the janitor of the house of worship, they lock up the building and organise its cleaning.

Cairo is called the city of the thousand mosques. In reality there are some 30,000.
Above the town the cries become one big, manifold sound layer. This is supposed to change now: The Minister for Religious Affairs wants to introduce the centralised muezzin by the end of this year.
Via one radio station one proclaimer each is to go on air for simultaneous
transmission from all state-owned mosques. This is not the end of the heterogeneous cultures of faith, but the end of cacophony. And thousands of Egyptian muezzins will remain silent?

Four Egyptian muezzins are the principal characters in “Radio Muezzin”: a blind
Qur’an teacher who spends two hours on the mini-bus each day to get to the
mosque; an Egyptian farmer’s son and former tank driver, who vacuum-cleans the mosque’s carpet on a daily basis; an electrician who after having been a migrant worker in Saudi Arabia and having been involved in a serious accident started to recite the Qur’an by heart, and a bodybuilder and vice world champion in reciting the Qur’an, whose Qur’an cassettes are very popular among taxi drivers. “Radio Muezzin” makes them meet an engineer who learned how to encrypt radio signals at the Aswan High Dam.
In a mosque of carpets and ventilators they all become the protagonists in a reconstruction of their life, they become individual representatives of
a religious culture, whose many faces are often being reduced to simple foe images in Europe. Between their words and the video images of their everyday-life new voice images come into being, speaking about the transformation of the call to prayer in the age of their technical reproduction.