EGYPTIAN MUEZZIN ON STAGE

Four Cairo Muezzins (callers for Salat) bring their lives to the stage for a piece of documentary theatre in Germany. Cairo, with over 30,000 mosques, is known as the city of a thousand mosques. Each mosque has its own muezzin, who is responsible for calling the faithful to prayer five times a day. However, this is soon to end! Egypt’s Ministry of Religious Affairs plans to introduce a centralised system which will enable a small group of carefully selected muezzins to broadcast the prayer call via radio. Instead of its own muezzin, each mosque will be expected to have its own radio receiver. A swiss theatre group is showing this imminent disappearance of the Cairo muezzin. For “Radio Muezzin,” its director Kaegi travelled to Cairo and brought back four minaret callers eager to tell Western audiences about their lives. As each muezzin tells his story, video screens behind him show the audience, his mosque, his home, and his family.