Replies

I had to travel to Malaysia on business and was sitting on the balcony of my hotel at 5:00am (jet lag) when the call to Muslim prayers was broadcast across the city. The only response I could hear in the quietness was the howling of dogs all over the city.

I just laughed.

The REAL dogs had their butts in the air and their faces toward Mecca.

I had to travel to Malaysia on business and was sitting on the balcony of my hotel at 5:00am (jet lag) when the call to Muslim prayers was broadcast across the city. The only response I could hear in the quietness was the howling of dogs all over the city.

I went to Israel in 1990 (landed there the day that Iraq invaded Kuwait). My brother lives there, and the next day we got up at about 4:00 in the morning to travel from Jerusalem to Masada, which we were planning to (and did) climb. Before we left, my brother said, "You have to see something very funny." So we went to his roof. His section of town is on the summit of a hill. On the other 2 hills surrounding a common valley, there are Moslem villages. He looked at his watch and said that in 2 minutes there would be the Moslem call to prayer in the first village, and that within 3 seconds of it starting, the dogs there, in the other village and his area would all start barking. That, in turn, would wake the babies in all 3 places, followed by parents waking up and turning on the lights. Sure enough, this is exactly what happened, like clockwork. We laughed our asses off about it.

I asked him why everyone put up with this crap every single day - after all, how can anyone be in a good mood and function if they end up getting woken up every day at 4 A.M. He told me that there are times when some Israelis take things into their own hands - like, for instance, the time when he was in the IDF, and a few of them climbed up the tower with the timer-armed tape recorder that actually sounded the call to prayer. You can see where this is going...they switched the tape for some heavy metal band and, suffice it to say, the Arabs were a bit less than pleased. Oh, and the next morning a bunch of them came out to actually do the call to prayer the old fashioned way - which was the point: if you're going to annoy everyone by making noise at O Dark Thirty, you're damned well going to get your own carcass out of bed to do it.