Moroccans divided on loud prayer calls

Some in Morocco worried that loud Muslim calls to prayer may put off visitors to the country of 33 million people. (Abdeljalil Bounhar/ Associated Press/ File)

RABAT, Morocco - The muezzins' calls echo well before daybreak, summoning the Muslim faithful to daily prayers and reminding foreign tourists in the Moroccan capital how far they are from home.

But the rising decibel level is deepening fault lines between a government drive to modernize and a wave of rigorous political Islam.

Morocco, a country of 33 million people, gets more than 7 million tourists a year, and there are worries that some may be put off by the five heavily amplified calls a day, each lasting five minutes, to "hasten to the prayer, hasten to the prayer."

Muslim purists counter that authorities are compromising religion to please Westerners and the country's liberal elite.

The frictions are happening in a country that is considered moderate on matters of religion and is a US ally at a time when there are fears that Al Qaeda is establishing itself in North Africa.

Morocco has lately been shaken by two different cases in which the government, or wealthy Westerners, have been accused of plotting to force down the volume on the muezzins who make the call to prayer.

Nouzha Skalli, the minister for family and social affairs, is accused of seeking legislation to lower the volume on muezzins in tourist zones. Newspapers have asked whether Skalli, a feminist and former communist, is trying to curb Islam and impose secularism on Morocco's overwhelmingly Muslim society. Some hard-line imams have cursed her during public sermons.

"It made huge waves, even a tsunami," Skalli said in an Associated Press interview.

She wouldn't say what exactly she had proposed, since it happened at a closed-door Cabinet meeting, but denied suggesting a law to muzzle the muezzins and said her statements were taken out of context. "It was a complete manipulation," she said.

Skalli views her job of promoting women's rights as part of a wider struggle between two models of society: one of "modernity, equality and openness" versus "closing-off and backwardness." She suspects she was targeted "because I'm a woman and because I represent modernity."

Earlier this year Annie Laforet, a Frenchwoman, was blamed for the closure of a mosque next to the luxury guest house she runs in the old town, or medina, of picturesque Marrakech. The claim, which Laforet denied, caused outrage in the local press, and Laforet says she received death threats on Islamist websites.

Local authorities backed her denial and then reopened the mosque, from which the prayer call now blares every morning about 4:30 a.m., and then again an hour later. "It's a bit loud, but it's fine," Laforet said. "Tourists know it's part of living in the medina."

Still, Mohammed Darif, a Moroccan political scientist and expert on Islamism, says hard-liners increasingly are depicting the tourist influx as a threat to Muslim values. The wealthy may support the government's pro-Western and liberal values, he says, "But the Morocco of poverty, backward countryside, and urban slums is increasingly averse to tourism and the internationalized elite."

He says some Moroccans complain of walled-off resorts that make them feel unwelcome. "It's discrimination by wealth, and tourism is highlighting the sore," he said.

Olivier Roy, French author of "Globalized Islam," says the tensions are a new phenomenon, and that the former French colony has "a history of cohabitation" in which Western hippies of the 1960s and '70s were welcome.

Roy says louder calls to prayer are a product of Salafism, a rigorous strain of Islam imported from Saudi Arabia. "Thirty years ago you could barely hear the muezzin," he said.

Also, he said, the audio technology used for prayer calls has improved, and imams are in competition to fill their mosques.