A muezzin’s voice sounds a timeless note

His voice, throaty and full, is as known and intimate to this neighborhood as a mother hurrying her children home. It slices from the minaret, spreading over alleys, piercing the sounds of snapping sheets, whispering schoolgirls, scraping shovels and the bargaining pleas of the broom seller:

“God is great. I testify there is no god but God. . . . Make haste toward prayers.”

The prayer caller’s chant is heard five times a day; from birth to death it is the music of Islam, lingering in the air, reminding the faithful to prostrate themselves before God. Morsi Abdel Fattah has sung these words for 20 years in this poor neighborhood, where cats slink and boys rush behind their fathers in the streets, learning the trades of tinker, mechanic and mattress maker.

Abdel Fattah is easily spotted among other men; he has a white beard and gray eyes, a pressed tunic and a prayer cap as snowy as a swan’s wing. He’s compact, almost clenched, seems stern but is not, and walks the same way he delivers the call to prayer: direct lines, little flourish. When he’s not at the mosque, he’s two doors down selling rice and macaroni from tin pots at the shop he and his brother run.

“I am seeking divine reward,” he says. “Since I was young, I’ve heard the prophetic saying that the muezzin [prayer caller] would have his head above the others on Judgment Day.”

Such a belief can carry a man through the birth of his children, the loss of his job, the way the neighborhood changes, how all those little things add up, like abacus beads sliding in the night. But it’s mostly been good, he has to say, although the boy thieves have forced him to lock the mosque in the afternoon, and the women today want more than when, as a young man, he offered his new bride a couch, a cupboard and a bed.

“Now, these young women want three rooms furnished,” he says, his finger, as it often does, pointing toward heaven. “That goes beyond the means of many men in this city. I think they’ve become too materialistic, too overexposed to the Internet.”

His father, a mason, moved the family to this neighborhood half a century ago. It was the time of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. Egypt was the center of the Arab world and a postwar boom was flooding Cairo with farmers and fishermen. The cliffs and rocky hills on the capital’s outskirts were dynamited; the stones that fell were hewn into roads, houses and mosques. Brick and mortar would replace the stone as buildings grew higher, the streets more crowded.

Abdel Fattah took a job in a state-owned soap factory when he was 12. He learned the call to prayer; his voice quieted the machines as workers washed their hands and praised God. Economic reform and privatization decades later made jobs tight, and he accepted early retirement. The nation was changing. It was getting tougher to live.

He and his wife raised four sons and a daughter, including one son who is a bank accountant and two who fix sewing machines. The family got used to his daily rituals that began before dawn and ended after sunset. God kept tugging and Abdel Fattah kept calling the faithful. His is the voice the young here have grown up with, like a coaxing uncle in a large family, a voice that soothes the devout and reminds those who have fallen that they need to return.

“When someone stays away from God, there is a terrible void,” he says. “But when you get closer to him, your soul is overwhelmed and it’s enough to go into the mosque and bow before him. It is difficult for hypocrites and demons. It’s God who decides whether to allow someone into his grace and it doesn’t matter if he’s rich or poor. You have to be content with what God gives you, even if it’s only a bit of salt in your hand.”

The mosque has expanded from one floor to three; its brown- and ivory-colored minaret, tipped with a crescent moon, rises over satellite dishes and fading flags from weddings past. Abdel Fattah has the key to the big wooden doors. When it’s time, the men sitting on the steps make way, and he glides through sunlight and shadow to the microphone. The loudspeaker crackles like a cicada, then quiets. After a breath:

“I testify that Muhammad is the messenger of God. Make haste toward prayers.”

The old men come first, creased faces, loosely tied turbans; then the workmen, dusted in mortar and paint; the shopkeepers, breathless and scurrying; the religious men in their prayer caps and beards; fathers trailed by little boys who want to be them, mimicking every gesture, the slipping off of sandals, the washing of hands and feet, the hugging of friends, the bowing in the dimness and kneeling in prayer as Abdel Fattah sends another verse into the late morning sky.

“This is the best place to be when you get old,” he says. “The best place to be at the end of your life. At the mosque, one should only think of paradise. He should leave his mundane troubles behind.”

When the last foot slides into the last sandal and the mosque empties, Abdel Fattah locks the doors, descends the steps, turns the corner and walks past vegetable bins and meat dangling on a butcher’s hook. The alley fills with sound: the mattress makers beating cotton; the boys gathering tin and garbage; the broom seller, weighted down as if balancing a clutch of rifles, yelling out his prices.

Abdel Fattah will return to the mosque in a few hours, slipping back into the cool half-light, his voice lifting over rooftops.

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jeffrey.fleishman@latimes.com

Noha El-Hennawy of The Times’ Cairo Bureau contributed to this report.