Adhan

The Adhan is the call to prayer, pronounced aloud before each of the five daily prayers, traditionally from the minaret of the mosque and now often amplified. Its lines are short declarative statements of the faith: the greatness of God (Allahu akbar), the two testimonies that there is no god but God and that Muhammad is His messenger, the summons to prayer and to well-being, and, before the dawn prayer, the added line that prayer is better than sleep. The tradition holds that the call was instituted at Medina in the first years of the community, and it attributes its first performance to Bilal ibn Rabah, a freed Abyssinian slave chosen for his voice, a figure Muslims remember with particular affection.

The adhan is not scripture but transmitted practice, and its wording differs slightly between the Sunni schools and the Shia, whose call adds a line on the authority of Ali. As sound it has become one of the defining features of Muslim life, marking the hours over cities and villages five times a day, and its recitation is an art in its own right, the muezzin's melodic delivery a valued skill. Answered by the shorter second call (iqama) that immediately precedes the prayer itself, the adhan turns the measurement of the day into a continual public proclamation of the faith.

Bilal ibn Rabah, traditionally credited as the first person to call the adhan, was a formerly enslaved Ethiopian companion of the Prophet, and Islamic tradition treats his selection for this highly visible and honored liturgical role, chosen specifically for the quality of his voice rather than for any social standing, as an early and deliberate demonstration of the new religion's rejection of the tribal and social hierarchies of pre Islamic Arabian society, a point subsequent Islamic teaching and popular retelling has returned to repeatedly as an example of the community's founding egalitarian ideals being enacted in a concrete, visible practice rather than only stated abstractly.

The adhan's wording is not perfectly uniform across all of Islam: the version recited in Shia communities includes an additional phrase after the testimony of faith, affirming Ali as the friend of God, a line absent from the Sunni adhan and reflecting Shia Islam's distinctive theological emphasis on Ali's specific spiritual authority following the Prophet, a variation that means the call to prayer, heard aloud from minarets five times daily across the Muslim world, is itself one of the most publicly audible markers of the Sunni and Shia liturgical difference, recognizable to listeners familiar with both traditions even though the great majority of the call's wording is identical between them.