26/365: Minarets

[valadilenne]

Grand Mosque Minaret in Egypt

Minaret is Arabic for lighthouse. They are the tower, in the Islamic religion, where (in the olden days) men would stand at the top and call everyone to prayer several times a day. Now they have speakers set up that play a pre-recorded call to prayer.

Distant View of a Minaret was a collection of short stories written by the female Muslim author Alifa Rifaat that I read for my Women in African Studies class, and the title always kind of struck me as really nice, in a vague way. It has both distance and something foreign about it, and the story itself. The story itself is about sexual repression--the woman of the story has sex with her husband but is unsatisfied because he ignores her after it's over. The city they live in has built up so much over time that all she can see out the window is one single minaret sticking up over the roofs of other buildings, far away in the distance. In the end, she comes back out into the bedroom to find her husband dead and thinks to herself how surprisingly calm she is.

They're beautiful pieces of architecture, but I don't think I'll ever disconnect them from that story.