CAIRO — 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.
