The iftar cannon

On Ramadan evenings in Damascus a single boom arrives with the call to prayer. Nothing leaves the barrel — the round is blank, and it means one thing: the fast is over. The iftar cannon was how a city without accurate clocks or mass media told everyone the hour at the same moment. What survives today is the habit, not the function.

When and where it is fired

The shot is timed to the sunset call to prayer, and there is only one. Syria brought the practice back after the war: the army fires it, and in Damascus the firing point is the square at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A further shot on the first day announces that the month has begun; after that it is one round each evening for iftar.

What it was for

The answer is technical. Without accurate clocks or mass media, sound was the only thing that reached a whole city at once. The call to prayer covered a quarter; the cannon covered the city. In Egypt the system went further and separate shots were added for suhur and for the start of the fast, so the day was marked out by three sounds.

Today the clock is in everyone’s pocket and the cannon has no practical work left. What remains is this: at the sound, a whole city does the same thing in the same second.

Where it came from

Two accounts exist and both begin in Cairo. In the first, the Mamluk sultan Khushqadam tested a new gun that had reached him in the year 865 of the Islamic calendar. The shot landed exactly at sunset and people took it for a signal to break the fast. Seeing how pleased they were, the sultan kept it up. The second account places the origin in the 19th century, under Muhammad Ali in Egypt.

The order of its spread is clearer. The idea moved first into the Levant — Jerusalem, Damascus and the other cities of Syria — and from there reached Baghdad late in the 19th century. So the cannon is not a custom that arrived in Syria late; Damascus was among the first places in the region to hear it.

What happens on the street

The hour before the sound is the busiest of the day: traffic locks up, everyone is trying to get home, and taxis disappear. At the sound the street empties, and it stays empty for about half an hour. Shutters are down and the pavement is bare; between the closed souqs a few stools, small tables with plates on them, and shopkeepers eating where they have shut up for the night. Then the city opens again and turns into a crowd that runs past midnight.

What it means for a visitor

The first evening it startles you. The sound is single, dry and closer than you expect. It is a calendar, not an explosion, and knowing it is coming is enough.

Two practical points follow. Do not be on the road in the hour before it — that hour is dead for transport, and intercity roads are worst. The half hour after it is the emptiest the old city gets all year, and the same lanes will be full again thirty minutes later.