The musahharati, the man who wakes the street

On Ramadan nights a sound passes through the middle of your sleep in the old city of Damascus: someone stops at a door, calls out, then starts again a street away. That is the musahharati. His job takes one sentence — wake the quarter for suhur, the meal eaten before dawn — and he begins his round about two hours before first light.

When you hear it

Suhur is the meal taken before the fast begins at dawn, and the musahharati is its clock. The round opens roughly two hours before that, at the quietest point of the night. The exact hour follows the season: when Ramadan falls in winter dawn comes late, when it falls in summer it comes early, and the sound moves with it.

In the narrow lanes of the old city the voice hits stone and grows, and it carries through a shut window. In the newer quarters, with their wide streets, it usually does not reach anyone at all.

Lutes, not a drum

The word brings a drum to mind, but that picture comes from Egypt, where waking people with a frame drum called a tar began. In the Levant the method was different. The sources describe the people of Damascus going round the houses playing the oud and the tanbur and singing chants written for Ramadan. In Yemen and the Maghreb doors were struck with a stick instead, and the Maghrebi waker carried a long horn, the nafir.

What he calls out

The call runs to a formula and the lines stay short, because they have to land on an ear that has just woken. The best known is ya naim, wahhid ad-daim — you who sleep, declare the Everlasting One. Another: qumu ila suhurikum, ja’a ramadanu yazurukum — rise to your suhur, Ramadan has come to visit you. Short hymns fill the gaps. What is asked of a good musahharati is carrying power: a loud, clear voice and lungs that last the night.

Where the practice began

Waking people for suhur grew up beside the call to prayer: Bilal ibn Rabah and Ibn Umm Maktum taking it in turns is counted as the first arrangement. The first man recorded as making a separate call for suhur is Anbasa ibn Ishaq, in the year 228 of the Islamic calendar; he walked the streets of Fustat calling people to the meal. Waking with a drum settled in Egypt later, and the image most people carry today comes from there.

Where the trade has gone

The musahharati asks for nothing during the night. He collects on the first morning of Eid instead, going door to door with his drum, giving the greeting and taking money, a gift or sweets in return. That is his whole income.

The trade has largely withdrawn, and the reasons stack up: people go to bed late and are awake for suhur anyway, a phone alarm does the job, houses are bigger and cities louder, so the voice no longer gets inside. Men still work the old city of Damascus, and they describe the work in their own words as waking people in old Damascus for prayer and for the suhur meal. Across the rest of the city the nights pass in silence.

What to do if you hear it

Nothing is asked of you. The sound is neither a warning nor a performance; it is the quarter keeping its own time, and it passes in a few minutes. If your room faces a lane in the old city you will almost certainly hear it, and closing the window is enough if you are not getting up. If someone knocks on the morning of Eid it is probably him, and a small tip is in order.