By Father Alex Fry
Special to The Texas Catholic
While living abroad, I relished every opportunity to find a cheap flight to somewhere new and exotic. It was a simple but reliable source of joy for me. Month after month, I would input my available dates into Google Flights and wait to see what affordable adventure awaited me. The crowning achievement of my penny-saving plans was the time I secured a 30 euro roundtrip flight to Rabat, Morocco, for a weekend break.
Besides watching “Casablanca” a few years earlier, I had little practical knowledge of the North African country where I would spend a few days. My travel partner and I settled on the city of Fes as our primary destination. Known as the cultural capital of Morocco, Fes is a vibrant, car-free medina, with over 9,000 winding alleyways. (Think “Aladdin.”)
Working our way through crowded streets of vendors, craftsmen, and even donkeys, we instantly fell in love with the old world charm of this ancient city. We sipped “Moroccan whiskey” (fresh mint tea) in the marketplace, visited the tanneries (open-air workshops where camel hides are laboriously turned into leather products), and enjoyed authentic tagine at our hotel, a beautifully converted riad.
On the first night of our trip, we climbed the steps to the top of our hotel, where we were treated to a 360 view over the rooftops of Fes. With the sun setting, we heard for the first time, the Muslim call to prayer, the Adhan, essentially a public notice that it is time to stop and give praise to God. Mesmerizing and hauntingly beautiful, it emanates from seemingly everywhere all at once and blends into an unsynchronized but somehow harmonic and layered melody. It reminded me that for the first time in my life I was in a country whose population was predominantly Muslim. (In fact, there was not even a Catholic church in the city.)
While it was unsettling at first, with each successive call to prayer (it occurs five times per day), I began to anticipate its occurrence and appreciate the value of this audible reminder of God’s goodness and care and of our duty to praise him.
“It is right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks…” We hear these words at every Mass, but do we live as though they are true?
For centuries, the Church bells marked the rhythm of Christian life. At six in the morning, noon, and six in the evening, they summoned the faithful to pause, pray the Angelus, and remember God in the midst of ordinary work. Time itself was sanctified.
Today, many churches ring their bells only on Sundays. And even if they did still ring each day, would we stop? Would we interrupt our meetings, our lunches, our errands, and pray publicly? Would we risk looking strange? Would our workplaces even tolerate such an open act of devotion?
What struck me most in Morocco was not merely that Muslims prayed regularly but that their prayer visibly interrupted life. The call to prayer reminded everyone that God deserved attention now, not merely when convenient. It was a public acknowledgment that man does not live for work, entertainment, or commerce alone.
With the call to prayer and the best chicken tagine you’ll have in your life, it’s easy to say that our Muslim friends in Morocco have some things in the right order. And that discovery was worth far more than 30 euros roundtrip.
Father Alex Fry is a parochial vicar at Christ the King Catholic Parish.
Cutline for featured image: Shown is Jean-François Millet’s “The Angelus” (c. 1857–1859), an oil-on-canvas painting depicting two peasants pausing in prayer in a field. The work is part of the collection of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. (Wikimedia Commons)
