What is the call to prayer like to experience?

The first one you really notice is usually the sunset call, and it stops you mid-sentence. A long, drawn-out note unfurls from a nearby minaret — 'Allahu akbar' — sung rather than spoken, with these aching melismatic bends in the voice, and then a beat later another mosque answers from across the rooftops, then another and another, until the whole city is layered in overlapping calls in slightly different keys, rolling and echoing off the walls. From a rooftop terrace at dusk, with the sky going pink and the swifts wheeling, it is one of the most genuinely moving sounds I know.

It happens five times a day, and each has its own character. The dawn one, the fajr, comes while it's still dark and is the one travellers remember — because it will wake you, especially in a riad near a mosque, a voice rising out of the silence at maybe five in the morning. The midday and afternoon calls thread through the bustle of the souk, half-heard under the noise. The sunset maghrib is the lyrical, beautiful one. And the night call closes the day. Each lasts a couple of minutes, and the muezzins are real human voices — some plain, some extraordinarily gifted, a few that give you chills.

What changes over a trip is your relationship to it. At first it's exotic, a soundtrack, maybe at 5am a mild annoyance. Then a few days in you stop hearing it as foreign and start using it — you realise it's late afternoon because the asr is sounding, you notice the shops half-shutter and men drift toward the mosque, you feel the rhythm of the day it imposes. It becomes a clock and a pulse. By the end of a week, the silence between calls feels like the unusual thing, and the call itself feels like the place breathing.

A few honest, respectful notes. It is a call to worship, not a performance, so the right posture is quiet appreciation rather than treating it as a tourist event — lower your voice, don't talk over it loudly, and if you're filming, do it discreetly. Near a mosque the dawn call is loud, so light sleepers should pack earplugs or ask the riad for a room away from the minaret. And do try to be on a rooftop at sunset at least once to hear the full overlapping wave of it across the city — it's free, it's spine-tingling, and it's pure Morocco.