The first time it happened, no one noticed.
It was a Tuesday in late winter on a narrow street in Whitechapel, where the wind found every gap between buildings and pushed its cold fingers through. The sky had already folded itself into early darkness. Cars crawled past slowly, their headlights smearing light across wet tarmac. Somewhere, a fox crossed bravely between two overflowing wheelie bins.
Inside the Masjid-e-Noor, the carpets were freshly vacuumed, the radiators hummed tiredly, and the faint smell of cardamom tea still lingered from the afternoon halaqa. The clock on the wall shifted from 16:59 to 17:00 with a quiet digital sigh.
And for the briefest, thinnest moment, no one called the adhan.
The silence lasted perhaps five seconds. Maybe seven. Long enough for one pair of eyes to look up from a Qur’an page, frown, and then drop back when the familiar voice finally rose—soft, worn, pulling the call to prayer from somewhere deep inside a chest tired of winter.
“Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…”
The sound floated gently through the prayer hall, through the stairwell, through the shoe racks, and out into the street, where it mingled with bus brakes and distant sirens.
The men in the front row didn’t know that for a heartbeat the adhan had been lost.
Only Imam Hafiz Abdul Karim knew.
He had been staring at the clock when it switched to 17:00, his lips dry, his tongue still, his mind a blank page where there should have been words.
And in that hole of forgetting, something old and frightened had opened its eyes.
He forced the call from his throat a moment later, his voice steady by habit. But inside, a crack had appeared in a wall he had been shoring up for years.
The First Silence
After prayer, people came to him in the usual way.
“Imam sahib, make dua for my son’s exams.”
“Imam sahib, is this mortgage halal?”
“Imam sahib, my back hurts when I make ruku, what should I do?”
He listened. He nodded. He gave answers he had given a hundred times, worn smooth by repetition.
No one noticed that his eyes flickered often to the clock. That he kept swallowing as if something stubborn had lodged in his throat. That occasionally, when no one was looking, he pressed two fingers to the side of his neck as though feeling for a pulse in his memory.
By the time he got home to the small flat above the Somali café, the silence had settled in properly.
His wife, Shahnaz, opened the door with a dishcloth in her hand and the smell of cooking in her hair.
“You’re late,” she said.
He blinked. “Am I?”
She frowned. “You forget? You told me you would be home early today. The boiler man was supposed to come. He called three times. You didn’t answer.”
He frowned back, trying to remember. The day felt like a series of overlapping pages, the ink smudged.
“I… must have been busy,” he said weakly.
Her face softened, but the crease between her brows stayed.
“You’re always busy,” she sighed. “Eat. The curry is getting cold.”
He chewed without tasting, the sound of his own voice from earlier echoing in his ears.
Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…
He had been reciting those words since he was ten.
How could he forget them, even for a moment?
A Village Full of Sound
Once, before Whitechapel, before the Somali café and the flat with the broken boiler, before the committee meetings and charity fundraisers and WhatsApp fatwas, there had been a village.
In Golapganj, the air carried a different thickness. Rice fields stretched like green prayers to the horizon. The river flowed lazily past, dragging along gossip from other towns. The cows had names, the mango trees had moods, and the mosque stood at the centre like a patient old man.
Hafiz had grown up in the shade of that mosque. He had learned to write alif, baa, taa on a wooden slate that smelled of oil and old hands. The village imam then had been a tall man with a beard as white as the prayer caps stacked on a shelf. His name was Imam Rashid, but everyone called him “huzur” with a reverence that sat like a shine on the word.
As a boy, Hafiz had been the one to run to the mosque when the clouds darkened unexpectedly and the village needed a dua for rain. He had been the one to recite small surahs at funerals, his child’s voice trembling but clear. He had been the one who knew, deep in his bones, that the echo of the adhan on the water at Fajr was what made morning real.
“Come,” Huzur had said one afternoon, when Hafiz was fourteen. “You have a good voice. Let me teach you the adhan properly.”
They had climbed the narrow stairs to the little balcony where the loudspeakers were fixed. The village lay below them, roofs and fields and dust roads, a patchwork of lives stitched together by routine and resilience.
“Listen first,” Huzur had said.
He had closed his eyes and breathed the call into the air, each word shaped with love.
Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…
The sound had rolled across the rooftops, bounced off the fields, slipped between the betel nut trees. Chickens paused in their scratching. Women lifted their heads from the well. Men in lungis adjusted their walking pace.
“This,” the old imam had said, after finishing, “is not just an announcement. It is a rope we throw into people’s days. We pull them towards something better.”
Hafiz had nodded, his heart full. When his turn came, he had called the adhan with all the sincerity his skinny chest could hold. His voice cracked once on a high note. He had blushed.
“Good,” Huzur had said. “You will get better. One day, you will do this in many places. Maybe even in London.”
London, back then, had sounded like a made-up city from a storybook. A place where everything gleamed and nothing smelled of cow dung.
Later, when the migration papers came and the village gathered to say goodbye, some of the elders had patted Hafiz on the head and said, “You’ll be a big imam in England, inshaAllah.”
He had smiled, half-proud, half-terrified.
“You’ll call the adhan where the buildings touch the clouds,” someone had joked.
He didn’t know then that in London, the buildings sometimes swallowed the sound of the adhan completely.
The Masjid on the Corner
Masjid-e-Noor sat squeezed between a minicab office and a shuttered launderette on a Whitechapel side street. Its green signboard had faded under years of cloudy sunlight. Inside, the walls were painted an optimistic white that never quite surrendered the faint shadows of damp.
For twenty-two years, it had been Imam Hafiz’s mosque.
He had arrived in London with a suitcase full of clothes, a bag full of Qur’an books, and a head swimming with dreams and warnings. Married quickly. Worked briefly in a warehouse until the job at Masjid-e-Noor came through.
“It’s not grand,” the committee head had said. “Not like the big mosques in East Ham or Brick Lane. But it’s ours. Our people need someone who understands them. Sylheti imam for Sylheti community, you see.”
He had taken the job thinking it would be for a few years. Enough time to find his feet, help some people, maybe move on to something bigger.
The years had melted into one another like candle wax.
He became the voice people associated with Ramadan nights and Eid mornings. He married couples, buried elders, recited Qur’an at hospital bedsides. He explained things gently to teenagers with one foot in the masjid and one in the off-licence. He answered questions about leaking roofs and leaking marriages with the same weary patience.
When the mosque finally collected enough donations to install an electronic adhan system, he had insisted they still call it live whenever possible.
“A recording has no dua,” he’d argued. “No heart. The adhan must come from a living throat.”
They had agreed, partly because they respected him and partly because the system kept malfunctioning anyway.
And so, five times a day, he stood at the front, lifted the microphone, and pulled the ancient words from his chest.
Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…
Over and over, like a pulse.
Until the Tuesday when, for a few seconds, the pulse skipped.
What the Doctor Said
After it happened again—this time at ‘Asr, with the young muazzin nudging him discreetly and whispering, “Imam sahib, time ho gaya”—Shahnaz insisted he see a doctor.
“You’re forgetting little things,” she said. “The milk on the stove. The keys in the door. Now the adhan? What if it is your sugar? Or pressure? Or… something else?” Her eyes darted sideways, unwilling to name the thing people feared more than jinn and more than poverty: a mind starting to fray.
He sat in the GP’s cramped consultation room, surrounded by posters telling him to eat less salt and move more. The doctor was young enough to be his son, with kind eyes and a name that suggested somewhere between Lahore and Luton.
“So,” the doctor said gently, “you’re concerned about your memory?”
Hafiz shifted in his seat.
“Sometimes,” he admitted. “I forget small things. Just for a moment. Then they come back. But it’s like… like a light flickering.”
“Any dizziness?” the doctor asked. “Headaches? Trouble speaking?”
“No,” he said. “Only… sometimes… when I try to remember the adhan quickly, my mind is empty. For few seconds. Then it returns. But those seconds…”
He didn’t finish.
The doctor asked more questions. Day of the week. Prime Minister’s name. Three words he had to remember and repeat after five minutes.
“Apple, table, river,” the doctor said.
Hafiz repeated them easily. Memory, when asked politely, still came.
The doctor tapped notes into the computer.
“It could be stress,” he said. “Or lack of sleep. You say you’re often called at night for emergencies?”
“Yes,” Hafiz replied. “People die more after midnight, it seems.”
The doctor smiled sadly.
“I’ll send you for some blood tests,” he said. “Just to rule out anything serious. But from what you’ve told me, it may also be… spiritual exhaustion.”
Hafiz blinked. “Is that a real diagnosis?”
The doctor shrugged. “Not in official books. But my father was an imam in Birmingham. I’ve seen what happens when people bring you their problems but never ask how you are. Sometimes the heart gets tired before the brain does.”
On the way home, the winter light lay weak on Whitechapel’s pavements. Hafiz walked slowly, hands deep in his coat pockets, feeling both exposed and unseen.
Spiritual exhaustion.
He rolled the words around in his mind like prayer beads.
Was that what this was? Years of being everyone’s ear, everyone’s shoulder, everyone’s witness, and rarely anyone’s child?
The Boy With Headphones
A few days later, on a windy Friday, Hafiz found himself standing at the masjid entrance watching the stream of latecomers rushing in for Jumu’ah.
Among them, he noticed a boy he had seen many times but spoken to only briefly. Seventeen, maybe eighteen. Hoodie, trainers, backpack slung carelessly, headphones permanently hugging his ears. His name was Yasin. He came sometimes with his father, sometimes alone, sometimes not at all.
After the khutbah, as shoes were pulled on and “Assalamu alaikum” bounced off the walls in overlapping waves, Hafiz saw the boy lingering near the back, scrolling on his phone.
He walked over.
“Yasin,” he said.
The boy looked up, slightly startled.
“Yes, imam?”
“Walk with me,” Hafiz said. “I am going to the shop.”
They walked together towards the Pakistani-owned corner shop that sold everything from fresh coriander to phone top-ups.
“I see your headphones,” Hafiz said lightly. “What do you listen to all the time? Qur’an? Nasheed?”
Yasin smirked. “Sometimes. Mostly podcast. Sometimes UK drill. Don’t worry, imam, I skip the rude bits. Sometimes.”
Hafiz smiled faintly.
“When you hear the adhan,” he asked, “do you take them off?”
The boy hesitated.
“If I’m outside, yeah,” he said. “If I’m inside… sometimes I don’t hear it.”
The confession stung more than Hafiz expected.
“Does it mean you don’t pray?” he asked.
“No, imam,” Yasin said quickly. “I pray. Just… sometimes a bit late. Sometimes I look up prayer times on my phone and set reminders. Easier. Precise.” He waved his phone. “App never forgets.”
Hafiz felt the words “I did” rising in his throat and swallowed them.
“You know,” he said instead, “when I was your age, the adhan was our reminder app. No electricity for clocks. Only that voice. If the muazzin was late, our whole life was late.”
“Here,” Yasin said, “there’s so much sound. Sirens. Ads. Music. Everyone shouting. Adhan just… gets mixed in. Sometimes I don’t notice it till it’s nearly finished.”
They walked in silence for a moment.
“Imam,” Yasin asked suddenly, “do you ever… get tired?”
“Of what?” Hafiz replied.
“Of being good all the time,” the boy said. “Of being the imam. Of people expecting you to be on it, every second. Like you’re not allowed one bad day. One swear word. One wrong opinion.”
Hafiz almost laughed. The sound came out strange.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “More than you know.”
Yasin glanced at him, surprised by the honesty.
Inside the shop, as they waited in line behind a man buying lottery tickets and naan, Hafiz heard his own voice in his head, calling the adhan thousands of times over the years.
Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…
The syllables were worn but intact.
It was the space before them that frightened him.
That brief, blank moment where nothing came.
The Night Without Sound
The real crisis came on a Sunday at Maghrib.
The winter sky had already turned navy blue. A fine rain hung in the air like breath. The mosque lights were on, warm rectangles on the street.
Inside, a handful of men waited. The old uncles who came early to claim their spots. The delivery driver grabbing a quick prayer between jobs. The convert brother who always arrived ten minutes before every jama’ah and sat quietly at the back.
Hafiz stood at the front, hand on the microphone.
He looked at the clock.
17:29.
Maghrib.
He opened his mouth.
Nothing happened.
No sound.
Not even a broken one.
His throat felt like it had been filled with wet cloth. The words he knew better than his own name evaporated. Letters scattered in his mind like frightened birds.
His heart hammered. His palms grew slick.
Seconds ticked by.
The old uncle in the front row shifted, frown forming.
Behind him, the young muazzin—Tariq, with his neatly trimmed beard and freshly memorised Qur’an—noticed the imam’s stillness.
He sprang up gently.
“I got it, imam,” he whispered, reaching for the microphone.
Hafiz let go.
“Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…”
Tariq’s voice was clear, melodic, confident. The notes climbed and dipped perfectly. Some of the uncles later said, “Subhanallah, what a voice that boy has. One day he’ll be a big imam, inshaAllah.”
During the prayer, Hafiz’s recitation did not falter. Muscle memory carried him. His tajweed was flawless, his voice steady. People left afterwards saying, “Today’s surah sounded beautiful,” unaware that their imam’s hands were still shaking inside his sleeves.
In the empty hall later, after everyone had gone, he sat against the wall and stared at the now-silent microphone.
There had been no words.
Only a roar of nothing, loud enough to drown out everything he thought he knew about himself.
He pressed the heels of his hands hard against his eyes until colours burst behind them.
“Ya Allah,” he whispered. “What is happening to me?”
Secrets in the Flat Above the Café
When he told Shahnaz, he expected panic.
She surprised him.
She did not gasp, or declare it a sign of the end times, or call every cousin in Sylhet for advice. She made tea. Placed the cup in front of him. Sat down opposite, her face more serious than he’d seen in years.
“Maybe it is time,” she said.
“Time for what?” he asked.
“To rest,” she replied. “To let someone else’s voice carry the adhan. You are not twenty-five anymore. You are fifty-six. You have done this nearly every day for twenty-two years.”
He bristled.
“I am the imam,” he said. “If I forget the adhan, what am I? A teacher with no lesson. A boat with no anchor.”
“You are still my husband,” she said quietly. “Still the father of our daughters. Still a man whose worth is not measured only by how many times he can shout ‘Allāhu akbar’ into a microphone.”
He looked away, his jaw tight.
“I came here to serve,” he muttered.
“Maybe,” she said, “you also came here to be human.”
The truth of it stung.
He remembered the young doctor’s words. Spiritual exhaustion.
“Tell the committee,” she went on. “Tell them you need an assistant imam. A second. Someone younger to share the load. You don’t have to disappear. Just… step back a little.”
The idea terrified him more than forgetting did.
“What will people say?” he asked.
She shrugged. “People always say things. You know this better than anyone.”
He thought of the uncles who complained when he shortened the khutbah by three minutes. The aunties who argued over the correct number of samosas at iftar. The WhatsApp groups that exploded if he dared suggest that women should have more space in the mosque.
“If I tell them I forgot the adhan,” he said slowly, “they will think I am finished.”
“Then don’t tell them everything,” she replied. “Just enough. Tell them the truth in a way they can carry.”
He sat there, staring into his tea, feeling like a man standing at the edge of a river, unsure if he was meant to cross or just sit and listen.
A Meeting and a Microphone
The mosque committee met on a Tuesday night, as they always did, around a long plastic table that had seen more arguments than any battlefield.
Polystyrene cups of tea. Plates of biscuits. Stacks of papers with numbers about donations, electricity bills, building repairs.
“Imam sahib wants to say something,” the chairman announced.
All eyes turned to him. Some concerned. Some curious. One or two already guarded.
He cleared his throat.
For a second, the words snagged. Then they came.
“Brothers,” he said, “I am not a young man anymore. Alhamdulillah, I have served this masjid for many years. I love it. I love you. But the work… it is heavy. The funerals, the marriages, the late-night phone calls. The adhan, five times a day, every day.”
He paused.
“I am asking,” he continued, “that we appoint a second imam. A young man. Someone I can train, and who can take some of the load. Especially the adhan. I will still lead prayers. I will still be here. But I need to share.”
Silence.
Then the murmurs.
“Is everything okay, imam sahib?” one uncle asked. “Are you ill?”
“Alhamdulillah, I am managing,” he said carefully. “Just… human.”
Another committee member frowned. “A second imam means more salary. More expenses. Our donations are not so strong. People already complain when we ask for more.”
“There is a boy,” Hafiz said. “Tariq. You know him. He already helps with classes. Give him something small. We don’t have to pay him like a full imam. He will accept little. He wants the experience.”
They discussed. They argued. They worried about money, about precedent, about the “message it would send” to the community.
As they spoke over each other, Hafiz’s mind drifted to his village in Golapganj. To old Imam Rashid, who had shared the adhan with him not because he was weak, but because he knew a voice must outlive a throat.
Finally, the chairman raised his hands.
“Okay,” he said. “We try. On a trial basis. Six months. Tariq will do some adhans, some prayers. We’ll see. But imam sahib stays, of course.”
They all nodded, partly reassured.
Hafiz exhaled slowly, a man who had just set down a heavy box but kept one hand resting on it, unsure if it might be taken away.
Learning to Listen Again
The first time Tariq called the adhan after the decision, Hafiz stood in the second row and listened like everyone else.
“Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…”
The young man’s voice filled the humble hall, threaded itself through the doorway, climbed the stairwell. It spilled onto the pavement outside, where two teenagers on scooters paused briefly before resuming their loud conversation.
There was a tiny ache in Hafiz’s chest, a sharp pinch of loss.
Then—unexpectedly—something like relief.
He didn’t have to remember in that moment.
He just had to answer the call.
He closed his eyes.
“Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…”
Behind the sound, he realised, there had always been another silence. The silence of hearts turning, feet moving, minds shifting briefly toward something other than bills and deadlines and dinner.
He had been so focused on being the voice that he had forgotten how to be the listener.
After the prayer, some uncles came up to him, half-concerned.
“Everything okay, imam sahib? You not calling adhan today?”
“Today I wanted to listen,” he said. “See if my ears still work.”
They laughed, assuming he was joking.
He smiled along, letting them.
That evening, as he walked home, the streetlights stretched tall and thin across Whitechapel. A bus rumbled past, its windows fogged. A group of teenage girls in school uniforms rushed by, scarves flying, laughing over something that vibrated on one of their phones.
He passed a side street where, faintly, another mosque’s adhan drifted through the cold.
Allāhu akbar…
Another imam. Another voice. Another rope thrown into the evening.
For the first time in months, he felt less alone.
Echoes from Golapganj
A few weeks later, a letter arrived from Bangladesh. Real paper. Real ink. Not a WhatsApp voice note, not a Facebook message from a cousin he barely remembered.
The envelope smelled faintly of damp and must.
Inside, a single page. The handwriting spidery but familiar.
“Assalamu alaikum, Hafiz,” it began.
It was from his younger brother, still in Golapganj.
He wrote about the rice harvest, about the new tube well the villagers had installed, about the price of oil.
Then, near the end, a line:
“Our old huzur passed away last month.”
Hafiz stopped.
Old Imam Rashid. The man who had first put the adhan in his mouth. Returned, now, to the One he’d called people towards all his life.
“They buried him near the mosque,” his brother wrote. “Many people came. Someone said, ‘He taught Hafiz who is now big imam in England.’ We were proud. The new imam is young. He calls the adhan differently. But the sound still goes to the same sky.”
Hafiz read the line again and again.
The sound still goes to the same sky.
He folded the letter carefully and slipped it into his pocket. Carried it with him for days, touching it occasionally like a talisman.
One evening, alone in the mosque between ‘Asr and Maghrib, he stood at the front and, without microphone, called the adhan softly to the empty room.
Just to see if it was still there.
Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…
The words came, a little hesitant at first, then smooth. His voice cracked slightly on a note, the way it had when he was fourteen.
He laughed under his breath.
“I forgot you,” he whispered to the words. “But you did not forget me.”
The Imam Who Forgot and the Boy Who Remembered
It was Yasin, the headphone boy, who later told the story differently.
Years after Hafiz had finally retired, after Tariq had become the main imam, after the mosque had been renovated and the launderette turned into a dessert shop, people would sit in the back row and talk.
“You remember old Imam Hafiz?” someone would say. “Subhanallah, what a voice he had. Never missed an adhan.”
Yasin, now older, with a beard starting to thread with grey, would smile.
“That’s not true,” he would say. “He missed a few.”
“Really?” the others would ask, surprised. “We don’t remember.”
“Exactly,” Yasin would reply. “Because when he forgot, someone else remembered. That’s the point. The adhan isn’t his alone. It’s ours. As long as someone is there to say it, to hear it, to answer it, it doesn’t matter if one throat gets tired.”
He would remember walking with the imam to the shop, the day the old man had admitted being tired.
He would remember that as the day he first understood that religious men were not made of marble.
They were made of breath.
And breath sometimes faltered.
The Last Call
Years later, when his knees matched the mosque stairs in creakiness, Hafiz finally stepped down completely.
They organised a small gathering for him. No grand speeches. Just tea, samosas, and community members standing up one by one to say awkward thank yous.
He felt both embarrassed and strangely light.
At the end, Tariq approached him with a microphone.
“Imam sahib,” he said, smiling. “One last adhan. If you feel up to it.”
Hafiz hesitated.
His heart did the strange flutter it always did now when the prospect of beginning those ancient words appeared in front of him.
Then he nodded.
He stood.
The hall was full. Faces he had seen go from black-bearded to white. Children he had once bounced on his knee now taller than him, standing with their own kids. Women watching from the balcony upstairs.
He did not look at the clock.
He did not think about forgetting.
He just opened the door in his chest where the words lived and let them out.
“Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…”
His voice was quieter than in his youth. Less show. More tremor. But the words were there, whole and bright.
As he called, memories layered themselves over the sound.
Golapganj fields.
The balcony with old Imam Rashid.
The first time he saw snow falling silently on Mile End Road.
The face of the first man he buried.
The tears of the first child he comforted.
The nights in Ramadan when his throat burned but his heart felt full.
When he finished, the hall whispered “Allāhu akbar” back at him, hundreds of hearts answering.
He handed the microphone back to Tariq.
“This time,” he thought, “I am not forgetting. I am letting go.”
The Sky That Still Hears
In the small flat above the Somali café, long after he had stopped working, Hafiz woke before Fajr as his body had learned to do over decades.
He sat on the edge of his bed and listened.
Through the thin walls, through the hum of fridges and the soft hiss of early buses, he heard it.
From Masjid-e-Noor down the road.
From the bigger mosque near Whitechapel station.
Sometimes, when the wind was right, from a distant masjid in Stepney.
“Allāhu akbar, Allāhu akbar…”
Different voices now.
Young throats, steady and strong.
He did not join them aloud. His lungs were not what they once were. His dentist had warned him about his voice strain. His daughters nagged him to “take it easy, abba, you’ve done enough.”
But inside, he repeated the words, his tongue moving silently in the dark.
He knew now that forgetting the adhan that winter evening had not made him less of an imam.
It had reminded him of something he had almost lost—
that the faith he served was never meant to sit on one pair of shoulders.
When he finally left this world, it was a quiet afternoon in late spring. The janazah was simple. The masjid was full. Tariq cried openly. Yasin recited Qur’an with a steady voice.
People remembered him as “the imam who was always there.”
Somewhere, one or two might mention, in passing, that he “slowed down a bit in the last years.”
No one said “the imam who forgot the adhan.”
But if they had, it might not have been an insult.
It might have been a reminder that even ropes thrown from heaven sometimes pass through shaking hands.
And that, in the end, the important thing is not who calls.
It is that the call is still made.
The sound still goes to the same sky.
And somewhere in that vast listening, a tired man from Golapganj, who once stood on a balcony with his teacher and learned to say “Allāhu akbar” without fear, finally rests in a silence that is not empty, but full.
Full of all the prayers he helped others pray, and the one he never quite managed to make for himself—
“Ya Allah, let me be enough, even when I am not.”
Disclaimer
This story, published on mujiburrahman.com is a purely fictional work. All characters, places, communities, and events described are products of imagination or used in a fictional context. Any resemblance to actual individuals or real-world events is entirely coincidental. The purpose of this content is storytelling and entertainment only and should not be taken as factual or representative of any real person or community.
💛 Support My Writing
If this story inspired you, moved you, or entertained you, you can support my writing journey here:
👉 Support Me on Buy Me a Coffee
Your contribution helps me reach my goal of raising £100,000 to take two years off and write a full-length novel.
Shop on Amazon UK using my affiliate link – This may earn me a small commission at no cost to you.