This Soapbox comes to you from Gili Air, one of the three small islands off the north-west tip of Lombok in Indonesia. It’s hard to have a strong opinion about anything when you are sipping a cocktail and marvelling at the crimson colours of the sunset, but I have become quite interested in the Muslim call to prayer, which we hear from the Central Masjid Mosque barely a 16-minute walk away.

Lombok, Indonesia

Lombok, Indonesia. Photo © Adhista Raw/Pexels

Every morning at 5:11am, the Fajr begins – the first of the five prayers. In a pre-amplified world, this could only extend as far as the natural human voice could project from a minaret, but now it blasts out across the island waking up everybody, whatever their religion. I wonder about the children living next door to the mosque and whether they are so used to it, they just roll over and go back to sleep; and whether putting in earplugs to block out the noise would make you a bad Muslim in the same way eating bacon and egg rolls makes you a bad Jew. (I had a Jewish friend...