Caledoniyya

…or not.

According to the Israeli Department of Labor, the 100-year-old tradition carried out each Ramadan by the Sandouka family faces extinction, thanks to a flurry of health and safety and bureacratic measures.

For the past century a cannon has been fired over Jerusalem’s Old City to mark the beginning and end of the daily fast of Ramadan.

Now Rajai Sandouka, the current cannon compere, fears that the Israeli Government is trying to push him out of his job and erase a vital part of the city’s Muslim tradition.

The quandaries emerged when Sandouka applied for the permit from the Department of Labor earlier this year, and was told that he would have to get additional permits from seven different offices.

Amidst the offices were the bomb squad, the secret service and the police; moreover, he was compelled to undergo a $2,000 course in handling explosives.

The changes are not new, but merely a part of rising restrictions, as Sandouka elaborates:

I’ve been doing this for 20 years and this is the first year they remembered I need to be qualified. Every year they make things a little more difficult, to push me to give up on the job. Then they can say, ‘He didn’t want to do it any more.’ It’s an indirect way of getting rid of an old Muslim tradition.

Rising before dawn to emit the symbolic explosion from the Old City’s Flowers gate, he is all too aware of the loss of such a tradition will have: should he be late with the sunset blast, Sandouka is flooded with angry phone calls from Muslims awaiting the signal for the start of iftar.

The canon currently used is a “sort of glorified firework that makes a loud boom” from a pipe resting at the gate. The previous cannons were donated by the Ottoman Empire, and were replaced twenty years previously by a gun donated by Jordan.

While this year’s herald has been approved, the security forces have insisted that the grenade be delivered each day by an armed Israeli military explosives expert, to ensure that it does not fall into the hands of ne’er-do-well terrorists.

In a show of solidarity, the Jewish Mayor of Jerusalem has stept forward to support Sandouka and rally for the continuation of the ritual.

Uri Lupolianski believes that changing the ritual could bear implications on a wider level, as ”changing the situation could cause damage to the delicate coexistence in Jerusalem”.

With tensions already at a high following last Friday’s skirmish between Israeli troops and hundreds of West Bank Palestinians trying to reach the Al-Aqsa mosque, Lupolianski’s observation has struck a chord.

For many Old City Palestinians, the move is perceived less as an act of bureaucratic caution and more an Israeli attempt to stifle a Muslim tradition. As Marwan Hashlaman, 51, expounds: “They are trying to abolish an old Arab custom. They want to take over Jerusalem.”

With measures already prohibiting men under the age of 45 and women under the age of 35 visiting the holiest Muslim site, the demise of the Sandouka cannon could prove another step back in relations between the Old City’s communities. One that they cannot afford.