Another pandemic Ramadan in Jordan, but cannon’s boom is a balm

At 7:14 on the dot, the artillery brigade officers fire the twin cannons into the sunset. The booms reverberate through the valley and up the crowded hills of the Jordanian capital.

The daylong fast is over. Iftar is served.

As Jordan marks its second Ramadan under lockdown from the coronavirus, officials are reviving a rather loud tradition. For Jordanians dealing with the stresses of pandemic-induced unemployment and uncertainty, it offers an audible celebration that all can take part in, and a bit of nostalgic comfort as well.

The familiar boom has become a balm.

“These cannons are taking me back to my childhood,” says Um Eyad, a mother of five in her late 50s. “Now this is the sound of Ramadan.”

For most Muslims, Ramadan means gatherings. 

Families, friends, and complete strangers gather together each sunset for the iftar meal – from a handful of dates and water to a multicourse feast at home.

Jordan hit hard

In ordinary years, mosques are at their fullest. Communal evening tarawih prayers see neighbors and friends pray shoulder to shoulder each night.

Throughout the holy month, the entire society is on the exact same schedule to the very second – eating, praying, and celebrating in lockstep.

But this year, after a March in which Jordan saw one of the highest numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths per capita in the world, the government imposed a series of restrictions for Ramadan, closing mosques and imposing 7 p.m. curfews, just before the sunset iftar.

In a society of strong tribal and familial bonds, where families are accustomed to a month packed with rotating iftar invitations and endless visits till dawn, the prospect of yet another Ramadan in isolation was especially severe.

Which is what lit the fuse for the return – after a decadeslong absence – of the Ramadan cannon by the Greater Amman Municipality (GAM) and the Jordan Armed Forces.

“Although the spiritual aspects of Ramadan, praying and reflections, are still there, the social aspect and festive atmosphere have been disrupted by the pandemic,” says Nasser al Rahamneh, a GAM spokesman.

“The cannon is a reminder that there is still a Ramadan spirit, a Ramadan flavor in the air.”

Uniting cities

There are various origin stories, but historians trace the use of the Ramadan cannon across the Arab world to the 19th century, before the availability of electricity or loudspeakers to carry the call to prayer or alert sometimes widely dispersed residents to the precise astronomical sunset, the moment that Muslims can break their fast.

Experts agree that the practice became popular in Cairo in the 1860s under the rule of Ismail Pasha, Ottoman viceroy and ruler over Egypt.

The idea of one sound uniting a city – allowing tens of thousands of people to break their fast simultaneously – caught on, and the use of iftar cannons spread across Arab cities under Ottoman control, notably Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus, and finally Baghdad in the late 19th century.

The practice reached Kuwait in 1907 and quickly spread throughout the Gulf, even reaching as far as Indonesia by the 1940s.

In the then-Emirate of Transjordan in the 1920s, authorities fired cannons from hilltops. For decades, people in surrounding villages would stand in the road or on rooftops, waiting to hear the cannon fire echo to hold iftar. Cannon men became figures beloved by children, akin to Santa Claus.

“In Jordan and much of the Islamic world, the cannon was transformed from a symbol of destruction and war to a symbol of joy,” says Nayef Nawiseh, a Jordanian historian and heritage expert.

Victim of modernity

Yet with the rise of television, radio, and mosque loudspeakers in the mid-1960s, citizens increasingly turned to their homes to check iftar time.

As of 1967, the Jordanian Ramadan cannon faded into disuse, only trotted out a few times in Amman in the early 2000s for special occasions.  

Nevertheless, iftar cannons had become so part and parcel with Jordanian Ramadan culture that today in outlying towns like Karak and Salt, people of a certain age use the phrase “when the cannon fires” to describe iftar time.

Jordan is not alone in ringing in this Ramadan with a bang.

In Egypt, some 30 years after the practice was retired, tourism authorities painstakingly rehabilitated a pair of 1887 Krupp cannons to fire once again from the hilltop Salah El-Din Citadel in Cairo.

In Amman, two black M102 howitzers unveiled last week to fire daily blanks have become an instant selfie destination for capital residents passing through downtown.

“I used to be afraid of the sound of the cannon as a child,” says Ibrahim Jilani, an unemployed engineering graduate who was living across the hill from the cannon’s position when it was briefly revived.

He stopped to take a photo of the cannons.

“Now I hear it as a comfort. It’s a daily reminder of a simpler, better time.”

But more than nostalgia, the cannon is offering Jordanians something that has been rare the past year: a sense of community.

“We may be divided this year due to the pandemic; we may be suffering economically and healthwise. But when that cannon sounds,” says Um Eyad, “we are united. And we are persevering.”