The play apparently is a reaction to Egypt’s decision to regulate the muezzins’ trade, replacing Cairo’s multitude of muezzins with a small number of government-approved prayer-callers. Reading that, I can’t help but hear the Clash in my head:

The sheik he drove his Cadillac / He went a-cruisin’ down the ville. / The muezzin was a-standin’ / on the radiator grille.

Zaqzouq, he don’t like it!

From the New York Times:

Opponents, meanwhile, express deep outrage at the very idea of someone tampering with the tradition of each mosque having its own muezzin, of different voices echoing across the city in a continuous round….
Given the widespread sentiment that no decent Muslim could ever consider such a change, no small number of Cairo residents seized on the obvious alternative: it is a C.I.A. plot, they muttered, right up there with other American attacks on Islam, like demanding changes in the Muslim world’s curriculums.
The conspiracy theorists further prophesied that the centralized system was just a test case for the real goal: to disseminate a single Friday Prayer sermon, written, naturally, in Langley, Va. The outcry reached such a level that the minister felt obliged to hold an hourlong news conference to quell the sense, as he put it, that doomsday was at hand.

As usual, the anti-American crowd has much higher expectations of competency from our intelligence services than are merited.

But I can’t say I’m totally unsympathetic. In Delhi I lived about halfway between a pretty good-sized mosque and a very nationalistic Hindu temple. Each of them had something like a 125,000-watt Kmart blue-light-special sound system. When the muezzins would start up the call to prayer, the Hindus would start playing loud patriotic marching-band music at super-high volume. So you’d hear: “Allah u akbar … OOOMPA! OOMPA! BANG! OOMPA! Ash hadu anna Muhammadar rasul ullah … OOMPA OOMPA OOOMPA! CRASH! OOOMPA!“ All of it mixed with tubas and screeching microphone feedback. The experience left me with less sympathy for U.S. detainees “tortured” with Eminem and Barney the Dinosaur tunes. I’ve seen worse done to Americans – I’ve experienced the awesome destructive power of “Achy Breaky Heart.”*

*The Times report says the feds decided not to use “Achy-Breaky Heart” at Waco, but I remember hearing it. Conspiracy theorists, discuss among yourselves.