Washington Post
12 October 2018
By Sally Tyler
[…] A less familiar story for most viewers is a
persistent urban legend about the first human to reach the lunar surface. I
first encountered it in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, in the 1990s, when I was
traveling alone for the first time. A Somali named Abdullah, who had come to
Indonesia to purchase sarongs to sell in his store back in Mogadishu, […] told
me, matter of factly, that when Armstrong was visiting the Middle East several
years after his Apollo flight, he heard the call of the muezzin and asked what
it was. Upon being informed of the sound’s source, the story went, Armstrong
said he had heard the very same sound on the moon. In the legend, he converted
to Islam on the spot. […]
That was my first exposure to an urban legend that
held sway in parts of the world for decades. […]
