The English city of Peterborough is the latest stop in the ongoing debate over a symbol of Islam’s growing footprint in the West: the amplified call to prayer (adhan).
Last fall, Masjid Ghousia requested permission to broadcast three daily prayer calls using loudspeakers to be located atop one of its minarets, an arrangement optimistically portrayed as “soothing and uplifting during these challenging and difficult times.” Peterborough City Council’s planning department disagreed, citing concerns that the “sudden” and “unfamiliar” sound would disturb the neighborhood and “set an undesirable precedent” for other mosques. One councilor described it as “unnecessary noise” akin to blasting “a loud rock song three times a day.”
The council rejected the proposal in January. A procedural error required additional review, leading to a second denial in March.
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Such disputes have become more common in recent years.
In one notable case from 2019, Amsterdam’s Blue Mosque wished to be the first in the city to boost the adhan with loudspeakers. “We do not want to provoke with this,” the imam explained, “but [to] try to normalize Islamic traditions” in the Netherlands. Mayor Femke Halsema was less enthusiastic, characterizing the use of amplifiers as “not of this time” and “no longer necessary” because Muslims have apps telling them when to pray.
Dutch municipalities can regulate but not prohibit the call, so the mosque eventually carried it out — though not before someone sliced an audio cable on the roof, delaying its debut.
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The coronavirus pandemic made 2020 a banner year for the call to prayer. In Britain, Germany, Australia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, local governments eagerly waived noise restrictions under the guise of promoting solidarity and raising the spirits of Muslims unable to visit their houses of worship, particularly during Ramadan.
Mosques controlled by Islamist organizations such as DITIB and Tablighi Jamaat were at the forefront of some of these campaigns. The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Hamas-linked group that months earlier had pushed for an ordinance backing amplified prayer calls in Paterson, New Jersey, was deeply involved in the “historic” Minneapolis adhan.
Yet not everyone was happy. “Numerous loud noise complaints” were directed at the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City, California, which had its amplification permit temporarily revoked. When Harrow Central Mosque in London sought to broadcast the adhan each Friday, more than 20,000 people signed a petition against it. Several Danish political parties even urged their government to consider banning calls to prayer in general, arguing: “Prayer calls are not something we have a tradition for in Danish society. We think that it will be very disruptive in Denmark.”
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Anti-Islamist Muslims have voiced opposition as well.
In a column from April 2020, Tarek Fatah highlights adhan-related discontent in Toronto and praises the BBC Urdu Service for noting, in his words, that “the Islamic clerics and the mosque administrators had a larger agenda when they asked for and obtained sundown [calls to prayer] on loudspeakers. A spokesperson of one of the mosques revealed that this was merely a first step” to making it “a permanent feature of mosques in Canada.” Fatah concludes: “Why does the fable of the Arab and his camel ring a bell in my ear?”
His follow-up article discusses an activist’s bid to launch a legal challenge to Mississauga’s amended noise bylaw on the basis of “separation of religion and state and preventing any group trying to thrust their religion on others via loudspeakers that blare religious messages into the privacy of homes.”
Another reformist, Farzana Hassan, gets to the heart of the ideological motives. “What is the purpose of this futile exercise other than to score points under the flag of Islam as a political movement, known as Islamism?” she writes. “It is obvious that for proponents of Islamism a political victory, however symbolic and however pointless, is what matters.”
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“The Islamists may have foisted this controversy upon us for the long haul,” Hassan laments. All signs indicate that to be the case. With the virus still raging, Islamists feeling emboldened, and Ramadan just around the corner, expect more sparring over the amplified call to prayer in the months ahead.
