Dubai Silence on the Call to Prayer
In a recent conversation it was brought to my attention that a certain residential community in Dubai may have taken to silencing the Muslim call to prayer in deference to tenants’ complaints.
I was told that most non-Muslim (and even some non-practicing Muslims) residents had petitioned for the action, deeming the Adhaan a ‘nuisance,’ ‘public disturbance,’ and even going so far as to categorize it under ‘noise pollution.’
As a Muslim, that’s a rather harsh pill to swallow. Even more bitter was the possibility that the developer had surrendered to these absurd charges, supposedly effectively quashing what is not just an Islamic ordainment, but what is a fundamentally native observance to any Muslim country.
Taking the word of a source, this post was previously a textual finger-pointing not only at those residents of the UAE but also the authorities for petitioning and allowing this to be followed through.
I have since been informed by both residents of the development in question as well a member of the community’s mosque committee, that the latter assertion was incorrect. The Adhaan continues to be sounded at each prayer, and, moreover, the authorities would not allow any such silencing.
The older post has now been replaced with this update.
As soon as the previous article was up, it was met with
outrage. Indignant protests from Muslims, and more heartening from a greater majority of non-Muslim expatriates at the possibility that this was true. Many found it disrespectful and near-impossible to imagine that anyone would create a furore over a host country’s cultural (if not religious) affiliations, especially after having been accommodated so liberally.
Most who commented on the issue, did so along the lines of a Devina Devicha:
I’m not Muslim, but the news that they’re quashing the call to prayer is appalling. People need to realize they’re in a Muslim country, and part of religion means people are going to pray. If the method of prayer involves adhaan 5 times a day, so be it. I’ve lived near mosques before and this hasn’t bothered me.
I realize I have the distinct advantage of growing up in Dubai, so adhaan is normal to me. Perhaps those coming in from elsewhere find it hard in the beginning? Even if that’s the case, it’s part of the country’s culture and religious behaviour, and can’t be removed (although your piece shows it’s starting to go down that path!). I lived in the UK for a while, and the cathedral near where I lived would have pealing bells on Sunday afternoon…do you think anyone would call for the bells to be silenced calling it noise pollution?
Look, my brother has autism and part of his autism means that he cannot handle loud sounds, so sometimes he has gotten upset by the call to prayer, and in those situations we try and move him away from the sound, so he can calm down. I’m not going to petition for the call to prayer to be dampened just because his auditory senses are hyper-sensitive!
It’s not noise pollution; I was in India in January, I was outside a church ready to attend a wedding, and while Mass was going on inside, a mosque right behind the church started its call to prayer and I felt at home.”
The Azaan/Adhaan, for those who aren’t too familiar, is the scheduled summoning by the muezzin (assigned caller) of a mosque calling all practising Muslims to worship – namely for the five daily prayers divinely prescribed via the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) during his miraculous journey,
Isrá wa Mi’raj (the anniversary of which is a public holiday in the Emirates).
Re. the advent of the Adhaan:
When the Muslims arrived at Medina, they used to assemble for the prayer, and used to guess the time for it. During those days, the practice of Adhaan for the prayers had not been introduced yet. Once they discussed this problem regarding the call for prayer. Some people suggested the use of a bell like the Christians, others proposed a trumpet like the horn used by the Jews, but ‘Umar was the first to suggest that a man should call (the people) for the prayer; so Allah’s Apostle ordered Bilal to get up and pronounce the Adhaan for prayers – Ibn Umar [Bukhari :: Book 1 :: Volume 11 :: Hadith 578]
The wording of the Adhaan in itself is said to be a loose synopsis of the Islamic faith, and is repeated as follows:
Allahu Akbar(x4) – God is Great
Ashhadu an la ilaha illa Allah(x2) – I bear witness that there is no god except the One God.
Ashadu anna Muhammadan Rasool Allah(x2) – I bear witness that Muhammad is the messenger of God.
Hayya ‘ala-s-Salah(x2) – Hurry to/rise up for the prayer
Hayya ‘ala-l-Falah(x2) – Hurry to success
[During pre-dawn prayer:
As-salatu Khayrun Minan-nawm(x2) - Prayer is better than sleep]
Allahu Akbar(x2) – God is Great
La ilaha illa Allah(x1) – There is no god except the One God
From the above, it is understood then that the Adhaan serves primarily as a melodious reminder of religious commitment to those preoccupied with the day’s non-spiritual obligations. Although some may argue that in this current age of sophisticated gadgetry devices can be programmed for the same, the exotic allure of the call cannot be denied.
Although this particular allegation has proven to be only partially true – the calls for the quietening of mosques in Dubai is real and is not new. Back in 2007, a certain property developer was under media and public scrutiny for luring potential investors to their luxury residences using assurances that the daily five times call to prayer would be silenced.
The UAE, Dubai especially, is extremely liberal in aspects of religious and cultural tolerance – rhetoric so oft-repeated that this in itself may as well be the bait that lures expats to set up camp.
Islam is not imposed on any resident, and aside from the call for decency in dress-code, stringent legislation enforcing a set attire is non-existent. Hindu temples and churches of all factions have propped up in the past 40 years of the county’s establishment, and even alcohol/pork consumption is not the anathema Western media just love to portray.
Admittedly there are a few Muezzins who don’t ‘carry the tune’ of the Adhaan as melodiously as others more rhythmically-endowed, but the less-stubborn alternative employed is choosing to reduce the decibel-level of the Adhaan; (especially for the early morning and min-afternoon prayer), out of consideration for the neighbourhood.
The Adhaan is not a deafening barrage of fire-crackers, nor a series of resounding horns blaring from impatient motorists in a traffic rut – to be classified under ‘noise pollution.’ It is a series of sacred verses dear to the devout, calling the faithful to prayer.
This misunderstanding has proven if not anything else, the level of accommodation by the varying cultures represented by the expatriates living here in the Emirates – of the values and practices it upholds affiliating it to an Islamic state.
While there will always be a handful of those not as understanding of the country’s cultural and religious values, it is comforting to witness that the numbers appreciative of the same visibly exceeds the latter.
A lesson learned in issues of verification, and an eye-opener to this unorthodox form of patriotism not likely to be witnessed anywhere else.
“They… were lined up praying, their shadows long upon the desert floor. I was watching them and thinking how this ritual must have remained unchanged in every detail since it was first prescribed by Muhammed…” – Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands, 67.
Bahrain renews ban on mosque loudspeakers
Saturday, 14 August 2010
Yateem mosque in Bahrain, located in a busy area in the country's capital, Manama (File)
Bahrain renewed a ban on the use of exterior loudspeakers in Mosques during prayers, ending a year-long contentious debate on the religiously sensitive issue in the Kingdom.
The decision was made by the Bahraini Sunni Endowment Department (Awqaf) of the Ministry of Islamic Affairs , which said that the blaring loudspeakers in mosques should not be used for anything other than the traditional Muslim call to prayer.
Prayers are between a person and Allah, and there is no need to make one's prayers heard by people walking in the streets in markets
Mohammed Ali al-Sitri
The religious authorities used SMS text messaging to instruct all callers to prayer, known as Muezzins, to respect the ban, but said the move is merely a regulatory one and an offense is only made if a complaint received.
“Prayers are between a person and Allah, and there is no need to make one's prayers heard by people walking in the streets and in markets,” said Mohammed Ali al-Sitri , the King's Advisor for Legislative Authority Affairs.
Former Member of Parliament Hamad al-Mahindi opposed the ban saying, “There should be a manifestation of God’s rituals during the holy month of Ramadan.”
“There are people that want to hear the prayers through the loudspeaker,” al-Mahindi added.
Tension in a Michigan City Over Muslims' Call to Prayer
By JOHN LELAND
Published: May 5, 2004
To hear people in this blue-collar city tell it, things were fine until the al-Islah Islamic Center petitioned to broadcast its call to prayer, or azan, over an outdoor loudspeaker.
Masud Khan, the mosque's secretary, sat on the carpeted floor on Wednesday and reflected on what he had learned about some of his neighbors in the last few months. ''How much they hate us,'' he said softly.
Jackie Rutherford, a librarian and youth-care worker, sat on her front stoop watching three men in Islamic shirt-dresses and tupi caps at the house across the street. ''I don't know what's going to happen to our little town,'' said Ms. Rutherford, 39.
''I used to say I wasn't prejudiced against anyone, but then I realized I had a problem with them putting Allah above everyone else,'' she said, of the plan to amplify the call to prayer, which mosques announce five times a day. ''It's throwing salt in a wound. I feel they've come to our country, infiltrated it, and they sit there looking at us, laughing, calling us fools.''
For the population of Hamtramck, a city of 23,000 surrounded by Detroit, the battle of the loudspeaker, which the City Council approved on Tuesday, has revealed a crossfire of religious, ethnic and lifestyle grievances, aggravated by the lingering memories of Sept. 11, 2001, which left many Muslims here feeling they were under suspicion.
Once an enclave of Polish immigrants, Hamtramck has since the 1990's become a haven for immigrants from Bangladesh, Yemen, Pakistan, Bosnia and other countries, including a large Muslim population. In the 2000 census, 41 percent of the city's population was born outside the United States.
On spring afternoons the sidewalks of Joseph Campau Avenue echo snatches of Polish, Bengali, Arabic and hip hop, punctuated by the sound of bells from several Catholic churches. Three mosques have opened in the last few years, increasing in size while the congregations at neighboring Roman Catholic churches dwindle.
Yet for all this churn, the ethnic populations coexisted with little overt friction.
''Even after 9/11 we had no problems,'' said Abdul Motlib, the president of the al-Islah mosque, which serves a mostly Bangladeshi membership (the other two mosques are primarily Bosnian or Yemeni).
Then last year Mr. Motlib applied for approval to amplify the call to prayer, a sonorous invocation in Arabic that lasts up to two minutes.
For some longtime residents, like Joanne Golen, 68, who described herself as a born-again Christian, the request crossed a line. Mrs. Golen said she had always gotten along well with the Bangladeshi families in her neighborhood. She noted that at Easter one of her new neighbors brought her a turkey that he had gotten at work. But she said the call to prayer was too much.
''My main objection is simple,'' she said. ''I don't want to be told that Allah is the true and only God five times a day, 365 days a year. It's against my constitutional rights to have to listen to another religion evangelize in my ear.''
At City Hall on Tuesday, before the final vote on the loudspeaker, a crowd of more than 100 crammed into a room, with dozens more listening or arguing in the hallway outside.
Chuck Schultz, 49, a computer programmer from nearby Grosse Point, spoke against the measure.
''Everyone talks about their rights,'' Mr. Schultz said. ''The rights of Christians have been stripped from them. Last week there were Muslims praying downstairs, in a public building. If Christians tried to do that, the A.C.L.U. would shut us down.''
Some residents complained about the potential noise. Others, like Veronica Wojtowicz, 81, reminded neighbors of a time when life in Hamtramck was simpler.
''My parents came to this country and worked hard,'' Ms. Wojtowicz said. ''I think the grace belongs on the other side. The intolerance doesn't come from the people who object, it comes from the other side. We all lived in peace and had no problems. You moved too fast.''
In response, Abdul Latef, the imam at Masjid Al-Falah, a mosque in Detroit, asked the community to be patient.
''You can make history,'' Mr. Al-Falah said. ''This is part of our religion. If it is too noisy, then you can complain, and they will stop it forever.''
Council members emphasized that there was nothing technically preventing the mosque from amplifying its call to prayer, even without amending the city's noise ordinance, and compared the amplification to the chiming of church bells. The amendment just gave government officials leverage to limit the volume and hours of the broadcasts, said Councilman Scott Klein.
Mr. Motlib said the mosque applied for approval ''because we want to be good neighbors.''
Paradoxically, the call to prayer is one that even most of the Muslims at al-Islah mosque cannot understand, because they speak Bengali rather than Arabic, Mr. Khan said.
Yet for many Muslims in town, the dispute seemed less about noise or the content of the azan than about insecurities of an older immigrant population feeling threatened by a newer one.
''They see we are coming more and more, and they think we are taking their city,'' said Abusayed Mahfuz, 34, the editor of Bangla Amar, a local Bengali magazine and Web site. ''It's not really a religious problem. It's about migration, which is a reality.''
Mr. Musad, who moved to Hamtramck from New York in 1999, said he understood the insecurity.
''It's human nature,'' he said. ''You feel an invasion. It could happen to me also.''
Like others in his mosque, Mr. Musad said, he was drawn to the Muslim community here not for its engagement with the rest of America, but for its distance.
''What attracted me was seeing school girls with veils and burkhas,'' he said. ''It's more authentic here than in New York, more roots. There's village life.''
His regret was that Muslims were not even more isolated from the other cultures around them. ''Parents feel they need to force their kids to follow their religion, or they're going to lose their kids,'' Mr. Musad said.
And for the Polish community of Hamtramck, the clash of immigrant cultures was nothing new, said Greg Kowalski, chairman of the town historical commission. When the first waves of Polish immigrants began to outnumber their German-American predecessors after World War I, the fissures were even more profound, he said.
''The Germans looked at these Eastern Europeans and thought they were all communists,'' Mr. Kowalski said. ''There was a lot of fear. So we're really repeating history.''
Opponents of the City Council decision on the loudspeaker said they would try to reverse it, either through the courts or by a voter referendum. Unless they are successful, the mosque is expected to begin broadcasting the call to prayer in a couple of weeks. Several mosques in Detroit and nearby Dearborn already use loudspeakers, without incident.
Bashar Imam, a Muslim who runs three medical centers in Hamtramck, smarted at the venom the conflict had brought out.
''These people get treated in my medical clinics, and that's what they think of us?'' Mr. Imam said.
But he added, ''This is healthy. This is how we get to know each other.''
Photo: At a City Council meeting in Hamtramck, Mich., the Rev. James Marquis, who traveled to the meeting from Wellston, Ohio, spoke out last week against a plan by a mosque to broadcast its call to prayer. (Photo by Tom Pidgeon for The New York Times)
Loudspeakers in mosques
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A mosque minaret in
Hyderabad, Pakistan fitted with loudspeakers in all directions
Loudspeakers were invented in the early 1900s, and they were introduced in
mosques in the 1930s, where they are used for the
adhan ("call to prayer"), and sometimes for
khutbah (sermons).
Outdoor loudspeakers, usually mounted on tall
minarets, are used five times a day for the call to prayer, sometimes starting as early as 4 a.m. Some mosques have loudspeakers that are powerful enough to be heard as far as 5 km (3 mi) away. In areas where more than one mosque is present, the loudspeaker sounds overlap one another, especially in the
early morning when sounds are more clearly heard. Loudspeakers are sometimes also used inside mosques to deliver sermons or for prayer.
Opposition
The installation of outdoor loudspeakers on mosques has frequently met with opposition in communities where Islam is a minority religion. In
Cologne,
Germany, the proposed construction of the
Cologne Central Mosque encountered strong criticism from some area residents; a ban on broadcasting the call to prayer over loudspeakers outside the building was among the first stipulations that the mosque's supporters had to agree to when seeking a building permit.
In 2008 in
Oxford,
England, local residents opposed a mosque's plans to use loudspeakers to broadcast calls to prayer, calling the electronic amplification an "un-neighborly intrusion" that would disrupt the peace and turn the area into a "Muslim ghetto". A spokesman for the Oxford Central Mosque explained, "We do not need the volume to be loud but we want to have the call in some form because it's our tradition."
In 2004, the
Al-Islah Mosque in
Hamtramck, Michigan,
US, attracted national attention when it requested permission to broadcast its call to prayer. This upset many of the non-Muslim residents of the area, which has a large and long-established
Polish Catholic population. Proponents pointed out that the city was already subject to loud bell ringing from the local church, while opponents argued that the church bells served a nonreligious purpose. Later that year, the city amended its noise regulations to limit the volume of all religious sounds. Prior to this, other mosques in the
Detroit area had been using loudspeakers to broadcast their calls to prayer without incident.
In India, some anti-noise pollution activists have called for restricting the use of loudspeakers, arguing that "religion is not a ground to violate noise rules". In 1999, in debating a proposed blanket ban on loudspeakers atop mosques, some political leaders in India alleged that loudspeakers had been used to create "communal tension", and that they had been used to "incite" a riot in Nandurbar, Maharashtra state, on November 10, 1999.
In 2002, Saudi Minister of Islamic Affairs Shaikh Saleh Al-Ashaikh sent an official order to Saudi
imams and
khatibs, stating that mosques should not be used as
political platforms, and that mosques are meant only for prayer, guidance and other pious activities.
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?I mean does it mean that someone in your family is marrying a Bengali girl
?
Yes, I know what you mean, their Tamil centric theory sounds as much idiotic like Sanskrit centric theory of Indo-European languages. 
