Having lived with the call to prayer for several years now, I can absolutely understand resident's frustration with it.
In a secular society, it shouldn't be treated any differently than if I got on a loudspeaker and started shouting 'wake up everyone!' at 5am every morning.
No, but some do try to ring them at 07:15 every morning really loud and really long, it took a judge to put a stop to that. Link in Dutch, no English source, sorry.
I'm all for stopping any such nonsense but then churchbells are out. All of them, they served their purpose in the times before social media and alarm clocks but nowadays there is no reason for them.
And if that is used to stop Mosques from doing their 'call to prayer' I'm all for it, but let's keep things equal.
Of course that may be a bit hard to do in a town with both a large Catholic and a large Muslim population. But either both should not take offense at what the other does or both should agree that there is no gain from any of this.
It doesn't have to be all or nothing.
To be equal, we can allow churches to ding the bell once a week on sunday, and allow mosques to recite call to prayer once a week on friday.
If you live in a country where Christianity is the state religion, you could just disallow the call to prayer on account of the fact it is not Christian. (One advantage of a state religion is that you can do stuff like this. Of course, you have to be careful not to take it too far - condemning unbelievers to death might be a bit much, for example.)
> Fed up with visitors ringing the church bells in this picturesque western England town, she took an ax to the 500-year-old church door this weekend and chopped down the belfry ropes.
> Mather's family has lived in Compton Basset almost as long as St. Swithun's church _ 400 years _ and she said she felt remorse for what she did. But she also felt that, after repeated pleas to church elders over the years, she could no longer take the bells pealing 100 yards from her home.
> ``My health was suffering and it was a choice of prison or more suffering,'' she said Monday. ``I have done my utmost to sort it out but in the end I had no option.''
> Before dawn Sunday, she spent 2 1/2 hours hacking through the church door with an ax; she then cut through the belfry ropes.
> Church Warden Robert Henly told the British Broadcasting Corp. that the belfry ropes were cut too close to the bells to be repaired.
> ``They can't be spliced,'' he said. ``They have to be new.''
> The last straw for 64-year-old Mather was the two hours visitors from Oxford spent ringing the bells on Saturday.
> ``I don't mind the ringing for village services, funerals and weddings, but when it is outsiders just doing it for fun it becomes unbearable,'' she said.
Bell ringers are arseholes too, it's not just Muslims.
Because to me it is exactly as irritating as the 'calls to prayer' but since we seem to accept the one I guess we have no option but to accept the other as well.
I'm trying to imagine the poor people living within earshot of both a church and a mosque.
Who says we accept them? Some people accept them, some people accept them in moderation, some people move away, some people look for options: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10614084
It's super annoying but depending on the value of 'tradition' (whatever that means) the composition of the local council (which the article here actually refers to) and the laws in place already you may or may not be able to find a judge willing to put a stop to it. This can be an extremely long drawn out battle. Churches get away with lots of stuff that otherwise would not be tolerated.
Islamic call to prayer translates roughly to "you really ought to pray right now if you want salvation. Seriously, it's time to acknowledge who is the greatest.. you know who, yeh that's right, God is greatest. And you know what? Prayer is more important than sleep, so do as I ask, just as you did yesterday, and just like you ought to do tomorrow. Get praying people".
Having lived with the call to prayer for several years now, I can absolutely understand resident's frustration with it.
In a secular society, it shouldn't be treated any differently than if I got on a loudspeaker and started shouting 'wake up everyone!' at 5am every morning.