A fuss has been rumbling for some time about the proposals for Muslim calls to prayer from the new East Oxford mosque. The Bishop of Oxford seems ok on the issue while many other Christians are concerned about the creeping Islamisation of Britain that this represents. Charlie Cleverly, rector of St Aldate's, Oxford, has been a vocal opponent, interviewed last week on BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
It's another of those thorny problems that does require some reflection, some knowledge of Islam and touches on how the church views its role in national public life. In the discussion, comparisons are drawn between the ringing of church bells: custom and practice in many areas and indicative of a certain British cultural understanding of Christian presence. It's a not entirely helpful analogy because church bells, though signalling "church" and very specifically, the Church of England, are not voicing a creed. The Islamic call to prayer, though, is first and foremost an invocation to prayer ("make haste to prayer"), and in that sense can be welcomed by all people of faith, but it also contains the core creed of Islam. The shehadah ("I bear witness that there is no lord except God and Mohammed is his messenger") is one of the five pillars of Islam and is the starting point of Muslim faith. To that end, the call to prayer makes exclusivist and evangelistic claims.
Against this argument, you might say that church bells make such claims implicitly and in a plural society we ought to defend and affirm the freedom of all groups to make their claims in public. Queasiness about more obvious signs of Muslim presence amidst the dreaming spires of Oxford might rather be suggestive of a certain cultural supremacy or religious nimbyism.
The debate is one containing a number of subtleties because there is no doubt that a Muslim call to prayer contains within it the sense of territorial claim: that the surrounding community are within the purview of Islamic allegiance, Muslim faith being determinedly public and political. Church bells too contain their territoriality drawn around the concept of "parish". Increasingly, we are recognising in the church that territorial claims to Christian allegiance are redundant and inappropriate, but British society is arguably ill-served by airbrushing all the various symbols of that historical presence (whether buildings, church-bell ringing, Christian values underpinning many laws etc etc).
So, what to do in east Oxford, then? I dare suggest to Christians in Oxford that this issue demands a workable compromise. All the above arguments have validity and, for me, a knee-jerk rejection of any call to prayer in Britain or conversely a passive acceptance that all public signs of faith are devoid of negative consequences are both poles that are to be avoided.
Questions that I would prefer being raised between church leaders, mosques and council leaders would seek to put any calls to prayer under the scrutiny of normative public acts of evangelism or marketing: is the city served by amplifying a call to prayer or can this proceed unamplified? It might be appropriate to allow a call to prayer just for the main prayers on a Friday afternoon, acknowledging some parallel with church bells. What do the local neighbourhood think about this? (Part of the anglican tradition is, rightly, a pastoral concern for the entirety of society: that means consideration for the freedom to worship of Muslims as it does for the fear of segregation and divisiveness that may exist among non-Muslims, Christian or otherwise. Do the mosque leaders have an understanding of their obligations to non-Muslim society in working towards constructive compromise?).
So, I do not see the need for a polarised debate but rather genuine dialogue, some uncomfortable and challenging conversations both ways. Interestingly, in my own city of Birmingham, there are very few places where the call to prayer is broadcast in the streets, and there is a far greater Muslim presence here. Muslims will hear the call via their radios, through various local and national Muslim radio stations. There is no evidence of pressure to make it otherwise. Let's use this scenario to build understanding; to work for the common good. My horrible fear is that so much of the impetus behind some of the church's response is a misguided attachment to a vision of middle-England, warm beer and cricket, that obvious signs of Muslim presence are clearly threatening.
