Re: Duke University’s decision to sound Muslim call to prayer(azan every friday)
The issue is not about whether it’s a blessing or how nice it is to hear it. We are mostly Muslim here so we all appreciate the azaan. To think we are saying we don’t want to hear it at all is just misunderstanding our position. Id love to hear a nice azaan 5x a day - id probably be better at keeping to my prayer time.
But these days you can get an azaan on your phone with an app. You can buddy up with someone at college who reminds you it’s time to pray. We managed to do all this when we were college kids. We would all study in the same place in the library and one of the guys who was a prayer enthusiast would tell us he was heading to the prayer room and would invite us.
So it’s not like these students need the azaan for a practical reason. When they end up working they will not have it in their workplace.
The issue is whether it’s practical to subject a majority of nonmuslim students to a muslim audio that they may not want to hear. Your invading the public space with a religious auditory symbol.
Just like you don’t particularly like the sound of church bells, accept the fact that many of them won’t like the azaan.
If it sounds discriminatory that they would object to hearing the azaan, then is it not discriminatory for you to state you don’t like the sound of church Bells?
We had like 4-5 churches on our campus and I lived on campus. Never heard them go off because the sound of the bell is fairly localized. The azaan would be on speaker and you heard it loudly all over campus. It’s nice if people respectfully listen and ask questions, it’s not so fun as a student hearing non Muslims mock it or make angry loud statements when they realize what it is. Why create that situation of angst?
And RV you give an example of a Muslim convent type school in the US. That’s a majority muslim school so the azaan and Quran readings is expected. If a nonmuslim doesn’t want that job to teach there they need not apply. It makes sense to sound the azaan there.
Duke is not a majority muslim school. Their muslim population is not a sizable minority. It’s a very slim minority. Handful of students on top of that who actually may be religious.
We aren’t azaan haters. We are simply empathetic to the other parties at hand here.
If you advocate the azaan then you better be ok with Christmas Carolers knocking on your door daily and a big whomping Hanukkah sign on your property if you live in a rich upscale area where there are a lot of Jews.