Muslim plans to broadcast a loudspeaker call to prayer from a city centre mosque have been attacked by local residents who say it would turn the area into a “Muslim ghetto”. Dozens of people packed out a council meeting to express their concerns over the plans for a two-minute long call to prayer to be issued three times a day, saying that it could drown out the traditional sound of church bells.
Dr Mark Huckster, who lives in Stanton Road and works at East Oxford hospice Helen House, told the Oxford Mail: “The proposal to issue a prayer call is very un-neighbourly, especially in a crowded urban space such as Oxford. I have lived in the Middle East and a prayer call has a very different feel to church bells and I personally found the noise extremely unpleasant, rather disturbing and very alien to the western mindset.”
Over at Dhimmi Watch Robert Spencer endorses Dr Huckster’s concerns: “Un-neighborly, yes. In The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon wrote that if the Muslims had won the Battle of Poitiers, ‘the Arabian fleet might have sailed without a naval combat into the mouth of the Thames. Perhaps the interpretation of the Koran would now be taught in the schools of Oxford, and her pulpits might demonstrate to a circumcised people the sanctity and truth of the revelation of Mahomet’. Well, this may come to pass after all, before too long.”
As paranoid Islamophobic fantasies go, the Muslim conquest of Oxford is hardly original. Spencer could at least have hat-tipped Daniel Pipes.
Update: Predictably, the fascists of the British National Party have taken up the defence of a trueborn Englishman’s right to live his life free from religious practices that are alien to the western mindset.