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Jan. 20, 2012
Law would silence muezzins
Israeli nationalist lawmaker wants to ban the Muslim call to prayer.
ARIEH O’SULLIVAN THE MEDIA LINE
Before the dawn rolls in from the east, Muslim worshippers have already been summoned to prayer by the muezzin’s call. Echoing off the stone walls of houses and apartments in Jerusalem, the summons is heard in Muslim, Christian and Jewish neighborhoods alike.
Not everyone likes it, particularly not at four in the morning. A move by an Israeli legislator from a nationalist party to have speakers removed from mosques aims to tone down this age-old, sacred call to prayer. The lawmaker who drafted the bill says it’s not singling out Muslims, but rather going after noise pollution.
“We respect the freedom of religion, the freedom of thinking, the freedom of staying in the place they want to stay but, at the same time, we need to respect the people who want to sleep at four o’clock in the morning,” said Anastassia Michaeli, a Knesset member belonging to Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu party.
A mother of eight, Michaeli, 36, said she’s particularly concerned for the children who are wakened by the call. “This noise pollution disturbs them.”
Embraced by some as a long-overdue measure and dismissed by others as everything from racist to superfluous, Michaeli’s bill has highlighted the complexities involved in coexisting in the Jewish state with a large Muslim minority in towns and cities that are becoming increasingly more mixed.
Cities like Jaffa, Acre, Nazareth, Ramle, Lod and Jerusalem, with their sizeable Arab neighborhoods, are particularly touched by the call, known as the adhan, which is recited five times a day. Michaeli toured these cities recently, garnering support from some of the mayors and a large chunk of the Jewish population who, she said, are losing tolerance for the wail.
“I hear the call to prayer at night and it bothers me and the kids. They have raised the idea about lowering the volume of the speakers but nothing has ever been done. It continues,” said Motti Gabai, a resident of Jerusalem’s Gilo neighborhood whose house borders the Arab neighborhood of Beit Safafa.
Michaeli said attempts in the past to get the muezzin to lower the volume have failed. She bemoaned the failure by officials to enforce existing noise pollution codes, saying police have complained they don’t have adequate meters for determining noise level. Michaeli proposes using new, less intrusive, electronic forms of summoning the devout to prayer such as Internet alarms and personalized radio broadcasts.
Michaeli said that many town mayors, lawmakers and ministers, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, have supported her legislation, but that it is caught up now in committee, and there are reported signs that the prime minister may withdraw his support for the controversial bill. Some officials, however, fear it could agitate Muslims.
Israeli President Shimon Peres has said he opposes the bill. “This is simply a march of folly…. I am personally ashamed there are attempts being made to pass such laws…. Israel doesn’t have to raise the ire of all the Muslims in the Arab world against us,” he told reporters.
Michaeli first came up with her bill months ago, but it is only now receiving media attention. She assumes it has attracted increased attention because it fits into a pattern of legislation initiated by right-wing lawmakers over the past two years that critics say strike a blow to civil liberties. These include reining in the power of the Supreme Court, placing ceilings on financial assistance to nonprofits by foreign governments and limits on the Palestinian commemoration of Israeli Independence Day as the Nakba (Catastrophe).
Reaction to Michaeli’s bill has been vocal and thousands of Israeli Arabs have protested in the streets against it.
“I think that they make all the demonstrations only because they don’t understand what it is about. The bill is not against their religion. I know that they have to pray five times a day and I respect that. Let them pray but not at a [noise] level that disturbs others,” Michaeli explained.
Meeting in her Knesset office, which was taken over by some of her children during the Chanukah holiday, Michaeli showed research on how other countries have dealt with the adhan. She said that in Austria it can be used to call to prayer only once a week on Fridays and that in France it is totally banned. Even Egypt and Saudi Arabia, she noted, have put a four-speaker limit on minarets and those must be directed inward.
“In Israel there is no limit on the number of speakers that can be placed on a mosque and the speakers are directed in all directions,” she said.
In Beit Safafa, the call to prayer is heard far and wide, and some say silencing it amounts to religious discrimination. The owner of a hardware store in the same building as the village mosque hears the call to prayer at all hours. He said he is not religious and didn’t want to talk about it, but said he is incensed by Jews attempting to interrupt Muslim tradition.
“When I go to Tel Aviv at night I hear these discothèques making all their loud noise in the middle of the night. It’s the same thing,” said the man, who asked not to be named.
Rami Mashhad, a contractor, is adamantly against the legislation and warns it could ignite the normally peaceful relationship with his Jewish neighbors. “I think this is a wrong decision at this time because … it will escalate the violence and the misunderstandings between the Israelis and the Arabs, so I think they should rethink it,” he told this reporter.
But even he, too, admitted that, perhaps, there was room to adjust the volume a bit. “I do understand if the prayer is annoying to other people but, for me, it is not annoying. Maybe the suggestion should be to make the speakers a little bit lower but not to remove them at all.”
Michaeli’s bill has a long way to go before it becomes law. It must first be approved by a ministerial law committee and then prepared for the first of three readings, a procedure that could bog it down. But this doesn’t deter the first-term legislator, who said that half the battle was getting the issue on the public agenda.
“It doesn’t matter if the bill exists or not. That is the purpose. The most important result for me is that at four o’clock in the morning people want to sleep and not to wake up because of other people who would like to go to pray,” she stressed.
Some people, like Gabai in Jerusalem, don’t believe the call to prayer is really even necessary, however. “They don’t have to remove the speakers, just lower the volume,” Gabai said, “but, believe me, anyone who wants to come and pray will come without calling them on the speaker.”
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