Should mosques in the UK be allowed to broadcast the call to prayer?

[yummylittlelapin]

The rector of a large evangelical church in Oxford has voiced his opposition to a proposal to allow a mosque to broadcast the Muslim call to prayer in the university city.

Personally I would not want to hear this 3 times a day. But that's not an anti-Muslim sentiment, I wouldn't want to hear the Lord's Prayer booming out every day either. Or anything else.

Is it an essential part of prayer for Muslims (please excuse my ignorance on this)? What do you do if you are not within earshot of a mosque? Presumably most British muslims don't have this anyway at the moment (I've never heard it in this country).

There was a mosque at the back of my old house in Leicester which broadcast the call to prayer. Never early in the morning, and you could just about hear it in the house with the windows shut, but it was a perfectly nice, musical sound, and didn't go on for long (unlike church bells which can ring for ages, esp when they're practising). It never really felt like a disturbance or noise pollution to me.

Trouble is, as long as there is a nice sense of community is it fine, but as soon as you've got a situation where some ethnic groups feel under siege from others, broadcasting into the street would start to feel like an act of aggression, meant to mark out territory, and hence start to raise your stress levels. Context is all.