A Discussion on the Practice of Call to Prayer over Loudspeakers

The use of loudspeakers placed on mosque minarets to amplify the call to prayer in Turkish cities has led to debates about their place in urban life, mostly centered around aesthetic concerns. However, it can be argued that loudspeakers, which have been part of the public life of Muslim-majority society since the 1930s, represent more than an aesthetic issue. Structural (historical and cultural) barriers have blurred the public discourse on the issue in Turkey, particularly the connection between the use of loudspeakers and social transformations. This phenomenon, which has received little attention in the academic literature, will be analyzed through the experiences of Turkey and Singapore in order to provide a framework for future research and explore the origins of the ongoing debate.

In recent years, I have seen many people around me complaining about the loudspeaker broadcast of the call to prayer from mosques near their homes for different reasons. In addition to comments that emphasize aesthetic complaints such as the increasing number of muezzins who do not know maqam, whose voice is not suitable for the call to prayer, and that the call to prayer is drowned in metallic sizzle; It is also possible to come across comments that point to more direct problems, such as being exposed to such loud noise that it is almost as if the adhan is being recited inside their homes, negatively affecting the health of infants, the sick and the elderly, having to temporarily suspend daily activities due to the noise during the adhan, sleep being disturbed especially during the morning adhan, and having to start the day tired. A simple internet search reveals that these complaints are quite common, but due to certain concerns, the issue has not evolved into a public debate.

Problematizing the current practice of the call to prayer in Turkey will undoubtedly refer to deep debates that are still hot in the widespread public memory, even if this is not at all what is intended. Starting with the Turkish call to prayer experience (Zengin, 2015), many problematic practices of recent political history constitute structural obstacles to a healthy conversation. Secular counter-arguments lacking depth often miss the social dimension of the issue (Tošić, 2015). Moreover, it is not easy to discuss the call to prayer as an everyday urban issue due to its special place in the value world of Turkish Islam, which reinterprets the call to prayer with distinctive nationalist motifs and applies it to the public consciousness. However, considering that politics is a public debate on justice between talking people (Rancière, 2013), it would be useful to invite this activity, which takes place in the open public sphere, from the non-political sphere to the table of everyday politics. It seems important in terms of democratic values that citizens of the city who have something to say about the current recitation of the call to prayer know that they have the right to negotiate about this social phenomenon that touches their lives at least five times a day. The main purpose of this study is to contribute to such a public debate about which there is very little academic literature.

The Sound

Sound is a product of human action that is causally generated through material activity and transmitted through various media such as solid, liquid, and gas. As such, sound can be considered as an element of material culture. This perspective is akin to Walter Benjamin’s concept of artifact, which recognizes that cultural production also produces complex cultural outcomes (1969). Sound production, therefore, is a conscious act that does not exist inevitably. While coincidence plays a role in its creation, it bears the traces of the spirit of the time in which it was produced.

The concept of acoustic artifact can be used to describe any sound production that is purposeful, has a temporal limitation with a beginning and an end, and repeats periodically (Fennes, 2012). The call to prayer, for instance, is a social phenomenon that can be understood as an acoustic artifact. On the one hand, it is a very individual and bodily performance, but on the other hand, it is always embedded in and affected by the social context. However, how the call to prayer is produced does not necessarily determine how it is perceived. While exposure to sound can create an experientiality that can lead to positive or negative motivation, hearing produces space through sound by experiencing positive or negative triggering. The meaning of the message, which refers not only to the literal meaning of the words but also to their social connotations, reveals the clear difference between hearing and listening. Being inside or outside the halo of protection offered by sound establishes a clear us-other opposition.

As an analytical tool for anthropological research on sound, Acoustic Communities establish a regime of habituation that keeps the sense of familiarity alive. In particular, the widespread belief that associates not being able to hear the call to prayer with expatriation points to the feeling of being at home.

The Mosque, Minaret and Call to Prayer (Ezan) in Turkey

“…it must be openly admitted here that there are some call to prayer reciters or muezzins who make even ahl-i salât Muslims lâ havle” (Akdoğan, 2013).

The traditional Islamic settlement develops around a square with the mosque at its center. The main element of the Ottoman city has always been the mosque. For this reason, social life was concentrated around the mosque (Akman, 2020: 20) and the settlement hierarchy was organized around this center. Although mosques have relatively lost their characteristic of being such a center due to changing conditions today, this dominant feature of mosques can still be easily read in old urban textures.

Change in the Number of Mosques in Turkey by Years (Presidency of Religious Affairs 2021)

The repertoire of meanings that mosques have in urban life in contemporary Turkey must be explained by references beyond their spatial dominance. The mosque, which was defined in the previous legislation by being included in the upper category of places of worship, replaced the category of places of worship with the Spatial Plans Construction Regulation of 2014, and the definitions related to places of worship of other religions became invalid (Resmi Gazete, 2014). This seemingly minor and important change was accompanied by the definition of walking distances in Article 12, Paragraph 3 of the Principles Regarding the Construction of Spatial Plans section of the relevant regulation, which sets out a completely different vision of the city. In zoning plans, it is stipulated that places of worship must be established at distances that any person can reach by walking 150 meters for masjids, 250 meters for small mosques and 400 meters for medium (neighborhood) mosques. The allocation of space according to assumptions in population projections and the assessment that the users of these facilities are adults are not mentioned, despite the seemingly compelling reasons for doing so. Thus, due to legislative regulations and transforming ideological tendencies, mosques have become more central to our lives spatially than ever before.

The steady upward trend in the number of mosques over the years calls for a more comprehensive consideration of the social impact of mosques in today’s cities. In residential areas where it is certain that a mosque will be located at a distance of at least 400 meters, how the call to prayer from mosque loudspeakers will be regulated gains importance in terms of social justice and urban aesthetics.

Although the practice of reciting the call to prayer over loudspeakers does not date back very far, today it is an indispensable part of the daily experience of the ordinary citizen. It has even become integrated with the call to prayer, a prerequisite for it by its very nature. Just as the dome form in traditional Turkish mosques has become a matter of style rather than a necessary element for the building with today’s architectural techniques, the functional aspect of minarets has been disabled with the installation of loudspeakers, and a situation has emerged where minarets are positioned only because the formal mosque prototype requires it. The following lines can be read about how the loss of function in the existing minaret balconies transformed the architectural conception:

Doesn’t the removal of the obligation to recite the call to prayer from the minaret’s balcony exclude the construction of the elements that make up the minaret, especially the staircase and the balcony? For this reason, we see traces of this idea in some newly built or projected mosques. Since the call to prayer is announced through loudspeakers placed in the directions of the chancel and the cone, the chancel of the minaret is removed, and instead of a spiral staircase that is used every day, a steep staircase is built only for the repair and control of electrical installations. This trend affects the classical form of the minaret, and in the new projects, the minaret becomes like a bell tower with electrical and loudspeaker installations and ceases to occupy a space (Sayar, 1977).

Minarets have basically emerged as functional auxiliary structures built for the call to prayer. Historically, the minaret rising adjacent to the mosque is a physical triangulation point indicating the sacred center of the local Islamic community, and the call to prayer is a “soundmark” (Schafer 1994:10) that regulates the daily life of every Muslim. Some authors (see: Gülle, 2010), who state that the disappearance of the function of minarets as a triangulation point with the loudspeaker will make the existence of the minaret controversial, suggest that in order to preserve the structure, the loudspeakers should be removed from minarets where the call to prayer is not recited with the central system and the custom of reciting the call to prayer with a bare voice should be adopted, and in mosques where the call to prayer is recited with the central system, the loudspeakers should be symbolically placed on the balconies. It is understood that another important purpose of moving the loudspeakers behind the balconies is the concern to prevent the visual pollution caused by these devices. It is possible to come across comments such as “those loudspeakers (that) are placed on every minaret and even on every balcony of the minarets, like pieces of bushes or dead geese or seagulls, are disturbing both in terms of aesthetics and sound” (Aydın, 2015) and that this is “a cruelty committed against those pencil-like minarets of Istanbul”.

In the Turkish religious music tradition, the adhan is recited in free meter within the framework of a unique performance style and style in the course of five different makam sequences selected according to five different prayer times (Alkan, 2014). It is an aesthetically evolved cultural social heritage that has left its mark on daily life. In addition to its religious and aesthetic aspects, there are also opinions that the call to prayer has a function that regulates daily life and organizes time. The claim that eating, drinking, lying down, getting up, working and resting times in the Ottoman period were programmed according to the adhan and prayer times (Çitçi, 2011) is based on this view. However, the means by which the sound of the call to prayer from minarets reaches the ears of the listener is an important matter of debate.

The claims that tourists plug their ears because of the call to prayer coming from loudspeakers, that in recent years hotels have had triple-glazed windows instead of double-glazed windows so that foreign customers are less disturbed by the call to prayer, that homeowners living close to mosques have done the same, and that people are now trying to buy houses far away from mosques because of the misuse of loudspeakers (Aydın, 2015) are striking. It is seen that the privilege of producing an antithesis, which is only given to oneself, has not had the expected effect despite the harshness of the discourse. One of the reasons why the negotiation of issues in the public sphere is more effective than the solution within the neighborhood is due to the possibility of expanding the horizons of discourses by broadening the base. However, in any case, it will be observed that those who oppose not the call to prayer itself, but the current practice of reciting it, have a widespread fear of stigmatization and uncertainty about how to overcome it. The imposition of discussing the issue on the grounds of belief is the most important factor that does not allow for a clear analysis of the concrete effects of the issue on the daily life of the city. This imposition is carried out through a method that focuses only on winning by positioning, for example, the bell as a counter-image to the call to prayer, and using unfalsifiable fallacies.

The claims that tourists block their ears because of the call to prayer coming from loudspeakers, that in recent years hotels have had triple-glazed windows instead of double-glazed windows so that foreign customers are less disturbed by the call to prayer, that homeowners living close to mosques have done the same, and that people are now trying to buy houses far away from mosques because of the misuse of loudspeakers (Aydın, 2015) are striking. It is seen that the privilege of producing an antithesis, which is only given to oneself, has not had the expected effect despite the harshness of the discourse. One of the reasons why the negotiation of issues in the public sphere is more effective than the solution within the neighborhood is due to the possibility of expanding the horizons of discourses by broadening the base. However, in any case, it will be observed that those who oppose not the call to prayer itself, but the current practice of reciting it, have a widespread fear of stigmatization and uncertainty about how to overcome it. The imposition of discussing the issue on the grounds of belief is the most important factor that does not allow for a clear analysis of the concrete effects of the issue on the daily life of the city. This imposition is carried out through a method that focuses only on winning by positioning, for example, the bell as a counter-image to the call to prayer, and using unfalsifiable fallacies.

Another important problem is that those who state that they see nothing wrong with the call to prayer being recited through loudspeakers in its current form tend to push/confine the issue to an area outside the debate. Sanctity, and therefore the inviolability of the sacred, is the most important reason behind this attitude. This situation, which is frequently mentioned in the writings and poems of Mehmet Akif and Yahya Kemal (Çiftçi, 2011), starts with the recitation of the call to prayer in the ears of newborn children and goes as far as determining how important it is in the cultural life of the society (Günaydın, 2007). It is clear that the call to prayer, which is one of the concepts that complement and nourish each other, such as flag-land-ezan-namus, is perceived as “…a sign informing that Muslims continue to exist independently and freely in a place of settlement, an omen showing that people who adhere to the Islamic religion are in the majority in that region” (Akdoğan, 2013). This perception also leads to the misconception that it creates an aura of “us” in which this perception is shared without exception. In Anatolian cities in particular, the discourse that there is a widespread consensus on the current practice of the call to prayer thus becomes widespread.

Akın Ünver, Associate Professor of International Relations at Kadir Has University, conducted an empirical study in which he mapped the volume range of mosque loudspeakers in Istanbul in the aftermath of the July 15 coup attempt and matched this information with social media reports of anti-coup marchers and clashes, and found that “it is mosque loudspeaker network density, not social media or internet-based communication, that explains how much each Istanbul neighborhood mobilized against the coup attempt” (Farooq, 2018). In fact, the functionality of mosque loudspeakers as a medium through which daily political developments are somehow articulated is interesting. This function also came to the fore during the pandemic following the coup attempt or during solidarity calls. Apart from these examples of the politicization of the call to prayer and the salaah, the claim that the volume of mosque loudspeakers has been gradually increased has also been widely circulated (Şikayetim Var, 2021).

There are also authors who draw attention to the economic as well as political aspects of the issue. According to a 1995 study on the centralized call to prayer system (Hürriyet, 2001), a muezzin who opposed the system expressed his concerns as follows:

“With the centralized call to prayer system, there will be no need for muezzins whose job it is to call for prayer. In a country where unemployment is so high, this practice will only increase the number of unemployed people.” (Günaydın, 2007)

It is seen that the main rationale of the opposition to the practice of reciting the call to prayer with loudspeakers in the social sphere is based on the idea that “…loud and metal-sounding loudspeakers distort the call to prayer” (Eygi, 2017). Here, we encounter a nostalgic image of the adhan (call to prayer) sung in a bare voice, which is perfected and reproduced. This discourse, which refers to the fact that non-Muslims “who became Muslims thanks to the sound of the call to prayer in old Istanbul, where the call to prayer was not recited with loudspeakers” (Aydın, 2015), is automatically followed by the inference that the call to prayer “…should be freed from the sound of the device and should be recited only with the human voice in order for it to continue as an element of beauty, awe and excitement” (Öztürk, 2000: 218) as it was in the past. The intermediate solutions excluded by this mythos of returning to the past, on the other hand, become a repetition of the same main discourse for the pious, who also produce the counter-discourse themselves. From time to time, the narrative of the loss of certain bright periods related to the beautiful call to prayer is brought up again in a way that points to the perpetrator. Accordingly, today’s badly recited call to prayer is somehow due to the breakdown of the religious doctrine that was practiced in the early republican period and the problem of not being able to transmit knowledge (Akdoğan, 2013). Since this discussion is beyond the scope of the context we are dealing with, let us stop here and take a look at the early examples of the use of loudspeakers in mosques in Turkey.

In the years following the proclamation of the Republic, as the establishment of national unity on the basis of the nation became certain, the mythos that would establish this unity was gradually constructed. The Turkification of Islam, or the creation of an independent Turkish Islam, began with the Turkification of the language of worship. In 1932, the decision of the Presidency of Religious Affairs to introduce the Turkish call to prayer was overturned by the Court of Cassation in the same year as lacking legal grounds and the practice was annulled (Günaydın, 2007), and Turkish call to prayer could only be implemented after a new law was enacted. Reşit Galip’s “Islam: The National Religion of the Turk”, in which he tried to prove Muhammad’s Turkishness, a dialog with Atatürk about some of the issues he raised is quoted as follows:

Gazi explained his opinion as if he understood what I was thinking, “Reşit Galip!” he said: “Let’s gather the religious scholars in Istanbul… Let’s announce it to the public, everyone should come… Let’s have loudspeakers installed in the mosque, so that those who cannot go inside can listen from outside… You discuss your idea with these scholars. Let the public be the arbiter!” (Cundioğlu, 1998: 194)

This passage reveals that in the early 30s, Ankara was already considering the installation of loudspeakers in mosques in order to circulate a certain ideological discourse. In the same source, it is stated that during the Ramadan of 1932, the Tarawih prayer was performed at Hacı Faik Efendi and that between the prayers, hymns and Ayin-i Şerif were recited. It is reported that loudspeakers were placed on all four sides of the mosque during the ceremony that began after the prayer and that it was broadcast to the whole world for the first time via radio (Cundioğlu, 1998: 237). This is the earliest document found on the history of the broadcasting of the call to prayer through loudspeakers from mosques in Turkey. However, it is understood that this did not become an established jurisprudence and was only installed temporarily in certain places.

The practice of placing loudspeakers in mosques for the call to prayer, as we know it, began in the early 1960s. Later on, it will be seen that it was also widely used for the kamet recited in mosques, the leading of prayers, sermons and sermons (Günaydın, 2007). It is unclear how citizens approached the introduction of the call to prayer over loudspeakers during this period. However, in the third year following the 1960 coup d’état, on May 13, 1963, the Advisory and Religious Works Review Board of the Presidency of Religious Affairs made a decision on the issue of “Call to prayer through loudspeakers”, stating that if the call to prayer through loudspeakers from one of the adjacent mosques met the need, there was no need for the others to be activated, that the sound should be lowered during the morning call to prayer, that muezzins should go up to the minaret* instead of calling for prayer from the ground because there was a loudspeaker, and that the call to prayer should be in accordance with the makam (Günaydın, 2007).

* [It is not right if the muezzin does not call the adhan from the minaret or from a high place, but from below. Because it is sunnah to recite the adhan from a high place and the electricity can be cut off suddenly. In that case, the adhan would be interrupted.” (Akdoğan, 2013).

Although it is said that studies on the beautiful recitation of the adhan have been carried out since 1976 (Akdoğan, 2013), the Istanbul Governorship’s statement “Speakers are a material means of amplifying the sound. Since such a device did not exist in the time of the Prophet, the execution of sharia orders with this device is considered ‘bid’at’” (cited in Günaydın, 2007), a public antithesis to the announcement of the call to prayer over loudspeakers has not yet been produced, and instead the issue has continued to be a ground for ideological conflict between different political foci. The debate on how the call to prayer should be recited continued after the 1970 memorandum. The letter dated July 8, 1971 and numbered 5–05/3843 of the Ministry of State sent to the Presidency of Religious Affairs was examined by the Supreme Council of Religious Affairs and decided on July 22, 1971 (Günaydın, 2007).

Singapore Case

The existence of modern Singapore as an island country and city-state in Southeast Asia can be traced back to the British colonization that began in 1819. After the de facto end of the colonial period in 1959, there was a preference to join the Federation of Malaysia in 1963. However, this union, which lasted only 2 years due to ideological differences, ended with Singapore’s expulsion from the federation in 1965. English, Malay, Chinese and Tamil are adopted as official languages in the country with a population of approximately 6 million, a quarter of which live outside the country. English is used as the lingua franca. Located on important international trade routes, the country is in a very good economic situation. It ranks second in the world in GDP per capita (Wikipedia, 2021). The ratio of Muslims in the country to the total population is approximately 14%. Ethnic and religious diversity is high. In Singapore, where the majority of the Malay population is Muslim, issues of Islamic faith are often addressed in relation to ethnic concerns.

In 1936, when the country was still a British colony, The Straits Times, then an English-language newspaper, reported that an anonymous Muslim benefactor had donated loudspeakers and a microphone to be installed in two of the four minarets of the country’s best-known mosque, the Grand Sultan Masjid Mosque, and that the equipment had been installed in the mosque under the planning and direction of the director of the British General Electric Company. It was said that it was clear that the noise of the modern city required a corresponding increase in the power of the muezzin’s voice, that “in the future it will be possible to address congregations of 4,000 to 5,000 people”, that despite the opposition of a minority who opposed the implementation of such technology on the grounds that it was “contrary to the romantic conception of the sacred cities of the East”, the public was very pleased with this innovation and that Singapore would be the pioneer country in this regard, as it was the first in the world (National Library Board, 2021-b).

A year later, in 1937, another news article appeared with the headline “Science has come to Singapore” (National Library Board, 2021-c). After stating that science had come to Singapore to lay cables for sound in mosques, the article praised the fact that the call to prayer could be heard a mile away with powerful loudspeakers installed in two of the four minarets of the Grand Sultan Masjid Mosque. The novelty of the muezzin being able to recite the call to prayer by whispering into a microphone from the room where he sits, without having to climb the minaret, is emphasized.

A 1941 newspaper clipping reported that the voice of the muezzin praying in awe on the evening of Ramadan, amplified 1,000 times by amplifiers, could be heard for miles around, although sometimes cracking occurred, distracting from the beauty of the sound (National Library Board, 2021-a).

Since the 1959 elections, Singapore’s parliamentary democracy has been dominated by the People’s Independence Party (PAP), which has been at the center of the country’s rapid political, social and economic development. The party’s use of electricity in its party emblem, which refers to modernization, as in similar examples around the world, is an interesting detail that seems familiar. When Singapore was granted self-government in internal affairs by the British Colonial Administration, the ruling People’s Independence Party (PAP) generally.

Since the 1959 elections, Singapore’s parliamentary democracy has been dominated by the People’s Independence Party (PAP), which has been at the center of the country’s rapid political, social and economic development. The party’s use of electricity in its party emblem, which refers to modernization, as in similar examples around the world, is an interesting detail that seems familiar. When Singapore was granted self-government in its internal affairs by the British Colonial Administration, the ruling People’s Independence Party (PAP) was generally recognized as the party in power:

* Political consolidation,
* Industrialization,
* Economic growth
* Urbanization
* Nation building (www.pap.org.sg).

In the following years, the PAP’s programmatic development thrusts, focusing on these discourses, would bring about major changes in Singapore’s cultural and physical landscape. Especially with the “Urbanization and Resettlement Project”, which brought up the construction of new “satellite” cities with public, high-rise apartment buildings forming the main residential area surrounded by industrial zones and served by highways, it will be seen that urbanization has entered a new phase with a very traumatic course. While in the pre-urbanization period one could speak of homogeneous religious clusters in kampungs, with the implementation of the project, a new situation emerged in which Muslims in particular were placed closer to other ethnic groups and at the same time further away from each other and the mosque (Lee, 1999: 87).

With these developments, it is noteworthy that Muslim leaders, in line with state policy, are appealing to the Islamic population, inviting them to accept and adapt to a modern, urban environment (Lisa, 2016). Muslims in Singapore are encouraged to “discard some of their old adat [traditions] to pave the way for progress” (National Library Board, 2021-d). By this they mainly mean that the loudspeakers installed in mosques from 1936 onwards are not compatible with the new urban form, which has since become increasingly compact, and they are urged to abandon them. However, despite the leaders, some congregations resisted this demand. When rumors circulated that the government was preparing to ban the call to prayer, the Minister for Social Affairs, Mr. Othman Wok, after accusing two religious groups (the Singapore Muslim Action Front and the Singapore Muslim Council) of “exploiting religious issues to create unrest” and waging a “smear campaign against the government”, was forced to issue the following statement on the content of their work:

“The Mufti recently met with the Management Committees of 68 mosques to discuss how best to cooperate with the Government to reduce noise from loudspeakers. … Some suggested that the loudspeakers currently installed outside the mosque building should be reinstalled inside the building; others felt that the loudspeakers should be left as they are, but the volume should be reduced. So you can see how some unscrupulous people are distorting the facts with shameless statements that the Government has banned the call to prayer. “

Between May and July 1974, as part of a noise abatement campaign, the government and Islamic organizations in Singapore decided to reorient the mosque’s loudspeakers from where they faced the exterior of the mosque to the inside. Newspapers during this period showed that this decision infuriated a section of the Islamic population, thus creating conflicts between the government and members of the Islamic community (Lee, 1999). It was only after it was assured that a cleanup of religious buildings would include not only the Islamic community, but also Chinese and Indian temples and Christian churches that negotiations could begin to take a positive turn. The compromise between the government and Islamic communities can be summarized in three points (Lee, 1999):

1. Reducing the amplitude of loudspeakers in existing mosques where they face outwards,
2. Directing loudspeakers towards the interior of new mosques to be built in the future,
3. Announcing prayer times through radio broadcasts.

By 1978, it can be seen that the regulations that had been pointed out had been implemented to a large extent. The Strait Times began to publish against loudspeakers in the opposite way to the arguments that had legitimized them in the 1930s and 40s. The article titled “Noise Levels and Tension in City Life” quoted below is noteworthy in this regard (National Library Board, 2021-e):

“…Amplifiers used in such places were to be fitted with sound attenuators by the Standards and Industrial Research Institute of Singapore. (…) Research has shown a direct correlation between the increasing tension of urban life and the noise level. (…) Officials from MUIS and [my] ministry were testing different sound amplification levels for the call to prayer and decided that the acceptable sound level measured at a distance of 10 meters from sound sources was 60 dBA. In the tests, this sound level could be clearly heard at a distance of 100 meters from the mosque. (…) Since August 15 last year, the ministry had arranged for the Azan to be broadcast by Radio Singapore five times a day. This meant restarting the station about an hour before its normal broadcast time to be on the air before the first Azan. “

Thus, from 1978 onwards, the de facto practice of broadcasting the call to prayer over the radio during prayer hours was introduced. Warna 94.2 FM, which broadcasts entirely in Malay, is allocated to broadcast the adhan only during prayer hours, while Ria 89.7 FM, another national station broadcasting in English and Malay, plays popular music outside the adhan. In Singapore, there is no practice of broadcasting the call to prayer on television, although the televisions of Islamic communities in Malaysia, which also broadcast the call to prayer, can be accessed via satellite channels (Lee, 1999).

In Singapore, where a wide range of ethnic and religious groups live together, it was decided through negotiations that it would not be appropriate for one group to dominate the dominant soundscape of public space (Garrioch, 2003). The practice of allowing older mosques built before 1975 to direct their loudspeakers outwards towards the surrounding community, while “new generation mosques” built after 1975 direct their loudspeakers indoors, appears to have worked smoothly. The promise that the perceived gap would be compensated for by the radio produced many different results in practice. The fact that the dominant character of the call to prayer was removed from the new composition of the sound dome that emerged in the city space by consensus, without any social conflict, is the result of a general public sphere debate. In this sense, it can be argued that radio produced radical effects on the transformation of the Islamic community in Singapore that are still ongoing.

The loudspeaker was seen as a means of acoustically recapturing the spirit of community lost after migration to the city. After an interim period in which Islamic acoustic communities, which could be observed spatially in rural Singapore (Schafer, 1994), were artificially re-established through the broadcasting of the call to prayer over the loudspeaker, which gave a sense of unity to the dispersed masses in the urban space, they were once again produced through radio. In this way, a new (larger, more dispersed) imaginary community (Anderson 1991) is established by meeting on a common frequency over radio lines. With the reorganization of the social sphere in Singapore during the 1960s and 1970s, in this new situation of increased dependence on technology for the preservation of cultural identities (Lee, 1999), the scope of the community has become a virtual expanse whose boundaries no one can fully control. Whereas in the traditional faith, the mosque served as a structural space that facilitated group identity largely among men, a wider Islamic community constructed through the airwaves now includes women.

Islamic leaders in Singapore seem convinced that the benefits of media technology outweigh the costs, whatever they may be, and that modernization does not necessarily lead to secularization. A kind of artificial selection process has emerged among the muezzins heard on radio broadcasts, driven by public acclaim (Lee, 1994). In this way, a kind of aesthetic evolution mechanism has operated, paving the way for the supply of the more popular call to prayer. The area of conflict caused by one medium (the loudspeaker) was reconciled by another (the radio) and produced results for the benefit of the community.

Instead of Conclusion

Focusing on the cases of Turkey and Singapore, this study examines the practices of call to prayer in the public sphere. The inclusion of the loudspeaker, an artificial sound amplification device, in the public life of these two societies as early as the 1930s is briefly touched upon in relation to the social transformations that took place, and the sources of the debates that continue today are examined.

It would be appropriate to be supported by further studies that appreciate the importance of an issue that has been little studied in our academic literature.

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