] From her front porch, Alice Dembowski has watched her
] city change, one tidy house at a time.
]
] "Chinese, Polish, Bosnian, Polish, Bengali,"
] she recites, her finger moving down the block. "They
] were all Polish at one time."
]
] "I've made friends. I go to their weddings.
] (But) we're losing our tradition and I'm
] getting mad," Dembowski said. "If they're going to live in
] America, why can't they be more American?"
]
] Next month, Hamtramck will become one of the few cities
] in the United States where the Islamic call to prayer is
] broadcast onto public streets. The impact of that
] decision is reverberating across the nation.

That woman's statement is humerous in its obvious ignorance.

This is a 4 minute thing that they blast 5 times a day. There is a sample on this site. For the most part I think its cool. I wouldn't mind it especially in an urban area. But, of course, I mostly like it because its alien. Others will hate it for the same reason.

I think the critical question is, at dawn? If this thing is loud enough to wake people up its a no go. I strongly support your right to blast islamic rites (or heavy metal for that matter) as long as you're not interfering with other people's sleep.

Community standards must factor in here. Obviously I couldn't set up a heavy metal loud speaker that played megadeth for 4 minutes five times a day. The only way to draw the line between this and that is to ask what the community is comfortable with, regardless of what you think of the community's reasons for choosing to be comfortable or uncomfortable with it. I don't see any way around that conceptually.

In general I think its a good thing to promote the notion that in the west Islam is acceptable. In the East they might ask if other cultures are similarly accepted.

(Of course, there is always the story about the Orb concert where they took a record of this thing and cut it into their mix because they thought it sounded cool and ended up getting their show shut down because there were Islamic people in the audience who got offended...)

Cultures collide in diverse Hamtramck