Let us begin with a scene. A gathering in Amsterdam — liberals, academics, people who consider themselves thoughtful about religion in the public sphere. Among them, Fouad Laroui: a Moroccan-Dutch novelist and academic, Muslim by background, secular by conviction, someone who has spent his career thinking seriously about the position of Islam in European modernity. And Laroui says, more or less: please keep it to yourself, and the world will become a better place.
He is — among other things — talking about the azan. His position is not that Islam is wrong, or that Muslims do not have rights, or that Europe should close its borders. His position is the position of a secular intellectual who happens to have Muslim heritage: religion is a private matter, it belongs behind the door of the mosque and the home, and broadcasting it into shared urban space is an imposition on people who did not ask to receive it. This is a coherent, considered, non-hysterical position. And it rests on a very specific — and contestable — understanding of what secularism is.
Here we must introduce a distinction that Pooyan Tamimi Arab develops in his study of the azan in the Netherlands, a distinction that, once grasped, makes a great many confusions dissolve. There are, he argues, two entirely different things that go by the name of secularism. The first is constitutional secularism: the legal-institutional framework that separates church and state, protects freedom of religion equally, and prohibits the state from privileging one religion’s sounds over another’s. Under constitutional secularism, the azan has exactly the same rights as church bells. The law in the Netherlands is clear on this. It is settled. The azan is protected.
The second is cultural secularism: the ambient assumption — not legislated, not enforced by any statute, but socially enforced with considerable force — that public space should be neutral, which is to say free of explicit religious presence. This is the secularism Laroui is invoking. And the problem with it — the problem that Tamimi Arab’s entire book is dedicated to making visible — is that it is not neutral. It never was. What it calls neutrality is a particular religious settlement that arrived first and then declared itself the absence of religion.
Let us be more dedicated here. Cultural secularism in Northern Europe is Protestant in shape. This is not an insult but a historical observation. The Reformation produced a particular understanding of what religion is: interior, personal, a matter of individual conscience, fundamentally private. You believe in your heart, you practice in your church, you keep it out of the street. This understanding was generalised — first across European Christian denominations, then presented as the universal definition of what a properly “modern” religion does. Privatise. Interiorise. Disappear from public life except on designated occasions in designated buildings.
But let us be more precise about which cities we are talking about, because the argument looks different depending on where you stand. The “cultural secularism is Protestant” claim is strongest in places where Protestantism is still a living cultural force — rural Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands of fifty years ago. In Amsterdam today, the churches whose bells ring every fifteen minutes serve congregations that represent a small fraction of the population. The Christmas market is attended by people who are Christian in the way that someone born in Paris is “culturally French” — a nominal identity that organises the calendar without organising the life. What we are really describing, in many Western European cities, is not Protestantism but its ghost: a settlement from which the religious content has been substantially drained, leaving the forms in place and calling them secular. This changes the argument slightly. The church bell that rings in a post-Christian city is almost nobody’s active religious practice. But it is still not the azan. And the azan is still marked as someone’s — still arrives as religious, still refuses the amnesia that the bell achieved precisely by becoming nobody’s in particular.
Christianity, in most of Northern Europe, has done this privatisation and interiorisation. Or rather — and this is the crucial point — it has appeared to do this. The church bells still ring. The calendar is organised around Christian holidays. The crosses remain in German and Italian public school classrooms. The Christmas market occupies the city center. But these residues of Christian religious presence have been reclassified. They are not religion anymore. They are culture, tradition, heritage, the texture of European civilisation. They have achieved what might be called historical amnesia: they are so thoroughly embedded in what “European public space” means that they have ceased to appear as religious at all.
The azan cannot achieve this amnesia (maybe yet, one might say). It arrived after the reclassification was complete. It will, at least for now, always appear as religious — which is to say, as an imposition on a neutrality that was already, invisibly, full.
And yet — we need to question the function and meaning of the azan as well. The amplified broadcast of the azan through loudspeakers is not simply “Islamic tradition.” It is a twentieth-century intervention, dependent on technology the tradition could not have anticipated, and one that is actively contested within Islamic jurisprudence itself. The traditional azan was a human voice from a human throat, acoustically calibrated for the urban fabric it inhabited — the minaret was engineered so that the voice would carry to the edge of the mosque’s community without mechanical amplification. The loudspeaker changes this fundamentally, and not without controversy. Several Muslim-majority countries regulate azan amplification far more strictly than European constitutional law requires. Egypt under al-Sisi standardised and centralised the broadcast across thousands of mosques, eliminating individual muezzins and their variations in the name of order and consistency. When we talk about the right to broadcast the azan in European cities, we are talking about a practice whose specific modern form is itself a construction — the tradition is old, but this version of it is not.
Nor do all Muslims want it — and this is the fact that the Islam-versus-European-secularism framing most aggressively suppresses. Within European Muslim communities, which are internally diverse in ways the public debate almost never acknowledges, there are serious disagreements about whether amplified broadcast is the “right” form of Islamic public presence in a non-Muslim majority context: whether it serves the community or primarily signals its existence to those outside it, whether the political energy spent defending it might be better spent elsewhere, whether it is even what the tradition requires in this specific historical situation. Treating the azan debate as a clean confrontation between Islamic tradition and European cultural secularism is a convenience for both sides. It simplifies what is, from within Islam, a considerably more open question — and it does so in a way that, ironically, mirrors the very move Tamimi Arab is criticising: flattening a diverse practice into a single, unified object that can then be defended or attacked wholesale.
On another note: The Swiss referendum of 2009 banned the construction of new minarets — note: not the azan, not Islamic worship, not even the sound of anything. The minaret itself. A tower. Silent architecture. Fifty-seven percent of Swiss voters found that the mere visual presence of Islamic vertical form in their cities was unacceptable. The minarets were not broadcasting anything. They were simply there. Constitutional secularism found the ban extremely difficult to defend, since it violated religious freedom in the most elementary sense. Cultural secularism found it completely natural. Presence, not sound, was the issue.
And yet the Swiss case opens a further complication, one that cuts in a different direction. A critic writing in the German tabloid Bild — in the context of the Cologne azan decision — argued that the church bell comparison does not hold, and not for the reasons one might expect. His argument: the church bell is a signal without words. It marks time, calls people to something, punctuates the urban day — but it asserts nothing. The azan, by contrast, makes a propositional claim. Allahu akbar. God is great. Muhammad is his prophet. It is not merely sound but statement, broadcast into public space where people of all convictions, or none, must receive it whether they wish to or not. One can dismiss this argument — and the source it comes from — as bad faith dressed in philosophical clothing. But it is not an incoherent argument. A genuinely secular public space, the position suggests, is not one that treats all religious sounds equally; it is one that does not broadcast propositional religious claims at all. The question is whether this distinction between signal and statement holds up — or whether it collapses the moment you notice that nobody in Amsterdam knows the words of the Kyrie Eleison the church organ is playing, and that a statement nobody can hear as a statement functions, in practice, as a signal anyway.
One might object: but the Swiss referendum is an extreme case, not representative of mainstream European attitudes toward the azan. True. But consider the proposals made in several Dutch municipalities when mosques applied for permission to broadcast the call to prayer. The suggestion, offered in good faith by people who considered themselves sympathetic: replace the azan with light signals. LED pulses from the minaret, timed to correspond to the prayer calls, visible to the local Muslim community. The religious function preserved. The sound removed. Islamic practice permitted, on condition that it becomes inaudible.
This is cultural secularism arriving at its logical conclusion. The only version of Islamic public presence it can tolerate is one that has been rendered almost invisible — which is to say, the only acceptable Islam is an Islam that has learned to perform the disappearing act that Protestant Christianity performed several centuries earlier. Such demands are not necessarily for religious equality, but for Islamic assimilation to a Protestant model of what religion is supposed to do with itself.
Which brings us back to Laroui, and to what he was asking for. When he says — from within the secular left, as someone with Muslim heritage, as someone whose position cannot simply be dismissed as Islamophobia (although maybe it can? This would be open to discussion) — please keep it to yourself, he is asking for something that sounds like tolerance but is in fact a demand for transformation. He is asking that Islam reorganise itself according to the interior/exterior split that the Reformation produced, and that European Christianity has spent several centuries practicing until it became natural. He is asking that Islam become Protestant, in a way. And he is asking this while standing in a room in Amsterdam where church bells ring every fifteen minutes and nobody in the room has ever called that a problem.
There is a historical dimension here that complicates the picture further, without resolving it: The countries making this demand — that Islam remove itself from European public space, privatize, disappear into the interior — are largely the same countries that spent the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ensuring that Islam could not organise its own public space in its own territories. France administered Algeria for 132 years, suppressed Islamic institutions, imposed Catholic spatial and temporal ordering, and in certain periods restricted the azan in the very cities where it had sounded for centuries. Britain, the Netherlands, and Belgium did comparable things in comparable ways across the Muslim-majority world. The demand for Islamic privatisation in Paris or Amsterdam is being made by states with an intimate and largely unacknowledged history of dismantling Islamic public life elsewhere.
Tamimi Arab’s response to this — and he was in the room, and he pushed back, not as a Muslim but as someone pointing out an empirical and conceptual impossibility — is not that Laroui is a bad person or a self-hating Muslim. It is something simpler and at the same time more devastating: you cannot produce a neutral public square by demanding that one religion privatise while leaving the prior religious settlement in place and calling it culture. The neutral public square does not exist. There is only the religious arrangement that arrived first, naturalised itself, and then told the newcomers that any visible presence on their part would constitute an imposition on neutrality.
What follows from this? Less than the argument might suggest. Showing that the neutral public square does not exist does not tell us what a non-neutral public square should look like, or whose sounds should be in it, or how communities negotiate presence when every position is already a position. The analysis dissolves a false clarity — the idea that Laroui’s secular demand is simply secular, or that the constitutional protection of the azan is simply about rights — and replaces it with a genuine difficulty. That difficulty has no academic solution. It has only the daily, imperfect, politically charged negotiation of cities that contain more kinds of belonging than their official self-descriptions can accommodate.
Reading that matters here:
Pooyan Tamimi Arab, Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape (Edinburgh UP, 2017). The constitutional/cultural secularism distinction is the conceptual centre of the book. The Deventer case — where these abstractions become a specific mosque, a specific neighborhood, a specific negotiation — is Chapter 4.
Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford UP, 2003). The longer argument behind Tamimi Arab: how the category of the secular was constructed historically, and why it is not neutral. Dense but essential.
Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Ratzinger, The Dialectics of Secularization (2006). Two thinkers who disagree about almost everything arguing about what religion’s place in a secular democracy should be. Worth reading as a document of the confusion that Tamimi Arab’s distinction begins to clear up.
Al Jazeera — the clearest and most readable account: https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2021/10/11/germanys-largest-mosque-to-broadcast-call-to-prayer-on-fridays
VOA News — shorter, good for the basic facts: https://www.voanews.com/a/german-city-of-cologne-allows-mosques-to-broadcast-call-to-prayer-/6266953.html
One detail worth knowing: a critic from Bild argued the church bell comparison doesn’t hold because bells are “a signal without words” whereas the azan says “Allah is great” — which relates to the question about whether the objection is about sound or content.
Switzerland minaret referendum 2009:
Wikipedia — comprehensive, has the full vote breakdown by canton: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Swiss_minaret_referendum
Human Rights Watch statement — useful for the rights argument: https://www.hrw.org/news/2009/12/04/switzerland-minaret-ban-violates-rights
France24 — good contemporary account with reactions: https://www.france24.com/en/20091130-referendum-voters-support-controversial-ban-minarets
Interesting to know: the Swiss government itself recommended voting against the ban as unconstitutional — and 57.5% voted for it anyway. That’s maybe the clearest possible illustration of the gap between constitutional and cultural secularism.
