On January 14, 2015, Duke University (North Carolina) announced that it would start broadcasting the Muslim call to prayer (adhan) from the bell tower of its campus chapel every Friday at 1:00 p.m. This “moderately amplified” adhan would be sung both in Arabic and in English.
On January 15, 2015, Duke University reversed its decision. The three-minute adhan would not be “moderately amplified” in the chapel’s bell tower every Friday after all, but would continue to take place in the quadrangle in front of the chapel and from there, students would proceed inside the chapel for their worship service–as they have been doing for some time. Michael Schoenfeld, vice president for public affairs and government relations at Duke, said, “What began as something that was meant to be unifying [the call to prayer from the chapel’s bell tower] was turning into something that was the opposite.” The university received hundreds of calls and emails–“many of which were quite vitriolic.”
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Feminism and Religion 