Religion Out Loud: Religious Sound, Public Space, and American Pluralism

6. Calling Muslims—and Christians—to Pray

158 > 159 diversity, however. More significantly, they have mediated contact among heterogeneous audiences, both willing and unwilling, who have interpreted their meaning and message in very different ways.2 In other words, it should be evident by now that when Americans have encountered other religions, they have done so not as intellectual abstractions , but as particular sets of embodied practices and material engagements. Responding to religious diversity has not been solely a matter of resolving theological or doctrinal differences, as it has often been presented in scholarship on religious pluralism, but of engaging with different kinds of religious mediations , making sense of new sights, sounds, and smells. At times, these multisensory displays have inspired audiences to reimagine what it means to be religious or what it means to be American. Several scholars have noted music’s potential to bridge boundaries and mitigate religious, racial, and ethnic differences, for example. But religion practiced publicly and out loud also has regularly generated controversy, conflict, and sharp divisions. As we have seen, sound often has marked the limit of what neighbors have been willing to tolerate. The public and plural nature of American religion today has given rise to occasions both for remapping and reinscribing the boundaries of collective identity.3 The Hamtramck adhān dispute offers a particularly rich case study for exploring more closely these dynamics of religious pluralism in the contemporary United States. Hamtramck residents heard and interpreted the meaning of the adhān in very different ways, and their varied responses to its call expressed competing conceptions of religion’s place in American society and how religious differences should best be managed. But the rhetorical strategies they deployed in advancing their positions also had unintended effects and unexpected consequences, which led to several surprising tensions and ironies. In the end, religion was able to make itself heard in Hamtramck, but only in carefully prescribed ways. This chapter analyzes the particular practices and processes through which religious newcomers have claimed a public place for themselves in American society. In our earlier discussion of nineteenth-century church bell cases, we considered how a long-familiar sound came to be heard as “out of place.” Conversely, this chapter studies how a “new” sound (or at least a sound that was new to its particular listening context) came to be heard as belonging. If the right to make noise freely signals social power or acceptance , as I have suggested that it does, then we can see how this shift had important implications for those who produced the contested sound. Yet the manner through which the adhān was made at home in Hamtramck reveals the particular conditions of possibility that continued to govern how American religions could be practiced out loud.4 160 > 161 lay leadership, which frequently put them at odds with the Irish-dominated Detroit archdiocese. They were intensely proud of their parishes and built magnificent churches, perhaps none as fine as St. Florian’s, which opened a new building in 1928 that dominated Hamtramck’s visual and auditory landscapes. Located “in the midst of the small homes of those it served,” the church had a two-hundred-foot-tall spire that could be seen from miles away, and its bells resounded throughout the city. The Boston architect Ralph Adams Cram expressly intended St. Florian’s to replace the Dodge Main as emblematic of Hamtramck, hoping that it would stand for “beauty, prayer, community, and order at the very center of the world of ugliness, smoke, noise, profit and materialism.” The dedication of its bells in 1928 provided an important opportunity for Hamtramck’s Polish Catholics to celebrate their communal growth. As one historian described the event, “In a very tangible way the bells brought together the parish community as the first step in giving life and making their own the structure that was soon to become the center of their neighborhood and their lives.” St. Florian’s bells visually and aurally represented the community’s coalescing civic and religious identity.7 Over the next few decades, as the city continued to grow and thrive, religion in Hamtramck remained visible, audible, and relatively homogeneous. Parish churches consistently reported high levels of attendance, and public processions throughout the year brought Catholic devotional practices to the streets. While there was always a small minority of the city’s population that did not share the dominant faith, Hamtramck’s Polish Catholics generally...