Duke University officials confirmed that beginning Friday, a Muslim call to prayer will be sounded throughout its campus, and will continue on a weekly basis.
Raleigh, N.C., CBS affiliate WRAL reported:
Members of the Duke Muslim Students Association will chant the call, known as adhan or azan, from the Duke Chapel bell tower each Friday at 1 p.m. The call to prayer will last about three minutes and be “moderately amplified,” officials said in a statement Tuesday.
“The adhan is the call to prayer that brings Muslims back to their purpose in life, which is to worship God, and serves as a reminder to serve our brothers and sisters in humanity,” Imam Adeel Zeb, Muslim chaplain at Duke told the station. “The collective Muslim community is truly grateful and excited about Duke’s intentionality toward religious and cultural diversity.”
WRAL continued:
In majority Muslim countries across the globe, the adhan is broadcast from mosques and on television and radio stations five times a day to correspond with prayer times. On Fridays, the day of worship in Islam, sermons are also broadcast.
In the United States, amplified adhan exists in a handful of communities.
“This opportunity represents a larger commitment to religious pluralism that is at the heart of Duke’s mission,” Christy Lohr Sapp, the chapel’s associate dean for religious life told WRAL. “It connects the university to national trends in religious accommodation.”
Not everyone is enamored with Duke’s decision. Franklin Graham, president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and Samaritan’s Purse, both based in North Carolina, was highly critical.
“Duke University announced today that they will have a Muslim call to prayer from their chapel bell tower every Friday. As Christianity is being excluded from the public square and followers of Islam are raping, butchering, and beheading Christians, Jews, and anyone who doesn’t submit to their Sharia Islamic law, Duke is promoting this in the name of religious pluralism. I call on the donors and alumni to withhold their support from Duke until this policy is reversed,” he said on his Facebook page.
He also took to Twitter:
I just heard Duke university is going to allow Muslim prayers from their bell tower every Friday in the name of religious pluralism.SHAME
— Franklin Graham (@Franklin_Graham) January 14, 2015
Zeb hailed Duke’s decision as a move toward “diversity,” a goal we hear more and more nowadays from the left — but it’s hardly a worthy goal.
America has traditionally been called the world’s “melting pot,” where people of many countries and cultures came together to assimilate, learn the language, love the country and become “Americans.”
That melting pot has since turned into a salad bowl, with each immigrant having but a single common denominator — a distinct distaste for American values.
And with that said, one can’t help but wonder how long it will be before that single weekly call to prayer will mushroom into the full enchilada — five calls a day, seven days a week — all in the name of “diversity.”
