Friendless Williams delights Oxford

The Archbishop of Canterbury (right) may be under fire from the entire British press, not to mention Gordon Brown's Cabinet, for saying that the adoption of some aspects of Sharia law in Britain seems 'unavoidable', but he has gained some new friends in Oxford. Among the comments he made on the BBC Radio's World At One, was a virtually unreported reference to a growing row in the university town over the local mosque's desire to broadcast, via loudspeaker, daily 'calls for prayer'.

Dr Williams said that while accommodation of a periodic call from the minaret at a mosque in Oxford might be possible, a daily call to prayer in "a mixed community which will never be homogeneously Muslim... doesn't seem to be appropriate".

Oxford Central Mosque applied before Christmas for permission to have a Mohammedan muezzin use a loudspeaker system to summon the faithful to prayer three times a day. The plan caused immediate uproar among local residents who claim that the sound would be inappropriately intrusive among Oxford's dreaming spires.

One resident told the Oxford Mail: "The proposal to issue a prayer call is very un-neighbourly, especially in a crowded urban space such as Oxford. I have lived in the Middle East and a prayer call has a very different feel to church bells and I personally found the noise extremely unpleasant, rather disturbing and very alien to the Western mindset."

Another, responding to the fact that the calls would include - in Arabic - the line, 'There is no God but Allah', said: "I do not want preaching at. It is not the tradition of this country or the tradition I subscribe to."

The Archbishop's words - if they get heard above the din surrounding his other comments - will come as some relief, especially after the novelist and critic Philip Hensher entered the debate, claiming in the Independent that Oxford was "famously self-absorbed" and asking: "Can it really be true that nobody would find charm, interest and perhaps even some beauty in the call to prayer echoing, once a week, across its domes and spires?"

Which is all very romantic, but it's not 'once a week' the mosque is asking for, it's three times a day. ·