Calls to prayer in Europe were once associated with the bells of churches. Today, the cry of the muezzin is increasingly familiar and in Oxford a row has erupted over a bid by the city's mosque to broadcast the call. Could it be just the wake-up call people need?

There is a story told of Milltown Park, the Irish Jesuit house of studies in Dublin, that during the First World War the British Army needed, somewhat to their embarrassment, to search the building for someone who was thought to be an IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood) fighter.

They consulted the Rector as to how best to do it. He told them that all the Jesuits should be at prayer in the chapel at 6 a.m., and that would be the least awkward time. So it was that a Jesuit scholastic who had overslept found himself summoned to prayer by the entirely unexpected presence of a British soldier, with rifle and fixed bayonet, who told him: "The Rector says that you should be in church."

Whatever the implausibilities of that tale, it came back to mind this week on hearing of the row that has erupted here in my home town of Oxford over the request of the new Oxford Central Mosque to broadcast the call to prayer - or Adhan in Arabic - three times during the day - omitting the dawn-to-sunrise and dusk-to-dawn prayer calls - from loudspeakers in its minaret. Opinion seems equally divided: strange alliances of evangelical Christians and devout secularists are set against it, while the local Muslim community has for allies people such as the Bishop of Oxford, the Rt Revd John Pritchard, who is pleading for tolerance. A history don has referred to "torment and torture".

A call to prayer seems, you might suppose, a good thing; one thinks of Victorian paintings of The Angelus, the call to prayer serving to mark the hours of the day, long before watches were invented or were at least affordable. Such a call indicated when farm-workers might happily start and end their labour, and so offered protection against exploitation. At my boarding school, however, the Angelus used, at least for a while, to ring at 6 a.m., an hour when it was not, it has to be said, uniformly welcomed by us adolescents who felt we needed our sleep.

In a previous generation my aunt, a spirited lady to the last, was (entirely to her and the nuns' delight) suspended from school; her crime had been to respond to the caller's "Blessed be the Holy Child Jesus" not, as was conventional, with "Now and forever more, Amen", but with "Will you get the hell out of here!" It is all in the eye of the beholder, or the ear of those who long to remain asleep.

I myself have been startled into wakefulness by the Adhan at remarkably early hours in Jerusalem and Johannesburg, and therefore found some sympathy for the lady in a rural English village who recently threatened to take the vicar to law for causing his church bells to be rung of a Sunday morning. English church bells are a lovely sound, but the lady felt that there were no circumstances under which she would be proposing to attend church on that day; and since in her view she needed as much rest as she could get after a hard week's work, her righteous indignation was at least understandable.

Does it make a difference that this Muslim call to prayer, proposed for Oxford, would be electronic and pre-recorded? There is a suspicion that neighbours would look with more sympathy on a cry about the greatness of God that had been uttered by someone who had had to clamber to the top of the tower, with nothing better than a handheld megaphone to make himself heard.

Perhaps, after all, it is the noise that is the problem. Our Jewish friends, for example, do not ever, as far as I know, offer such a noisy summons to prayer (except in Jerusalem, where the beginning of Shabbat is announced by trumpet or by siren) and yet for all their discretion they manage to get to the synagogue on time.

Discretion, however, is not the only issue. A public call to prayer, emanating from whatever religious source, can usefully serve as a reminder that there is such a thing as God's time, and that our task is at all times to give praise and glory to God. At boarding school we were, as the former Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman so tellingly put it, "summoned by bells", and when we raced down to the church, dressing as we went, in order not to be late for the daily Mass, we were certainly so summoned.

Our main aim in hurrying, of course, was to avoid the sanctions consequent upon lateness; but once we were there, what we experienced, perhaps unreflectively, was certainly a communal experience of the worship of God. It is possible that British society today needs a reminder that prayer and worship is not a private, individual matter, between me and my God, but something that we do corporately, in company with others.

The difficulty is that in a heterogeneous society it seems plausible to object to "these religious people forcing their beliefs on the rest of us". There is obviously something in this argument, but a call to prayer is not forcing anyone to do anything, merely offering God's invitation. We are always free to accept or reject the invitation of God.

One further consideration may be worth a moment's reflection. The Oxford mosque is not proposing to play the call at dawn or at night, but only during the day. The widely expressed resistance to the sounding of the electronic Adhan may, after all, conceal a surly sense that "these Muslims are taking over Our Country", and what they are playing, even in the decent obscurity of Urdu or Arabic, is "Teaching a False Religion". If that is the motive (and of course no one could admit publicly to such an unworthy sentiment), then perhaps it needs to be named and shamed. The call to prayer is something that our country needs to hear today, no matter who utters it.

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