The Mughammadiyyah Masjied committee has launched a petition, calling on the City of Cape Town to institute concrete changes to the by-law relating to noise nuisances.

While Mayor Geordin Hill-Lewis has met with the mosque committee in Salt River to explain his decision to update the Standard Operations Procedure (SOP), the mosque says that this is not enough to protect religious institutions from such complaints.

Mosque liaison, Anwar Omar says that the SOP leaves it open to Hill-Lewis’ successor to interpret the by-law to include the sounds coming from religious institutions.

The Tennyson Road mosque had received a complaint earlier this month from a resident that claimed that the Muslim call to prayer, (Athaan) was too loud.

A City official that reportedly was unaware of the changes to the SOP, which exempts religious institutions that are zoned as such from these complaints, had taken action against the mosque over the athaan.

Omar says that in its 106 years of being in that community, it has always been sensitive to the multicultural make-up of the area.

He says that the athaan is only three minutes long, and does not exceed the noise level.

They hope to collect 100 000 signatures to their petition to force the City to institute a more rigorous, public participatory, democratic process of amending the by-law.