Cairo plans hi-tech unified call to prayer for all mosques - Gulf News

Communication control is a requirement for modern-day tyranny.

Control of a negative externality (in economist's parlance) is just a fig leaf for the true purpose. If the government was serious about noise it would ban car horns.

UPDATE: A native of Old Cairo, and economist, tells me the rest of the story. It is a story of unintended consequences. Two setups to the story.

First, anyone who puts a mosque in their apartment building or office building gains a tax exemption for the entire building. In effect, mosques have been subsidized. As a result there has been a proliferation of informal mosques. (People respond to incentives.) Each mosque must have an imam. These informal mosques do not use imams with formal training.

Second, in reaction to the threat that Islamic fundamentalists pose to the government, the government has for some time harassed all students who showed strong interest in Islam. The ones who persisted were the ones most willing to bear the harassment -- the fundamentalists.

As a consequence of these two policies, Cairo mosques have tended towards leadership that is either unqualified, or fundamentalist. The former are large in number and tend to turn up the volume at prayer time in competition with each other; the latter the government would like to control.

Hence the idea of a centrally controlled closed circuit call to prayer.