A Danish minister who this week declared to the news agency Ritzau that the call to prayer should not echo across the nation's rooftops that no one should ever find himself “walking through part of Denmark and wonder whether he was in a suburb of Islamabad” wasn't making a point about decibels. He was sketching a line between what he felt is a northern European country of six million people and what he doesn't want it to become.

Immigration Minister Morten Bødskov, who is a top official in the ruling centre-left Social Democrat party, has announced a new probe into whether the playing of the adhan from outdoor loudspeakers can be banned across Denmark without violating the nation's own constitution. It follows two previous attempts by a Social Democratic minister to limit the practice in 2020 and 2025. It's coming back which means that the question has not been solved in Denmark but just shelved.

What's surprising is that it's being raised by people. It's not an outlandish nationalist proposal. It is the centre-left, heirs of Scandinavian social democracy, who say the gradual growth of Islamic religious expression is taking up too much public space. Bødskov put it starkly, and said that the country should have a sound and feel distinctly Danish, not like a neighbourhood in a Pakistani city. The language of the populist right is now being used by a governing party of the left and the political landscape has already changed beneath everyone's feet.

Consider the actual dimensions and the symbol is clear. Denmark has approximately 270,000 Muslims, approximately 100 mosques and a population of approximately six million. Very few of those mosques do this at all, and only call outdoors. Several municipalities, including Copenhagen, already limit the volume of amplified prayer call with regular noise regulations and the local Grand Mosque has an agreement with the authorities to prohibit the adhan from outside. A nationwide ban would thus criminalize a practice which is not frequent at all. It is not a noise issue. There's something in it the notion that a religion might declare itself audibly in common Danish air.

That is why the legal route is so cumbersome. In Denmark, freedom of religion is anchored in the constitution, except in limited situations that have to do with preaching in a way that is detrimental to democracy and giving to banned organisations. Law experts say that such a law would be clearly unconstitutional as it would be the state discriminating between religions, especially since it was a law about the Islamic call to prayer. To overcome this, lawmakers would have to draft a neutral public amplifying rule, a rule which does not mention any religion. The problem is that a similar rule might also apply to the Christian church bells, but those who are in favor say that bells simply make a sound and not necessarily theological statements which is why they aren't comparable. In either case, the government is compelled to call a “measure” to one religion a “measure” to none.

To see why it is a left-wing government that's doing this now, just track the votes and the money. Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has recently entered her third term following her Social Democrats' worst result in over 100 years in the March election, due to discontent over the cost of living, welfare pressures and migration. Denmark's rightist Danish People's Party more than doubled its vote, on a zero net migration of Muslims platform. Frederiksen's response has not been "softening" but "hardening. She has called for the nationwide face-veil ban to be extended to schools and universities, and to remove prayer rooms from campuses. The call-to-prayer ban is part of the same project: a centre-left government which is seeking to hold on to its working-class heartland, while also battling the right on cultural territory it can no longer avoid.

Economics are much more important than slogans and the economic reality under all that politics is ruthless. Denmark is one of the most generous welfare states in Europe, and the decades of data indicates that immigration from Muslim majority countries has overburdened rather than replenished its welfare state. At the peak of integration in 2008, the employment rate of non-Western immigrants was still about 56 percent, compared with native Danes' 79 percent, and even then the non-Western immigrants were a net fiscal drain. The same is true for figures from the European Commission that claim the more recent employment gap is around 18 points, which is an improvement but not even close to parity. Geography is a telling clue too. Approximately 54 per cent of non-Western immigrants reside in public housing, while about 14 per cent of the native Danes do. The proportion is even higher among families of Somali and Pakistani background. Those figures drive a tacit worry that the social contract, upon which a high-tax model and social trust rely, is deteriorating in a nation that believes it has a shared responsibility.

Well before anyone was talking about loudspeakers, Denmark had been working on that fear for years. It has so called "ghetto laws", which allow the authorities to move people out of neighbourhoods which "contain too many people of non-Western origin" and in some cases, the state has demanded that asylum seekers contribute to the cost of their accommodation. The government even created a statistical category called MENAPT, which stands for the Middle East, North Africa, Pakistan and Türkiye, to monitor this population alone in terms of crime, employment and poverty, which critics argue is used to create a chance for the state to act against Muslims without using their names. A modified benefits system gives tiered payments and introduces a compulsory "work obligation" which targets migrant women in particular who are not on the labour market, from this month. The call to prayer is one more brick in a wall that has risen over the past decade. Significantly, Denmark is one of the few countries to be identified by the international migrant-integration index as being in a process of backsliding.

The ban actually has a case for it, not of the nativist right at all, and it should be given a hearing and a fair one – since it is the one that is most shouted down. It runs like this. The distinction is between a private and protected form of worship, and the broadcasting into a space shared by all of a religious summons, which is an assertion of the religion onto the commons. On this account of secularism, a true public square demands that all religions remain indoors, and integration involves faith being made a personal matter rather than a part of the streetscape. Those who throw this out and many of them are reform-minded believers, secular Muslims, or those who have completely abandoned Islam add a sharper point. In such battles, it is often the most conservative religious bodies that are the Noisiest representatives of "the Muslim community", and the quiet believers and former believers are drowned out. The first ones to be silenced are the secular Muslims who would most welcome an open debate when any criticism of political Islam is reflexively called racism. According to them, that's not about Muslims as people, but about "an ideology's takeover of public space," which the headlines rarely capture.

That's a very strong argument. It also has its drawbacks and the worldwide situation illustrates why there is no easy answer. Other democracies have come to the opposite conclusion on the same facts. In 2023, NYC took steps to eliminate its permit system for mosques to call the adhan on Fridays and during the month of Ramadan, and instead to consider it a civic courtesy. A Sydney region council is considering planning restrictions banning outdoor loudspeakers at mosques before a council meeting on a proposed application in Lakemba. Britain and Germany follow a middle course and make the call but limit its volume and timing. But Europe as a whole has taken a restrictive stance: the Netherlands, Belgium, Austria, Switzerland and Denmark have all implemented full or partial ban on wearing face coverings, while the New York model demonstrates that this does not have to be the case. What might sound like good news in one city is dangerous in another. The difference is not on the adhan, but it is on the confidence of the society listening to the adhan.

After all, that is the issue that Denmark is actually debating. A country that has developed a famous high trust, high spending, cohesive social model is wondering how much social change it can withstand before trust itself erodes. The minister's "suburb of Islamabad" line was crudely put and it will rightly offend many of the law-abiding citizens it describes. However, behind the naivety lies a dilemma that all European democracies now face: the question of what exactly is a secular public square and what does it entail to be secular? Is it a matter of excluding religion or establishing space for the religion that the citizens practise? For the moment Denmark has opted for the first answer. Whether this constitutes is allowed under its own constitution is next for the courts and the voters to determine.