Given the cacophony that afflicts any Cairo street - the braying donkeys, the caterwauling vegetable vendors, the constant honking of car horns - it might seem a particularly daunting task to single out just one noise to prosecute as the most offensive.
But the minister of religious endowments recently did that, more or less, making a somewhat unlikely decision in these times when many Muslim faithful believe that their religion is under assault.
The call to prayer, the minister declared, is out of control: too loud, too grating, utterly lacking in beauty or uniform timing, and hence in dire need of reform. The solution, the evidently fearless minister decided - harking back to an answer Egyptian bureaucrats have seized upon since long before Islam - is to centralize it.
The minister, Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq, announced that one official call to prayer would be broadcast live from one central Cairo mosque five times a day, and that it would be carried simultaneously by the 4,000-plus mosques and prayer halls across the capital.
From the ensuing national brouhaha - the outraged headlines, the scathing editorials, the heated debates among worshipers - one might gain the impression that Mr. Zaqzouq was leading an assault against Islam itself. "Minarets Weep," intoned one banner headline, while another suggested sarcastically that the minister was less than a good Muslim. "The Call to Prayer Upsets Minister," it read.
Comedians and intellectuals had a field day. Ali Salem, one of Egypt's leading playwrights, envisioned a turbaned, high-tech SWAT team dispatched across Cairo whenever one mosque or another inevitably sabotaged the centralized prayer-call operation.
Not everyone ridiculed the idea, though.
Secular Cairenes endorsed it as a possible means toward greater government control over all of the tiny storefront mosques that have often proved a font of violent, extremist Islam. And Mr. Zaqzouq insisted that his proposal enjoyed wide grass-roots popularity.
In the surging religious environment of the last decade, the multiplication of mosques and prayer halls is such that any random Cairo street might house half a dozen, each competing with the others in volume and staggering the timing of their call slightly in an effort to stand out.
Particularly at dawn prayers, some mosques blast not just the roughly dozen sentences of the call itself, but all of the Koranic verses and actual prayers intoned by the local imam. When three different mosques do the same thing, what should be an announcement lasting at most two minutes can drag on for 45 minutes, keeping the entire neighborhood awake.
"There are loudspeakers that shake the world," the minister protested. "Everyone hears them. Every day I receive bitter complaints from people about the loudspeakers, but when I ask them to register official complaints, they say they fear others will accuse them of being infidels."
Opponents, meanwhile, express deep outrage at the very idea of someone tampering with the tradition of each mosque having its own muezzin, of different voices echoing across the city in a continuous round.
"During the time of the Prophet there used to be more than one mosque in each town, in each quarter, and he didn't unify the prayer, so why do it now?" asked Sheik Mustafa Ali Suliman, who works as a muezzin in a small mosque amid the twisting streets of Cairo's medieval quarter. "There is even a saying by the Prophet Muhammad that implies that in God's eyes muezzins will garner special honor and respect on judgment day."
Given the widespread sentiment that no decent Muslim could ever consider such a change, no small number of Cairo residents seized on the obvious alternative: it is a C.I.A. plot, they muttered, right up there with other American attacks on Islam, like demanding changes in the Muslim world's curriculums.
The conspiracy theorists further prophesied that the centralized system was just a test case for the real goal: to disseminate a single Friday Prayer sermon, written, naturally, in Langley, Va. The outcry reached such a level that the minister felt obliged to hold an hourlong news conference to quell the sense, as he put it, that doomsday was at hand.
The instructions did not, in fact, come from Washington, he said. "Opponents call this initiative an American one, as if every step of reform should come through instructions from abroad," Mr. Zaqzouq said dismissively.
The most serious religious charge against him was that centralizing the call to prayer would amount to "bida," an innovation bordering on heresy. While Saudi Arabia's Wahhabi clergymen tend to be the all-star team of bida police, slapping the label on practices like giving flowers to hospital patients or using mobile phones with cameras, declaring something bida in Egypt is far less common.
The minister was having none of it.
"The real bida is the loudspeaker," Mr. Zaqzouq said. "Islam did just fine without loudspeakers for 1,350 years." Any mosque where the muezzin wants to climb up into the minaret and sing out the call to prayer without electronic amplification will be exempt from the centralized system, he promised.
There were also dire predictions that the change would throw at least 100,000 muezzins out of work in a country already suffering severe unemployment. The minister said that the proposal was just for Cairo, although the country's other 26 governorates could follow suit if they wanted, and that the capital had exactly 827 officially recognized muezzins, who could surely find other useful tasks around each mosque.
Various clerics said they hoped the proposal would remain "under study" for years to come, and indeed Mr. Salem, the playwright, unearthed a joke predating the automobile that he said underscored the timeless nature of the debate.
A Maltese visitor riding a donkey through an Egyptian village hears what he considers beautiful music and asks his dragoman the source. "That is our call to prayer, sir," the guide responds, and the Maltese adopts the Muslim faith on the spot.
By the next prayer time, a few hours later, they have arrived at a different village, where the muezzin calls out with a particularly ugly, rasping voice. "Hurry up, hurry up," the dragoman says, beating the donkey to speed it through the village, "lest our visitor hear the muezzin and recant."