Since built five years ago as an emblem of non secular and cultural integration, considered one of Germany’s largest and grandest mosques has begun reaching worshippers with an Islamic call to prayer publicly sounded for the primary time on October 14.
The historic event unfolded on a Friday—the holiest day of the week for Muslims—on the Central Mosque in Cologne, Germany’s fourth-largest city. Home to about 120,000 Muslims, Cologne has considered one of Germany’s largest Islamic communities.
The decision to prayer was no straightforward affair, nonetheless. It was the results of a 2021 agreement with local authorities that paved the best way for the muezzin to publicly issue the customary Arabic chant—something that was previously done in Cologne only inside the mosque’s 4 partitions, at not more than 60 decibels, over two loudspeakers only of Fridays for five minutes maximum and only between noon and three p.m.
Noise limits vary from mosque to mosque, depending on the situation. Unlike Cologne’s roughly 70 mosques, that are positioned in relatively distant corners of town, the Central Mosque is in Ehrenfeld, a neighborhood just west of downtown, renowned for its role in making town the cultural and economic seat of the Rhineland.
Run by the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, the Central Mosque has two towering minarets. Architecturally, the constructing is modernist and was inaugurated by the Turkish President.
Across the road from where the muezzin broadcast the decision to prayer that day, some 20 people gathered in protest, testifying to the lingering opposition to the mosque’s existence spurred on by right-wing groups and a former Catholic archbishop.
Wielding banners demanding “No Muezzin Call in Cologne! Public space must be ideologically neutral,” the demonstrators were accompanied by a gaggle of ladies protesting a recent crackdown on protests in Iran of a law requiring women to cover their heads with a hijab in public.
In one more challenge to this holy tradition, the decision to prayer from the Central Mosque is subject to a two-year trial period. Still, Abdurrahman Atasoy, a senior official with the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs, described the temporary agreement as “a crucial step within the perception of Muslim religious communities as a part of society.”
“That Muslims have arrived and been accepted with their representative mosques as a visual part and with the decision to prayer as an audible a part of society is the core message of this long process,” Atasoy said. And up to date developments have catapulted Muslims “out of unseen and ugly backyard mosques into the fold of society.”
Cologne Mayor Henriette Reker has expressed agreement with Atasoy’s assessment. Muslims, she said last yr, are a part of town’s social fabric, not least because a lot of them are German born.
“If we also hear the decision of the muezzin in our city alongside church bells,” Reker said, referring to bells of the commanding Catholic cathedral that may be a major city landmark, “that shows that diversity is appreciated and lived in Cologne.”
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