OER-ERKENSCHWICK, NR-W – A court in the western German town of Oer-Erkenschwick, in North Rhine-Westphalia, has banned the Muslim call to prayer, or Adhan, after the complaint of a Christian couple who live about a kilometer away.
“The call to prayer lasts for two minutes, just around 1 p.m., but only on Fridays,” Huseyin Turgut, a senior official with the affected mosque told Reuters news agency, Deutsche Welle reported.
“We’ve never had any complaints and we have German neighbors who are much closer — just 10 meters away.”
However, the couple in the town of Oer-Erkenschwick, near Dortmund, said the muezzin’s call violated their religious rights.
“It’s a kind of vocal chant in a tone that has a disturbing effect on us. But we are mainly concerned with the content of the call. This puts Allah above our God of Christians. And as a Christian who grew up here in a Christian environment, I can’t accept that,” Hans-Joachim Lehmann, 69, told tabloid newspaper Bild.
Their lawyer said that the call to prayer was different from church bells.
“This is not to be compared with the ringing of bells in Christian churches. That is a normal sound and the call of the muezzin is something more,” lawyer Wolfgang Wesener told the daily Rheinische Post.
“Something is expressed verbally. Basically, it is a compressed creed and one is forced to participate.”
Citing the application process rather than religious freedoms, the Gelsenkirchen Administrative Court ruled the town had not properly assessed the 2013 request of the local Turkish Muslim community to broadcast the call to prayer.
It added that the mosque was still free to reapply for permission. The ruling did not agree with arguments that the call violated other listeners’ religious freedoms.
The Adhan is the call to announce that it is time for a particular obligatory Salah (ritual prayer).
The Adhan is called five times a day.
According to official German statistics in 2014, Muslims form the largest minority religious group in the country with about 4.7 million people, representing about 5 per cent of the German population.
More than half of the Muslims in Germany, about 63.2 per cent, are of Turkish and Kurdish origins. Both groups are followed by Muslims from Pakistan, Bosnia, Albania, North Africa, the Levant, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
Most Muslims live in the capital Berlin and the large metropolises of former West Germany.
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