India: Mosques in Mumbai were forced to lower the call to prayer

Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi, the central Khatib of Mumbai's largest mosque, said: "It has become a political issue how loud our call to pr...

Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi, the central Khatib of Mumbai's largest mosque, said: "It has become a political issue how loud our call to prayer should be, but I do not want it to take a sectarian turn.

 

According to the foreign news agency 'Reuters', Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi, the Central Khatib of the largest mosque in Mumbai, shouted loudly before giving the call to prayer while looking at the large hall for prayers sitting in the office full of books. Inspected the meter attached to the speakers.

Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi, one of the most influential Islamic scholars in Mumbai, a city on the west coast of India, pointed to the loudspeakers attached to the minarets of the Juma Masjid and said: It has become a political issue but I do not want it to take a sectarian turn.

 

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Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi and three other senior clerics from Maharashtra, where Mumbai is located, said that more than 900 mosques in the west of the state had agreed to reduce the call to prayer following complaints from local Hindu politicians.

Raj Thackeray, leader of a regional Hindu party, had in April demanded that mosques and other places of worship should be allowed to make noise to a certain extent and that they should be kept within that limit. Hindus will worship outside

Raj Thackeray, the leader of the party, which has only one seat in the state 288-member assembly, said he was merely pushing for enforcement of court rulings on allowing noise.

"If religion is a private matter, then why are Muslims allowed to use loudspeakers 365 days a year," Thackeray told reporters in Mumbai, India economic hub and capital of Maharashtra.

"My dear Hindu brothers, sisters and mothers are one in bringing down the loudspeakers," he said.

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The move by leaders of India 200 million Muslims on the eve of the holy festival of Eid was accompanied by a tacit agreement with the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to deny them their right to free worship and religious expression. Looking at it as another attempt to trample.

In recent weeks, a senior BJP leader has begun pushing for the replacement of religiously based marriage and inheritance laws with a uniform civil code aimed at eliminating such laws as those that apply to Muslim men. Allows to have four wives.

The BJP did not respond to a request for comment on Raj Thackeray move, while the party denied allegations of targeting minorities, saying it wanted progressive change in society that would benefit all Indians.
The position of the police

Juma Masjid scholar Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi said he had complied with Raj Thackeray demands to reduce the risk of violence between Muslims and Hindus.

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Bloody riots have erupted intermittently across India since independence, with dozens of people, mostly Muslims, killed after protests against the citizenship law in Delhi in 2020, Muslims say. They have been discriminated against.

Mohammad Ashfaq Qazi said that hardline Hindu leaders were trying to weaken Islam in this situation. "We Muslims have to maintain peace and tranquility while the state has taken Raj Thackeray move seriously," he said.

Senior police officials met with other religious leaders, including Ashfaq Qazi, earlier this month to make sure the microphones were muffled as they feared a clash in Maharashtra, where more than 10 million Muslims and seven There are more than one crore Hindus.

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Police in Mumbai on Saturday registered a case against two people for using loudspeakers for the morning call to prayer, while Raj Thackeray party workers were warned to gather around mosques.

"Under no circumstances will we allow anyone to create sectarian tensions in the state and the court order should be respected," said VN Patel, a senior Mumbai police official.

A senior official in Raj Thackeray party said the move was not aimed at discriminating against Muslims but was aimed at reducing "noise pollution" from all places of worship.

The issue of azan has spread beyond Maharashtra to other parts of the country, with BJP politicians in three states asking local police to remove loudspeakers from places of worship or limit their volume.

The deputy chief minister of Uttar Pradesh, the country most populous state, said more than 60,000 unlicensed loudspeakers had been removed from mosques and temples.