Elham Asaad Buaras

Cologne authorities announced on October 2 that the Islamic call to prayer (adhan) will be recited on loudspeakers for weekly congregational Friday prayers. Cologne Mayor, Henriette Reker, said the decision was a response to requests and that it demonstrates “mutually accepted religion”.

“Our Muslim citizens are an integral part of our city. Hearing the call to prayer alongside church bells in our city shows that diversity is valued in Cologne and that diversity is experienced here,” the Mayor said.
Under the rules of the two-year pilot project, which includes 30 mosques, the adhan must last no longer than 10 minutes and the volume must be monitored, with each mosque assigning an individual to receive queries from the public and log complaints.

Cologne, Germany’s fourth most populous city is the biggest state in the North Rhine-Westphalian region and is home to more than 120,000 Muslims, nearly 12% of the city’s population. 55,000 Turkish immigrants live in the city, according to official census data from 2017 and 2018.

Last year, the community court of Münster reversed a ban imposed after a complaint from a local Christian couple over a mosque’s call to prayer. The court ruled that the call did not infringe on the couple’s rights.

“Every society must accept that one will sometimes be aware that others exercise their faith,” presiding judge Annette Kleinschnittger said at the time. The far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) party slammed the decision to allow mosques to broadcast the Adhan. Matthias Buschges, the AfD’s deputy spokesman in Cologne, said the decision “gives the impression that Germany is not a Christian country, but a Muslim one. This is not the case.

Cologne is a city of religious diversity and freedoms. Allowing muezzin’s call to prayer is for me a sign of respect,” she stressed. But Islamophobic movements and the far-right AfD party heavily criticized Reker for her decision, arguing that this was another sign of “Islamization of Germany”.

Beatrix von Storch, the Deputy Federal spokeswoman of the AfD, said her party strongly opposes this decision. ‘The muezzin call is not an expression of religious freedom, and tolerance, and diversity. It is an expression of a political claim to rule, of submission and Islamization,’ she said on Twitter.