Edirne - (AFP) - On a summer day, five muezzins compete inside the old mosque, whose construction was completed in 1414, in the Turkish city of Edirne, to reach the finals of a competition for the best muezzin, in a country where the call to prayer sometimes takes on a political dimension.

One of the competitors, dressed in black and wearing a white turban, approaches the radio and slowly pronounces the takbeer while placing his hands on his ears while fixing his elbows to perform the prayer in the historic mosque.

The jury members take notes while sitting in front of the nominees. From the center of the mosque, Mufti Altin Bozkurt, who represents the highest religious authority in the region, announces after about an hour the name of the muezzin who performed the best.

The winner, Abdullah Omar Erdogan, 25, told AFP, "I started performing the call to prayer when I was ten years old, during summer lessons that were offered by the mosque," indicating that he paid attention to the health of his vocal cords by not exposure to cold, drinking lukewarm water, and avoiding some sleeping positions. .

And if he manages to win the next stage of the competition to be organized at the end of July, the young muezzin who wears an orthodontic device and enjoys a trimmed beard will participate in the awaited national competition on August 17, which dedicates the most beautiful voice of a muezzin among the hundreds who participated in the competitions. Across the country it has been launched since the beginning of June.

In April, two Turkish muezzins, one of whom was praying in the ancient city of Edirne, won the first and second places in a similar competition broadcast on television and organized in Saudi Arabia with the participation of muezzins from 80 countries.

In a video clip posted by the winner the day after the announcement of the results of the competition, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan appears congratulating the winner, telling him, "May God protect you."

Since he came to power in 2003, initially as prime minister, some 15,000 new mosques have been built across Turkey, one of which is in Istanbul's famous Taksim Square, a symbol of secular Turkey and where unprecedented anti-government protests took place in 2013.

Erdogan, who also built the largest mosque in Turkey on the Chamliga hill in Istanbul, and converted the former Hagia Sophia church into a mosque in 2020, gave prayer a prominent political dimension.

On the night of July 16, 2016, in which an attempted coup against power took place, imams and muezzins from about 90,000 mosques in Turkey, through the minarets' loudspeakers, urged faithful Muslims to repel the putschists, in a move that followed an appearance by the Turkish president via the "FaceTime" application.

And the Mufti of Edirne says, "We realized that night the power of the call to prayer. Thanks to it, we called the people to take to the streets and saved the country" from the coup attempt.

Erdogan, who will seek re-election as president in June 2023, accuses his opponents of wanting to silence the mosques . He said on several occasions, "They will not be able to silence the call to prayer!", although this step did not appear in any of the political parties' programs.

In Turkey, which has an overwhelmingly Muslim population and a secular regime, the politicization of the call to prayer has made it irritating to some.

Erol Koemen, a postdoctoral student in folk musicology at the University of Chicago, points to "a widespread feeling among secularists that the volume of the call to prayer has increased since the coup attempt, as part of the current authority's attempts to change public spaces."

The researcher, who prepared a study on the role of the call to prayer in repelling the failed coup attempt in 2016, adds that these attempts "led to an increasing rejection of the call to prayer (among secular circles)."

Since 2017, the powerful Directorate of Religious Affairs has required mosques “not to exceed the level of eighty decibels” during the broadcast of the call to prayer, a number that some Turks consider too high, while others assert that mosques do not respect it.

And after the order directed by the Saudi government last year to mosques to reduce the size of the loudspeakers in them to a third of their maximum capacity, under the pretext of their impact on the health of children and the elderly, voices were raised in Turkey calling for their country to follow the example of the Kingdom.

Inside the old Edirne Mosque, Mufti Altyn Bozkurt expresses his dissatisfaction with the will of some to silence the mosques and stresses that "the call to prayer is a legal right!"

"Muslims should be able to hear the call to prayer, just as Christians can easily hear the sound of their church bells," he added.