The Administrative Court of Hesse has allowed members of the Imam Ali mosque in Frankfurt to continue holding twice weekly outdoor prayer meetings.
The ruling comes even though its congregation, the Centre for Islamic Culture (ZIK), has been banned as an extremist Islamist organisation.
Since the ban in July 2024, the Muslim members of ZIK have met outside their closed mosque every Thursday and Friday to pray together – complete with pavilions, prayer rugs and loud recitations of the Quran.
The prayer meetings regularly block parts of Eschborner Landstraße, a main thoroughfare in Frankfurt’s West, causing disruptions to private and public transport.
According to the Frankfurt Public Order Office, so far there have been 170 prayer meetings, causing a total of 405 hours of road closures and on average affecting 450 bus passengers every time.
The city administration had tried to deny the Islamist protesters permission for their meetings, saying they constituted religious services rather than protest congregations.
The Administrative Court court, though, decided on February 18 that the prayer meetings enjoy the constitutional protection of freedom of assembly. The decision cannot be appealed.
Moradi Karkaj, a spokesman for the Court, said: “The scope of protection is not limited to events where arguments and disputes take place, but encompasses a wide range of forms of collective behaviour, including non-verbal forms of expression. This also applies to religious acts as a means of communication.”
This means the Muslim group members are free to continue their outdoor prayers.
Michael Jenisch, spokesman for the Frankfurt Public Order Office, told Welt TV yesterday: “Uninvolved people who are be passing by, they don’t think: ‘Oh look, there’s a gathering, right?
“An opinion is being expressed, people are meeting to assert their opinion.’ Everyone who passes by thinks to themselves: ‘Oh my, look, prayers are being said, it’s a religious service.’
“We share this opinion, and we would have liked to see more focus on the factual level and less on the assumption at a higher level that this religious practice also involves the expression of opinions,” Jenisch said.
The ZIK congregation had been banned in July 2024 as part of a network of organisations spearheaded by the Hamburg Islamic Centre, a radical Islamic group with close ties to the Islamist regime of Iran.
Following police raids on 55 locations of the network throughout Germany in 2023, the German interior ministry had concluded that ZIK and other groups constituted “extremist Islamist organisations who pursued goals inimical to the constitution”.
Then interior minister Nancy Faeser (Social Democrats, SPD) said in July 2024 the groups were “propagating Islamist totalitarian ideology in Germany” and would disseminate aggressive anti-Semitism.
