Claims About the Coronavirus and the Prayer Bans
The "They Prayed with Zero Distance Between Them" Claim
Unfounded
Claim
Fact
21–22 May 2020, Adana. On the night of 21 May there was an intervention against a small group that wanted to perform the tarawih prayer in the open air, and 47 people were taken into custody that night. The following morning the crowd waiting for those in custody to come out performed the dawn prayer on the road in front of Alparslan Kuytul's house. A television channel carried this footage with the caption "a prayer at zero distance".
The claim is refuted by the very footage it rests on: in the frame on the screen there is about one and a half metres between the rows. This is also the answer Kuytul gave the same day:
"The headline, the caption, 'a prayer at zero distance'. What it shows is us, and there is one and a half metres between us."
The second error is in the name of the prayer. The frame presented in the report as the tarawih prayer belongs to the dawn prayer of the morning after. Two separate days have been compressed into a single report.
The third is the place. The prayer was performed on the road not out of preference but out of necessity: the mosque was right beside them, but the area around it had been closed off by the police and no entry was allowed. The only house inside the cordon was Kuytul's house, and the nearly three hundred people waiting there would not have fitted into it. The only option left was to pray in the open air, keeping distance.
In short, a prayer performed in the open air, with distance and with masks, was announced as "disregarding the measures".
Two separate nights, two separate prayers
There are two incidents that the report confuses, and the date of each is known.
The night of 21 May 2020: five or ten people wanted to perform the isha and tarawih prayers in Merkez Park, next to the Merkez Mosque in Adana. The police said that the park was off-limits, the group began to move away, and as they were moving away there was an intervention. The number of people taken into custody that night reached 47.
The morning of 22 May 2020: nearly three hundred people waiting for those in custody to be released performed the dawn prayer on the road in front of Kuytul's house.
The footage that came onto the screen belongs to the second incident. The report, however, presented it under the name of the first, as the tarawih prayer and as a provocation.
The caption contradicts its own footage
The phrase "zero distance" means that the rows are shoulder to shoulder. Yet in the frame the report used there is a gap of about one and a half metres between the rows. That is, no other document is needed to refute the claim; the report's own footage is enough.
Other things can be seen in the same frame as well: the crowd is wearing masks, the prayer is being performed not in an enclosed place but in the open air, and the gap between the rows has been kept throughout. None of this found its way into the caption.
Why the road and not the mosque?
The mosque was right beside the place where the crowd was. But all the roads around it, and the mosque itself, had been closed by the police; the only house inside the cordon was Kuytul's house. Packing nearly three hundred people into one house was both impossible and, as far as the virus was concerned, far riskier than the open air.
"How am I to lead this many people in prayer at home without social distancing? Keeping to social distancing, we had no choice but to pray on the road."
The prayer performed in the street is the consequence of the mosque being closed.
The objection is not to distance, but to congregational prayer being banned
This distinction is the point most often skipped in the reports. Kuytul said openly that he accepted the requirement of distance:
"You can say to me, 'you have to keep distance so that this virus does not spread'. Fine. I will comply with that as well."
What he objected to was that, with the same distance kept, one person stepping forward to lead as imam was forbidden. If four people prayed in the same place separately, with distance between them, no problem was seen; when one of them stepped forward, the same picture became forbidden. That was the rule he was arguing about.
Why was the criterion applied to prayer alone?
In his statement dated 23 May 2020, Kuytul recalls that in those same days the shopping centres, the markets and bazaars, the buses and minibuses, the bank queues and the factories were open. While enclosed and crowded places were operating, a prayer performed in the open air with distance kept became news; in his view this shows the inconsistency of the criterion.
What is left?
What is left is a caption that contradicts its own footage, and two separate days joined together as though they were a single incident. These two errors work together: once the distance is erased, a lack of precaution appears; and once the dawn prayer is presented as the tarawih, what appears is an action stubbornly persisted in. Yet the crowd seen on the screen consists of people who, while waiting for their relatives in custody, performed the prayer whose time had come.
The criterion is simple: the truth of a report can be tested by looking at whether it agrees with the footage it itself shows. Here it does not agree. That is the reason the label is "Unfounded".
There are two further claims about the same night: The "They Attacked the Police" Claim and The "He Brought the People Out onto the Streets and Disturbed Public Order" Claim.