November 19, 2021
Tehran resumed its weekly congregational Friday Prayers October 22 after 20 straight months in which the worship services were canceled because of the coronavirus epidemic.
The National Coronavirus Task Force at first refused to allow the gathering, but eventually relented because Tehran was hosting an international Islamic Unity Conference, with hundreds of Muslim scholars attending.
But the task force insisted on social distancing, and the prayer grounds enforced the rules. Worshippers were spaced out and not jammed shoulder-to-shoulder as on Fridays previously.
News reports said a number of other cities resumed congregational prayers, but did not give numbers or names.
The last congregational prayers were held in Tehran February 21, 2020, just two days after Tehran acknowledged its first cases of the coronavirus.
The prayers were resumed with the youngest and newest of the city’s six rotating prayer leaders, Mohammad-Javad Haj-Ali-Akbari, presiding.
He called for Muslims from throughout the Islamic world to bind themselves together to foil “foreign plots.”
He proclaimed, “Americans with their scandal in their elections and their defeat in West Asia [Afghanistan], which was a strategic defeat, now have no option but to exit from Iraq.”