Did Trump’s inaugural prayer service feature Muslim call to prayer?

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A video showing a man performing the Muslim Call to Prayer at the U.S. National Prayer Service held at the Washington National Cathedral on January 21, 2025 has sparked widespread confusion online.

An Islamic blog, @IslamicStrength, shared a two-minute video featuring an Islamic cleric performing the Muslim call to prayer during the post-inauguration prayer service held for Donald Trump as the 47th US president.

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The video collage shows Trump and his wife seated among attendees, listening attentively to the prayer session. The Muslim cleric was shown in the top section of the video, while a second scene shows Trump and the audience beneath.

It was captioned thus:

“President Trump at Washington National Cathedral listening to the call to prayer.”

The video post has garnered over 2.5 million views, more than 44,000 likes with over 7,000 reposts and over 3,000 reposts as of January 23, 2025.

Also, it has sparked significant reactions online, with many, particularly Muslims, dismissing the video as fabricated.

For instance, an X user, @Idris_A_Oni, commented: “What kind of call to prayer is this? This has to be a fake video.”

Similarly, another X user, Olúwaníṣọlá Moṣerere Ọpẹ́yẹmí (@olusholaspecia) stated thus: “If this were true, it would have been everywhere. This video is fake.”

Many other users echoed similar doubts and flagged the video as fake on X Community Notes.

 

CLAIM

Video shows a man performing the Muslim call to prayer during Donald Trump’s post-inaugural prayer service.

 

THE FINDINGS

Checks by The FactCheckHub show that the claim is TRUE.

On January 21, 2025, a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, a prayer service was held at Washington National Cathedral in the United States as part of the post-inaugural events. The service was an interfaith gathering, with representatives from various faiths, including Christians, Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists, invited to participate. Each faith was given the opportunity to pray according to their tradition.

To verify the claim, our fact-checkers subjected key frames from the video to a reverse image search.

The search result revealed that the video had not been available online prior to the X post. Instead, it linked to several original videos of the prayer service, including one posted by Sky News on YouTube same day.

Sky News uploaded an hour-long video of the prayer service, which was also available on the YouTube channel of The National Desk.

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Upon careful review of the footage, our fact-checker observed that at exactly 28:04 minutes in the Sky News video, a Muslim cleric approached the podium and deliver a speech. Shortly after, at exactly 30:01 minutes, another individual performed the Muslim call to prayer. This sequence corroborated the scenes depicted in the video going viral on most social media platforms, especially X.

 

THE VERDICT

The claim that a man performed the Muslim call to prayer during Donald Trump’s inaugural prayer service at the Washington National Cathedral is TRUE; multiple videos available publicly show that representatives of various faiths, including Muslims, were seen leading prayers at the event as the Muslim call to prayer was indeed part of the event.

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