Chaos In Florida: Woman (?) In Full Burqa Blasts Islamic Call To Prayer At Pinellas County Meeting

A woman (we think) in a full black burqa walked up to the public-comment microphone at the Pinellas County, Florida, commission meeting Wednesday and played a recording of the Islamic call to prayer instead of speaking. Board Chairman Dave Eggers ordered her removed, and a sheriff’s deputy escorted her out. The meeting was streamed live on YouTube, and the clip below starts around the moment she presses play.

She said nothing before the audio started. The recording ran for about a minute before Eggers said, “Stop the tape, ma’am,” and then “Just escort out.” When she did not stop it, a sheriff’s deputy took her from the podium, and her removal set off arguments in the audience until Eggers asked for decorum. County rules call for spoken comments, and he said, “We ask you to come here and make comments, and that was not a comment,” Fox News reported.

The Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office said the woman left without further incident and will not face criminal charges. Nobody has said why she did it. She gave no statement from the podium, and it is unclear whether it was a protest or a prank.

Residents at the meeting were speaking against the expansion of Masjid Al-Rahman, a mosque at 2577 Keystone Road in unincorporated Pinellas County near Tarpon Springs, and the commission had already approved the land-use change for it, 4-3, according to the Tampa Bay Beacons. The vote moves the 2.69-acre site from Residential Rural to Public/Semi-Public. A companion zoning change limits it to community assembly, and the plans call for a building about 1,000 square feet larger than the current one, with new parking and stormwater work. Forward Pinellas and the county’s Planners Advisory Committee both recommended approval unanimously. The next step is site plan review.

Much of the argument at the vote was over a word. County paperwork described the project as a “community assembly facility,” and Commissioner Vince Nowicki, who voted no, pressed staff on why it did not say mosque. “It’s a mosque, right?” he asked. Long-range planning manager Scott Swearengen answered, “I believe so,” and said, “We don’t define church, we don’t define mosque, we don’t define a number of other things.” Nowicki later cited six countywide cases from 2021 to 2025 in which the documents for church projects named the religious use outright.