Sitting in an office full of books overlooking the vast prayer hall, the imam of Mumbai's largest mosque, Muhammad Ashfaq Qazi, checked a device that connected to loudspeakers before he called for prayer.
"Our call to prayer has become a political issue, but I don't want it to take a societal turn," said Qazi, one of the most influential Muslim scholars in Mumbai on the west coast of India.
As he spoke, Qazi pointed to the loudspeakers attached to the minarets of the Friday Mosque in the city's old business district.
A judge and three other senior clerics from Maharashtra state - where Mumbai is located - said more than 900 mosques in the western state had agreed to lower the call to prayer after complaints from a local Hindu politician.
Last April, Raj Thackeray, a leader of a local Hindu party, demanded that mosques and other places of worship adhere to noise limits.
He threatened that if they did not do so, his followers would protest in front of mosques, chanting Hindu prayers.
Thackeray, whose party has only one seat in the 288-member state assembly, said he was only insisting on implementing court rulings related to noise levels.
India's Muslim leaders (who number about 200 million Muslims) see this move - which coincided with Eid al-Fitr - as another attempt by extremist Hindus to undermine Muslims' rights to freedom of worship and religious expression, with the tacit approval of the ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party.
Bloody clashes have erupted sporadically across India since independence, most recently in 2020, when dozens of mostly Muslims were killed in Delhi, after protests against a citizenship law that Muslims said was intended to discriminate against them.
Senior police officials in Maharashtra met religious leaders, including a judge, earlier this month to make sure the loudspeakers were lowered because they fear clashes in the state of more than 10 million Muslims and 70 million Hindus.
On Saturday, police filed a criminal case against two men in Mumbai for using loudspeakers during the morning call to prayer, and warned Thackeray party members not to gather around mosques.