NEW YORK: A Muslim man in Cincinnati filed a lawsuit against a gym franchise on Monday after managers at a branch ordered him to stop praying in the locker room, according to the Los Angeles Times.

Mohammad Fall, 28, said three managers walked up to him while he was praying on Jan 29 and said he would be banned from the facility if he continued to do so, the newspaper said.

Fall’s attorney, Timothy Burke, told the Times that his client’s habit of praying after a workout “was widely known,” and “nobody had an issue with it.”

However, Chris Link, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Ohio, told Times that Fall might have to prove that he was specifically targeted for being a Muslim in order to win the lawsuit.

Fall, who moved to America as a refugee with his family from Senegal in 1999 and has maintained permanent resident status ever since, was “confused and concerned,” the lawsuit states.

He said he had been practicing prayer in the gym’s locker room since he started using the facility, and never had an issue with other patrons or staff.

Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2015

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