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http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/0,1518,565146,00.html
The planned construction of over 180 mosques in Germany is mobilizing
right-wing xenophobes but also an increasing number of leftist
critics. They fear the Muslim places of wor****p will facilitate the
establishment of a completely parallel society.
The issue at hand wasn't the construction of a missile base or a new
nuclear power plant. Yet the media re****ted "turmoil" and an "enraged"
audience in a school auditorium in Ehrenfeld, a district of the German
city of Cologne. The mood was almost comparable to that of the protest
gatherings once held against nuclear missiles or reactors.
Instead the outrage was directed at a huge mosque planned for the
area. Still, the words used by the project's opponents called to mind
the protests of earlier times. "The minarets even look like missiles,"
railed one woman. A man said the mosque's dome reminded him "of a
nuclear plant."
Ill will over mosques like the one being built in Cologne is spreading
rapidly throughout Germany, often to the surprise of local
politicians. For a long time the establishment of Muslim prayer rooms
provoked little protest, housed as they were mostly in residential
buildings, shops and back courtyards. Recently, though, there has been
an increasing number of acts of protest, some violent. Molotov
cocktails were thrown through mosque windows in the Bavarian town of
Lauingen; Christians set protest crosses inscribed with "Terra
christiana est," or this is Christian land, on the grounds of a mosque
in Hanover; and construction trailers went up in flames in the Berlin
district of Pankow.
The anti-Islam protest movement has also begun to spill over into city
politics. In Cologne, for example, the extreme right anti-mosque
initiative Pro Cologne captured five local government seats in recent
elections. Now the group is aspiring to enter the national scene as
Pro Germany, together with other like-minded organizations, some from
the far-right fringe. Their approach follows the example of populist
Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn, whose anti-immigration party garnered a
surprising degree of sup****t before he was murdered in 2002.
In Germany there is also a market for these "single-issue parties,"
suggests trend researcher Adjiedj Bakas, who himself emigrated from
Surinam to the Netherlands. In the populous Ruhr Valley region of
western Germany the Voter Initiative Recklinghausen (whose acronym
"WIR" is the German word for "we") has found resonance with its
message. The group claims it is fighting against "creeping
Islamization," and is allied in the local government with the
conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), one of Germany's major
political parties. WIR members say they aren't alone in their
opposition to Islam and their concern "that in 20 years in
Recklinghausen, as in all large German cities, the majority of the
residents under the age of 40 will be Muslims." "Discomfort is already
spreading in some parts of the city," says Georg Schliehe, a WIR
representative on the local city council, "but policy, public
authorities and scholars downplay the problem."
This burgeoning sentiment against mosques has no doubt been
strengthened by the Islamist murders and suicide attacks that have
also afflicted European cities in recent years. Some Muslims like
Imran Sagir, director of a property development company specializing
in mosques, say they can understand German citizens' fears. When you
hear on the news about crimes committed in the name of Islam," he
says, "who can blame people who don't want a mosque in the
neighborhood?"
Wolfgang Huber, the head of Germany's Protestant Church and bishop for
the states of Berlin and Brandenburg, names what he sees as one
im****tant cause for the increasing unease. He says there is an
"obviously large-scale initiative" on the part of Islamic
organizations to show their presence in as high-profile a way as
possible and in as many places as possible. No fewer than 184 new
mosques, some with domes and minarets, are currently being built or
planned throughout Germany. That's considerably more than the 163
existing traditional mosques (along with around 2,600 prayer rooms
mostly hidden within secular buildings).
And that appears to be only the start of an expected wider European
mosque-building boom. One organization alone -- Ahmadiyya, a movement
seen as an outsider community within Islam that the respected German
weekly Die Zeit described as "something like the Jehovah's Witnesses
among Muslims" -- has introduced a "100 mosque plan" for Germany.
Currently 25 percent of these projects have been completed.
More often than in the past, Muslim communities nowadays are trying to
include Middle Eastern style minarets in their building projects. It's
an addition that is rousing greater protest -- no matter where the
mosque is getting built in Germany. "As soon as the foreignness is
cemented in a structure like a mosque, the problems just multiply,"
says Christoph Dahling-Sander, the Protestant church's representative
in the city of Hanover for matters concerning Islam.
There have been some notable exceptions, though. Residents in the far
northern town of Rendsburg in the state of Schleswig-Holstein kept
their famous northern German composure and a majority accepted the
construction of a large mosque. But as a rule, when building plans for
mosques become public, neighbors immediately mobilize with a laundry
list of concerns about why they will be bad for the neighborhood. They
fear parking shortages, plunging property values and noise pollution.
Hoping to maintain a veneer of political correctness, local
politicians with the traditional parties play down these concerns. But
by doing so, they just create even greater op****tunity for grassroots
groups like the citizens' movement Pro Germany.
"Where this kind of gaudy Middle Eastern building goes up, with a dome
and minarets, the next thing will be an application to the authorities
for permission to do the call to prayer," a passage on the Pro Germany
Web site reads. It's visions like this that are leading more and more
Germans to see the construction of mosques as the expression of a
"kind of land grab," observes Claus Leggewie, a political science
professor at the University of Giessen in the western state of Hesse.
This impression is aggravated not only by right-wing agitators but
also, according to Leggewie, by careless or sometimes even
deliberately provocative statements by Muslim builders. Many seem to
think like Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. In words
spoken in 1997, Erdogan made mosque construction seem like part of a
strategy of Islamization: "The minarets are our lances, the domes our
helmets, the believers our army."
The names of some of the newly built mosques aren't exaclty in harmony
with the reassuring "Islam is peace" slogan. Religious scholar Ursula
Spuler-Stegemann at Germany's University of Marburg, among others,
criticizes the fact that mosques are named after warlords like Fatih
Sultan Mehmet, conqueror of Constantinople. "That can only be an
agenda," she believes. "These Muslims don't just want to show their
presence here, but also to strengthen and expand it."
Statements made by intellectuals like Spuler-Stegemann, who has also
said that, "Islam has a problem with violence," underscore the fact
that criticism of mosque construction is no longer exclusively the
domain of mindless xenophobes. And it would be a mistake, offical
representatives on immigration issues from Germany's states warned a
recent joint convention, to sweepingly dismiss mosque critics as being
right-wing extremists.
In the case of the controversy over the mosque planned for Cologne's
Ehrenfeld neighborhood, the right-wing Pro protesters have indeed been
pushed into the margins. Their complaints have been drowned out by
more high-profile statements coming from prominent leftists and
liberals including German Jewish journalist Ralph Giordano, women's
rights activist Alice Schwarzer and investigative re****ter Günter
Wallraff, who have all spoken out against the mosque. Representatives
of Germany's large churches have increasingly added their voices to
the criticism as well. The "dishonest dialogue" with Islam described
in SPIEGEL's pages in December 2001 -- in which church representatives
simply ignored scandalous and unbearable aspects like persecution of
Christians, discrimination against women, toleration of terror and
"honor" killings for the sake of harmony -- is now a thing of the
past.
In place of the "fairy tale that we're all 'children of Abraham'," in
the words of Leggewie, the churches are now making an effort not to
entangle themselves in finding contrived common ground with Islam.
Instead they are trying to find areas in which they differ -- and this
applies particularly to the construction of mosques.
"Why Would You Build a Mosque in an Area Where Nobody Lives?"
Of course the Protestant and Catholic churches stress unanimously that
Germany's more than 3 million Muslims have the same constitutional
right to build houses of wor****p.
But agreeing to a mosque, German Protestant leader Bishop Huber said
at a national church meeting in 2007, should in no way preclude the
op****tunity for an open and critical discussion about the location,
size and number of such buildings.
Location, size, number -- at least one of these factors seems to be
out of pro****tion in some of the 184 new mosque projects. There are
plenty of examples out there.
In Berlin the local Ahmadiyya congregation, just 200 members strong,
is pu****ng construction of a mosque at a cost of around €1 million
($1.6 million) in Berlin's suburban Heinersdorf district, which is
home to a paucity of Muslims. Feeling left out of the process by local
politicians, furious residents quickly began to gather at numerous,
often overflowing and sometimes tumultuous protest meetings. "No to
the mosque" or, as in the time around the fall of the Berlin Wall in
this former East German district, "We are the people." They demanded
that their quiet neighborhood not be allowed to be transformed into a
"second Kreuzberg," a reference to a downtown Berlin neighborhood
known for its massive Turkish immigrant population. "Why?" one of the
speakers asked, drawing applause, "Why would you build a mosque in an
area where no Muslims live?"
Meanwhile, in populous Cologne in western Germany, the locally based
Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) -- which has close
ties to a sister institution in Ankara -- has plans to build what it
is describing as "Europe's biggest mosque." The construction is
designed for thousands of visitors and slated for Ehrenfeld, an
overburdened neighborhood that already suffers from a serious parking
shortage. It's not just the mosque's location that has local residents
seething, though, it's also its gigantic scale. Once built, the mosque
will have a surface of 22,000 square meters (236,800 square feet) and
55-meter minarets standing as tall as an 18-story office tower. The
enormous Ottoman style building, pronounces author Dieter Wellershoff,
is as strange for some residents as it would be "if it were some
object that suddenly landed there from another planet."
And in Frankfurt's village-like Hause district, already home to two
mosques, a 300-member association wants to erect the third Muslim
community center in a 400-meter radius at a cost of €3 million. Local
residents are afraid the concentration of mosques might cause their
area to "tip." A typical statement made by local residents at protest
meetings goes like this: "It wouldn't feel like home anymore if more
come here."
The resentment fomenting amongst the mosque's opponents, who have
already collected well over 1,000 signatures, was further fueled when
the local Green Party's spokesperson on integration policies, Nargess
Eskandari-Grünberg, pointed out that 40 percent of the city's
population are immigrants. "If that doesn't suit you," she said, "then
you need to move somewhere else."
Local mosque critics did manage to find sup****t from the Protestant
Church, whose leader in the local state of Hesse dismissed the Green
Party politician's statement as "tasteless." Although state church
leader Peter Steinacker says he has no personal objections to the
construction project, he says the issue of whether a third mosque
should be built in an area like Hausen is a "question of political
prudence."
These conflicts often come to a head following the same pattern.
Persuaded by the argument that Germany's constitutionally guaranteed
freedom of religion requires them to authorize any proposed mosque,
city administrators are often keen to come to an arrangement with
builders early and behind closed doors, coming to comprehensive
agreements.
But with this strategy, which political scientist Leggewie describes
as "paternalistic," local governments tend to make "the mosque
association's demands their own" and to inform the public of "too
little, too late." And because the Muslim communities "often don't
display the necessary openness" when residents find out about the
sometimes enormous projects, they feel they're being presented with a
done deal and taken for fools.
Often it is only then, when the local conflict is taking on traits of
a clash of civilizations, that the fundamental questions avoided by
city planners at the beginning of the process are discussed. They
include, for example, topics such as how the organization behind the
project deals with issues like terrorism and women's rights, whether
the project is aimed at integration or separation and whether plans
that go to architectural extremes are really covered by the
constitutionally protected right to freedom of religion.
And it is often in this phase that local media and local politicians
raise the issue of how the planned mega-mosques differ from Christian
or Jewish holy buildings. "Whether a mosque can even be called a house
of wor****p at all," says Middle East scholar Spuler-Stegemann, "is
contested even within Islam."
In Islam expert Leggewie's opinion, mosques are "definitely not
churches." He says they can be better described as multipurpose
buildings. In the same way, Islam itself is "not just a religion,"
emphasizes Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a Green Party politician and long-term
representative for multicultural affairs in Frankfurt. It is "also a
theocratic vision," in which politics and belief are inseparably bound
and "democracy and human rights are subordinate and conditional
values." Islamic associations are not officially recognized religious
communities, points out Necla Kelek, a Germany-based sociologist and
feminist of Turkish descent. Granting building permits for mosques,
she says, is "not a question of freedom of religion but a political
question." She says Germany's laws governing construction and
associations are ill-equipped for dealing with the issue.
The great dissimilarity between these mosque centers and churches is
evident in the original plans for the Cologne mosque, in which only
one-fifth of the 22,000 square meters was set aside as an area for
prayer. The remaining space, according to a Turkish-language appeal
for donations, was intended for a TV studio, pharmacy, doctor's
office, legal practice, bakery, hairdresser, supermarket, bank,
preschool, library, restaurant and jewelry store. The mosque's size
was only later reduced as a result of public protest.
Large mosques like the one in Cologne often offer even more: Koran
schools and kickboxing studios, computer and TV rooms, travel agencies
and funeral homes -- all services provided under one roof or in the
immediate vicinity. "It's everything a Muslim needs outside the
apartment," claims Kelek, "If he wants to, in addition to praying, it
also allows him to have nothing to do with Germany society." She
describes the mosques as "breeding grounds" for a parallel society and
an "obstacle to integration."
Under the pretext of religious privilege, the DITIB strategists in
Cologne have in truth claimed the rights to a commercial center that
also happens to include the op****tunity to pray. A Muslim community in
Berlin's Neukölln district also wanted to take its cue from Cologne
and construct an immense commercial and cultural center. But at least
the planners there, as the daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
recognized, only described the structure as being a "semi-mosque."
That plan, however, failed in the face of the strong opposition of
Deputy Mayor and District Councilwoman Stefanie Vogelsang of the
conservative Christian Democrats. Her awareness of the issue had been
heightened by a conflict with DITIB a few years earlier, when the
organization deliberately violated its building permits during the
construction of a new mosque in the same neighborhood.
By the time construction had been completed, the mosque's two minarets
rose 37 meters into the Berlin skyline rather than the approved 28
meters and the dome measured around 22 meters instead of the permitted
18. For Vogelsang that was cause enough to slap the Muslim
congregation with the highest fine ever imposed in her district,
€100,000. "Whoever lives here, whoever builds here, needs to follow
our laws," she said.
The local Berliner Kurier newspaper praised her as the "councilwoman
who doesn't let people walk all over her," but the Muslim community
had a totally different opinion. It would have been perfectly fine if
the illegally erected minarets had been "a little bit bigger," a
re****ter overheard in the mosque. Another congregation member
complained that "every mosque in Turkey" is bigger. "They must be
laughing themselves silly at us," he grumbled.
Reactions like that reinforce the impression on the part of critics
like Spuler-Stegemann that for some building associations mosque
construction is, more than anything, a show of power and an effort to
establish Muslim enclaves. "Where you can hear the call of the
minaret," she says, "from a certain Muslim perspective, that's Islamic
ground."
Building Code Violations and other Community Spats
After her experience with the mosque on Columbiadamm, Vogelsang
appeared determined "not to allow herself to be tricked" and not to
allow further Muslim communities to massively violate building code.
Later, she successfully blocked an association called Inssan, which
had plans to build an immense mosque center in Neukölln, which is
already home to 15 official mosques and 31 other prayer rooms. The
proposed structure violated "all zoning ordinances," she claims.
The 8,000-square-meter complex had been planned for a strictly
residential area with no bus service or parking lots; and it would
have been located near the Rütli School, which became infamous
throughout Germany in 2006 for its high level of student violence. The
building was designed to sit along the street on a strip of land 73
meters wide, rather than the prescribed 13 meters, with an area 40
percent greater than that permitted in the area.
Financing for the project also seemed dubious to Vogelsang. After the
builders "almost snottily" rejected requests for disclosure of their
sources of funding to district authorities. She eventually found out
through the Berlin state government's Interior Ministry that "Saudi
and other Arab foundations" were behind the project -- countries
ranking at the bottom of the list on the global scale of religious
freedom.
The building lot had been purchased by Ibrahim el-Zayat, a
representative of the Islamic Community of Germany organization. The
Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Germany's
domestic intelligence agency, claims the group has connections to the
Muslim Brotherhood and other radical groups. Vogelsang doesn't believe
the Inssan Association's assertions that there are no strings attached
to the donations from the Middle East. "You find someone who is
willing to give me €15 to €20 million with no strings attached," she
says.
Vogelsang considers herself lucky "that the mosque could be rejected
because of construction ordinances," but the Inssan Association is
already pursuing a new strategy. It now wants to build the mosque
center in a commercial zone in western Berlin's Charlottenburg
neighborhood. The site first chosen in a residential part of Neukölln
was zoned for chuches, but not meeting places of the mass scale of the
mosque center.
The organization has also been taking great pains to publicly position
itself as being moderate in its approach to Islam. It arranges PR
training for its members, criticizes forced marriages and runs blood
drives and environmental campaigns. In this, diehard opponents see
less a sign of liberalization than a camouflage intended to deflect
attention from the group's dubious funding sources and Islamist
backers.
"To get in good with the Berlin elite, you meet with members of the
dialogue industry and put on some politically correct events," says
Ian Johnson, an American author, Pulitzer Prize winner and Islam
expert living in Berlin.
Instead of putting all their cards on the table when they meet with
adjacent property owners, leaders of an association wanting to build
will strike a deal with "the usual clique of politicians and officials
in charge of immigrant issues," says Johnson, and then put "a mosque
right down in the middle of the neighborhood." This approach carries
the danger that "through the lack of a democratic outlet," residents
will be pushed into the arms of right-wing populists who reject the
construction projects for "nationalistic or racist reasons."
Public opinion polls generally show that the predominant view in
Germany's major cities is that Muslims should have a right to places
of wor****p beyond those hidden behind courtyards -- as long as the
plans comply with building laws and fit their surroundings. At the
same time, a majority sup****ts the position of journalist Giordano,
who suggests there is "no fundamental right to building a mega-
mosque," especially if it disrupts the look of the city around it. A
balance, says Giordano, must be found "between the back courtyard and
the centrally located grand mosque."
The group that is dead set against the construction of any type of
mosque is a relatively small minority. But in addition to affected
residents and xenophobes whose views cannot be changed, this group of
opponents also notably includes Islam experts from the Muslim world.
There are "more than enough mosques in Germany," says Mina Ahadi, co-
founder of Germany's Central Council of Ex-Muslims. Ahadi has been
under police protection since she publicly renounced Islam -- a crime
punishable by death according to radical interpretations of sharia
law."
"When a mosque is built," Ahadi says, "the result is that greater
pressure is placed on women, and even more children are forced to wear
a headscarf to school, which leads to isolation." She accuses German
politicians of "boundless naiveté" in their dealings with Islamic
organizations that, she argues, "ultimately want to instate sharia
law."
Meanwhile, among those local politicians who have no general
objections to mosques being built, there is an increasing willingness
to investigate the true ambitions and financial backers of the
builders more fully than in the past. This is not always easy,
however, given the complexity of the situation as well as the fact
that imams' sermons are mostly delivered in languages other than
German. Moreover, some groups are adept at strategies for concealing
intentions that run contrary to the German constitution, using what
the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution calls
"legality tactics" -- in other words, using government means to get
around government laws.
Even DITIB, the comparatively moderate organization behind the mosque
project in Cologne, arouses mistrust. DITIB is the long arm of a
religious institution in secular Turkey. "What will most likely
happen," ask the residents of Cologne who take part in the protests,
"if the feared Islamization of Turkey happens? Will DITIB bring it
over here?"
Cologne's Archbishop Joachim Meisner is already warning people about
of areas in Germany "where sharia law is increasingly spreading." In
the case of DITIB, this warning might be premature or simply
inaccurate. At the same time, however, the association is remotely
controlled from Ankara and has a reputation for being more concerned
with helping to maintain the identity of Turkish immigrants than with
helping them integrate in their new homes.
The worldview of Ahmadiyya, the organization that currently wants to
build one of its planned 100 mosques in Berlin's northern Pankow
district, also causes some unease. Every now and then, rumors escape
the mosque walls claiming that many of the group's leaders consider
not only women and Jews to be second-class citizens, but also
homo***uals. In 2007, an Ahmadiyya Web site stated that the
"increasing tendency toward homo***uality" could be traced to the
consumption of ****k.
Widespread protests against Ahmadiyya by residents of Schlüchtern in
the western state of Hesse led the town to change its zoning laws so
as to prevent a planned mosque that would have included minarets from
being built. In other locations as well, politicians are becoming more
and more inclined to use city-planning laws as a way of limiting or
completely prohibiting dubious projects by questionable developers.
This is exactly what Bonn did when the city voted against the
construction of a cultural center with minarets on the grounds that
the project would further aggravate the "uncontested and ongoing
formation of ghettos" in a specific Muslim-influenced neighborhood. In
Munich, the city government rejected a proposed mosque project because
its "dispro****tionate mass" would have allegedly impacted a square
whose buildings are on historical-preservation lists.
Minarets 'By No Means Compulsory'
Cologne wants to prevent two associations from building a mosque in
the district of Mülheim because they have contacts with the Islamic
organization Milli Görüs. Norbert ****hs, the district's mayor,
certainly sees it as a "problem (when) political questions are dealt
with by using building ordinances." For his part, though, Cologne's
Deputy Mayor Guido Kahlen is convinced that: "In those cases where we
have room for administrative discretion, we have to use it."
Seeing that this mindset appears to be catching on in other places,
builders are apparently becoming more and more willing to exclude
minarets from their architectural plans. As they see it, people living
near these mosques view the minarets less as symbols of integration
and more as demonstrations of power.
When Leggewie gives out advice, he says that mosques should be built
without the classic soaring towers -- on practical grounds. "As soon
as a mosque differs from the look of the city around it through its
‘foreign' form," Leggewie reasons, "you can count on greater
resistance, which often necessitates more involved authorization
procedures."
"The traditional style underscores, even unintentionally," Leggewie
adds, "the orientation of Muslims toward the areas most im****tant to
Islam and toward their homelands." And lastly, he points out, the
Middle Eastern style of a mosque with minarets is "by no means
compulsory."
Indeed, a counterexample is the mosque of the Turkish parliament in
Ankara, built in 1989, which doesn't have minarets. And than there's a
"mosque for the future" planned for London's East End. Plans for the
mosque envision space for 70,000 wor****ppers in a high-tech structure
with a glass roof instead of a dome and wind turbines instead of
minarets.
For the proposed Ahmadiyya mosque in Hausen, near Frankfurt, architect
Mubashra Ilyas has designed a simple building with "Bauhaus elements"
and one symbolic minaret that people passing by can only see from a
certain angle. As Ilyas explains it, this is "because it's certainly
easier for native Germans living in the area to live with it that
way."
In any case, minarets are no longer needed for the muezzin's call. A
call to prayer is redundant, according to Fazlur Rehman Anwar of the
Ahmadiyya mosque in Eimsbüttel, Hamburg: "After all, there are
watches."
On the other hand, when Muslim builders with financial backers in the
Middle East insist on enormous, showy multipurpose centers in Turkish
or Arab style, they must accept a high degree of political risk. The
openly Middle Eastern style may lead to a flare up in the already
smoldering debate about religious freedom in the countries that back
these projects financially, since some are countries in which
Christians are violently persecuted and prevented from building
churches.
Representatives of both the Catholic and Protestant churches in
Germany continue to emphasize that they have in no way made their
approval of mosque construction contingent on Muslim countries'
allowing Christians to build churches there. At the same time,
however, they let it be known that they can't accept the status quo in
the long run.
While Protestant Bishop Huber calls for "Muslims' unrestricted right
to convert," his Catholic colleague Archbishop Meisner has appealed to
the DITIB, who are building the mosque in Cologne, "to sup****t a
project in Turkey." As Meisner explains: "The Pope has declared 2008
to be the Year of St. Paul (as) we are celebrating of the 2000th
birthday of the apostle Paul. Yet at his birthplace in Tarsus, we
Christians have nothing … We need to campaign to be allowed to build a
pilgrim center and a small church there. In return, that would be
taken into account here in Cologne."
Less elegant than the cardinal's approach – which, admittedly, met
with no success -- is the direct method used by some representatives
of the CDU. While representatives of the Christian Social Union (CSU)
the CDU's Bavarian sister party, were satisfied with the stipulation
that minarets could not rise higher than church steeples, local CDU
members in Castrop-Rauxel, a city in western Germany, recently agreed
to a dispro****tionately radical resolution on the topic.
Of course mosque construction should be allowed, the CDU members say,
but land usage must be strictly restricted: "We suggest applying the
standards that are in effect for the construction of new Christian
religious buildings in Turkey."
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