written by Seda Serdar
November 21, 2019
In a bid to reduce foreign influence on Islamic religious leaders, Germany is launching a new pilot project that educates imams locally. Experts say it is a positive step, but a more comprehensive approach is needed.
The government has long struggled with foreign involvement when it comes to the education of imams who lead Muslim communities across Germany. Now, a new educational association, with start-up funding from Germany's interior ministry, is set to launch at the University of Osnabrück on Thursday.
Even though some Muslim organizations have been training imams for their own communities in Germany, the majority of imams working in the country are affiliated with the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB).
Among Germany's nearly 4.5 million Muslims, around 3 million are of Turkish origin.
Long awaited financing
It was precisely this influence that moved the German government to take such a bold step, Green party parliamentarian Filiz Polat told DW. It was a measure her party "had long been asking for," she added.
DITIB is Germany's largest Islamic umbrella group, with 900 affiliated mosques. Its imams are educated, financed and sent from Turkey. So the language and cultural barrier together with many of these imams' loyalty to the Turkish government, has pushed the German government to deal intensively with the issue in recent years.
One of the major obstacles to approaching the issue was that of securing funding. That now has a temporary solution, with the government's planned investment.
Polat told DW that in response to her official inquiry on the subject, the interior ministry had already confirmed its plans for the start-up financing.
A neutral approach
One of the organizations that will take part in the new association will be the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD), confirmed its chairman, Aiman Mazyek.
"We can't just always complain that there are foreign imams," he told DW. But the establishment of the association is a concrete step and " a positive development, but it should have been introduced decades ago."
Constitutionally, the German state is required to stay out of religious community affairs. However, according to parliamentarian Polat, the neutrality of the state is safeguarded through the founding of an independent association, which will be located in the state of Lower Saxony.
"The rabbinical seminar in Potsdam has received state start-up funding and this strategy has paid off," she said, referring to the state-supported Abraham Geiger Kolleg. "Such a way would also be constitutionally unobjectionable," she told DW.
'A foot in the door'
Currently, Islamic theology is taught at academic institutions in the cities of Münster, Tübingen, Osnabrück, Giessen and Erlangen-Nuremberg. In October this year, Humboldt University of Berlin also opened an Islamic theology institute.
However, students of theology cannot simply work as imams in Germany, since reading of the Koran, how to perform a prayer and other practical tasks are not taught at these institutes. To do so, a separate and practical education is needed.
In a response to DW's inquiry, the Lower Saxony Ministry for Science and Culture said the plan includes the "establishment of a registered association in cooperation with Muslim organizations and mosque communities that are interested." Islamic theology experts will a part of this new association, the statement underlined. The ministry also suggested that the method could "function as a model" for the education of imams elsewhere.
DW spoke to Professor Rauf Ceylan of Osnabrück University, who had previously drafted a "road map" on how education for imams in Germany should be built. He sees the new initiative as "putting a foot in the door."
However, he cautioned that the pilot project should not begin with "high expectations." But "we just need to start, and I think when the quality shows itself, in the long run it will gain acceptance."
PoliticoThe Local, Germany reports 8/18/2017: Upping the stakes in an intensifying row with Berlin, Erdogan said ethnic Turks in Germany should not cast their ballots either for Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Social Democratic Party (SPD) of Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel, or the Greens."I tell all my kinsmen in Germany... not to vote for them. Neither the Christian Democrats nor the SPD nor the Greens. They are all enemies of Turkey," Erdogan told reporters in Istanbul in televised comments.German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel was quick to hit back at the Turkish leader."That is an unprecedented act of interference in the sovereignty of our country," Gabriel told the RedaktionsNetzwerk media group, adding: "Erdogan's interference in Germany's electoral campaign shows that he wants to incite people in Germany against each other.""For all our citizens living in Germany this is now a struggle of honour," he added.
written by Zia Weise
December 17, 2019
HAMBURG, Germany — Among imams, Abdulsamet Demir is somewhat of a novelty: He’s one of only a handful of Muslim faith leaders who grew up, studied and trained entirely in Germany.
Some 90 percent of imams at German mosques come from abroad, usually from Turkey, often holding their sermons in a foreign language. A smaller group have been brought up in Germany but trained or studied abroad.
Demir, the 28-year-old imam of the Eyüp Sultan Mosque in Germany's second-largest city of Hamburg, believes that needs to change.
“I think Germany needs German imams,” he said. “German means: university-educated and ideally born or raised here, with knowledge of the customs and traditions of this country.”
Mainstream political parties and most Islamic associations agree. They worry that foreign imams hinder integration and allow countries such as Turkey to exercise undue influence over Germany's nearly 5 million Muslims. Within the community, many, including Demir, also worry that imams who can’t speak German aren’t able to connect with younger generations.
The trouble is no one can quite agree on how to achieve that — as became evident when one university announced it would establish an imam-training program.
Last month, the University of Osnabrück in northwestern Germany said it would set up a two-year course starting next summer, likely with financial support from the German interior ministry. The so-called imam college will be run by an association independent from the university, but supervised by its academics, and involve various German Islamic organizations.
Yet two of Germany’s largest Islamic groups — the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB) and the Islamic Community Millî Görüş (IGMG), together representing nearly half of Germany’s estimated 2,500 mosques — declined to participate, citing concerns over potential state interference.
They have their own approach to training imams, with DITIB launching its own program in early January 2020.
“We are in the middle of a societal change. Teenagers today know German better than Turkish,” said Eyüp Kalyon, coordinator of DITIB’s planned course and an imam himself. “We’re aware, and we know we have no option but to participate in this reorientation.”
Fears of foreign influence
Over the past decade, Berlin has gradually started paying closer attention to who leads German mosques. The interior ministry set up an Islam Conference in 2006; its current focus is on mosque personnel and training. The country's first Islamic studies degrees were launched with state support in 2010.
Germany isn't the only country grappling with these issues. Several European countries are also trying to foster local training courses, with varying success. In the Netherlands, Islamic theology and training courses foundered. Sweden launched its first state-funded imam course in 2016. France, which brings in most of its imams from the Maghreb and elsewhere in the Arab world, has struggled to formulate a response due to its strict separation of religion and state.
In Germany, the issue of foreign imams has become a major subject of public debate in recent months in part because of developments in Turkey, where President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has taken his country down a more authoritarian and conservative path.
DITIB, the largest German Islamic umbrella association with 960 member mosques, has close links to the Turkish state, specifically the country’s religious affairs directorate Diyanet, which answers to the Turkish president. The Diyanet sends Turkish imams, whose wages are paid by Ankara and who tend to be Turkish civil servants, to German DITIB-run mosques for a limited amount of time. The organization also sends German high school graduates who want to work in mosques to Turkey to study theology.
DITIB describes itself as politically neutral. But a number of recent controversies — including accusations that the organization called on Muslims to pray for the success of Turkey’s military incursion into Syria and a dropped investigation into allegations of spying — have thrown its connections to Turkey into sharper focus.
German politicians have reacted by calling for domestically trained mosque personnel. Mainstream parties, including opposition groups such as the Greens and the Free Democrats, want local imam-training courses, as does Chancellor Angela Merkel, who said last year, “We need imam training in Germany.” (The far-right Alternative for Germany, on the other hand, has described such courses as a step toward the “Islamization” of Germany.)
Last month, the government announced plans to introduce a German-language requirement for religious personnel coming from abroad.
The proposal was roundly criticized. Rauf Ceylan, a professor of Islamic studies at Osnabrück University, described the move as “populist,” given that while it will in theory apply to all religious personnel, in practice it will mainly hit Muslim communities.
“That’s completely missing the mark,” he said. “It’s not just a solution for people to speak German. Nationalists and fascists can speak German, too.”
The new generation
Abdulsamet Demir thinks the government’s German-language demand isn’t such a bad idea. It may sound radical, he says, but fluent German is enormously important for an imam.
“The problem is the new generation,” he said. While many first- and second-generation immigrants are often more comfortable in Turkish, younger people “speak better German than Turkish. They prefer German. And they’re not going to the mosque anymore because the imams don’t speak German.”
In his mosque — housed on the ground floor of a residential building with only a small sign marking its entrance — Demir has tried to find a balance. Friday sermons are held in German; during the week, when mostly older members attend, he leads prayers in Turkish.
Demir, with his laid-back attitude and ready laugh, has a different approach to what an imam can be.
“Today, we speak about everything — sexuality, love, drug addiction. The image [of an imam] changes to a person who still commands authority but can speak to young people on equal terms,” he said.
Demir, who described being an imam as his “dream job,” jumped at the opportunity to study Islamic theology when Osnabrück University began offering the degree in 2012. Besides Osnabrück, six other universities offer degrees in Islamic theology. But Demir thinks there should be a practical training course too.
“We were thrown into the deep end when we graduated,” he said. “What we need is something like the seminaries for priests and rabbis. It needs to meet the expectations of academics, the state, the communities, the associations — a difficult job given the diversity here.”
The program “shouldn’t reinvent the wheel,” said Aiman Mazyek, chairman of the Central Council of Muslims, an umbrella organization that has signed up to the Osnabrück project. But it needs a “dedicated program for our country” that addresses topics such as secularization, he added.
Imam shortage
Besides the make-up of the course itself, many Muslim communities are wary of receiving funding from Germany’s interior ministry and potentially opening the door to state intervention in religious matters.
The interior ministry is in touch with the Osnabrück project leaders about potential government funding for the training course, a ministry spokesperson said, though the amount has not yet been specified.
The ministry stressed that although it considered developing “alternatives to foreign influence on training and work of religious personnel” to be important for the integration of Muslims in Germany, there would be no state-led imam training — for constitutional reasons alone.
Not everyone is reassured by this.
“Financial support always leads to dependence eventually,” said Mehmet Karaoğlu, the chairman of the Alliance of Islamic Communities in Northern Germany, an umbrella organization of 17 mosques belonging to IGMG.
Karaoğlu, who came to Germany aged 12 from the Anatolian village of Kalfat, studied alongside Demir at Osnabrück and also sees the need for more locally trained imams.
He thinks the religious associations should be in charge of the practical side, not the state. IGMG, for instance, has established a training institute meant for students that graduate from high school at 16, meaning that unlike Osnabrück and DITIB’s courses, it requires no academic qualification to enter.
Karaoğlu is hoping for two graduates from that course to join his community next year. Germany, he says, is suffering from an “imam shortage."
Muslim faith leaders, including imams, do far more than hold prayers, he pointed out. They may teach, organize social clubs and offer pastoral care, among other things. Demir described his work as a 24/7 job.
Karaoğlu serves as one of three imams at Hamburg's Centrum Mosque, housed in a former public bath in the city center and flanked by two striking green-white minarets. Given the community’s size, it should have four imams, he said — but it’s a struggle to find new recruits.
“We could get one from abroad, that would be easy,” he said. “But they can’t speak German.”
The availability of training courses isn’t the only issue, according to Karaoğlu. The question of who pays an imam’s salary once trained is also a major point of contention.
Ceylan, of Osnabrück University, agrees. “An imam college doesn’t solve the question of who will later pay the imams. And if someone’s graduated from university here, they won’t want to work for a few hundred euros at a mosque.”
In Germany, Catholics, Protestants and Jews pay a special tax that funds churches and synagogues. For Muslims, there is no such system — though that’s being debated — and most mosques rely on members' donations, meaning particularly smaller communities are strapped for cash.
Demir said many of his fellow theology students switched to teaching due to low pay for imams; the salary ranges from €1,000 to €2,000 a month, he added, and jobs are also difficult to find, with imam vacancies rarely advertised.
The DITIB approach
DITIB, which doesn’t suffer from the same shortage as it can rely on Turkish imams, also wants to keep imam training in-house.
The organization agrees that there is an increasing demand for German-speaking imams, and for a practical training program to complement theology courses, according to Şeyda Can, who leads DITIB’s academy.
Turkish DITIB imams have five or more years of experience, “while graduates are going straight from university to the communities,” she said.
But the imam college at Osnabrück is “not relevant” to DITIB communities, according to Can.
Details on the organization's own two-year course, which launches in January, are scant — Can said she was unable to disclose much before the official launch — but it will be open to women, offering a broader faith-leader training rather than a men-only imam course. (Osnabrück’s planned course also aims to be open to all genders, Ceylan said.) The program will initially have 20 participants.
For now, however, DITIB has no plans to fill all its mosques with German imams. About 120 of DITIB's 1,200 imams are "socialized" in Germany and are German-speaking, said Kalyon, Can's colleague.
“The German language will grow in importance, but we also have many first- and second-generation Muslims speaking Turkish. We cannot offer only German-language services. That's why we’re glad to have imams from Turkey,” he added.
For those worried about foreign influence, the prospect of home-grown DITIB imams does not necessarily allay their concerns. “The key problem is that [imams] should not be dependent on a foreign state,” said Ceylan, the professor.
But to Demir, Germany is finally on the right path. The transition needs to be gradual, he said, warning against an abrupt stop to employing foreign-trained and Turkish-speaking imams.
“What happens if there’s no more older imams, but there aren’t enough young ones yet?” he asked. Still, he’s certain that he's at the forefront of an inevitable changing of the guard in Germany's mosques.
“We are the vanguard — the third generation, the new youth that’s trained here, born here, brought up here,” said Demir. “We are the pioneers.”
Germany Grants Turkey Request To Prosecute GERMAN Comedian Over Insulting ISLAMIC President ON GERMAN TELEVISION. https://t.co/AC5rgvbCfa— Global Awareness 101 (@Mononoke__Hime) April 15, 2016
Spiegel News, Germany local
written by Von Özlem Gezer und Anna Reimann
February 28, 2011 👈
Thousands of Turkish immigrants gave Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan a rock star welcome in Germany on Sunday in a show of national pride that remains fervent, even after decades spent in Germany. He told them they remain part of Turkey, and urged them to integrate into German society -- but not to assimilate.
The lyric keeps echoing around the hall in Düsseldorf. "The land belongs to us all." The sentence isn't referring to Germany, but to Turkey.
Immigrants are waving hundreds of Turkish flags and the chanting and the music are deafening. One woman shouts "Turkey is great!" into a microphone to cheers from the crowd. Everyone in the ISS Dome, a huge sports and concert venue, is fired up, as if they're waiting for a rock star. There's only one show in town this Sunday, and his name is Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
The Turkish prime minister has come to Germany. He wants to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel but first he wants to speak to his "compatriots." To people who have been living in Germany for decades, who were born here, and of whom many have German passports.
They have come from all over Germany to see him live, some 10,000 people. They say things like: "The Germans will never accept us, but we have Erdogan." Or: "At last someone feels responsible for us, for the first time a Turkish prime minister isn't forgetting his compatriots abroad." One woman says: "Erdogan may get Merkel to see us as part of this society. He is our savior."
Some 3 million people of Turkish origin live in Germany, most of them descendants of Turks invited by the government in the 1950s and 1960s as " guest workers" to make up for a shortage of manpower after World War II.
Muslim immigrants have been the focus of a heated public debate in Germany over the last year, with conservative commentators and politicians accusing them of failing to integrate into German society. Many immigrants in turn complain that they are still being called "foreigners" even if they were born in Germany, have German citizenship and speak the language perfectly.
"You are part of Germany, but you are also part our great Turkey," says Erdogan.
It sounds like a domestic campaign speech ahead of elections in Turkey this summer. Erdogan is wooing for votes among Germany's Turkish population. In previous elections, immigrants with Turkish passports flew to Ankara, Istanbul or Antalya just to cast their ballots at the airport.
'No One Has the Right to Deprive us of Our Culture'
Erdogan portrays himself as a supporter of democracy and freedom of opinion. Turkey is changing, he says, adding that all artists and writers who left Turkey and went into exile should return. The message is that the European Union should let Turkey join.
Human rights, innovation, progress -- the rural way of life that many Turks now living in Germany left behind them in the 1960s, no longer exists, Erdogan told the crowd. "We mustn't cling to it anymore. I want you to learn German, that your children learn German, they must study, do their masters degrees. I want you to become doctors, professors and politicians in Germany," says Erdogan.
And then he repeats the sentence that caused such a stir at a speech he held in Cologne three years ago. He warns Turks against assimilating themselves. "Yes, integrate yourselves into German society but don't assimilate yourselves. No one has the right to deprive us of our culture and our identity."
👇 OTHER RELATED NEWS 👇
The Church of St Savior in Chora, which was converted into the Kariye Mosque in the early 16th century after the city fell to the Ottoman Turks, was transformed into a museum by the Turkish government in 1945 and opened to the public.https://t.co/42h6K26acl— Global Awareness 101 (@Mononoke__Hime) February 27, 2020
Apollo, The International Art Magazine reported 12/3/2019: Erdogan Turkish court rules that Kariye Museum must become mosque. Istanbul’s Church of the Holy Saviour in Chora, a Byzantine Greek orthodox church later converted into a mosque before becoming a museum in 1958, has been ordered to return to a Muslim house of worship by a Turkish court. In session last month, Turkey’s Council of State ruled that the conversion of the church into the Kariye Museum was unlawful because a mosque ‘cannot be used except for its essential function’. The decision could result in the church’s 14th-century frescoes being removed, and could also have repercussions for other Byzantine Christian monuments, notably the Hagia Sophia, which is currently a museum but was earmarked for consecration by the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan earlier this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment