BERLIN, March 21 (UPI) -- In Europe, integration of Muslims has become the topic of the moment, mainly because officials have tied the issue to domestic security.
On Sept. 11, 2001, Oguz Ucuncu, the secretary-general of the Islamic Community Milli Gorus, a German-based Muslim group, was in an office in Dortmund trying to convince local officials that they should grant his group the right to build a mosque in their city.
While he was pleading his case, a TV set behind him showed the Twin Towers collapsing. "You won't be surprised to hear that it took us more than five years to build that mosque," Ucuncu said earlier this week at an integration and security conference in Berlin.
The conference, organized by the European Forum for Migration Studies, a think tank at the University of Bamberg, brought together several security experts and officials from the Muslim world.
"Since the Madrid and London bombings, many people in Europe feel uneasy about immigration from Muslim countries," said Steffen Angenendt of the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin.
Apart from the bombings, committed by groups linked to al-Qaida, several other incidents have endangered peaceful coexistence between Muslims and Christians in Europe.
In the past year, the Prophet Mohammed cartoons and the controversial remarks by Pope Benedict have irritated Muslims in Europe, leading to violent and sometimes deadly protests.
In Germany, two Muslim students placed a pair of homemade bombs on two commuter trains, but neither device exploded.
An estimated 13 million to 15 million Muslims live in Europe, most of them in Germany, the United Kingdom and France. While U.S. Muslims tend to be well-paid and highly educated (57 percent make more than $57,000 a year, said Arsalan Iftikhar of the Council on American-Islamic Relations), Muslims in Europe have below-average educational achievement, often hold low-qualified jobs and tend to live in districts with poor housing conditions, said Thomas Schwarz of the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, a Vienna-based body.
According to personal interviews the agency compiled with some 60 Muslims from all over Europe -- all of whom say their situation has deteriorated over the past five years -- integration is at a watershed point.
While Muslims acknowledge that they need to do more to engage with wider society, the demand to integrate can be counterproductive if Muslims are not treated equally, Schwarz said.
Especially since Sept. 11, Muslims in Europe -- the overwhelming majority of whom condemn any form of terrorist activities -- feel they are sidelined by society.
"Many Muslims, particularly young people, face limited opportunities for social advancement ... that could give rise to feelings of hopelessness and alienation," Schwarz said.
Ucuncu, of Milli Gorus, said his nearly 30,000 members living in Germany have been especially discriminated against.
A European-wide Muslim group with ties to banned Turkish nationalist parties, Milli Gorus for the past several years has been under constant surveillance by the German Office for the Protection of the Constitution, a federal agency monitoring extremists, because of alleged Islamist tendencies.
In its latest report, the agency states: "According to Milli Gorus, justice is indispensably and inseparably linked to Islam and a strict Islamic order, while politics that divert from Islamic political or social models are synonyms for injustice and despotism."
At the conference, Ucuncu said his members have been put under general suspicion ever since Milli Gorus was mentioned in these reports.
He said his group was in a "visible, ongoing transformation process," and added that Milli Gorus, active in youth work, has been doing everything "to be part of the constitutional order of Germany."
"But that transformation needs time and time is not given to us," he said.
With young members of his group losing their jobs and being expelled from universities, German authorities were "undermining" his transformation efforts, he said.
Germany undoubtedly is a special case in Europe; an estimated 3.2 million Muslims live in the country, most coming from a guest-worker background and stemming from Turkey.
Last September Germany held the first-ever official conference on Islam in an effort to better integrate the country's Muslim population.
The conference has officials from the government and Germany's main Muslim groups meet in working groups every three months to tackle integration problems. One working group is entitled "Islamism and Security," and Milli Gorus is part of it.
Officials ahead of the conference noted that Muslims bring a rich and valuable cultural addition to Germany and that they are and will be welcome in the future.
Friedrich Heckmann, head of the European Forum for Migration Studies and the main man behind the conference in Berlin, said the Islam summit was an innovative project with great opportunities to strengthen "societal cohesion and security."
"The Islam conference has established a new reality in the religious-cultural life of Germany," Heckmann said. "It will help establish and strengthen relations of trust."
The summit was initiated by German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schaeuble, who ironically also is the country's top anti-terror czar.
Schaeuble has been a key advocate of international cooperation to fight terrorism; when on Jan. 1, 2007, Germany took over the EU presidency, Schaeuble already had several initiatives in the pipeline to enhance EU security.
Mathias Schaef, a senior official of the German presidency's EU working program "migration and security," laid out the body's strategy.
With almost no border controls and people able to travel from Lisbon to Warsaw without having their passport checked, "we need not less, but more Europe to maintain freedom and security," Schaef said.
Several existing criminal, immigration and security databases will be linked EU-wide, Schaef said, a move that "will put cooperation of law enforcement officials in Europe on a new level."
In Germany, immigration offices already work together with intelligence groups and police: Of the 28,000 asylum seekers last year in Germany, 750 were reported to the Office for the Protection of the Constitution because of extremist suspicions, said Martin Lauterbach of the German immigration and refugees office. In 68 cases, asylum was denied because of security reasons. Nevertheless, Lauterbach said his agency was carefully examining the fate of each applicant and would not be careless about an individual's future.
"Yes, we want to get tough on the bad guys, but on the other hand, we also want to extend an offer for real integration."
