Analysis: Churches vs. Mosques in Europe

BERLIN, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Europeans are alarmed by a rise in mosques that may become catalysts in another round of a cultural conflict, further hampering the integration of Muslims in Europe.

The Sehitlik Mosque in Berlin’s Kreuzberg district, near the Tempelhof Airport, is a beautiful and impressive building, complete with a traditional dome construction and two lavishly adorned minarets that stretch some 100 feet into the air. The mosque is open to anyone who wants to see it, and guided tours in multiple languages explain its architectural and religious peculiarities.

The building is one of only 159 in Germany that can be recognized by passersby as a mosque; for their sermons, the country’s more than 3 million Muslims still venture to more than 1,000 so-called backyard mosques, community halls and buildings in industrial districts. No wonder communities are updating existing buildings or constructing entirely new mosques: "It’s very normal and good that a big religion presents itself all over the world," Boris Groys, a philosophy professor and cultural expert at Karlsruhe’s State University of Design whose family hails from Russia, said Tuesday at a discussion forum on mosques in Berlin.

Yet some have warned of a mighty wave of mosques that is about to sweep Europe: In Germany, the Muslim community is planning to more than double the number of mosques, with 184 projects in the planning. Groups in Saudi Arabia and Turkey finance many of these projects, large and prestigious buildings that critics say are intended as power symbols, rather than prayer houses. Often, its imams are sent directly from Turkey and don’t speak any German, and Islam, sidelining traditional Christian churches, has long turned into the fastest-growing religion in Europe.

"No one has anything against a mosque," Ralph Ghadban, a Lebanese-born Islam expert at Berlin’s Protestant University of Applied Sciences, told United Press International Wednesday in a telephone interview. "But the large projects are Islamic centers that also do social work and child education on the basis of the Sharia (Islamic law). These centers don’t help to integrate people, they foster parallel societies."

In Cologne, a traditional Catholic stronghold in western Germany, a Muslim group linked to Turkey’s Ministry of Religion is turning its existing community building in the center of town into a lavish, citadel-adorned full-scale mosque. While the local Christian churches and the city support the construction, citizen groups have voiced their opposition to the project.

"One has the feeling that it is easier today to build a nuclear power plant than a mosque," Ali Kizilkaya, the head of the German Islam Council, said in a newspaper interview with Berlin-based daily taz.

Yet Germany isn’t alone: In England, Switzerland, Austria and the Netherlands, people have in the past rallied against controversial mosque projects in the center of their cities. Often, people are driven by a mixture of xenophobia on the one hand, and anxiety over what they see as an Islamist intrusion on the other hand.

The problem is that far-right groups have recognized the capital they can squeeze from the Islamophobia being waged in Europe: In Switzerland, a country with some 300,000 Muslims, the far-right SVP party has campaigned with posters playing on xenophobic images that will hand them an overwhelming victory in next Sunday’s elections. One SVP lawmaker, Ulrich Schluer, even rallied support to bring about a referendum to write a new clause into the Swiss Constitution that would forbid the building of minarets in the country. He already has more than 40,000 signatures, and observers expect that Schluer will get the necessary 100,000 next year to launch a referendum.

In Italy, officials in Bologna and Genoa had to delay a mosque project because of an ugly anti-Islamic campaign by the far-right Northern League party, and in Austria, far-right leader Joerg Haider said he wants to make his province Carinthia a "pioneer in the battle against radical Islam" by banning mosques, though not a single one is planned for the predominantly rural region in the Austrian Alps.

Yet the anti-mosque comments aren’t exclusively reserved for the extremist parties: Earlier this month Germany’s Edmund Stoiber (of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives), who once came within 6,000 votes of becoming the country’s chancellor, said in his farewell speech that a mosque should never be higher than a church. "Church towers, not minarets, should be what you see when you look out across the state," the 66-year-old said, sparking thunderous applause from the crowd.

Germany, as most countries in Europe, has had problems integrating its estimated 3.2 million Muslims, who hail mainly from Turkey. Some Germans fear that Islamic parallel societies are established in the country's big cities; Berlin is a famous example, with schools in the Kreuzberg district made up of students solely from a migrant background. Especially since Sept. 11, 2001, Muslims in Europe feel they are put under general suspicion and marginalized by society.

"Germany is my home, but I don’t always feel that my home loves me," said Kizilkaya, of the Islamic Council.

The government in Berlin last September established an Islam Conference to open an official dialogue with the country’s Muslim groups and boost integration efforts. Yet it undermined them with several controversial security measures, including calls to monitor all converts to Islam after a failed terror attack involved such a man, preventing rather than helping to pull Muslims into mainstream society.

"Whoever is treated like that will see himself as an outsider and will consequently retreat into his or her snail-shell; that will result in the opposite of integration," Lale Akgun, a lawmaker from the governing Social Democratic Party who hails from Turkey and the group's Islam expert, wrote in a commentary for taz.

Akgun, who is also the Islam expert for her party, hopes that Muslim groups in Germany can strip themselves of the influence of conservative superiors in Turkey or the Middle East, and develop an "Islam that gives answers to (Germany's) living conditions, is independently organized and measured against the European and German laws. … In a secular democracy, Islam can grow and do good for the people."

Meanwhile, the online guest book of Berlin’s Sehitlik mosque is full of praise for the guided tours.

"Thanks to Yasemin and her husband for showing us around," writes Ulrike, adding that the mosque’s openness "is of great help to reduce prejudices between cultures and religions.”

Below the comment, the mosque's webmaster has inserted a short reply: "Thanks a lot for coming. We'd be happy to welcome you again."