In Munich - Building a Mosque is a Provocation

[ElPunto]

In Munich, Provocation in a Symbol of Foreign Faith

 

 

New York Times

 

By MARK LANDLER

Published: December 8, 2006

 

MUNICH, Dec. 5 — Helga Schandl says she has nothing against Muslims. For three decades, she worked in Munich’s wholesale food market, where many of her colleagues were immigrants from Turkey. “I have experienced integration firsthand,” she said.

 

Yet Mrs. Schandl, a 67-year-old Bavarian, is leading a fierce campaign to halt plans to build a mosque in a working-class district here. “It is a provocation,” she said of the mosque, which would sit across a graceful square from her Roman Catholic church — its minarets an exotic counterpoint to the church’s neo-baroque steeples. “The mosque doesn’t have anything to do with religion,” she said. “It is a power play.”

 

Of the many ways that Christians and Muslims rub up against each other in this country, the construction of mosques has become one of the most contentious. Symbols of a foreign faith, rising in German cities, they are stoking anti-foreign sentiment and reinforcing fears that Christianity is under threat.

 

Why, Mrs. Schandl asked, do the Turks want to build their mosque right here, on a site opposite St. Korbinian? Like churches everywhere in Germany, hers is struggling to survive in a secular society. A few empty churches are being converted into banks or restaurants.

 

For Onder Yildiz, a soft-spoken but intense leader of the Turkish community, the answer is simple: “A mosque next to a church helps intensify dialogue between the religions,” he said.

 

On one level, Mr. Yildiz is right: St. Korbinian church and the city’s mayor have welcomed the mosque, which would be the third, and most prominent, in Munich, the heartland of German Catholicism.

 

But a vocal minority of residents has resisted, holding protest meetings, collecting signatures, and filing a petition with the Bavarian Parliament. “Bavarian life,” the petition declares, “is marked by the drinking of beer and the eating of pork. In Muslim faith, both are unclean and forbidden.” With the support of Bavaria’s conservative state government, the residents have been able to tie up the project in court.

 

Mosques have existed in Germany for decades, but only in recent years has there been a building boom. There are now 150 mosques in Germany, in addition to about 2,000 Muslim prayer rooms in cellars, warehouses and other converted industrial spaces.

 

As Germany’s 3.2 million Muslims put down deeper roots, they are no longer willing to worship furtively. A few of their projects — like a new mosque in the industrial city of Duisberg — have some of the grandeur of great European cathedrals. More than 1,000 people can pray under its soaring domes, which are meant to evoke the Blue Mosque in Istanbul.

 

“Whenever Muslims in Germany come out of their closets or hidden places, the controversy starts,” said Claus Leggewie, a political scientist at Giessen University who has written about mosques in Germany.

 

“The protests begin on technical issues, like parking problems and noise,” he said. “But it has a cultural bias. There is a nationalist minority, which opposes immigration and especially Muslim immigration.”

 

Right-wing politicians pander to these sentiments, Mr. Leggewie said, aided by the specter of Islamic terrorism and by a number of extremist mosques in Germany that have rattled even some open-minded Germans. Muslim groups aggravate the tensions, he said, by not talking to their non-Muslim neighbors.

 

The Munich dispute has an added edge because Bavaria is the most religious and conservative state in Germany. Pope Benedict XVI was born near here, and once served as archbishop of Munich. He delivered his now famous speech, in which he seemed to equate Islam with violence, at the nearby University of Regensburg.

 

“I understood his message,” Mrs. Schandl said, drinking a beer at the market where she used to work.

 

The mayor of Munich, Christian Ude, noted that Protestants had a tough time here, too, until two centuries ago. And then there was the burning of the Jewish synagogue by the Nazis in 1938. “The theme of houses of worship for religious minorities has a long history in Munich,” he said.

 

Munich has between 80,000 and 120,000 Muslims, the bulk of them from Turkey, who constitute nearly 10 percent of its population. The city’s first mosque was built in the 1960s on the outskirts of town, and caused little comment. A second was built in the 1990s, also outside the center, and drew some opposition from the Christian Social Union, the conservative party that has ruled Bavaria for decades.

 

The proposed mosque is to take the place of an Islamic prayer center that is now housed in an old furniture warehouse nearby. As the Turks see it, having a proper mosque is a sign of their maturity as an immigrant group in German society.

 

“Turks are now in their third generation in Germany,” said Metin Avci, the imam of the community in Sendling. “In the first generation, they only wanted to work to earn money. In the second and third generations, they developed a desire to worship in a more visible way.”

 

After a competition, the group chose a local architect, Walter Höfler, who came up with a contemporary design, which he says does not compete with that of the church.

 

The mosque’s minarets, he noted, would rise 134 feet — 46 feet short of the steeples of the church. Each would have a sign, spelling the word Allah, which could be lighted at night. They would also have balconies — decorative rather than functional, because under German law, a muezzin cannot broadcast a call to prayer from them.

 

The mosque would have the capacity to hold 250 men and 150 women. But Mr. Yildiz said it was also designed to accommodate non-Muslims for social and educational activities.

 

“We want to integrate into Germany,” said Mr. Yildiz, who is 40 and has lived here for 25 years. “We want to have a presentable place, where we can invite guests to drink tea.”

 

St. Korbinian and the local Protestant church both seem open to such a dialogue. They have steadfastly supported the mosque. But they say the debate has divided their members.

 

Wolfgang Neuner, a parish counselor at St. Korbinian, said parishioners told him they would not feel comfortable at prayer, knowing that they were near a mosque. Andrea Borger, the deacon at the Protestant church, got a letter asking, “What are you going to say when your daughter isn’t able to walk in this neighborhood without a head scarf?”

 

Such fears resonate with politicians. Speaking in a beer tent last April, Bavaria’s prime minister, Edmund Stoiber, pledged to block the mosque. His Christian Social Union invalidated the preliminary permit that was issued by the Munich government, which is run by a coalition of the Social Democratic Party and the Greens.

 

Mr. Ude, the mayor, who studied in Turkey as a young man and grew a mustache there that he still wears, said the conservatives were exploiting the issue before elections in 2008. He said he was confident that the courts would reinstate the building permit.

 

Fears about mosques are not entirely misplaced, he acknowledged. Munich’s oldest mosque is under police surveillance because of its radical tendencies. But Mr. Ude said the planned mosque — which is linked to Ditim, a moderate Turkish group — would pose no danger.

 

For Turkish residents of Munich, even those who are not religious, the mosque has become a fraught symbol. “This has been a very emotional debate for me,” said Sedef Ozakin, a female member of the city council. “I think, ‘Why should I integrate into this country when it doesn’t even recognize my religious beliefs?’ ”

[hodman]

Good for the Muslims in Germany!