The German government’s historical record of integrating Muslim migrants is less than stellar. The 867,000 mostly Turkish-Muslim “guest workers” who arrived in Germany during the post-World War II economic boom were originally only permitted to stay for two-year periods. Even after the two-year restriction was overturned, the government’s failure to integrate these workers and their families into German society led to residential clustering, lower educational and labor outcomes, and low levels of German language fluency.
Today, between 4.4 and 4.7 million Muslims live in Germany. Most are descendants of Turkish guest workers and have lived in the country for generations. However, about 25 percent—1.2 million immigrants, most of them from the Middle East—came to Germany between 2011 and 2015 alone. Decades of failed attempts at integrating Muslim guest workers and their families into German society has led the German government to blame Islam itself, rather than ineffective German policies, as a barrier to integration. For this reason, the German government has in recent years toyed with the idea of “Germanizing” Islam: creating a version of Islam “for and by Germany.” This entails policies including training imams in Germany, requiring that religious services be conducted in German, and mandating close cooperation between Muslim religious institutions and the German government. While some of the proposed policy changes are necessary to preserve national security, others are steeped in Islamophobia.
The underlying assumption in “German Islam” policies is that the version of Islam currently practiced by millions of Muslims in Germany is at odds with the values of German society and Western democracy as a whole. This imagined incompatibility between Western democracy and Islam is, at its core, a form of liberal Islamophobia. By extension, the government’s belief that there is a need for a reformed Islam is an endorsement of the stereotypes that have fed harmful anti-Muslim hostility across the political spectrum for years—that Muslims are resistant to change, loyal to their countries of origin rather than to Germany, and don’t believe in democracy, gender equality, or the freedom of speech.
The reality is quite different: A 2017 Bertelsmann Foundation study showed that Muslims feel slightly more connected to Germany than the average German and support democracy as a form of government at a slightly higher rate. Moreover, Muslims born in Germany disagreed with traditional gender roles at a similar rate to Catholics and Protestants. Clearly, other forms of discrimination like sexism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism are not inherent to Islam, and it is blatantly Islamophobic for politicians or the media to assume that they are.
The underlying Islamophobia in the move to Germanize Islam reveals the anti-Islam hostilities that permeate the highest ranks of the German government. In 2018, Federal Minister of the Interior Horst Seehofer provoked widespread outrage by claiming that “Islam is not part of Germany.” Disturbingly, Seehofer oversees several initiatives to improve the integration of Muslims into German society, including the German Islam Conference, a joint forum of federal and state politicians as well as Muslim religious leaders.
However, anti-Muslim hostilities in Germany are not limited to politicians: 49 percent of German Christians are uncomfortable with the idea of a Muslim marrying into their family and 52 percent of all non-Muslim German citizens view Islam as a threat. Thus, when politicians make the Muslim “other” less visible and therefore more palatable for their constituents, they are following a recipe for electoral success. In light of this political dynamic, it unfortunately comes as no surprise that major political parties like the Christian Democratic Union and the center-left Social Democratic Party support bans on hijabs, some of the most recognizable symbols of the Muslim faith. To maintain the cover that the policy’s goal is secularism and state neutrality towards religion, hijab bans are often entwined with more general restrictions for public servants on carrying or wearing religious symbols. However, these same restrictions usually include leeway for Christians: For example, the Hessian Law on Civil Servants states that “the Western Christian tradition of Hesse is to be adequately accommodated.” The law’s proponents argue that this double standard takes into account the long history of Christianity in Germany. In reality, this reflects the belief held by key figures in the German government (and by many German citizens) that Christianity is a legitimate part of German society while Islam is not.
One of the less controversial goals of Germanizing Islam is reducing the influence of foreign regimes and extremist actors in domestic Muslim organizations. Currently, the largest Sunni organization in Germany, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), receives funding and directives from Diyanet, a Turkish religious institution with direct ties to the administration of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. The majority of imams in German DITIB mosques are sent from Turkey by Diyanet for a limited time period, meaning that they rarely speak German and are typically not integrated into German society. In 2016, the Erdoğan administration confirmed accusations that 19 DITIB imams were Turkish spies, and the organization maintains close connections to the Turkish intelligence agency, MIT. Similarly, one of the largest German Shia religious institutions, the Islamic Center Hamburg (IZH), maintains a strong connection to the Iranian government, and its leader is considered the Iranian revolutionary regime’s primary representative in Europe.
Organizations like DITIB and the IZH clearly threaten Germany’s national security, and in these sorts of cases, government involvement in Islamic institutions should be welcomed. If any of the imams provided by these groups have ties to Turkey and Iran, then it is common sense that the German government should promote the training of imams domestically rather than ban these organizations outright. Since they provide religious services, language lessons, and religious education for many Muslims, these institutions, with even further government involvement, could serve as a tool to encourage Muslim integration into German society. In the long term, though, these organizations’ potential as partners for integration can only be fully realized when they are no longer connected to foreign actors.
Despite the Islamophobic motives that often inform the policy discussion, involvement in Islam by the German government is necessary in cases where the alternative compromises German national security and the inclusiveness of German society. Initiatives such as deradicalizing organi- zations like the IZH and DITIB and expanding Muslim religious education in public schools are especially important. However, Muslims should not be entirely responsible for their own inte- gration. Education in interreligious tolerance is key to prevent right-wing groups from spreading Islamophobia into the mainstream. At the end of the day, Islam should be seen as an enrichment, not a threat, to German society.