Hamas attacks have reopened Germany’s Muslim integration debate

When Berlin’s newest mosque opened six years ago, the televised scenes of laughing, dancing women challenged many ideas about what to expect from a house of Islamic worship.

The Ibn-Rushd-Goethe mosque was founded by a team around Seyran Ates, a formidable German women’s rights lawyer and Muslim feminist. In premises sublet from a Lutheran church, Ates hoped to realise her dream of an inclusive faith space where all – heterosexuals, queer people, even non-Muslims – would be welcome.

“Men and women will pray together. It will be possible for women to lead prayers and preach,” Ates said in 2017.

“With that we triggered a lot of anger and annoyance, people sent us messages that we should be beheaded”

No sooner had the doors opened than the waves of protest began, requiring 24-hour police protection for Ates and the mosque. Things got even darker after October 7th. When the liberal mosque issued a clear and public condemnation of Hamas as a terrorist organisation and support for Israel’s right to defend itself and secure its existence, a chorus of angry protesters took aim at what one called a “place of devil worship”.

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“With that we triggered a lot of anger and annoyance, people sent us messages that we should be beheaded,” says Ates, who was born in Istanbul but moved to Germany with her parents as a six-year-old in 1969.

It was after security authorities picked up on concrete plans for an attack on the mosque and Ates that she announced the closure until the end of 2024.

This first visible victim of the October 7th attack in Germany is part of a long-running integration debate around the views of Germany’s Muslim community, which, in the current Middle East conflict, has had a clear pro-Palestinian and anti-Israeli focus.

Though many marches focus on ceasefires and concern for Gaza civilians, authorities note frequent anti-Semitic messaging at demos and in online postings, which have an added component in the context of Germany’s 20th-century history.

Some German conservatives are spinning a fifth column narrative of imported anti-Semitism, which others suggest is merely a distraction from home-grown problems. Above all, they say, it overlooks the multi-ethnic nature of German identity today.

Germany’s Muslim community comprises almost 7 per cent of the population, an estimated 5.6 million people, though no official register exists. Almost half are migrants from Turkey and their descendants (47 per cent) while 27 per cent have roots in Arabic-speaking countries in the Middle East (19 per cent) or northern Africa (8 per cent).

An estimated 2,350 Islamic congregations exist in Germany, and about 70 per cent of practising Muslims attend a mosque funded by DITIB, an organisation steered from Turkey.

In a 2015 Bundestag submission, DITIB said its mosques were “open to all” and that it “rejects every form of violence and [rejects] calls for violence”.

But in Friday prayers after the October 7th attacks, the president of DITIB’s Turkish parent organisation, Ali Erbas, likened Israel to “a rusty dagger stuck in the heart of Muslim geography” that had resorted to “all kinds of oppression against Muslims in the territories it occupied”.

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The response to the Hamas terror attack on October 7th has been fierce. In the weeks since then, Israel has unleashed a war against Hamas but in which thousands of civilians in Gaza have lost their lives. Where will that war lead, and who will rule Gaza if Israel achieves its goal of eliminating Hamas? Irish Times columnist Fintan O'Toole talks to Hugh Linehan about why the only viable process is a peace process - and why Israel's current government is not able to envisage one.

In its own post-attack statement, Germany’s DITIB acknowledged that Hamas started the latest attacks and condemned violence against the civilian population on all sides, but it made no mention of Israel’s right to defend itself – or exist.

After protest it updated its statement to “condemn the unspeakable Hamas attacks on Israeli civil population in the harshest of terms”. It added that “Israel’s right to exist may not be questioned, neither the right to exist of Palestine”.

While these largely conservative religious communities in Germany have encouraged members to attend a big pro-Palestine rallies since October – with the largest yet expected on Saturday in Berlin – concerns are growing over the extremist element steered by mosques and imams largely beyond German control.

Agitation against Israel and glorification of Hamas are standard fare in many of these mosques, so few German observers were surprised at their failure to condemn clearly the attacks on Israel.

“Criticism is formulated more generally because you don’t want to upset some of your members, some of whom include believers with more extreme attitudes towards Israel,” says Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, a former federal justice minister and now a state anti-discrimination commissioner.

Hamburg’s political parties united after the October 7th attacks to demand the Blue Mosque and its operating organisation be banned by Germany’s federal interior ministry

As Berlin’s best-known liberal mosque closes, anger is growing that Hamburg’s so-called Blue Mosque remains open. Years of surveillance by German intelligence indicate that, behind the decorative oriental facade on Hamburg’s Alster lake is a hotbed of anti-Semitic, anti-democratic and misogynistic preaching and agitation. Its proven links to the terrorist Hizbullah militia and Iran, the most influential supporter of Hamas, have yielded little but expressions of concern and general dithering going back years.

But Hamburg’s political parties united after the October 7th attacks to demand the mosque and its operating organisation be banned by Germany’s federal interior ministry.

The ministry has declined a request for comment on this, though on Thursday minister Nancy Faeser announced it was banning local operations of Hamas and Samidoun, an organisation it said organised “feasts of celebration” in Germany after the October 7th attacks.

“These spontaneous celebrations ... show the anti-Semitic, inhuman world view of Samidoun in a particularly disgusting way,” Faeser said.

Pressure on this front will continue to build ahead of a likely visit to Germany later this month by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

His insistence that Israel is guilty of war crimes and that Hamas is not a terrorist organisation carry huge weight among many people with Turkish roots living in Germany, many of whom consume only state-run Turkish media and narratives.

In last May’s presidential election, Turkish citizens living in Germany gave Erdogan a proportionately higher share of presidential votes than in Turkey itself.

The tense German debate on October 7th and its aftermath comes just as the Scholz administration presents proposals to liberalise German citizenship laws.

Spotting a political opportunity, the opposition centre-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has suggested naturalisation should come with a condition: accepting Israel’s security and right to exist. “Anyone who can’t sign up to that has no place in Germany,” said the party’s leader, Friedrich Merz.

Its critics say the CDU is making prejudiced assumptions that German anti-Semitic agitation is an external, imported problem involving immigrants attending foreign-controlled mosques.

For Gilda Sahebi, a prominent German-Iranian journalist, this is “pure racism” because the CDU “doesn’t know which people are Germans and which aren’t and can be deported”.

“Our problem is that this is not imported anti-Semitism, this is ours,” Sahebi said on a popular German talkshow this week. “To suggest that these people don’t belong to Germany because they have a different ethnicity – that is racism.”

Some 47 per cent of the country’s Muslims have German citizenship, according to official statistics. As for their religiosity, a representative 2021 survey by the reputable Allensbach institute that asked participants “Are you religious?” found that 64 per cent of Muslims in Germany viewed themselves as religious – similar to the 63 per cent of Catholics.

A study last March by the Robert Bosch Foundation found that although 11 per cent of Germans without migration roots agreed with classic anti-Semitic tropes such as “Jews have too much influence in the world”, this view was shared by 23.5 per cent of respondents with migrant roots – and 52 per cent of those with Turkish roots.

At the same time, the study found the migrant population with a lower incidence than the majority ethnic German population of so-called “secondary anti-Semitism”. In the German historical context, this manifests itself in minimising the Holocaust or – in discussions about Israel – in a victim-perpetrator reversal.

I am also concerned about anti-Semitism in parts of the political left, and unfortunately also among young activists

—  Federal economics minister Robert Habeck

Nearly a month on, the shockwaves of October 7th have revived Germany’s old, unresolved integration debate, prompting leading Green cabinet ministers to warn that anti-Semitism in Germany takes many forms, all of which are of concern.

Federal economics minister Robert Habeck warned that imported, Islamist-led anti-Semitism was a concern, but no less than “anti-Semitism consolidated in Germany”.

“I am also concerned about anti-Semitism in parts of the political left, and unfortunately also among young activists,” he added, warning that colonialism discourse “cannot be used to legitimise systematic violence against Jews”.

With the closure of Berlin’s Ibn-Rushd-Goethe mosque, founder Seyran Ates says she is “so exhausted and tired” by the surge in threatening messages since October 7th that she doesn’t even read them any more. Those threats continue, meaning the lawyer continues to live with 24-hour police protection.

“I pray every day for the bodyguards,” she told Berlin broadcaster RBB. “I am just thankful that the state protects me.”