Pat Dollard | Young Americans

Mosque Wars Erupt

(RTRS): Petitions in London, protests in Cologne, a court case in Marseille and a violent clash in Berlin — Muslims in Europe are meeting resistance to plans for mosques that befit Islam’s status as the continent’s second religion. Across Europe, Muslims who have long prayed in garages and old factories now face scepticism and concern for wanting to build stately mosques to … give proud testimony to the faith and solidity of their Islamic communities. Some critics reject them as signs of “Islamisation.” Others say minarets would scar their city’s skyline. Given the role some mosques have played as centres for terrorists, others see Muslim houses of worship as potential security threats.

“The increasingly visible presence of Muslims has prompted questions in all European societies,” Tariq Ramadan, one of Europe’s leading Muslim spokesmen, argued when far-right groups proposed this year to ban minarets in his native Switzerland.

The issue hit the headlines in Britain in late July when a petition against a “mega-mosque” next to the 2012 London Olympics site was posted on Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s Web site. It attracted more than 275,000 signatures before it was taken down. In Germany last month, there were anti-mosque protests in Cologne and Berlin and a local council voted against one in Munich. A French far-right group vowed to sue the city of Marseille for a second time for helping build a “grand mosque.”

Bekir Alboga of the Turkish Islamic Union (DITIB) in Cologne said critics who see these new mosques as signs of separatism or of an Islamic colonisation of Europe miss the point. “The desire of Muslims to build a house of worship means they want to feel at home and live in harmony with their religion in a society they have accepted as theirs,” he said. Plans to build one of the biggest mosques in Europe here have Christian leaders and the far-right up in arms over the Muslim community’s bold new assertion of its presence in Germany.

An imposing but elegant new building is to go up in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne, a city that is 12 percent Muslim but is best known for its spectacular Gothic cathedral.

Currently, most Muslims pray in small, often shabby quarters spread throughout the city and often hidden from plain view.

A visit to a typical prayer center in Cologne reveals a stifling room in a prefabricated beige building where fake crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Two giant posters of Makkah and Madina adorn the thick walls.

Frequently more than 1,000 worshippers attend Friday prayers at the building which once housed a pharmaceuticals factory, squeezed between a petrol station and a noisy street. If the crowd grows too big, prayer mats are laid out outside.

“Do you really want us to continue to pray in this miserable place?” asked Bekir Alboga, the director of intercultural dialogue at the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), which runs the center.

“Just as the Christians have their churches and the Jews their synagogues, we want to pray in a mosque.”
Which is what led DITIB, the biggest Muslim organization in Germany, to press ahead with plans to build the sprawling new mosque and administrative building.

Two 55-meter-tall (180-foot-tall) minarets will frame its 34.5-metre-tall glass cupola, high above a chamber where 2,000 people will be able to worship at once. Construction, financed by private donations and a bank loan, is to begin this year.

The conservative mayor of Cologne, Fritz Schramma, called the plans “excellent, both aesthetically but also symbolically.” He is joined by local officials from across the political spectrum.

“Cologne has 120,000 Muslims,” the Social Democratic district councilman, Josef Wirges, said. “They should be able to pray at a prestigious building,” he said. “After all we have the beautiful Cologne cathedral.”

But others in the city on the Rhine nicknamed “the Rome of the north” which hosted the Catholic Church’s World Youth Day in 2005 are eyeing the plans with suspicion. The Archbishop of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, said he understood why a giant mosque in their midst would make some in the city wary, adding that he too had a “negative impression” of the plans.

“You have to take people’s fears seriously,” Schramma added. “But these people have never been concerned about the fact that there is already a mosque here,” albeit insufficient for the community’s needs.

The debate has exposed deep fault lines between Germans and the more than three-million-strong Muslim minority. In a country in which immigrants were long considered temporary “guest workers,” many harbor resentment that some Turks, for example, still do not speak German 40 years after their arrival.

Muslim immigrants respond that integration is a two-way street and requires more respect and tolerance on the part of Germans.
Major mosque projects need years of planning. In the process, Muslim leaders and city officials get to know each other better and most mayors end up supporting them as projects that help integrate the new minority.

But neighbourhood groups and far-right activists, sometimes joined by Christian leaders, have recently spoken out against them as it became clear they would soon have a mosque next door.

The tensions arise because houses of worship have a high symbolic value in Europe, where the cathedral or church is usually the centre of town, said Riem Spielhaus, an expert on Islam in Europe at Berlin’s Humboldt University.

“A mosque symbolically retraces the changes that have been made in society,” she said. “It reopens the debate on whether these changes are good, whether Muslims should live here, even whether Islam is a good religion.”

But this is rarely discussed openly, she said. Disputes about mosques tend to focus on other issues, such as terrorism, the role of women or the availablity of parking spots. Critics of the London mosque, led by a local councillor from a Christian group, argue a large mosque with room for 12,000 worshipers will turn the integrated neighbourhood into a “one-faith zone” driving out followers of other faiths. They also charge that Tablighi Jamaat (TJ), the Islamic missionaries building the mosque, are a security risk because “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid and two suicide bombers in the July 2005 London attacks followed the publicity-shy movement. In Cologne, DITIB’s plan for a modern Ottoman-style mosque has met charges it will be too big for a city housing one of the most imposing Gothic cathedrals in the Christian world. “I have a queasy feeling,” Catholic Cardinal Joachim Meisner said. “A mosque would give the city a different panorama. Given our history, there is a shock that Muslim immigration has brought a cultural rupture in our German and European culture.”

A mosque project in Pankow, an eastern Berlin area with few Muslims, sparked violent clashes last month between supporters and opponents. Neo-Nazi groups have joined the protests and a truck was torched at the construction site in March.

France, whose five million-strong Muslim minority is Europe’s largest, has a longer history of mosques in its cities and many mayors provide land at low cost for them.

A far-right political party, the National Republican Movement (MNR), unexpectedly won two court cases this year against these subsidies in the Paris suburb of Montreuil and in Marseille, where a quarter of the population is Muslim.

Mayor Jean-Claude Gaudin of Marseille was so set on seeing a “cathedral mosque” built after decades of debate that he quickly got approval for a new contract at slightly higher rates.

“Everyone has a right to a significant house of worship,” he told the city council. Most Marseille Muslims now pray in neighbourhood mosques too small for their congregations.

In Switzerland, two right-wing parties have launched a petition for a referendum to ban minarets on mosques there.

Italy’s anti-immigration Northern League called last month for all mosques there to be closed for security checks. In December 2006, protesters left a severed pig’s head outside a mosque being built in the Tuscan town of Colle di Val d’Elsa.

Concern about Islam has deep roots in some countries. In Greece, which lived for four centuries under Ottoman Turkish rule, Muslims only got their first purpose-built mosque in Athens in June. Plans for a larger one are still on hold.

In Spain, a bastion of Islamic culture for eight centuries until 1492, Catholic leaders nervously turned down a request from Muslims to pray in Cordoba Cathedral, originally a mosque.

A local Muslim group wants to build a half-scale replica of the mosque for its own use, but has not yet submitted its plan.