Immigration society
Why Islam and Germany Go Hand in Hand
For years, politicians, the media and the public have questioned whether Islam truly has a place in Germany. And yet a quick look at the country’s history coupled with the reality of modern German society leaves no room for doubt. Here are eight good reasons why Islam and Muslims play an integral role in German life.
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Because the roots of Islam in Germany go back a long way.
Did you know that Prussia chose a mosque to represent itself at the 1867 Paris Exposition? Or that Bavaria’s ‘Swan King’ Ludwig II liked to receive his subjects dressed in a sultan’s robe complete with shisha pipe and cakes made from dates? Charlemagne himself kept an elephant named Abu Abbas (a gift from the Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Raschid), while Muslim mathematicians and philosophers were prized teachers at the court of Frederick II and a Tartar unit even served in the Prussian army. Wherever you look, Germany’s history is intertwined with Islam – an opinion shared by the managing director of the Bavarian state association for the preservation of local history Rudolf Neumaier. As part of our project “Islamberatung Bayern” (Islamic Affairs Counseling in Bavaria), Neumaier recently noted: “Home is diversity; home encompasses all that is here. And Islam has been here for a very long time.”
In 2015, the Robert Bosch Stiftung and the Diocese of Rottenburg-Stuttgart launched the Islamberatung project, with Hussein Hamdan as the first Islamic Affairs Consultant in Germany. The counseling is aimed at both municipal employees and Muslim organizations, as there are questions on both sides. The aim is to strengthen Islam-related expertise in municipalities and to support Islamic actors in their integration into municipal communication and decision-making processes. Because the project was successfully established in Baden-Württemberg, Islamic counseling was also introduced in Bavaria in 2019, where it is carried out by the Eugen Biser Stiftung. Islamic counseling will also be available in communities in Austria and Switzerland from 2024.
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Because Islam caught the German imagination
From Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan” to Mozart’s “The Abduction from the Seraglio” and Karl May’s “Orient Cycle”, from the red mosque in the Schwetzingen Palace Gardens to Berlin’s New Synagogue and Dresden’s former tobacco factory Yenidze: The ‘Orient’ was a source of inspiration and longing for the Germans of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was not our ancestors, then, who decided Islam has no place in Germany – luckily for us! German culture would certainly be poorer for it.
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Because Muslims have helped build Germany
Where would Germany be without its economic miracle, the post-war Wirtschaftswunder? Muslims played a key role here: Some 14 million so-called ‘guest workers’ came to Germany between 1955 and 1973, many from Muslim-majority countries like Turkey, former Yugoslavia, Morocco, and Tunisia. Today, their descendants are creating their own work. People with Turkish roots alone, who also include both secular and Alevi people, now run more than 80,000 companies in Germany, which makes for more than 400,000 jobs. In doing so, they build bridges between mainstream German society and their, or their parents’, former homeland.
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Because Muslims have become a cornerstone of German society
Even as German politicians Serap Güler and Lamya Kaddor debate the next pension reform in the Bundestag, German national soccer captain İlkay Gündoğan passes the ball to Antonio Rüdiger, while talk show host Ahmad Mansour gets the conversation started. Not to mention that without researchers Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci, we might still have no Covid vaccine.
For a long time now, it has been inconceivable to imagine German society without Muslims, a fact backed up by the statistics: Between 5.3 and 5.6 million people in Germany are Muslim. This makes Muslims Germany’s largest religious minority – and the fastest growing. “German Muslims contribute to society: whether in politics, the media, or in science,” says Hussein Hamadan, who, as Germany’s first Islamic adviser, is closing the gap between Muslims and municipal officials. He can no longer imagine a Germany without Muslims: “Islam is part of the German reality.”
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Because Muslims are at least as democratically minded as the rest of the population – if not more so
Do Muslims make better democrats? They certainly don’t make worse ones! A representative study revealed that 81 percent of Muslims living in Germany concurred with the statement that democracy is the best form of government, while only 70 percent of the population as a whole were in agreement. Similarly, Germany’s Muslim population also exceeds the German average when it comes to volunteering and donating. “Muslims are active not only in their own communities but also in schools, associations, and sports, as well as in helping older people, their neighbors, and refugees,” reports Ayten Kılıçarslan, a former project partner of the Robert Bosch Stiftung. Certainly, more than 1,300 people are involved in the women-run charity “Sozialdienst muslimischer Frauen” (SmF), headed by Kılıçarslan. The only thing lacking, she continues, is public recognition and appreciation, which is in turn reflected in funding deficits.
Muslim women on prejudices they face
Muslim women from one of our former programs talk about the prejudices they face in everyday life – and the future they want for their daughters.
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Because the German language would be far poorer without gems like ‘wallah’ and ‘habibi’
From ‘A’ (admiral) to ‘Z’ (zenith): Just like English, the German language bears witness to centuries of intercultural exchange with the Islamic world. The Arabic article ‘al’ – Alkohol [alcohol], Algebra [algebra], Almanach [almanac], Algorithmus [algorithm], and so on – hints at a loanword brought to the ‘Occident’, and German, by Arab mathematicians and philosophers. These days, however, it is popular and youth culture we have to thank for upping the Arabic quota in the German language: You’ll struggle to get very far in the charts – or the schoolyard – these days without ‘habibi’ (my darling), ‘yallah’ (let's go), or ‘talahon’ (young man with a stereotype appearance) in your vocabulary. And don’t get us started on where our numbers come from. Wallah (I swear to God)!
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Weil die Freiheit der Religion ein Grundrecht ist
Building places of worship, teaching religious education, educating theologians, interring the dead according to religious rites, religious community organization, wearing a head covering: These are not issues up for political debate; they are fundamental rights enshrined in the principles of the German constitution. Article 4 of the German Basic Law states: “Freedom of faith and of conscience and freedom to profess a religious or philosophical creed shall be inviolable. The undisturbed practice of religion shall be guaranteed.” This holds true for Christians, Jews, Buddhists, and Hindus, just as much as for Muslims.
For many years, the Robert Bosch Stiftung has been funding projects for Muslims in Germany – pictured here are young people from the former “Yallah” project with Volker Nüske from the foundation's Immigration Society team (far left)
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Because exclusion harms us all
The number of Islamophobic hate crimes and cases of discrimination in Germany has reached an all-time high. We can see this from the latest police crime statistics as well as reports from documentation agencies like CLAIM, and the German Federal Anti-Discrimination Agency . Public debates that other Muslims as ‘foreign’ and exclude them from society are also giving rise to a growing anti-Muslim sentiment.
“Women who wear headscarves, in particular, are experiencing frequent assaults,” says Volker Nüske. As a senior project manager for the topic of immigration society at the Robert Bosch Stiftung, Nüske strives to bolster visibility and agency – for Muslims as for everyone in our immigration society. In his words, the only thing that sets Muslims aside from the rest of society is “that their inclusion is constantly put under the microscope.”