ISLAM IN EUROPEGermany Trains New Generation of Muslim Leaders
In a groundbreaking move, Germany has begun training its own Muslim religious leaders, fostering a deeper connection with local communities. Muslim groups across the country are seeing change brought by a new generation.
Osman Soyer is a religious affairs officer who was sworn into office this month in the Sehitlik Mosque in Berlin’s Neukölln district. He is one of 28 young men and women who have been trained as “religious representatives” by DITIB, Germany’s largest Islamic organization. They are involved in a variety of pastoral duties; this can also include acting as imams, but the job description is broader.
Soyer has been working as an Islamic religious representative in Alfter, a town near Bonn in western Germany, for a few months now. Community outreach, he says, is his top priority. It includes a wide range of activities. “I teach pupils, I’m a prayer leader, preacher and pastor. We also go to weddings, I do funerals.”
His parents came to Germany from Turkey in 1972, and his father worked at the large Opel car manufacturer near the city of Mainz — a fairly typical life for many immigrants at the time.
The swearing-in ceremony in Berlin reflects this history. Around 900 mosque communities make up the Turkish-Islamic Union, part of the Institute for Religion (DITIB) in Germany. That’s out of more than 3,000 estimated mosques and Muslim prayer houses in Germany overall.
For a long time, the Turkish-Islamic Union has been financed exclusively by the powerful Diyanet Turkish state religious authority — indeed, the union’s imams were sent from Turkey to preach and provide pastoral care in Turkish.
Building Social Cohesion
The training program is an “important service,” Eyüp Kalyon, DITIB Secretary General, tells DW. He says his association is geared towards the needs of Muslims in Germany. As a religious community, it’s committed to providing personal as well as financial support and has made a shift in perspective reflected in the training of Imams in Germany to strengthen “social cohesion.”
In the future, the German language “will be a much bigger part of the picture,” he tells DW. “It will be the language that binds us all together, that connects the Muslim community in particular. That’s why our training language is German.” But maintaining Turkish-language services will also be important for older members of the community, he adds.
The idea of training Muslim clergy in Germany has long been part of integration and religious policy debates in Germany. Over the years, the German Islamic Conference (DIK), which was launched in 2006, has always emphasized the issue of imams’ lack of German language skills.
