Bekir Alboğa

Bekir Alboğa, 2016

Bekir Alboğa (born January 3, 1963 in Doğanhisar , Turkey ) is a German scholar of Islam . From 2012 to 2017 he was general secretary of the “ Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion ” (DİTİB).

Life

Alboğa comes from a Turkish guest worker family ; his father came to Germany in the early 1960s . In 1980 his son followed him as part of the family reunification . In 1982 he began studying German at Selçuk University in Konya . In Germany, Alboğa studied Islamic studies, journalism , communication studies and Ottoman-Altaic studies at the University of Göttingen from 1984 to 1990 , and in 2012 he received his doctorate from the University of Heidelberg .

In 1995 he worked as an imam and educational officer in the Mannheim Yavuz Sultan Selim mosque and became the Muslim chairman of the Christian-Islamic Society in Mannheim. In 2004 he moved to the dialogue department at DİTİB headquarters in Cologne and became head of the department for intercultural and interreligious encounters. In addition to his work for the “Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion”, he is a research assistant at the Institute for German-Turkish Integration Studies. He also became a member of the German Islam Conference and the Integration Summit for DİTİB .

Alboğa was spokesman for the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany for six months in 2007/2008, 2009/2010 and 2011/2012 .

In 2018, Alboğa applied to run for the AKP in the Turkish parliamentary elections in his hometown of Konya, but did not make it onto the candidate list. His application again raised doubts about DİTİB's independence from the Turkish government. Alboğa had always emphasized that it was a German religious community that was apolitical. Upon request, he let it be known that he would resign from his DİTİB offices for the duration of his political activity. After his unsuccessful AKP candidacy became known, DİTİB announced the termination of Alboğa's employment relationship, as his political activities and the tasks assigned to him in the DİTİB association could not be reconciled. This also ended his work as a commissioner for interreligious dialogue .

Bekir Alboğa has a daughter and two sons. In 2013 he took on German citizenship.

Fonts

with Georg Bienemann, Werner Höbsch : Ready for dialogue. Christians and Muslims in conversation. Published by the Catholic State Working Group for Child and Youth Protection North Rhine-Westphalia eV, Münster 2007.
with Georg Bienemann, Werner Höbsch: Christians and Muslims next door. Don Bosco, Munich 2008, ISBN 978-3-7698-1661-7 .