Wilmersdorfer Mosque

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Wilmersdorfer Mosque
Wilmersdorfer Mosque
Coordinates : 52 ° 29 ′ 15.2 "  N , 13 ° 18 ′ 41.5"  E Coordinates: 52 ° 29 ′ 15.2 "  N , 13 ° 18 ′ 41.5"  E
place Berlin-Wilmersdorf
Laying of the foundation stone 1924
opening March 23, 1928
Direction / grouping AAIIL
Architectural information
Details
capacity 400
dome 1
Dome diameter Ø 10 m
Dome height 26 m
Minarets 2
Minaret height 32 m
Website: http://berlin.ahmadiyya.org/

The Wilmersdorfer Mosque (historically also Berlin Mosque or Ahmadiyya Mosque ) is the oldest existing mosque in Germany. It was built between 1924 and 1928 on behalf of the Ahmadiyya Andschuman Isha'at-i-Islam Lahore ( DMG Aḥmadiyyah Anǧuman-i Išāʿat-i Islām Lāhaur) in Brienner Strasse in the Berlin district of Wilmersdorf . The mosque has two detached minarets that are 32 meters high and a 26 meter high dome ten meters in diameter; the assembly room holds around 400 believers.

history

Weimar period

Assembly room in the mosque
The Turkish ambassador Kemaleddin Sami Pascha in front of the still unfinished mosque, Bayram April 1926
Imam Muhammad Abdullah, 1930
Service in the mosque, 1931
Aerial view of the mosque

The mosque was modeled on the Mughal architecture of the Taj Mahal mausoleum and was designed by the Berlin architect K. A. Hermann. Before that, a wooden mosque had been built in 1915 at the expense of the German Reich for Muslim prisoners of war near Wünsdorf (so-called " half-moon camp "), which was demolished in the 1920s due to its dilapidation.

The builder and current owner of the Berlin mosque in Wilmersdorf is AAIIL, which financed the construction exclusively with donations. The mosque was built between 1924 and 1927; It was ceremoniously opened on March 23, 1928.

The church was founded in 1922 at Giesebrechtstrasse 5 in Charlottenburg . There were rivalries and disputes among the Muslim associations and Islamic student groups in Berlin during the Weimar Republic , and of the mosque plans only the Wilmersdorf mosque was realized. The mosque was “open to worship equally for Muslims of all Muslim nations and all religious schools”.

Managing Director since 1925 was the writer Hugo Marcus , who from Judaism to Islam converts , but was still a member of the Jewish community remained.

In January 1934, the first German couple (Abdullah Dayer and Fatima Adaresh) to embrace Islam were married by the Imam in the mosque . Overall, the community attracted a large number of converts, including Jews such as Leopold Weiss and Elsa Schiemann-Specht, who from then on called themselves Muhammad Asad and Aziza Asad.

Period of National Socialism and the Second World War

During the National Socialist era , the rulers succeeded in exploiting the Islamic community and abusing the mosque for propaganda appearances with the SS guest of honor, the anti-Semitic Jerusalem Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini . At the same time, however, the community played a double game and secretly helped its long-time Jewish manager Hugo Marcus to escape into exile in Switzerland. The Egyptian doctor Mohamed Helmy , who lives in Berlin , secretly saved a Jewish family, and the chairman of the Islamic Central Institute, Kamal el-Din Galal, helped him with this, using secretly stolen papers from Grand Mufti Mohammed Amin al-Husseini.

From 1936 to 1938 the Russian Orthodox Christ the Resurrection Cathedral was built in the immediate vicinity (200 meters) .

At the end of the Second World War , the mosque was badly damaged after German machine-gun riflemen took up position on the minarets and the mosque therefore came under fire from the Red Army . The minarets collapsed except for a stump and the dome received an artillery hit .

post war period

After the war, the mosque was poorly restored with the help of the Allies . Additional donations came from members of the AAIIL around the world, mainly from the United States . In August 1945, around 200 Muslims attended and held their first service in the preserved rooms of the community center. On June 24, 1952, she was returned to her destination with a sermon given by the Berlin imam , Mohammed Aman Hobohm .

The Society for the Preservation of the Mosque was founded on November 17, 1990 as a support association for the Wilmersdorfer Mosque (AAIIL) . V. The mosque has been a listed building since 1993 . In 1996 the main house was restored. The northern minaret was rebuilt in 1999 and the southern minaret in 2001. The costs of over 800,000  marks were raised by the community, the Berlin State Monuments Office , the German Foundation for Monument Protection and a representative of the community from the USA .

A conference of the German and Dutch sections of the AAIIL was held in the mosque from May 25 to 27, 2007, which was also attended by the President and Emir of the global community, Abdul Karim Saeed Pasha and his wife Sahiba Saeed.

opening hours

Since 2010, Friday prayers with the Chutba have been regularly held in the Berlin mosque on Fridays ; the start is in winter time at 1 p.m. and in summer time at 1:30 p.m. The mosque's office is always manned during business hours. The mosque is also opened for special events, for example annually on “ Open Monument Day ” and on “ Open Mosque Day ” on October 3rd.

Sponsorship and teaching

Maulana Muhammad Ali , the then head of the AAIIL, called at the "Annual Conference in Lahore" in December 1921 for fundraising to set up mission houses in America and Germany. In the following year the “Berlin Muslim Mission” was founded by Maulvi Abdul Majid and Maulana Sadr ud-Din , who later became the head of the AAIIL. The AAIIL is part of the Ahmadiyya community and is subject to the Ahmadiyya doctrine in that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad is seen as a reformer of Islam.

The Berlin Muslim Mission published the magazine Moslemische Revue from 1924 to 1940 and its publisher Sadr-ud-Din published the first German translation of the Koran from a Muslim pen in 1939 .

In November 1959 Maulana Muhammad Yahya Butt took over the management of the Berlin Mission. Yahya Butt worked as an imam in the Berlin mosque for 27 years and - according to AAIIL Berlin - 157 people joined Islam under his leadership. In 1962, Yahya Butt revived the German-Muslim Society .

The “Islamic Community Berlin” is the German headquarters of the Ahmadiyya Andschuman Isha'at-i-Islam Lahore and has around 60 members. According to other sources, of 50 people who attended the service (1996), only the Imam Saeed Ahmed Chaudhry is a member of the Lahori community.

According to Manfred Backhausen there were “only a handful of Lahore Ahmadis in all of Germany in 2006”. Although the goal of “bringing people of the West closer to Islam” could be achieved to a limited extent, there was never a continuous German community in the Berlin mosque. The number of converts won was too small for this and the mosque remained almost exclusively a place of prayer for foreign Muslims in Berlin. Due to the immigration of mostly Turkish Muslims to Germany, the Berlin mosque, which is more closely connected to the Indian subcontinent, has lost its central role. The mosque in the German capital is mainly perceived as “an exotic or Indian testimony” with little reference to the Islam practiced in Germany.

After the Woking Muslim Mission, the Berlin Mission was the AAIIL's second mission in Europe.

Arson attack

An arson attack was carried out in the mosque on the night of January 8, 2011. Several self-made explosives were detonated in the entrance area, but only property damage occurred. A suspect was arrested in January 2011 and initially placed in a penal psychiatric hospital. In July 2011 the perpetrator was sentenced to two years and nine months in prison; if a mental disorder is found after the total sentence has ended, the court says he will remain in an appropriate psychiatric facility.

literature

Web links

Commons : Wilmersdorfer Moschee  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gerhard Hopp: The Wünsdorfer Mosque: An episode of Islamic life in Germany, 1915-1930 . In: Die Welt des Islams , New Ser., Vol. 36, No. 2 (July 1996), pp. 204-218.
  2. ↑ a b Chalid-Albert Seiler-Chan: Islam in Berlin and Elsewhere in the German Empire . (PDF; 1.9 MB) In: Muslim Review , October 1934
  3. ↑ a b Berlin's oldest mosque is complete again . In: Berliner Zeitung , August 30, 2001
  4. ^ A b Gerdien Jonker: The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress , Leiden 2016, pp. 144, 199.
  5. ↑ The Berlin Mosque and Mission of the Ahmadiyya Movement to Spread Islam (Lahore), p. 40
  6. ^ Gerdien Jonker: The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress . Leiden 2016, p. 142-144 .
  7. ^ Burkhard Schröder: leaders among themselves. In: tip , May 29, 1996
  8. ↑ Mohammed Aman Hobohm : Islam in Germany: New Beginnings for Muslim Community Life in Berlin after the War . From the lecture series of the Islamic University Association at the University of Cologne in WS99 / 00
  9. ↑ Ronen Steinke: How a Muslim Saved a Jew from the Nazis, Süddeutsche Zeitung. Retrieved June 8, 2017 .
  10. ↑ Islamic Mosque Wilmersdorf
  11. ^ Commercial register : "Society for the preservation of the mosque e. V. “, extract from the register of associations Berlin (Charlottenburg) VR 11145
  12. ↑ Entry in the Berlin State Monument List
  13. ↑ Lahore Ahmadiyya Conference at the Berlin Mosque (PDF; 2.7 MB), May 2007
  14. ↑ The Koran - Arabic-German . Translation, introduction and explanation by Maulana Sadr-ud-Din . Verlag der Moslemischen Revue, Berlin 1939; 3rd unchanged edition 2006.
  15. ↑ The Berlin Mosque and Mission of the Ahmadiyya Movement to Spread Islam (Lahore), p. 27
  16. ^ A Brief History of The Berlin Muslim Mission (Germany) (1922–1988) .
  17. ↑ The Berlin Mosque and Mission of the Ahmadiyya Movement to Spread Islam (Lahore), p. 74
  18. ^ Mosque in Wilmersdorf: complete with dome. In: Der Tagesspiegel , August 29, 2001
  19. ↑ Germany's oldest mosque is falling into disrepair . In: Berliner Zeitung , March 26, 1996
  20. ↑ The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement in Europe, pp. 204f
  21. ^ Arson attack on Berlin mosque . sueddeutsche.de, January 8, 2011
  22. ^ Series of arson attacks - arson attack on Berlin's oldest mosque . In: BZ , January 9, 2011
  23. ↑ Crime: Arrest warrant for mosque arsonists . In: Berliner Morgenpost . January 23, 2011. Retrieved April 4, 2015.
  24. ↑ Public prosecutor charges mosque arsonists . In: Berliner Morgenpost , March 18, 2011
  25. ↑ Berlin mosque arsonist has to go to prison . In: Berliner Morgenpost , July 6, 2011