Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion

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Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion V.
Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği
(DİTİB)
logo
legal form registered association
founding 5th July 1984
Seat GermanyGermany Cologne
Chair Kazım Turkmen
Members over 900 clubs
Website ditib.de

The Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion e. V. ( Turkish Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği , abbreviated DİTİB ) is the largest Sunni - Islamic organization in Germany .

The association, based in Cologne - Ehrenfeld , has been registered with the Cologne District Court since July 5, 1984 . He is under the permanent management, control and supervision of the State Presidium for Religious Affairs of Turkey , which was previously attached to the Turkish Prime Minister's Office and is now directly subordinate to the President. He is a founding member of the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany . The chairman of DİTİB is also the Turkish embassy counselor for religious and social affairs. In addition, the DİTİB imams trained at state theological universities in Turkey are sent to Germany for five years and are de facto officials of the Turkish state, from which they are also paid.

Since September 2018, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has been reviewing the DİTİB headquarters as a suspect or observation object.

organization structure

As an organ of the Turkish government active in the Federal Republic of Germany with religious and social objectives, DİTİB represents an understanding of Islam in the sense of the Sunni Islam that is predominant in Turkey . The statutes of the registered association are not published by DİTİB, but can only be viewed at the responsible district court in Cologne . The objectives include religious support, education and instruction for Turkish Muslims living in Germany , the establishment and maintenance of places of prayer and teaching and the training of lay preachers, as well as the organization of social and cultural activities and language courses and the implementation of vocational training measures.

Organs are the general assembly, board of directors and advisory board. The latter is named as the most powerful body of the association, because according to the statutes it determines the board of directors: “§ 9, paragraph 2. Election of the board: The board is elected for a period of 2 years. Only persons proposed by the advisory board can stand for election. The advisory board has to put up 2 candidates for the election of a board member. ”At the same time, the advisory board“ exercises management, steering and control powers vis-à-vis DİTİB. The powerful advisory board, which has to be involved in decisions on all fundamental questions of the association and mostly has the final decision-making authority, consists exclusively of Diyanet officials. In addition, Diyanet representatives in the DITIB general meetings have a greater weight of votes than the representatives of the 896 DITIB local congregations. "

In terms of organization, the association has ten departments:

  • Department for the Chairman's Personal Office, Media and Public Relations
  • Advisory and supervisory services department
  • Department for Religious Services and Religious Education Practice
  • External Relations Department
  • Pilgrimage Department ( Hajj and Umrah )
  • Family and Social Services Department
  • Department of Education, Research and Publication Services
  • Administration and Financial Services Department
  • Human Resources Department (Personnel)
  • Construction and Real Estate Department

DİTİB also maintains a funeral fund to finance and organize the repatriation and burial of deceased Turkish Muslims in Turkey.

In the founding year 1984 there were 230 associations, in 2002 there were over 770 mosque associations with 130 to 150 members each, in 2005 according to the association there were 870 associations, in 2007 more than 880 and in 2014 896 associations. The affiliated local congregations are mostly located in larger West German cities and operate mosques there . Most of the mosques are backyard mosques . They are legally and economically independent registered associations that pursue the principles and statutory purposes of the DİTİB and recognize the DİTİB as an umbrella organization. However, many member organizations are becoming increasingly dependent on DİTİB headquarters by overwriting their properties to it. In 2001 55 of 66 new mosque construction projects in Germany were carried out by mosque communities belonging to DİTİB.

DİTİB regulates the posting of full-time hodschas or full-time theologians ( e.g. imams / preachers and prayer leaders) from Turkey who come to the Federal Republic as state employees for around five years and are paid and supervised by the respective consulate. It is criticized that “these prayer leaders often neither know the exact living conditions of the Turks in Germany nor have a sufficient command of the German language ”.

Each DİTİB mosque association regularly elects a board from its own members. These local councils in turn choose their DİTİB regional councils from among their ranks. Both structures are civilly organized and work on a purely voluntary basis.

In each DİTİB mosque association and each of the 15 DİTİB regional associations there is an elected youth and women's association. A DİTİB Federal Women's Association has existed since 2013. and since 2014 the DİTİB-Bundesjugendverband “Bund der Muslimischen Jugend”, in short: BDMJ

Management staff

In 2004, the Deputy General Secretary Mehmet Yıldırım accepted an unconditional headscarf ban in public schools. This view has fundamentally changed the leadership of the DITIB today and is now one of the strongest advocates for the relaxation of the burqa ban .

If, according to the statutes, there is already a close connection with the Turkish state, it results in practice that, qua office, the embassy councils for religious affairs of the Republic of Turkey in the Federal Republic of Germany provide the DİTİB presidents. Between 2003 and 2007 Rıdvan Çakır was President of DİTİB. From April 2007 to 2010 Sadi Arslan, Counselor at the Turkish Embassy , was chairman. Ali Ihsan Ünlü became the general secretary. For the first time, Ayten Kiliçarslan, a woman, was elected to the DİTİB board and immediately appointed deputy general secretary. However, she resigned from the board in 2009. Ali Dere was chairman from 2011 to 2012, İzzet Er from 2012 to 2014, and Nevzat Yaşar Aşıkoğlu from 2012 to 2019. Kazim Türkmen has been chairman since 2019. The former head of the DİTİB Department for Interreligious Dialogue , Bekir Alboğa , was spokesman for the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany from October 1, 2007 to March 31, 2008 .

Central mosques

DITIB Central Mosque Cologne

Since November 2009, the long-planned, previously controversial new construction of a central mosque has been implemented on the site of the DİTİB's Germany headquarters in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne . Another DITIB central mosque in Essen is being built in the Altendorf district . The topping-out ceremonies of both mosques were celebrated in 2011 and 2012 respectively.

The Turkologist Ursula Spuler-Stegemann warned that it was strange that the DİTİB named so many mosques in this country “after a warlord like the Constantinople conqueror Mehmed II ”.

The then chairman of the Evangelical Church in Germany, Wolfgang Huber, and the sociologist and critic of Islam, Necla Kelek , accused the association of measuring two different standards in 2007 on the occasion of the construction of mosques in Germany. In Germany they demand religious freedom for Muslims and build mosques, in Turkey, however, the same authority denies Turkish Christians and Turkish Alevis the construction of their sacred buildings and full religious freedom.

Controversy

Anti-Semitism, Relationship to Islamism and Integration

During Çakır's presidency, DİTİB paid particular attention to its portrayal as a factor ready for integration in German society. DİTİB was one of the initiators of the mass event “Together for Peace and Against Terror”. More than 20,000 Muslims took part in this demonstration in Cologne on November 21, 2004. Among the guest speakers were the Green politician Claudia Roth , the Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein and the North Rhine-Westphalian Interior Minister Fritz Behrens . The aim of the event was to condemn the use of violence in the name of Islam.

After the attack on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in France, the major German Islamic associations called for a “ vigil for tolerance and against extremism” at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin. Six months later, Robin Alexander reported to Welt am Sonntag that the event had been organized by the Federal Chancellery . This charge was contradicted by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany .

In 2015 the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) and Report Munich reported that radical Islamists were also active in DİTİB mosques. For example, a photo became known in which a board member of DİTİB Dinslaken posed with an outstretched index finger, a gesture from Salafist circles . The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung criticized the fact that there was too often a "tacit solidarity" of the old gentlemen on the mosque boards towards the misguided, angry young men and women. The DİTİB umbrella organization distanced itself from this in a press release. The responsible board member resigned immediately, and in November 2015 a new board was elected following the announcement of the resignation of the old board.

In the same year, the DİTİB community in Melsungen posted an extensive collection of sayings about Jews from the Koran and the hadiths in Turkish , in which Jews are characterized as thieves , liars , contract breakers, prophet killers as well as arrogant and stingy. In this regard, the DİTİB regional association of Hesse has distanced itself.

The Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg was the first federal state to conclude a state treaty with the DİTİB, among others, within the framework of its subject under international law . Holidays and certain rights of the Islamic minority in Hamburg are to be regulated. Furthermore, the coexistence of religions and religious instruction should be promoted. Green party leader Cem Özdemir criticized this approach: “If we open our schools for Muslim religious instruction through DİTİB, we allow Erdoğan's ideology to be disseminated in our country. I find that unbearable. "

In April 2016, Stern reported on a comic for children by the Turkish religious authority Diyanet, in which the death of a martyr is glorified. In the picture story with the message “May God bless our martyrs, may their graves be filled with holy light”, which is aimed at children, a father tells his son how honorable it is to die for one's convictions. The father says: “How nice to be a martyr!” Then his son asks him: “Do you want to be a martyr?” And receives the answer: “Of course I want to be a martyr. Who doesn't want to go to heaven? ”Elsewhere it says:“ Martyrs are so happy in heaven that they want to be martyrs ten times. ”Or:“ I wish I could be a martyr too. ”Elsewhere a girl says : “I wish I could be a martyr.” The mother replies: “If you long for it enough, then Allah will give you the opportunity.” The Ministry of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia asked the German subsidiary DİTİB to comment on this . In the statement, however, no sufficient distancing could be determined. Six months later, North Rhine-Westphalia ended its cooperation in the “Wegweiser” prevention program against Islamic extremism with the Turkish mosque association DİTİB.

The North Rhine-Westphalian Justice Minister Thomas Kutschaty (SPD) has all the DİTİB imams who are used in the prisons of North Rhine-Westphalia to look after prisoners checked by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution due to the controversy surrounding the martyr comic . He told the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger : “The preachers of DİTİB no longer enjoy a leap of faith”. The review by the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is "the consequence of the comic strip by the Diyanet religious authority, in which the death of a martyr is glorified".

Attitude to the Armenian Genocide

DİTİB denies the genocide of the Armenians and called for protests in the run-up to the Bundestag vote on the genocide resolution on June 2, 2016, together with other Turkish associations and organizations, including the Turkish community in Germany and the Union of European-Turkish Democrats . In a joint letter to the MPs, 557 Turkish migrant associations in Germany, including the DİTİB, came together to prevent recognition of the Armenian genocide in the Bundestag. After the genocide resolution was passed by the Bundestag, DİTİB canceled a Ramadan fast break, which was supposed to take place in the Sehitlik Mosque with Bundestag President Norbert Lammert , because of threats. Also Aydan Özoğuz , the Integration Commissioner of the Federal Government , was unloaded from the DİTİB from a common breaking of the fast during the Ramadan because they had not voted against the genocide resolution of the Bundestag. In addition, DİTİB imams receive special training for the purpose of denying the genocide of the Armenians .

Children in war scenes

In April 2018 it became known that in various DİTİB mosques in Germany children of preschool age in soldier uniforms and with Turkish flags had to re-enact war scenes. Images of these scenes from DİTİB mosques in Herford , Mönchengladbach and Ulm became known, and in Austria the local DİTİB counterpart “ ATIB ” organized such children's war games. At the events, young children in uniforms march through the mosque. Then they play that they sink to the ground hit by bullets. A youth then spreads the flag of Turkey over it as a shroud. Little girls sing: "I can feel the bullet that hit you in my body ... My martyr, sleep well!" The commemoration of the Battle of Gallipoli was named as the reason for these events .

The war games were heavily criticized in particular by representatives of the CDU and FDP.

Role during Turkish military offensive in Syria

During the Turkish military offensive on Afrin from mid-January 2018, according to the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution , "people attributable to individual DİTİB mosque communities developed anti-constitutional nationalist-religious activities and made corresponding statements". In the same context, there were also 26 attacks on Turkish mosques in Germany, 18 of which belonged to DİTİB. The federal government saw a direct connection between attacks and the attack on Afrin .

Connection to the Turkish state

For critics, DİTİB is “the extended arm of the Turkish state”; it is pursuing an “ Islamization of Germany” as planned and can be described as the “apron organization of the Turkish AKP ”, the party of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan . Due to such a role as the guardian of state-political interests of Turkey, which in some cases can be interpreted as Islamist, DİTİB is increasingly being criticized. According to Islamic scholar Ralph Ghadban, DİTİB stands for “Turkish nationalism instead of integration.” Süleyman Sögütlü is a board member of the Offenburg DITIB mosque and describes himself as “non-political”. In November 2016, a photo of Sögütlü became known showing him in front of the Turkish national flag with the greeting of the right-wing extremist Gray Wolves . He had published it himself on Facebook . In the report, Civan Altan is quoted from the board of directors of the Yazidi Cultural Center, according to which Turkish foreign policy is practiced in the mosque, but hardly any religion. According to the then mayor of Berlin-Neukölln Franziska Giffey , DİTİB is "controlled by Turkey and communicates Turkish political understanding - not that of our country". The head of the international extremism department at the Office for the Protection of the Constitution in Baden-Württemberg has observed a "rollback" in the DİTİB communities since Recep Tayyip Erdoğan took office. The then CSU General Secretary Andreas Scheuer also sees the proximity of DİTİB to Erdoğan as a cause for concern because Turkey under the Erdoğan government is increasingly distancing itself from the fundamental values ​​of an enlightened Europe. The financing of mosques and Islamic kindergartens from abroad, especially from Turkey and Saudi Arabia, must be ended so that extreme values ​​are not imported in some cases. In 2015, a law was passed in Austria prohibiting the funding of religious associations from abroad. On the basis of the law, the visa for an imam sent by DİTİB was not extended at the beginning of 2016 . 64 other prayer leaders are also threatened with de facto expulsion. DİTİB sends 970 Turkish imams to Germany, most of whom cannot speak German and who are regularly exchanged every five years.

“DİTİB as the representative of Turkish Islam is officially subordinate to the Turkish Ministry of the Interior. DİTİB is tasked with preventing the integration of the Turks, but receives (annually) 8.5 million euros in grants from the German state for so-called integration projects. "

- Bassam Tibi , 2017

Thomas Strobl , Minister of the Interior of Baden-Württemberg , expressed a similar opinion : “We cannot accept that.” Journalist Matthias Kamann summarized similar opinions in an article in Die Welt .

According to ARD research, there is an instruction from the Turkish religious attache that in the DİTİB mosques (also) in Germany, believers should be called to unity for Erdogan's war in Syria. In January 2018, the Diyanet had prayers in the DİTİB mosques with the sura of conquest of the Koran for a success of the Turkish military offensive against the Kurds in Syria. DİTİB mosques also spread war videos on social networks. In March 2018, round trips to Turkey for young adults are to be carried out, which are advertised in DİTİB mosque communities. At the end of these trips, "our highest military leader", Erdogan, should be paid homage. The politician Volker Beck demanded that the state of Hesse must withdraw its recognition of DİTİB as a religious community. The cooperation of the German state must be reviewed.

On April 28, 2020, the state of Hesse announced that it would suspend the partnership in denominational Muslim religious instruction with the association from the following school year due to the close proximity to the Turkish state.

Cooperation with the Turkish secret service

The Focus magazine reported repeatedly on the cooperation between the Turkish secret service and DİTİB. As early as April 1994 it was reported that the imams paid through Turkey as spiritual leaders were obliged to write a detailed report every four months on the inner workings of the Turkish communities. The 700 state mosques in Germany are known as the listening posts of the secret service. In the course of a trial against the former advisor to Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Muhammed Taha Gergerlioglu, who was described as a top spy, Focus reported in July 2015 that the state DİTİB mosque in Cologne-Ehrenfeld was considered an important base for Hakan Fidan's secret service MIT. The prayer leaders are allegedly instructed to provide information about Erdoğan critics as well as photos of alleged traitors. If a riot squad were needed for harsh punishments, the thugs of the nationalist Gray Wolves would be happy to stand by. In an “open letter” the DİTİB press office called this a “ridiculous conspiracy theory ”. The news site Die Welt quoted in December 2016 from further documents of the Cumhuriyet newspaper , which confirm the allegations of the Focus magazine. The newspaper stated that independence from the headquarters in Ankara, as Ditib officials like to claim, “cannot be that far”.

After the attempted coup in Turkey in 2016, a dispute with supporters of the Gülen movement began within DİTİB. It is classified as a terrorist organization by the AKP and the Turkish government. In a letter dated September 20, 2016, the head of the foreign department of Diyanet, Halife Keskin, instructed the diplomatic missions of Turkey and their religious attachés to report on the Gülen movement in their area. The religious attachés then asked the imams of the DİTİB congregations to report accordingly. At the end of 2016 it became known that imams were spying in their mosques for the Turkish government in several German cities and that DİTİB was collecting their reports. Some of the imams wrote very detailed reports on alleged supporters of the Gülen movement living in Germany . In a letter from the Turkish religious council to all diplomatic missions in the Cumhuriyet newspaper , “detailed reports” on the people, institutions and activities of the Gülen movement in Germany were requested. In this way, 50 lists from 38 countries were created. Reports from the consulates general in Cologne and Düsseldorf were among the lists in which the persons concerned were named by their full names . Denouncing imams are also said to have worked for the consulate in Munich . Ali Ertan Toprak ( CDU ), Federal Chairman of the Kurdish Community in Germany (KGD) and President of the Federal Working Group of Immigrant Associations (BAGIV), described the DİTİB practices as " Stasi methods" after they became known , which should not exist in Germany.

The DITIB Federal Association initially denied that municipalities had received such an instruction. DİTİB spokesman Bekir Alboğa later moved away from the denial and admitted that the imams in Germany had been asked via the Turkish consulates general to report on the Gülen movement. This mailing list was "simply a mistake and not intended". Ercan Karakoyun , the chairman of the Foundation Dialogue and Education in Berlin, a contact person for Hizmet (Gülen movement) Germany, replied that it was "already very belittling to speak of a breakdown now". Rather, the DİTİB imams wanted to find out who they were and what they were doing in their research. This is why many Hizmet supporters no longer dared to go to the DİTİB mosques and left the communities in droves.

The attorney general at the Federal tested after learning of the allegations, whether and to what extent the DİTİB is responsible for the acts of its imams. In February 2017, in the course of the espionage affair, several pieces of evidence were seized in the apartments of DİTİB imams in North Rhine-Westphalia and Rhineland-Palatinate during police raids . The Turkish Justice Minister Bekir Bozdağ condemned the raids as “a clear violation of international agreements and the German constitution”. Ultimately, freedom of religion and belief is enshrined there. Bozdağ said the raids showed how easily Germany "believes terrorists' claims". Halife Keskin, author of the original espionage assignment, caused a scandal in February 2017 because he was able to travel to Germany on February 19 unmolested by German authorities and no attempts were made to question him about the espionage affair.

Since the raids, the Federal Public Prosecutor has been investigating 19 Ditib imams who are said to have provided the Turkish government with information about opponents living in Germany.

In September 2018 it became known that the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution is examining the monitoring of the DITIB and is waiting for statements from the federal states until mid-October. A controversial debate about whether Ditib should officially be classified as a suspected case or even as an object of observation is expected in circles of the protection of the constitution.

On May 5, 2017, DİTİB was given the negative Big Brother Award in the Politics category, “because imams working for DİTİB for Turkish authorities and the MİT secret service have eavesdropped on their members and visitors and thus exposed them to persecution by Turkish government agencies should". DİTİB had previously threatened the organizer of the BigBrotherAwards, Digitalcourage eV, with a lawsuit for defamation in the event that the award ceremony took place.

Maintaining tradition as an obstacle to integration

The former Islam commissioner of the SPD and Islam critic Lale Akgün accused DİTİB of lust for power and "reactionary attitudes". As an “offshoot” of the Turkish governmental religious authority Diyanet, “these moral preachers are not concerned with religion, but with interpretative sovereignty over the social”, Akgün writes in the Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger . As an example, Akgün referred to a guideline of the Turkish authority Diyanet for “good and exemplary Muslim women”, which was later removed from the Internet, which contained “ misogynistic regulations” such as the ban on traveling alone for women. Even after it was declared that it had withdrawn it, DİTİB continued to distribute an Islam primer with the title Permitted and Denied by the Turkish Islamic scholar Hayrettin Karaman , in which beating wives is presented as appropriate behavior.

The writer and journalist Ralph Giordano took the view that DİTİB was an unsuitable developer for mosques in Germany, insofar as it was more concerned with the preservation of Turkishness than with the integration of Turkish migrants into German society. The DİTİB also replaces religion with "ultra-patriotism". The CDU citizenship parliamentary group in Hamburg accused the Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion (Ditib) to be aggressive against Christian culture. Around the turn of the year 2016/2017, Ditib representatives on the Internet had raised the mood against celebrating Christmas and New Year's Eve. As Focus reported, however, it was only about the Facebook pages of a few smaller DITIB communities

Funding and institutional influence

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The Diyanet stated that it had currently sent around 970 imams to Germany, who each regularly stayed in the Federal Republic for five years. The authority for religious affairs at the Turkish Prime Minister in Ankara, which also heads DİTİB, had around 6.4 billion Turkish lira (around 1.8 billion euros) in the 2016 budget. It builds and maintains mosques and has 120,000 employees. Since 2008, its budget item in euros has almost doubled, and in lira it has even tripled.

The journalist Jörg Lau criticized the “proximity to the Turkish state”, the DİTİB was a “long arm of Erdogan”.

The institutional connection between DİTİB and Diyanet İşleri Başkanlığı , the state praesidium for religious affairs of Turkey in Ankara, is laid down in the association's statutes. Deutschlandradio has viewed the legally binding version of the statutes at the Cologne District Court , the competent registry court , where the umbrella organization is registered as a non-profit association . Stefan Muckel , professor of public law and canon law , a well-known expert on Islamic organizations, including the DITIB, says of the statutes that the dependence on the Turkish religious council Diyanet is clear.

“DİTİB has organizational and institutional links to Diyanet. This can be seen in the statute, there are certain rights for high officials of the Turkish Office for Religious Affairs. "

- Stefan Muckel : Deutschlandradio, January 11, 2017

The statutes stipulate that the president of Diyanet is also chairman of the advisory board of DİTİB. This body alone determines who can be elected to the board . In addition, further paragraphs create a direct connection to the Turkish religious office Diyanet, said Muckel.

In October 2017, it became known that the federal government was reducing the funding for the association in 2018 to 297,500 euros. This amount is only a fifth of the 2017 funding and less than a tenth of the 2016 funding. The Federal Ministry of the Interior paid 1.47 million euros to the Ditib headquarters in Cologne and Ditib sub-associations in 2017. In 2016, 3.27 million euros were paid. The Central Council of Muslims received z. B. 2016 just under 880,000 euros, 2017 more than a million euros and should receive a good 100,000 euros in 2018.

Dispatch of imams from Turkey by Diyanet and own imam training in Germany

The object of criticism is also the sending of imams from Turkey, their lack of language skills and limited service hours, which prevent the imams from familiarizing themselves with the cultural customs in the respective countries. DİTİB rejected the imam training program designed in 2010 at the universities of Münster , Osnabrück and Tübingen .

In 2017, the Turkish religious authority Diyanet sent 350 Islamic clergymen to Germany, whose residence was approved by means of work visas with a validity of 180 days.

In 2019 it was reported several times that an amendment to the Employment Ordinance should be changed to the effect that religious staff (of any religion) from abroad must already have language skills before starting work in Germany.

With the establishment of its own imam training center in Dahlem / Eiffel, DİTİB is meeting demands for imams who have socialized in Germany. Since January 2020, it has been offering the “Religious Officer for Mosque Communities” training program for the first time. The aim is, according to a survey by the BAMF , "newly hired religious representatives and community officers, graduates of the" International Theology "course in Turkey and the Islamic Theological Centers in Germany, with which the DITIB cooperates, for practical purposes Qualify work in a mosque. " The aim of the training is to qualify as imam, muezzin, but also preacher, community pastor and community pedagogue. The two-year program is aimed at 30 people per year who have at least a bachelor's degree in Islamic theology.

The religious scholar Rauf Ceylan thinks that the imam training of the DITIB is not a solution due to the dependence on the Turkish state. According to press reports, the federal government is cautiously optimistic about the project. Interior Secretary Markus Kerber said : "This will create an alternative to sending imams from Turkey." At the same time, he warned that it was an "important, but only first step taken".

The topic of restricting the posting of workers in Germany is also part of the coalition agreement of the federal government.

War propaganda for the Turkish military operation in northern Syria

In connection with the deployment of the Turkish army against Rojava , the use of the DITIB mosques for the Turkish war propaganda was criticized: The praying of the Fetih Surah for the victory in Afrin by the Berlin religious attaché , which many DITIB communities followed, brought criticism to the DITIB a. The latter rejected them because the appeal did not come from her, but from the religious authority in Ankara. “The DITIB did not call for certain prayers in the parishes.” There were further allegations about a trip to the highest military leader in Turkey and in connection with a consular event on Martyr's Day in DITIB mosques.

Relationship with the Muslim Brotherhood

The DITIB also maintains relationships with the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood . For example, Ibrahim el-Zayat and Khaled Hanafy, two well-known personalities who are assigned to the organization by security authorities , took part in an Islam conference in Cologne's DITIB central mosque in January 2019 . Hussein Halawa , General Secretary of the European Council for Fatwa and Research (ECFR) , which is close to Muslims , was also invited . Regarding participation, the North Rhine-Westphalian Ministry of the Interior stated that “Turkey supports the movement of the Muslim Brotherhood. Against this background, the Ditib, which is dependent on the Turkish religious authority, does not seem to have any reservations about the Muslim Brotherhood ”.

Web links

Commons : Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Foundation and structure: DITIB Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion eV DITIB - Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion eV, accessed on January 3, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Erdogan's long arm in Germany . ( tagesspiegel.de [accessed on November 29, 2018]).
  3. ^ The Muslim community DITIB - umbrella organization of many religious associations ( Memento from December 3, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) ZDF broadcast “ Forum on Friday ”, October 26, 2012, accessed on November 5, 2017.
  4. ↑ The Office for the Protection of the Constitution examines the observation of Ditib . In: Welt Online . 20th September 2018.
  5. ↑ a b Kemal Hür: Statutes of the Islamic Association DITIB: Turkish officials have the say in the German association. Deutschlandfunk, January 5, 2016, accessed on January 5, 2016 (quoted from the Scientific Service of the German Bundestag).
  6. ↑ a b c d Sevket Kücükhüseyin: Turkish political organizations in Germany , Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Sankt Augustin 2002, ISBN 3-933714-55-9 .
  7. ↑ About us . DİTİB website, accessed November 5, 2017.
  8. ↑ DİTİB: First Muslim federal women's association founded in Germany . DİTİB-Bundesverband, December 1, 2013, accessed on November 5, 2017.
  9. ^ Association of Muslim Youth founded . DİTİB press release, January 8, 2014, accessed November 5, 2017.
  10. ↑ DİTİB Executive Board, accessed on November 5, 2017.
  11. ↑ a b c d Till-Reimer Stoldt: Mosque buildings excite all of Germany . In: Die Welt , September 21, 2007. Retrieved November 15, 2015.
  12. ↑ Robin Alexander: How politics stages anti-terrorism Islam. In: Welt Online . July 26, 2015, accessed November 5, 2017 .
  13. ↑ Do Muslims have to remain in the terror corner? In: islam.de. July 29, 2015, accessed November 5, 2017 .
  14. ↑ Christoph Ehrhardt: With the gesture of the Salafists. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , July 13, 2015, accessed on November 3, 2017.
  15. ^ Developments in Dinslaken . DITIB press office, July 15, 2015, accessed on November 3, 2017.
  16. ↑ Dinslaken: New beginning for the Ditib mosque . Rheinische Post , December 21, 2015, accessed on November 4, 2017.
  17. ↑ Stefan Laurin: Ditib community puts anti-Semitic agitation online. In: Die Welt , November 24, 2015, accessed November 4, 2017.
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