History of Islam in Germany

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The history of Islam in Germany begins in the 18th century with the permanent establishment of the first Islamic communities. Contacts between the Islamic world and the Roman Empire of the German nation began with a visit by Muslim envoys to the Frankish ruler Karl in Aachen in 788. Germany developed closer diplomatic relations with individual Islamic countries, beginning with the Ottoman Empire , but it wasn't until 1914 that the first mosque became established erected on German soil. A significant increase in the Muslim population has been recorded since 1945 or since the 1960s, v. a. through immigration from Muslim countries, many of them from Turkey . It is estimated that over 4 million Muslims live in Germany today, which corresponds to around 5% of the population (see under Religions in Germany # Islam ).

In 801, Caliph Harun gave Emperor Karl a white elephant named Abul Abbas

Middle Ages, Renaissance and Early Modern Times

After the first contacts between Caliph Hārūn ar-Raschīd and Charlemagne in the 2nd half of the 8th century ( Islam in France ) and a brief Arab rule over some southwestern parts of Switzerland, which was then part of the empire, and the Duchy of Burgundy in the 2nd half of the 10th century ( Islam in Switzerland ), in the 1st half of the 13th century Emperor Friedrich II was culturally under Islamic influence (see Islam in Italy ). In the battle of Tannenberg (1410) , the Teutonic Order was defeated not only by Poles and Lithuanians, but also by Polish Lipka Tatars . In the second half of the 15th century, Turkish Muslims began to invade Austria . In the middle of the 17th century, the Tatar storm in East Prussia claimed numerous victims.

After the first siege had been repelled in 1529, the city of Vienna experienced the second siege by the Ottomans in 1683 . The fear of the Turkish threat , known as " Turkish distress", shaped the attitude towards life throughout Europe. The imperial estates took part in the defense of the royal seat of the Holy Roman Empire as part of the Reichstürkenhilfe . There may have been hundreds of Muslim prisoners of war at the various courts. The majority were baptized or returned to their homeland. The legacy of these booty Turks in Germany was, at best, a grave. The oldest known and preserved graves are those of the six-year-old Mustaf in Brake from 1689 as well as those of Hammet and Hasan in the Neustädter Friedhof in Hanover from 1691.

18th and 19th centuries

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Mosque from 1799 as a staffage in the Schwetzingen palace gardens

In 1701 the first official Ottoman diplomat , Mektupçu Azmi Said Efendi, came to what was then the Holy Roman Empire . The reason for this visit was the coronation of Frederick I on January 18, 1701 in Königsberg Castle as King of Prussia. His son, King Friedrich Wilhelm I , received twenty tall Turkish prisoners of war from the Duke of Courland as a present for his guards regiment of the Lange Kerls . According to Muhammad Salim Abdullah , Friedrich Wilhelm I had a hall built as the “first mosque” for these Muslims in the military orphanage at the Langen Stall in Potsdam with the decree of Potsdam in 1731 and 1732, and the first Islamic congregation was founded on German soil in 1739 at the latest he follows. The Catholic theologian Thomas Lemmen contradicts this thesis: from a contemporary source it emerges that the said Muslims only stayed there temporarily. In the Collectaneen (collections) of Samuel Gerlach (1711–1786), which were printed in the communications of the Society for the History of Potsdam in 1883 , it says:

“The 22 great Turks who came into the hands of the subsequently unfortunate Duke of Curland in the war that Russia waged with the Turks and which Duke A. presented to our kings in 1739, were their Muslim worship They were also assigned their own room in the Royal Waysen House, and who knows what more the King would have done if he had wanted to keep them, but out of royal generosity they were all released again and sent back to their fatherland with presents. "

Friedrich Wilhelm I's successor, Frederick the Great , fully committed to religious freedom in his response to a request from the city of Frankfurt am Main in 1740 as to whether a Catholic could acquire citizenship in a Protestant city :

“All religions are the same and look good, if the people, if they profess (= practice), are noble people, and if Turks and pagans come and want to pug (= populate) the country, we want them to build mosques and churches. "

Prussian Bosniak Regiment 1786

In 1760, the Russian tsarist army was rumored to have the Turkish sultankaliph planning to declare a " holy war " against Russia out of friendship with Prussia . In fact, the Prussian king, surrounded by enemies, and an envoy of the sultan in the Bunzelwitz camp concluded a military alliance agreement in 1761. This led to the fact that the numerous Muslim soldiers serving in the Russian army defected to the Prussians. From them an independent " Bosniak Corps " with approx. 1000 men was formed in 1762 . This then led to the settlement of "Tatars" in West Prussia in 1775. The connections continued to intensify, but for a long time were not based on reciprocity. Only towards the end of the 19th century was there an upturn in German military and diplomatic activities in Turkey. There was a permanent Ottoman embassy in Berlin since 1763, but the German Embassy in Constantinople was not opened until 1877 , and the German Military Mission in the Ottoman Empire also developed its advisory activity in the service of the Ottoman Army, mainly during the Bismarck era .

The architecture in Germany of the 18th century borrowed some of the oriental architecture. In the so-called “Turkish Garden” of the Palatinate Elector Carl-Theodor , a building called the “mosque” was built in the palace gardens of Schwetzingen , which was not designed as a place of prayer, but as an expression of the Enlightenment and Orientalism and (according to Lange / 1994) how other orientalizing buildings were not used in this way either. According to Muhammad Salim Abdullah , however, it was used as a place of prayer by prisoners of war Zouaves and Turkos from 1870/71 .

On October 29, 1798, the third Ottoman envoy, Ali Aziz Efendi, died. The Prussian king made an area available for his burial. Another change of site followed. This new area formed the cornerstone of the Turkish cemetery on Columbiadamm, which is still in use today .

Prussian-German Muslims fought against Napoleon's army in the campaigns of Frederick the Great and in the Battle of Prussian Eylau on February 7th and 8th, 1807 .

20th century to 1945

Postcard from the wooden mosque of the half moon camp
Adolf Hitler with the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem Amin al-Husseini (November 28, 1941)

The founder of the International Sufi Order , Hazrat Inayat Khan , also stopped in Germany on a trip to the USA in 1910.

At the instigation of the intelligence agency for the Orient , the half-moon camp was built in Wünsdorf near Zossen near Berlin since the beginning of the First World War , in which up to 30,000 mostly Muslim prisoners of war were interned. Attempts were made to convince the prisoners to overflow to the German side with little success. This was mainly because the prisoners were able to observe the fasting month of Ramadan and in 1914/1915 the first functioning mosque was built on German soil in the half-moon camp . After the First World War, a number of Muslim exiles and refugees stayed mainly in Berlin. Due to the danger of collapse, the wooden mosque was closed in 1924 and demolished in 1925/26. Only the "Mosche Street" and some soldiers' graves still remind of them.

In the period that followed, a number of associations were founded to promote Muslim life in Germany. In 1918 the “Association for the Support of Russian-Muslim Students eV” and the “Aid Association for Muslims Living in Germany” were founded, unfortunately they could not achieve anything historical and sank into insignificance in the next few years.

Berlin mosque in the Nazi Empire

In 1922 the first missionary of the Ahmadiyya congregation Maulana Sadr ud-Din reached Germany to found a mission in Berlin based on the model of the Woking Muslim Mission and to bring Islam closer to the German population. As early as 1922 he founded the “Islamic Community Berlin eV” with the Muslims living in Berlin, predominantly followers of the Ahmadiyya . The imam of the mosque Maulana Sadr ud-Din also published the first German translation of the Koran by Muslims in 1939 . The converts from Germany joined this association and Ahmadiyya Islam.

The oldest surviving mosque. The Wilmersdorfer Mosque of the Ahmadiyya

Around 1924 the oldest still preserved mosque in Germany in Berlin was built by donations from the Ahmadiyya : The Wilmersdorfer mosque , which was then called the “Berlin Mosque”. In addition, the first Muslim magazine, Moslemische Revue, was published between 1924 and 1940 .

In 1924 the "Society for Islamic Worship of God" was founded. In 1927, the Islam Institute in Berlin, designed as a " pious foundation " under Islamic law, was founded . Two associations later formed, the “Islam Institute in Berlin eV” and the “Islamic Central Institute in Berlin”, referred to the tradition of the institute, which reflected a disagreement within the Muslim community of those days.

On May 30, 1930 , at the suggestion of Muhammad Nafi Tschelebi , the German Muslim Community was founded, which later operates as the German-Muslim Society . Basically it was just a matter of renaming the existing community in Brienner Strasse, which still exists today under the name "Islamic Community Berlin". This was intended to demonstrate openness to converts on the one hand and loyalty to Germany on the other. Muhammad Nafi Tschelebi, a Syrian student at the Technical University of Charlottenburg, was one of the most outstanding personalities of the Muslims in Germany at that time. He died in unknown circumstances. His body was found in the summer of 1933 on the banks of a lake in Grunewald. At that time there were around a thousand Muslims in Germany, including 300 German converts.

On October 31, 1932, the Association of Islamic World Congress / Branch Berlin was founded, which was entered in the register of associations at the Berlin-Lichterfelde District Court on May 31, 1933. With an "Islam Colloquium", this association created the first Muslim educational institution on German soil, which today belongs to the Central Institute Islam Archive Germany. The Islamic Council , founded in 1986, sees itself as the legal successor to the Association of Islamic World Congress / Berlin branch. The founding members of the Islamic Council include the VIKZ, the Sufi community "Les amis de l'Islam eV", the "Islamic community Jama 'at-un Nur eV", and the Islamic World Congress / German Section eV , which was founded in 1997 with the " Islamic World Congress Germany “(old Prussian tradition) eV united

In 1939 the Islam Institute (Ma'ahad-ul-Islam) zu Berlin eV is founded. On September 21, 1941, the Egyptian journalist Kamal Eldin Galal founded the “Islamic Central Institute in Berlin eV” in the “ Berliner Kindl ” restaurant on Kurfürstendamm, which later became the Central Islam Archive Germany eV, which has been based in Soest since 1981 . Galal worked under the code name Baschir Sufian, like most of the employees of the newly founded institute, as a journalist for the Foreign Office . In 1942 the archive received the legal status of a registered association.

Compared to Jews , Muslims in the Nazi state were not subjected to any religiously based persecution. However, there were also Arab and Muslim prisoners in all the concentration camps ; however, due to the lack of historical research on the subject, the exact number is not known. In terms of foreign policy, however, the Nazis sought alliances with some fundamentalist Muslims due to their mutual opposition to the English colonial empire. In June 1941, the British crushed a coup in Iraq led by Prime Minister Rashid Ali al-Gailani . One of those present, Mohammed Amin al-Husseini , fled to Berlin, where he arrived on November 6, 1941. Al-Husseini propagated anti-Semitism in agreement with the host: the Jews were the “bitterest enemies” of the Muslims, had always been a “corrosive element” and “ world Jewry ” had unleashed the Second World War. Al-Husseini traveled several times to Bosnia, where he recruited Muslim regiments on behalf of the SS . a. the Bosniak Waffen-Gebirgs-Division-SS Handschar . In 1943 over 800 of the Bosnian SS men mutinied and were subsequently arrested. SS leader Heinrich Himmler raved about an "ideological bond" between National Socialism and Islam . In May 1945, al-Husseini fled illegally to Switzerland, was picked up there and immediately deported to liberated France. From there he got to Cairo with official help and then to Lebanon. The individual al-Husseini is now used by right-wing extremists in part to propagate that Islam and NS were close and that today's right-wing extremists, usually anti-Muslim, have nothing to do with Nazi ideology. Overall, little research has been done into the history of Muslims during the Nazi era; according to what we know so far, there were both victims and collaborators among Muslims at that time.

History since 1945

The first post-war mosque in Hamburg (Ahmadiyya movement)

After the end of the war, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was able to safely send the withdrawn missionaries to Germany again. The first Ahmadiyya missionaries came to Germany and via Switzerland with the British occupiers. From 1946 to 1961, Sheikh Nasir Ahmad, an Ahmadiya missionary from Switzerland, founded the first missionary offices in Germany.

In August 1955 the Ahmadiyya members registered again as eV in Hamburg.

In 1954 a revised German translation of the Koran was published, which completely replaced the translation by the Berlin imam Sadr ud-Din . The first German edition of the Koran by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat was praised by Al-Azhar University in Cairo when it was published in 1954 and was described as an outstanding German translation.

In 1956 the first post-war mosque was built by the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat in Hamburg ( Fazle-Omar-Moschee ).

In 1957 the oldest mosque in Hesse was built in Frankfurt by the Ahmadiyya . The cornerstone of the first two post-war mosques was laid by the former President of the General Assembly of the UN - and President of the International Court of Justice, Sir Muhammad Zafrullah Khan .

In the years up to the immigration of guest workers from Muslim countries, Islam was represented and represented by the Ahmadiyya community until the 1970s, as it is the only association that has been active in Germany without interruption since the 1920s.

With the increasing organization of guest workers and immigrants from other Islamic countries in the 1970s and 1980s, several independent associations and Islamic groups were formed. These formed new Islamic umbrella organizations. The increasing level of organization of new associations and clubs and their rejection of Ahmadiyya Islam led to the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community being pushed out of politics and the media. In Germany, local members of individual associations had mosques with minarets and domes built. Several backyard mosques were built. In 1978, the Christian-Islamic Meeting and Documentation Center (CIBEDO) was founded in Frankfurt / Main to promote interreligious dialogue and the coexistence of Christians and Muslims.

In modern times, Islam is split up into various groups and independent local associations. The Ditib Turkish-Islamic Union of the Institute for Religion was registered as a registered association in 1984 and claimed to represent the majority of Turkish Muslims. It is financed and controlled by the Turkish state. In fact, only a minority of Turkish Muslims are organized in associations. Estimates range from 15 to 20 percent of Turkish Muslims.

After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001 , radical Islamic views moved into the media interest. From then on, Islam was increasingly viewed as a danger by the non-Muslim population. Demonstrations against new mosques are taking place more and more. The first mosque in East Germany (Berlin-Heinersdorf) in particular led to protests.

Some Wahhabi Salafist associations emerged; these are observed by the protection of the constitution and the first associations are banned by the Federal Ministry of the Interior from 1993.

As the first Federal President of Germany, Christian Wulff stated in a keynote address on October 3, 2010 on the 20th anniversary of German unity that Islam belongs to Germany: the wording "Islam belongs to Germany". In 2015, Chancellor Angela Merkel affirmed this statement with the words: "Islam undoubtedly belongs to Germany".

In 2013, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Jamaat was recognized as a public corporation and legally and politically equal to the Christian churches.

In 2013, the first Islamic religious instruction was introduced at Hessian schools.

In the 2015/2016 refugee crisis in Germany , hundreds of thousands more Muslims came to Germany , mainly from Arabic-speaking areas in the Middle East and North Africa.

literature

See also

Remarks

  1. ↑ Peter Carstens: Much more Muslims than expected FAZ.net from June 24, 2009.
  2. ↑ Petra Kappert , Ruth Haerkötter, Ingeborg Böer: Turks in Berlin 1871-1945. de Gruyter Verlag, Berlin 2002, ISBN 3-11-017465-0
  3. ↑ Ingeborg Boer, Ingeborg Böer, Ruth Haerkötter, Petra Kappert: Turks in Berlin 1871-1945 - a metropolis in the memories of Ottoman and Turkish contemporary witnesses , page 2. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2002
  4. ↑ Thomas Schmitt: Mosques in Germany - Conflicts about their establishment and use , page 48. German Academy for Regional Studies, Leipzig 2003
  5. ^ Muhammad S. Abdullah: Crescent under the Prussian eagle - the history of the Islamic community in Prussia (1731-1934) , page 8. Verlag für Christian-Islamisches Literatur, 1984
  6. ↑ Olaf Thiede, Jörg Wacker: Chronology of Potsdam and its surroundings - events, buildings , page 503. O. Thiede, 2007
  7. ↑ Heinz Duthel: Islam in Germany - This is what the future of Germany and Europe looks like , page 15. BoD - Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2013
  8. ↑ Bärbel Beinhauer-Köhler: From the invisible to the visible religion - spaces of Muslim religious practice in the Federal Republic , In: Zeithistorische Forschungen / Studies in Contemporary History, online edition, 7 (2010), issue 3, pp. 408-430.
  9. ↑ Tagesspiegel online from March 27, 2018: Islam belongs to Prussia
  10. ↑ Protection of the Constitution of the State of Brandenburg: Protection of the Constitution in dialogue with science and Muslim organizations
  11. ↑ Jürgen Ahrens: How German is that? The most popular misconceptions about Germany and the Germans . Heyne Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-641-08401-1 .
  12. ↑ [1]
  13. ↑ Michael Sontheimer: Hitler's Arab friend. In: Spiegel history. 3/2009. May 26, 2009, accessed March 13, 2015 .
  14. ↑ Gerhard Höpp : Muslims under the swastika ( Memento from August 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) website with information on the years 1927 to 1945
  15. ↑ The Islam Archive in Solingen maintains holdings of the various groups that called themselves “World Congress” in Germany after 1945, according to the following scheme: "4. Church foundation (from 1963). 4.1. Islamic World Congress / German Section (re-establishment) from 1993 4.2. Islamic World Congress Germany (apT) eV (apT = old Prussian trad.)
  16. ↑ Gerhard Höpp: Muslims under the swastika see previous note.
  17. ↑ a b For a differentiated view , Deutsche Welle , 2005
  18. ^ Gerhard Höpp: Muslims under the swastika
  19. ↑ Thomas Lemmen: Muslims in Germany. a challenge for church and society. In: Writings of the Center for European Integration Research. Volume 46, Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft, Baden-Baden 2001, p. 30.
  20. ↑ [2]
  21. ↑ Germany's oldest mosque turned 50 , Hamburger Abendblatt dated June 19, 2007. Note on the headline: The oldest mosque in Germany is the Wilmersdorfer Mosque in Berlin, the Fazle-Omar-Mosque is the oldest mosque in Hamburg and West Germany and the oldest post-war mosque.
  22. ^ President of the UN
  23. ↑ n-tv: Mosque turns 50
  24. ^ Thomas Lemmen: Islamic Organizations in Germany . Ed .: Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-86077-880-3 , Chapter 5.7 Organizations of the Ahmadis , p. 71/72 ( online [accessed July 20, 2015]).
  25. ^ Thomas Lemmen: Islamic Organizations in Germany . Ed .: Friedrich Ebert Foundation. Bonn 2000, ISBN 3-86077-880-3 , Chapter 5 The Islamic Organizations in Detail , p. 34–72 ( online [accessed July 20, 2015]).
  26. ↑ [3]
  27. ↑ [4]
  28. ↑ [5]
  29. ↑ [6] BMI prohibitions on associations
  30. ↑ BP Wulff speech Islam now officially belongs to Germany
  31. ↑ Chancellor Merkel on Islam in Germany
  32. ↑ welt.de: Islam now officially belongs to Germany
  33. ↑ hr-online on January 10, 2010: Two possible partners: Islam lessons are getting closer. Archived from the original on January 12, 2011 ; Retrieved February 3, 2011 .

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