Giant Cologne mosque tests German tolerance
Cologne, Germany) - Plans to build one of the biggest mosques in Europe here have Christian leaders and the far-right up in arms about the Muslim community's bold new assertion of its presence in Germany.
An imposing but elegant new building is to go up in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne, a city that is 12 percent Muslim but is best known for its spectacular Gothic cathedral.
Currently, most Muslims pray in small, often shabby quarters spread throughout the city and often hidden from plain view.
A visit to a typical prayer centre in Cologne reveals a stifling room in a prefabricated beige building where fake crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Two giant posters of Mecca and Medina adorn the thick walls.
Frequently more than 1 000 worshippers attend Friday prayers at the building which once housed a pharmaceuticals factory, squeezed between a petrol station and a noisy street.
If the crowd grows too big, prayer mats are laid out outside.
"Do you really want us to continue to pray in this miserable place?" asked Bekir Alboga, the director of intercultural dialogue at the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), which runs the centre.
"Just as the Christians have their churches and the Jews their synagogues, we want to pray in a mosque."
Which is what led DITIB, the biggest Muslim organisation in Germany, to press ahead with plans to build the sprawling new mosque and administrative building.
Two 55-metre-tall minarets will frame its 34,5-metre-tall glass cupola, high above a chamber where 2 000 people will be able to worship at once.
Construction, financed by private donations and a bank loan, is to begin this year.
The conservative mayor of Cologne, Fritz Schramma, called the plans "excellent, both aesthetically but also symbolically."
He is joined by local officials from across the political spectrum.
"Cologne has 120 000 Muslims," the Social Democratic district councilman, Josef Wirges, said.
"They should be able to pray at a prestigious building," he said. "After all we have the beautiful Cologne cathedral."
But others in the city on the Rhine nicknamed "the Rome of the north" which hosted the Catholic Church's World Youth Day in 2005 are eyeing the plans with suspicion.
The Archbishop of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, said he understood why a giant mosque in their midst would make some in the city wary, adding that he too had a "negative impression" of the plans.
"You have to take people's fears seriously," Schramma added.
"But these people have never been concerned about the fact that there is already a mosque here," albeit insufficient for the community's needs.
The debate has exposed deep faultlines between Germans and the more than three-million-strong Muslim minority.
In a country in which immigrants were long considered temporary "guest workers," many harbour resentment that some Turks, for example, still do not speak German 40 years after their arrival.
Muslim immigrants respond that integration is a two-way street and requires more respect and tolerance on the part of Germans.
Similar rows have recently broken out in other German cities including Berlin, as well as the Netherlands and Spain.
The debate in Cologne grew more heated when a prominent Jewish writer and Holocaust survivor, Ralph Giordano, called for the mosque to be stopped because it would only backfire in its aim to encourage more integration.
Saying that Muslim women "veiled from head to toe" looked like "human penguins", Giordano found himself in uncomfortably close company with a right-wing citizens' group called "Pro Cologne" which has five members on the city council and has waged an anti-foreigner campaign against the mosque.
The organisation argues that it will be a symbol of the creeping "Islamisation" of European society and a haven for extremists.
"It reinforces the development of parallel communities and the authority of an imam who can impose the Sharia (Islamic law)," Pro Cologne leader Manfred Rouhs said.
In the working-class neighbourhood of rundown apartment buildings where women in headscarves share the sidewalk with trendy students, Alboga of DITIB seeks common ground.
"We are not a danger to the country," he said. "Our mosque is an open one."
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Friday, August 03, 2007
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