Europe and its MuslimsIslamic theology in Germany: Spanning the divide
More than four million Muslims live in Germany and 750,000 pupils of Muslim faith attend German schools. Islam is one of Germany′s religions – that is no longer a provocative statement, but a simple fact. Nonetheless, Islamic theology was not offered by German universities for many years, nor were schoolchildren offered Islamic religious education in German.
The German Council of Science and Humanities, the leading advisory body in German education policy, therefore recommended in 2010 that degree courses in Islamic studies be established at German universities. This would allow theologians, imams and, above all, Islamic religious studies teachers to be trained.
The Federal Ministry of Education and Research provided a total of 20 million euros in funding over the course of five years to pay for Islamic centres at the universities of Munster, Osnabruck, Frankfurt am Main, Tubingen and Erlangen-Nuremberg.
Annette Schavan, the minister of education at the time, was the driving force behind the project: she hoped to create courses in theology that would succeed in bringing religion into the present day. The new subject was also supposed to serve as a milestone in terms of integration.
New subject gets good marks
The subject was evaluated in 2016 to take stock of the progress made so far. The assessment given by Islamic scholars and theologians proved positive. As Federal Education Minister Johanna Wanka put it, the Muslim faith has found a home for itself in the academic and theological debate thanks to the centres.
Around 1,800 students, both male and female, have enrolled in the bachelor′s and master′s courses at the universities. Funding is to be made available for a further five years, while faculties of religious education and theology have also been established in Paderborn and Freiburg. Berlin is still discussing whether to follow suit.
The road has not always been smooth, co-operation with the Islamic associations proving to be one obstacle. These include for example the Ditib (Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs), the Islamic Council and the Central Council of Muslims. Even though they represent only a good third of Muslims in Germany, over 80 percent of the mosque communities number among their members.
They are involved in the Islamic degree courses at the universities through what are known as advisory councils and they are supposed to have a say – rather like churches do in the case of Christian theological faculties – when it comes to personnel decisions and indeed teaching content. These associations are highly conservative and orthodox in orientation. For them, theology is the administration of religious scholarship. For this reason, many academics have warned of the risk of association officials being overly intrusive – which would undermine the freedom of research and teaching at a state university.
