German minister says schools should teach Islam
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BERLIN: Schools in Germany should offer Islam - along with Christianity and Judaism - as a required religion class in the future, the interior minister said Thursday, but he insisted that the courses be taught in German.
Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble said that it would take a while before Muslim community leaders worked out a legally binding agreement with the state, but that an agreement on the issue had been reached.
"It will take some time, but we are moving ahead," Schäuble said after a third conference with representatives of Germany's estimated three million Muslims. Other participants said it would take several years before the classes became available.
Both sides have wrangled for years over the teaching Islam in state-run schools, where religion classes are required by law. Pupils now only have the choice of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism or Judaism. Many schools also offer ethics classes as an alternative.
Offering Islam in schools will be "a very, very considerable contribution to integration and peaceful coexistence," said Bekir Alboga, a spokesman for the Muslim participants.
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The Roman Catholic and Lutheran churches in Germany, as well as the Jewish community, already have established legal partnerships with the state.
Participants in the conference, set up in 2006 in an attempt to improve often strained relations between Germans and the nation's Muslim community - dominated by roughly 2.2 million Turks - also agreed to support construction of more mosques in Germany and fight against Islamic radicalism.
Treatment of Germany's large ethnic Turkish population is another major issue at the conference, and Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey urged Germany to take measures to counter discrimination, saying his own relatives in the country feared for their safety.
In an interview in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Erdogan also criticized Chancellor Angela Merkel for not joining him for an event in Cologne last month attended by thousands of German Turks.
"The German government must take severe measures," Erdogan told the newspaper. "I have relatives in Germany and they tell me: We are scared."
Erdogan was responding to a question about a house fire in Ludwigshafen last month in which nine people of Turkish origin died.
The Turkish media have speculated that the fire was a racially motivated attack, but German prosecutors have virtually ruled out arson as the cause of the blaze, which killed five children and a pregnant woman.
Erdogan, who visited the site of the fire last month, said he had seen Nazi symbols on the door of the house.
During the trip, Erdogan spoke to a crowd of around 16,000 people of mainly Turkish origin in Cologne and urged them to resist assimilation, sparking criticism from Merkel and other members of her government.
In the newspaper interview, Erdogan criticized the chancellor for not participating in the event.
A senior German official who requested anonymity denied that Merkel had ever agreed to attend the Cologne event, saying it had been arranged by Erdogan's people without consulting Berlin.
Schäuble acknowledged that more needed to be done to make Muslims feel at home in Germany but hit out at Erdogan for telling Turks to resist becoming part of German society.
"I'm not insisting that all Turks become Germans - but when they want to become German citizens they cannot remain Turkish," Schäuble told the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
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