Islamic Integration

By: Peter Armstrong

December 5, 2013

Even here in the little German town of Tübingen, Islam is on the rise and gaining recognition. Through different courses and activities, I have made the acquaintance of many traditional Turks and other practicing Muslims, of which there seems to be a thriving community here. According to www.moscheesuche.de (Mosque Search, a German website), there are four different mosques within Tübingen, a city of just over 80,000 people. At the university, I take courses from the Center for Islamic Theology, from where many of my classmates will go on to teach Islam as an elective in state-financed public schools. The Tübingen University is even accredited to teach and train imams within Germany, a movement for which there is growing support in recent years.

Although Tübingen was the first university to offer such opportunities in theological study in Germany, it is nowadays not the only one. The University of Münster in northwest Germany also offers courses in Islamic theology, where one can study under Mouhanad Khorchide, an Austrian Doctor of Theology of Palestinian descent who has recently come under fire from conservative Muslim critics who disagree with his liberal interpretations of Islamic theology. According to Khorchide, "Theology needs debate. Otherwise it can’t develop… Without free space theology runs the risk of becoming politicized and being used as an instrument of power." Understandably, his belief system comes into conflict with that of much of the rest of the Muslim world. Even in Germany, according to one other professor, many Muslims would feel misrepresented by Khorchide.

But nowadays, as more and more second- and third-generation Muslim immigrants in Germany search for religious leaders that can understand and share a similar background with them, the desire for Muslim religious leaders “made in Germany” is growing ever stronger, and Khorchide’s classes at the university remain full of young Muslim students eager to lead the next generation of Muslims in Germany.

In my own studies, Khorchide’s liberal, rational, and open-minded theology reminds me of Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, a thirteenth century Persian author who wrote The Nasirean Ethics. We have been studying this work in my "Islamic Ethics" course here, and much of what Tusi writes about is actually based on another book of a similar title, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. In fact, due to their common heritage, I find that much of what I’ve been reading about is actually very similar to the writings of Thomas of Aquinas, whom I also studied a year ago while taking a "Christian Ethics" course back at Georgetown. If these two contemporaries, some of the greatest thinkers of Islam and Christianity, were able to be in such unwitting agreement so many hundreds of years ago, it seems odd that Christians and Muslims still have such difficulty fitting in with each other within society in our modern age.

One past experience of mine, however, gives me hope: in Kazan, Russia, where I lived for ten months before coming to Georgetown as a freshman, I lived with a Muslim host family in a majority-Muslim city and region, where Christian Russians and Muslim Tatars got along just fine, as they had been doing for hundreds of years. The daily life of my host family was no other than that of any Russian family, other than the five short interruptions for prayer and a fast during the month of Ramadan. If these two cultures can live so peacefully and well-integrated in Russia, then I know I can hope that such an outcome will also be possible in Germany. As more Turkish immigrants and their descendants climb the social ladder and become integrated in German society through education and status, I believe and hope that Islam and Muslim identity will become common, ordinary, and accepted throughout the country.

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