RELIGION: Headscarves Now on German Minds

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Clive Freeman

BERLIN, Aug 5 2004 (IPS) - After a period of what many felt was collective suspicion, Germany’s Muslims are searching new ways of recovering identity.

Some 3.3 million Muslims live in Germany. Many of them are of Turkish origin. They were first invited as guest workers to fill gaps in the West German labour market in the 1960s and 70s, but many settled down with rapidly expanding families in cities like Berlin, Frankfurt, Duesseldorf, Wiesbaden and Cologne.

Today, there are a total of 2,300 mosques and schools in German cities where Turkish is the spoken language. Other Muslims come from Egypt, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Nigeria, and from south-east Asian countries such as India, Pakistan, Singapore and Malaysia.

Times have been difficult after Sep. 11. The arrest and subsequent trials – and retrials – of terror suspects Mounir al-Motassadeq and Abdelghani Mzoudi in Hamburg added to the deep sense of unease among moderate Muslims. Now, the tension has eased somewhat. In some cases Muslim organisations are again reporting membership increases.

Berlin-born Ronald Paris, 42, is a photographer and museum technical adviser. One of about 100,00 native Germans to have converted to Islam, mostly after marriage, he is now known to his friends as Zayd. His wife Jasmin, a 31-year-old Indian now awaits their first child in Berlin. Zayd is an active member of the German Muslim Circle (DMK) in the city’s Wedding district. He regularly attends Friday prayer sessions and lectures at a mosque.

Zayd is disappointed by the attention to the Muslim “headscarves issue” in Germany. “Thirty years ago most people in the German countryside were wearing headscarves, and nobody got upset about that,” he says. “Now offence is taken when Muslim women wear them to conceal their hair. What’s repressive about that. Muslim women often feel quite naked in public without a headscarf.”

On his conversion to Islam in 1998, Zayd says: “Before Berlin reunited I was a citizen of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). My father Ronald Paris was a well known artist in the socialist state. We had lots of people visit us from other countries even when the Wall was in place. I yearned to travel.

“After the Wall fell I seized the opportunity, visiting Turkey, Egypt and then India in the 1990s. It was in India that my interest in Islam began during discussions with friends. I’d never given Islam a thought before that.”

He is impressed by the close-knit structure of Muslim family life. “They welcome you in their homes and are very hospitable. I’m building a house in India,” he says proudly. “One that eventually I will leave to my children.”

Meanwhile, he divides his time between Germany and India. “I’m a German citizen and will remain one. Converting to Islam won’t change that.”

Lale Lucan, 29, is a Turkish law student in the German capital. She wears a headscarf, but her two younger sisters do not. “They are religious and want to wear headscarves eventually, but they haven’t reached that stage yet. There should be no compulsion in one’s faith.”

In a recent interview in Brigitte, a German women’s magazine, she speaks of being asked sometimes to ‘take your headscarf off so that we can accept you.’ That kind of talk does not impress her. “For the first 24 years of my life I did not wear a headscarf, and I was still the unaccepted foreigner who should go back to Turkey. But I was born and grew up here. I have a German pass. I’m not convinced that putting my headscarf aside will make me more a part of German society.”

An Allensbach Institute survey in Germany indicated recently that 53 percent of Germans regard the headscarf as a form of repression, and something not reconcilable with western values.

The German states Baden-Wuerttemberg, Saarland and Lower Saxony have all passed laws banning Islamic headscarves from public schools.

In central German state Hesse, a bid by the Islamic Religious Association to have Islamic religious classes introduced for the approximately 60,000 Muslim schoolchildren was rejected. Ethics classes emphasising Islam’s teachings were offered instead. About 300,000 Muslims live in Hesse.

Now the interior minister of Berlin city-state Ehrhart Koerting has announced a draft bill, which if confirmed later this year by the city’s ruling coalition government of Social Democrats and far leftist members of the PDS (Party of Democratic Socialists), will ban symbols of “all religious faiths and creeds.”

It incorporates Muslim headscarves, Jewish skullcaps and Christian crosses. Some 60,000 out of 140,000 Berlin teachers, members of the police force and workers in the city-state’s judicial system could be affected if the bill is approved.

The proposal has already drawn the wrath of Christian denominations. The Protestant diocese of Berlin claims the conflict over headscarves should not be made an occasion for a general restriction on freedom of worship.

Despite increasing religious pluralism in society “religiousness cannot be banned from the public realm and pushed away to the privacy of one’s home,” a church spokesman said.

Zayd shakes his head in despair. “It’s absurd,” he says, “when Muslim women are denied teaching posts because they insist on wearing headscarves. What kind of a society is it we are living in when that happens?”

Arwa Hassan, 31, a programme officer with the Berlin-based anti-corruption organisation Transparency International is equally critical. She does not wear a headscarf in public. “But that doesn’t mean I won’t one day change my mind. For Muslim women the headscarf is a way of protecting dignity.”