Germany: Hamburg grants three holidays to the Muslims

An agreement was signed on November 13 between the State authorities and the city of Hamburg, on the one hand, and three Muslim associations and the Alevi community (a so-called heterodox branch of Islam that is the second-largest religion in Turkey after Sunni Islam), on the other hand.  The text, which still must be approved by the Parliament, acknowledges that Muslim and Alevi communities have certain rights to religious instruction in a school setting, as well as to funeral rites.  It also grants them three holidays.  For their parts, the 130,000 Muslims and 50,000 Alevis of Hamburg commit themselves to “respecting fundamental rights and promoting equality between men and women”.

These Muslim and Alevi holidays thus acquire the same status as Christian religious holydays, and employees who wish not to work on them can apply a day of vacation or make it up later.  The implementation, in the next five years, of instruction in the Islamic and Alevi religion in the public schools will be guaranteed by representatives from the Islamic or Alevi community.  However, Muslim associations will not be able to benefit from the same rights as the Catholic Church and the Protestant churches, which has the status of “corporations of public law” allowing them to collect a church tax (paid out by the State).

This signing “will be a landmark event”, Olaf Scholz, the Social-Democratic mayor of Hamburg opined on November 13 during a press conference.  Zekeriya Altug, General Director of the State of Hamburg’s branch of the Turkish-Islamic Union of Religious Affairs (DITIB), the most important Islamic organization in Germany, which runs nine mosques in Hamburg, for its part declared that this was an “historic day for Hamburg, but also for all of Germany”.  According to the government of the City of Hamburg, this is a “gesture” to indicate that the Muslim religion is recognized;  the City-State of Hamburg, the second-largest city of the country after Berlin, had around 130,000 Muslims and 50,000 Alevis out of a population of 1.8 million inhabitants (on the picture : the Hamburg mosque).

Last summer, when the text was announced, the Auxiliary Bishop of Hamburg, Bishop Hans-Joachim Jaschke, quoted by the online edition of Le Figaro on August 20, 2012, already saw in it “a good signal”.

For several years now Germany has been studying the formation of 2,000 imams present in its territory, most of whom were sent by Turkey or the Arab States and do not speak German.  And so it decided to open in Autumn 2012 so-called faculties of “Muslim theology” in Münster-Osnabrück and Tübingen, Frankfurt/Giessen and Nürnberg-Erlangen.  The establishment of these programs in German universities is part of a policy of integration pursued by the German government.  The “future professors of Islam must combine tradition and modernity,” declared Bülent Ucar, a member of the denominational council of the University of Osnabrück, by studying the exegesis of the Qur’an, Islamic law but also German law.  (Sources:  apic/Le Figaro/afp/Der Spiegel – DICI no. 266 dated December 7, 2012)

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