“Wanting to ban the distribution of copies of the Koran shows an appalling lack of understanding for the values of an open society. The new debate about missionary Salafism in Germany also underlines the need for the introduction of generally binding ethics lessons in Germany based on the Berlin model,” said Frieder Otto Wolf, President of the Humanist Association of Germany, on Monday.
The background to this is an advertising campaign by Salafists in which up to 25 million copies of the Koran are to be distributed in Germany. Günter Krings, vice-chairman of the CDU/CSU parliamentary group in the Bundestag, described it as an “aggressive campaign” and called for it to be stopped “wherever possible”. Hamburg Bishop Hans-Jochen Jaschke criticized the distribution as a “disturbance of religious peace” that would arouse aggression and fuel mistrust. The Coordinating Council of Muslims warned against the instrumentalization of Koran advertising for the purposes of individual groups. “Church representatives from the clergy and in politics are trying to hide the fact that the distribution of Bibles by radical and fundamentalist Christian movements is an everyday phenomenon in Germany, even in schools,” Wolf therefore reminded. “In turn, the Muslim associations should see it as their duty to get in touch with their brothers and sisters in faith in order to critically question the motives behind the campaign and moderate the will to engage among the faithful in the spirit of an open society.” Frieder Otto Wolf warned against spreading hysterical reactions to the advertising campaigns of missionary Salafism. “The seeds that dogmatic and fundamentalist movements of all kinds want to sow by advertising their ideas can only sprout in an unenlightened milieu. The emergence and growth of these milieus must therefore be prevented at all levels of life – not just in the educational sector,” Wolf stated. Wolf: “An open society is based neither on a ban on the distribution of religious writings nor on dogmatic religion. It is based decisively on education, the ability to question critically and tolerance. In order to prevent the staging and marketing of fundamentalists and hysteria, these skills must be taught as early as possible. A generally binding ethics education for all adolescents in Germany is a starting point, the implementation of which can have a lasting impact in this respect, whether with regard to the proselytizing efforts of Salafists or those of neo-Nazis.”
