“Neither special laws for certain religions nor clinging to the status quo of religious constitutional law will do justice to the interests and needs of a pluralistic society in Germany.” This is what the President of the Humanist Association of Germany, Frieder Otto Wolf, said on Saturday afternoon in Berlin regarding the discussions about a German equivalent to the Islam law passed by the Austrian parliament last Wednesday. Wolf also voiced clear criticism of the religious and ideological policy priorities at federal and state level. According to Wolf, these were one-sided and in part misguided. The new version of the Islam Act passed in Austria, which first came into force there in 1912, had caused a great deal of controversy. Among other things, the new version enshrined the right to Muslim pastoral care in the military, prisons and hospitals. Muslim religious communities will be able to register as public corporations in future, and six state-funded university professorships for Islamic theology are to be created from 2016. A ban on financing Muslim associations from abroad was also introduced, and imams must be trained and resident in Austria in future in order to be allowed to exercise their profession in the country. Islamic associations and the opposition criticized the law. The new version also met with a mixed response in Germany. While political representatives in Germany pointed out that such a law is not necessary or permissible in Germany due to the existing constitutional framework, the chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany, Aiman Mazyek, welcomed the new regulation. “We need this kind of direction in Germany in order to restore normality and a matter of course in the Muslim community,” said Mazyek. Frieder Otto Wolf said that it is fundamentally right and important to give Muslims living in Germany equal state inclusion and support to members of the Christian religious communities, in particular in order to “strengthen liberal, informed and more enlightened understandings of faith and thereby also curb the highly virulent hostility towards Muslims, which is jointly caused by xenophobia and groups of religious and anti-religious extremists of various stripes.” He also emphasized that the appropriate response to ideological and religious pluralization and the associated social conflicts cannot be radical secularism on the French model. The liberal and ideologically neutral state develops its strength best through the intelligent use of possibilities under the guiding principle of cooperative secularism, as Belgium and the Netherlands show. However, this has been largely lacking to date, as the discussions about the Islam Act have once again made clear. “Even if an Islam law based on the Austrian model would be quite absurd from a German perspective, the proposals to simply extend the application of traditional religious constitutional law also miss the mark in reality,” Wolf continued.
For one thing, the Islamic religion, like other religious and ideological communities, does not have the structures of the churches to which today’s religious constitutional law is tailored. For example, he pointed out that “the members of our association do not accept formal membership under the age of 14 and do not recognize religious preaching. Muslims, Alevis and Buddhists also do not have the structures of comprehensive organizational membership that the Christian churches practice. It is therefore simply wrong – at least in terms of the ideologically neutral state – to demand that non-Christian religions and world views should adapt to the special model of the major churches. Rather, a contemporary religious constitutional law must respect the large number of differences and adapt to them.” On the other hand, there is a growing number of people in Germany who do not profess any religion, Wolf continued. However, they were largely excluded from the relevant discussions on shaping relations and promoting the integration of religions and world views. “This is one of the reasons why German religious policy is in a clear imbalance,” said Wolf. Although the German Islam Conference has been in existence since 2006, a conference of religions and world views that is appropriate to the ideologically neutral and pluralistic state and is not limited to a single religion is lacking. The focus on one religion, which has been pursued by the federal government and Islamic associations for almost ten years, is “detrimental to sustainable general development”, said Wolf. In view of the numerous obvious problems and the fact that around a third of the population in Germany does not belong to a Christian church, more fundamental reforms are needed to ensure equal and comprehensible participation of the different faiths. “Everything else follows on from the blatant failure in the religious policy priorities that we have had to observe over the past two decades. Any serious proposal must therefore make this clear: Not only Christians, Jews and Muslims belong to Germany, but also the non-religious worldviews and ideological communities,” Frieder Otto Wolf concluded.
