Growing Number of Germans Embracing Islam
BERLIN (AFP) – To all appearances Herr Herzog is an average German, but today Mohammed will be one of a growing number of his compatriots to begin the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, one of the five pillars of their faith. A former Protestant who worked in a social welfare center for Turkish immigrants for many years, Herzog converted to Islam in 1979 when he realized that the “Quran gathered together everything I had ever believed in.” Today he is the director of a Muslim cultural center in the capital Berlin and he says that the number of Germans who convert to Islam “is rising each year” and that they “are getting younger and younger.”
“Many are looking for new lifestyles and some sense of direction,” he says.
The central institute on Islam archives estimates that about 12,400 people born in Germany to German parents are Muslims, with the total Muslim population set at around 3.5 million people, most of them of Turkish origin.
Each year, the institute issues between 350 and 400 documents in German and Arabic, complete with identity photograph, as proof people have converted.
“It would be an exaggeration to talk of a rash of conversions,” says its director Salim Abdullah.
Nevertheless the document folder gives its owner the right to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, another of the five pillars of Islam which has to be performed at least once in a lifetime.
Norbert Mueller grew up with almost no exposure to religious instruction, but he says he has found warmth and “the feeling that he belongs to a community” with his Turkish and Arab friends in the northern city of Hamburg.
A 41-year-old practicing lawyer, Mueller converted in 1991 and has married a woman from Iran.
When he was a student, he used to go to bars with other Germans, but some grew irritated when he refused to drink a beer with them.
“I never realized that alcohol played such an important role in one’s social life,” says Mueller, who now mainly frequents other Muslims.
According to Monika Wohlrab-Sahr, a Leipzig University professor and author of a study on religious conversions in Germany and the United States, it is impossible to know how many people have become Muslims.
Professing one’s faith before another Muslim is enough to convert, she says. “The majority are people whose spouses are Muslims. Nothing obliges though to convert,” Wohlrab-Sahr says. “Many of them have difficult pasts that pose them problems, they are looking for discipline in their lives.”
By becoming Muslims, though, they are confronted with other problems. “The newest of converts have to deal with a new world which they have to assimilate,” says Norbert Mueller. “They have to find their way and for that reason some give the impression they are observing the rules 150 percent, but it’s usually a passing phase.”
Nor does Wohlrab-Sahr see this as a big issue.
“One could say that some new converts follow the rules in a particularly strict way. But that’s a tendency one finds with all converts, Catholics included,” she says.
Comment:
Alhamdulilah the revival of Islam in the west is continuing in the absence of the Islamic state, makes you wonder how many millions will convert once they see the implementation of Islam in its entirety and as an alternative to Capitalism, which surely is on its last legs.