globeandmail.com: Muslims find their voice outside religion

globeandmail.com: Muslims find their voice outside religion

DOUG SAUNDERS

COLOGNE, Germany — Arzu Toker noticed recently that her identity had changed. When she arrived in this prosperous German city from Istanbul 30 years ago as a labourer she was known by everyone as a Turk, part of a growing minority in Germany. She struggled to become a German.But now, this 54-year-old woman has discovered she has a new identity, one that prevents her from being either a Turk or a German. She and all her Turkish, Arabic and Iranian friends are now identified by the government, by their own ethnic communities and by most of their neighbours simply as Muslims, a religious identity that she, like many European Turks, abandoned before she arrived.

When her friend Mitra Zainal landed here two years ago, she was a refugee who fled the Islamic regime of Iran with her children. She made an alarming discovery: “In Iran, I spent years trying to get out from the power of the Muslim authorities,” she said over glasses of tea in Ms. Toker’s kitchen. “Now that I’m in Germany, I don’t have to have religion, but it turns out that the people who speak for me are what? They are Muslim authorities.”

This month, the two women decided that they were part of a silent majority, and acted.
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Mina Ahadi, co-founder of the Central Council of Former Muslims, addresses a press conference in Berlin to announce its creation. (AFP PHOTO/JOHN MACDOUGALL)

Mina Ahadi, co-founder of the Central Council of Former Muslims, addresses a press conference in Berlin to announce its creation. (JOHN MACDOUGALL/AFP)
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“The government keeps saying that there are 3.5-million Muslims in this country, and they’re including me when they say that,” Ms. Toker said. “I don’t want to be on that list. But I have no way of saying no.”This week, they found a way.

To enormous news media attention in Germany, they took part in the launching of an organization for this large, underrepresented group of Islamic immigrants. Provocatively, the group, formed with Iranian human-rights activist Mina Ahadi, 50, and 40 other individuals, is called the Central Committee for Ex-Muslims. That is a play on the name of the largest German mosque organization, the Central Committee for Muslims, whose headquarters is located not far from Ms. Toker’s apartment in Cologne.

The newly-formed committee has become a talking point for the German news media and a source of heated debate among mainstream Muslim groups. Its impact belies its modest size, which has grown to 200 members in the past five days. Some members post their pictures on its website, declaring that they have abandoned Islam – a risky venture, since radical Muslim groups consider this an act punishable by death.

Suddenly, non-religious Muslims here are finding their voice. Known variously as cultural Muslims or secular Muslims or, in Germany, as ex-Muslims, they describe themselves as increasingly frustrated with a society that insists on associating them with a religion that is hardly central to their lives.

This week, 500 people attended a much-publicized “Secular Islam summit” in Florida, in which prominent scholars and activists signed a statement of opposition to religious influences. Similar organizations have sprung up in recent months in Britain and Denmark. And Ayyan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch politician whose flamboyant protests against Muslim treatment of women led to her being threatened with death and hounded out of her country, has become a bestselling author in Europe and an inspiration to many of these groups.

Unlike non-religious Jews (who form a majority in Israel and elsewhere) or non-observant Christians, cultural Muslims aren’t acknowledged by their own religion and are barely recognized by Western governments. Their numbers are unknown, but European studies indicate that a sizable majority of immigrants from Muslim countries do not regularly attend mosques, that fewer than 10 per cent of Muslim young people pray with any regularity and that a majority of Muslim immigrants consider themselves largely secular.

“This is a German identity problem,” Ms. Toker said. “When the German government looks at me or at her, they just say ‘Muslim.’ And if they want to know about what we think, they ask Muslim leaders. They seem unable to realize that we are very different individuals and that maybe we’re not Muslim at all.”

Much of the debate around Muslim immigrants has concerned questions of integration: Have they become isolated from mainstream European society? But this debate brings up a new dimension. Ms. Toker is a firm assimilationist; she wants to be seen as fully German, and believes in universal European values. Ms. Zainal, on the other hand, identifies herself as “Iranian-German” and is in favour of a multicultural country made up of differing ethnic communities. Both, however, were incensed when the German government held hearings into ethnic assimilation and invited mainly mosque-based organizations to participate. That sense of exclusion led to the formation of their group.

But the newfound voice of non-religious Muslims has provoked controversy across Europe in recent weeks. Many observers worry that the debate is making integration even more difficult for immigrants from Muslim countries by implying that they should give up their religious faith, a rare source of security for many newcomers. And reactions from established Muslim organizations have ranged from silence to outrage.

Ayyub Axel Koehler, a German convert to Islam who is president of the Central Committee of Muslims, the country’s most prominent Muslim organization, spoke out yesterday in an interview with German state radio, expressing his displeasure with the concept of Muslims abandoning the Koran.

“Apostasy is not a matter in which we take any pleasure,” he said when asked about the group. “No religious denomination will do so. But in our charter we have committed ourselves to both positive and negative religious freedom alike, and adopted an unequivocal stance on this, both internally and externally. Hence, such phenomena have to be accepted.”

Here was the dilemma for Western governments looking for the voice of Muslim communities. Mr. Koehler’s organization is among the most moderate and reformist in Europe, its views inspired by Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, who calls for a complete integration of Muslims into Western society. Its charter, in line with Mr. Ramadan’s writings, declares that “the message of Islam is rationalistic” and calls for “the development of a properly European Muslim identity” and the embrace of European human rights.

It is organizations such as this that Western governments turned to after the major Islamist terrorist attacks in New York, Washington, Madrid and London, in order to try to find common cause with moderate Muslims in the struggle against terrorism. They offered the prospect of dialogue, and have helped prevent mosques from being taken over by extremist Saudi-financed influences.

Those efforts had some success, but now it is becoming apparent that they may have sidestepped a larger group of Muslims who don’t see these groups as moderate at all.

At the same time, Western intellectuals and policy leaders have become consumed with a discussion about the most appropriate way to deal with immigrants from Muslim countries. The debate was started by Ms. Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somali politician, after she declared in a series of books and movies that she had found liberation after abandoning her Islamic faith.

In his recent book Murder in Amsterdam, the Dutch-American writer Ian Buruma argued that Ms. Hirsi Ali was an admirable figure, but that she did a disservice to many poor Muslim immigrants by telling them that they were failures and victims unless they completely abandoned their faith: That, he said, set too high a barrier for these vulnerable people. He was soon supported by Timothy Garton Ash, a professor of European studies at Oxford University, who suggested that a critical tolerance of Islam was a better approach than complete rejection.

That provoked a furious response last month from some of the most prominent thinkers in France and Germany, in a high-calibre debate taking place on the Berlin media website signandsight.com. The French philosopher Pascal Bruckner denounced Mr. Buruma, accusing him of “capitulation” to Muslim extremism. The German writer Ulrike Ackermann compared the debate to the one that took place in the 1980s over communism, when some Western intellectuals suggested a middle-ground compromise between communism and democracy. He likened the ex-Muslim groups to those East European dissidents who brought down the Berlin Wall, and Mr. Buruma and his colleagues to those who dismissed them.

In Ms. Toker’s kitchen yesterday, there was little sense that you were at the centre of one of Europe’s great intellectual debates. For this small group of immigrants, the question is one of practicality: “When I was a kid, we left our little Turkish village to get away from the old ladies who wanted us to cover our heads,” she said. “Then I came to Germany to start a new life, and I was amazed to find the same pressures. I’d just like to be able to get away from that religion, and this is the best way to do it.”