When Islam had long arrived in Germany, it remained largely invisible for many years. “Everything that was valid before, everything that defined me as an individual, suddenly didn’t hold much value anymore,” say those who came from Turkey to Germany in the 1970s even today. They were and still are supported by the Turkish religious authority DITIB, with its mosques and cultural institutions. If one wants to talk about DITIB, it’s good to know its history.
The migration from Turkey to the north in the early years was characterized by the fact that neither the Turkish nor the German government showed much interest in the cultural, religious, or social affairs of the people. On the Turkish side, this changed with the “Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs” (DITIB). Like the first mosque communities, it entered public life in the Federal Republic of Germany largely unnoticed 40 years ago. No ceremonial act marked the founding of the mosque association, but rather an administrative act: the registration in the association register at the Cologne district court on July 5, 1984. The DITIB – to which more than 900 mosque communities belong today – was initiated by the Turkish religious authority Diyanet and has since been in a constant balancing act. Through Diyanet, it is directly connected to the Turkish government, while also being an association under German law.
The largest Sunni-Islamic association in Germany only became widely known to the public through a series of scandals in recent years. Particularly great outrage was sparked by DITIB after the failed coup in Turkey in the summer of 2016, when more than a dozen of its imams collected information on alleged supporters of the preacher Gülen, who had fallen out of favor with President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, other alleged enemies of the Turkish state, or “terrorists” and forwarded this information to Ankara. “No Turkish leader before him has politically instrumentalized DITIB like Erdogan,” says the German politician Karaahmetoglu. “This fits into his general political ruthlessness and unscrupulousness.” Erdogan has brought DITIB into disrepute. However, there will be a time after Erdogan, and then the mosque association will also change, believes the Social Democrat. “I know some communities that repeatedly rebel against the DITIB headquarters. So, I also rely on the reform power from below.”
Meanwhile, many politicians across party lines have long been calling for a mosque tax so that the communities can become independent. They have been harshly critical of the mosque association for years. At the same time, politicians emphasize the importance of not losing sight of the many pastoral services in the communities, such as youth and women’s work. They point out that DITIB also provides support and advice to families in case of death, even if they have no ties to the mosque association.
For this reason, political actors of all stripes in Germany have always been quite happy that DITIB organizes the religious and social affairs of Turks in Germany. Especially since Germany initially explicitly did not see itself as an immigration country, and many of the Turks recruited as guest workers lived with the awareness that they would return home sooner or later. Even when it became clear that most guest workers had put down roots and would stay in Germany with their children and grandchildren, all interior ministers, regardless of whether they were from the SPD, CDU, or CSU, were grateful and pragmatic in dealing with DITIB. It was also very practical: if there were questions or problems, a phone call would suffice. Their dependence on Ankara was not particularly noticeable as long as the political majorities in Turkey seemed to align with German views. This was also the case in the early years of the AKP government. It was only when expatriate Turks were granted the right to vote in Turkey that Erdogan changed course and made DITIB the central pillar of his diaspora policy in Germany. The success of this strategy was most recently evident in the presidential election in May of last year when two-thirds of Turkish voters in Germany voted for Erdogan, while in Turkey only about half of the voters supported him.
Forty years ago, DITIB came in handy for German politics for another, security-political reason. With DITIB, the Turkish religious authority responded not only to the religious needs of its brothers and sisters in Germany. It was also about not leaving the field to independent and, from the perspective of both the then Turkish and German governments, dangerous diaspora communities like Millî Görüş, the Kaplan supporters, or other politically Islamic groups. Ankara saw such groups as a threat to the desired collective identity of diaspora Turks and the secular state concept rooted in Atatürk. The religious authority Diyanet, created in 1924 – shortly after the founding of the state – and later its foreign branches like DITIB in Germany or ATIB in Austria, are by no means in contradiction to Turkish-style secularism. Unlike French secularism, Turkish secularism does not separate state and religion; instead, the state uses religion for its own purposes. With the help of Diyanet, popular Islam in Turkey was to be brought under state control, steered, and modernized.
For many years, the relationship between DITIB and German politics has been strained. The lowest point was the spying affair. At one point, the Federal Prosecutor General was investigating 19 imams on suspicion of espionage. Another affront occurred in the fall of 2018. The representative, at least architecturally demanding and modern-looking Central Mosque at the DITIB headquarters in Cologne-Ehrenfeld, which was planned as a widely visible symbol of integration, was not opened by the Federal President as promised for many years, but by Erdogan. The event resembled a Turkish state ceremony on German soil, a demonstration of power. At his side was Diyanet President Ali Erbas from Ankara – who was partly responsible for the recent severe German-Turkish discord.
Despite all the scandals, German politics still sees DITIB as an indispensable partner. This was made clear in December by German Interior Minister Nancy Faeser, who described an imam agreement with Diyanet as a “milestone for the integration and participation of Muslim communities in Germany.” The agreement provides that imams in DITIB mosques will no longer be sent from Turkey in the medium term. Instead, one hundred imams are to be trained in Germany every year. The dispatch of Turkish preachers, who are subject to the instructions of the government in Ankara, is to be gradually reduced in equal measure. However, in mid-May, during a press conference at DITIB in Cologne, it emerged that 75 of the candidates would be theology graduates from Turkey, coming from universities controlled by Diyanet and Erdogan’s AKP. The remaining 25 places are to be filled with graduates of the DITIB training program for religious officials in Dahlem, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Criticism of German politics for simply accepting that DITIB continues to be just an executive organ of the Turkish religious authority Diyanet is growing louder. In terms of religious policy, nothing has changed in Germany since the founding of DITIB in 1984. Just as in 1984, the German government in 2024 is still negotiating fundamental questions of Muslim life not with Muslims in Germany, but with a religious authority in Ankara, whose head, Erbas, has been promoting blatant anti-Semitism since October 7. Moreover, Erbas and Diyanet officials, as members of DITIB’s religious council, decide who will be the head of DITIB. Contrary to what politicians of all stripes demand, DITIB is therefore not detaching itself from the Turkish state.
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