The statement made by former German President Christian Wulff, that Islam is now also a part of Germany, was a short sentence but one with significant impact. Hardly any other sentence has been debated so long and passionately in Germany, even within Wulff’s own party, the German conservative CDU. Although it reappears in an altered form in the new party program of the Christian Democrats, it now includes an addition: An Islam that “does not share our values” is explicitly not included.
Fourteen years and October 7 separate Wulff’s statement and the new CDU program. The attempt to turn Islamic associations into German associations has failed; foreign governments like Erdogan’s Turkey continue to exert more influence over German Muslims than the German state does. Numerous new coordination centers and tax-funded “empowerment” projects for “young Muslims” have failed to prevent this, as has Islamic religious instruction in public schools.
This raises a fundamental question about German Islam policy: does the state even know what it is doing? The answer is simple: no, it does not! It doesn’t even know exactly how many Muslims live in the country, let alone where. Worse still, it doesn’t want to know.
Last month, Germany’s statistical office released the first results of the 2022 census, half a year late. The public learned much about various types of fuel Germans use to heat their homes, their educational qualifications, and their rental payments. The Federal Statistical Office randomly selected and surveyed more than ten million citizens for this purpose.
In its analysis, the statistical office also used data from registration records. With this data, it can show fairly accurately in which German cities and communities the majority is Roman Catholic or Protestant. Anyone wanting to know the proportion of Muslims will be disappointed. The office itself doesn’t know because it didn’t collect this data.
It sounds absurd, but Germany, which has been debating the integration of Muslims for decades, has voluntarily refrained from learning more about the Muslims in Germany. Because its own statistical office does not know the numbers, the government has commissioned surveys. The last large-scale study by the German Islam Conference dates back to 2020. According to this, between 5.3 and 5.6 million Muslims lived in Germany, 82 percent of whom were strongly or somewhat religious. What remains unknown is how the number of Muslims has developed in recent years and where followers of various Islamic denominations live.
When asked about the reason for this omission, those responsible give different answers: the Federal Statistical Office refers to the Census Act passed by the federal government, while the responsible Federal Ministry of the Interior—then led by the CSU—refers to the “methodological assessment” of the statisticians.
In fact, the agency had still collected the religious affiliation as voluntary information in the 2011 census. According to the Federal Statistical Office, however, the survey did not lead to “reliable figures.” The agency cites other reasons that supposedly speak against such a survey, which also led the government to act often blindly during the Corona pandemic: data protection concerns.
This is surprising because such problems are unknown in Switzerland, for example. There, the general affiliation with a religious community—whether public-law or not—is surveyed annually. Also voluntarily. According to the Swiss statistical office, only about one percent of participants refuse to provide information about their religious community.
With the results, Switzerland can make fairly accurate statements about the spatial distribution of believers and their share of the population over time, even with a smaller sample size. Accordingly, the proportion of Christians has been shrinking for years, while that of people without religious affiliation and Muslims is rising. In 2022, it was just under six percent.
Unlike the Swiss census questionnaire, the German one in 2011 contained two questions about religion. Instead of replacing this obscure two-step procedure with a general question about religious affiliation, the statistical office no longer asks at all and uses only data from registration records for the census.
These numbers have little to do with the reality of the 21st century, in which entire neighborhoods are now predominantly Muslim. They reflect a country that no longer exists. Perhaps some German politicians even prefer it that way. Systematic looking away has a long tradition when it comes to Islam in Germany.
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