What has been happening in the Hamburg district of St. Georg in recent months is far away from the everyday life of the metropolis, which somehow connects different lifestyles. The venerable Hotel Atlantic stands enthroned towards the Alster, while in the other direction, at large museum buildings, the drug scene gathers. The district has an important theater, the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, and in the streets behind it there is poverty-stricken prostitution. The cafés on Lange Reihe celebrated queerness, but on Steindamm, which runs parallel, a completely different atmosphere prevails. The street scene is dominated by the dress code of a strict Islam. There is hardly any skin to be seen, but bearded men in long robes and deeply veiled women. There are few places in Hamburg where the contradictions of the modern city are gathered in such a small space.
It was here that the group Muslim Interaktiv, whose program calls for absolute monotony, demonstrated several times. It openly advocates the introduction of the caliphate, an Islamic theocracy based solely on Sharia law, which has long since proven to be murderous in practice. Its constant theme is the fight against Israel. The fundamentalist movement had already protested against the state in 2021, and the Gaza war brought a veritable mobilization offensive. At the end of October last year, directly after the Hamas massacre in Israel, they circumvented a ban on assembly with a well-organized flash mob. At the first demonstrations there were only a few hundred, but the most recent protests have now caused a stir in the media with over 2,000 participants. There, the participants held up signs that the organizers had previously distributed. Each one had just one word on it: “censored,” “forbidden,” “banned.” The action is accompanied by minutes of silence, which is occasionally interrupted. “Allahu akbar,” sounds from the back rows.
It is intended to be a “silent protest with a loud message” against the “dictatorship of opinion” in Germany – a reaction to the stricter conditions that the Hamburg assembly authority has issued for the renewed demonstration of the Islamists: no procession through the city center, no gender segregation, no denial of Israel’s right to exist and no dreams of a caliphate in word, picture or writing. There are not many possible messages left.
“The dream of a caliphate” is part of the battle of opinions, says the German Minister of Justice. It was different before, when the demonstrators held up copies of the newspaper Bild smeared with red paint and chanted for a theocracy as a “solution”. The gathering provoked nationwide outrage and calls for a ban. The Chancellor and the Federal Minister of the Interior assured that they were keeping an eye on the extremists. “We are using all instruments: from intelligence surveillance to intensive investigations,” said Interior Minister Nancy Faeser. “In our constitutional state, however, we can only ban such groups if the high legal requirements are met.” The Federal Minister of Justice also sees little scope for this at present. As absurd as the demand for a caliphate may be, the mere expression of this wish is part of the intellectual battle of opinions and must be tolerated unless there is a violation of legal interests, said Minister Buschmann.
That is the fine line that Joe Adade Boateng walks. The alleged head of Muslim Interaktiv is a student teacher and influencer who calls himself “Raheem”. He is the only speaker that day, and he paints a distorted picture of a country in which repression and coercion of opinion supposedly prevail. Muslims should submit and be silenced, claims Boateng. He shouts this into a microphone, his voice filling an entire district.
Still under the impression of these images, the Hamburg associations Secular Islam and Culture Bridge called for a protest against the Caliphate supporters. Other civil society groups supported the plan, and the CDU, SPD, Greens and FDP from Hamburg’s city/state council called for participation. With the motto “Neither Caliphate nor Patriarchy, only Unity and Law and Freedom”, the organizers had covered as much ground as possible – from feminism to constitutional patriotism. Despite favorable media coverage beforehand, the result was extremely sobering, with just under 1,000 participants. Although the proportion of migrants among the demonstrators was high, civil society seemed to have little interest in the problem overall.
The organizers expressed the hope that resistance against the Islamists would grow in the future. Muslim Interaktiv, on the other hand, was unimpressed and immediately announced a new meeting on X. The group thrives on provocations and tries to make the most of the media attention. So far, it has succeeded. The activists are young, disciplined and differ from the archaic look of the Salafists. Although the women, who always operate in separate locations, are usually masked except for a slit for their eyes, their male members prefer a sporty outfit. The strictly trimmed beards and neatly parted hairstyles, T-shirts with the group logo, the Tiktok agitation of eloquent cadres and their media-effective actions identify them as the Islamist twin of the right-wing extremist Identitarian Movement. Their performance obviously offered the Islamists orientation, and they also share with them the same ideas about gender order, a static understanding of culture and a distorted preservation of tradition. Old myths, youthful dynamism and the dream of the rebirth of past greatness: these are the ingredients of all fascist movements. As with the new right-wing youth movement, the Islamists’ actions are primarily intended to generate images for the digital world.
Similar to their brothers in spirit from the Muslim Brotherhood, the agitators of Muslim Interaktiv have mastered the art of presenting their own claim to absoluteness using rhetoric of civil society tolerance. Alongside the signs praising the caliphate as the solution to all problems, they promote “discourse” and denounce a “colonial order”. They play the victim role just as masterfully as the German right, complaining about “Islamophobia” and the “oppression” of Muslims in the “values dictatorship” of Western democracies. By equating their rigid religious interpretations and practices with those of “the Muslims”, measures against political Islam are reinterpreted as repression against the entire religion. This is how the caliphate ideology wants to pave its way under the banner of tolerance and religious freedom.
One of their greatest successes is that they managed to redirect the fight against racism. Muslim Interaktiv appeared soon after the Hanau attack, when a German racist murdered ten people in 2020. Most of the victims came from families with a migrant background, and the programmatic nature of the murders was underlined by a pamphlet by the perpetrator full of annihilation ideas against “destructive races and cultures”. But the commemoration of the victims was soon pushed in a completely different direction by groups such as Muslim Interaktiv. Although there were no Palestinians among the victims, but mostly Roma, Turks and Kurds, a parallel to the Middle East was drawn at memorial events. The slogan “From Hanau to Gaza, Yallah Intifada!” pushed the actual events into the background and effectively used them for the Palestinian cause. The desire for annihilation in the shooter’s manifesto had revolved as much around Israel as it did around Islamic countries.
The umbrella organisation from which Muslim Interaktiv originates cultivated very different contacts anyway. Hizb ut-Tahrir, which was banned from operating by the Interior Ministry in 2003, had a friendly dialogue for a long time with the far-right NPD. In 2002, a delegation of neo-Nazis attended an Islamist event, and contacts continued even after the ban was imposed. Shared anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism acted as the ideological bridge between this particular “discourse”. In view of these connections, it is all the more grotesque when Muslim Interaktiv claims the victims of racism in Germany for itself. The appearance of Muslim Interaktiv and related groups shows how paralyzing the identity circus of recent years has been. The identities cemented in the claim of inviolability are now fuelling each other. While one group rejects any rapprochement under the slogan “for Islamic identity, against assimilation”, the other counters with its equally static understanding of native identity and tradition. Even the fight against these activities brings them small successes, since with every measure liberal society moves one step towards the anti-liberalism that the identity fetishists themselves strive for – the classic paradox of tolerant societies. The paralysis will only be resolved when religious and ethnocentric identitarians, political Islam and the extreme right are recognized as parts of the same problem.
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