Islam in Europe : Giant Cologne mosque tests German tolerance

Cologne, NU Online
Plans to build one of the biggest mosques in Europe here have Christian leaders and the far-right up in arms over the Muslim community's bold new assertion of its presence in Germany.

An imposing but elegant new building is to go up in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne, a city that is 12 percent Muslim but is best known for its spectacular Gothic cathedral.

Currently, most Muslims pray in small, often shabby quarters spread throughout the city and often hidden from plain view.

A visit to a typical prayer centre in Cologne reveals a stifling room in a prefabricated beige building where fake crystal chandeliers hang from the ceiling. Two giant posters of Mecca and Medina adorn the thick walls.

Frequently more than 1,000 worshippers attend Friday prayers at the building which once housed a pharmaceuticals factory, squeezed between a petrol station and a noisy street.

If the crowd grows too big, prayer mats are laid out outside.

"Do you really want us to continue to pray in this miserable place?" asked Bekir Alboga, the director of intercultural dialogue at the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), which runs the centre.

"Just as the Christians have their churches and the Jews their synagogues, we want to pray in a mosque."

Which is what led DITIB, the biggest Muslim organisation in Germany, to press ahead with plans to build the sprawling new mosque and administrative building.

Two 55-metre-tall (180-foot-tall) minarets will frame its 34.5-metre-tall glass cupola, high above a chamber where 2,000 people will be able to worship at once.

Construction, financed by private donations and a bank loan, is to begin this year.

The conservative mayor of Cologne, Fritz Schramma, called the plans "excellent, both aesthetically but also symbolically."

He is joined by local officials from across the political spectrum.

"Cologne has 120,000 Muslims," the Social Democratic district councilman, Josef Wirges, told AFP.

"They should be able to pray at a prestigious building," he said. "After all we have the beautiful Cologne cathedral."

But others in the city on the Rhine nicknamed "the Rome of the north" which hosted the Catholic Church's World Youth Day in 2005 are eyeing the plans with suspicion.

The Archbishop of Cologne, Joachim Meisner, said he understood why a giant mosque in their midst would make some in the city wary, adding that he too had a "negative impression" of the plans.

"You have to take people's fears seriously," Schramma added.

"But these people have never been concerned about the fact that there is already a mosque here," albeit insufficient for the community's needs.

The debate has exposed deep faultlines between Germans and the more than three-million-strong Muslim minority. (dar)