The first teaching units for the prospective imams already took place on Monday, the official start will follow this Tuesday.

Then the Islamkolleg Germany will be opened in Osnabrück in the presence of the former Federal President Christian Wulff.

In future, Islamic theologians will be able to learn the profession of imam at the institute in German-language classes, regardless of foreign influences.

Reinhard Bingener

Political correspondent for Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Bremen based in Hanover.

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    The training center closes a gap.

    In Germany there has long been no shortage of opportunities to study Islamic theology at a university.

    However, the course threatens to become a dead end if the graduates do not receive professional training in the same way as the clerkship for teachers or the vicariate for pastors.

    At the Islamkolleg Deutschland, Muslims who have a bachelor's degree in Islamic theology can now train to become imams for over two years.

    In addition, there is also the possibility of training as a pastor or community supervisor.

    80 percent of the imams come from abroad

    The first year, the training of which has just started, comprises 25 people, most of them men, but also some women. The curriculum ranges from teaching preaching, reciting the Koran and pastoral care to social work and political education. The training also includes the practical application of the learning content in mosque communities that cooperate with the Osnabrück institute.

    The academic director of the Islamic College, Bülent Ucar, calls the establishment a "milestone". “By creating transparent and independent structures, we want to encourage trust at all levels and establish German-language alternatives to the status quo.” With this, Ucar, who also heads the Institute for Islamic Theology at Osnabrück University, focuses on where the imams are around 2500 mosque communities have been trained so far. According to estimates, more than 80 percent come from abroad. The clergy of the Ditib, by far the largest mosque association, are usually people who not only received their training in Turkey and often only have a rudimentary knowledge of German, but are also paid by the Turkish religious authority Diyanet.

    This situation has been viewed increasingly critically by German politics since Turkey under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan developed into an autocratic regime with an Islamist and increasingly nationalist orientation.

    For this reason, the federal government has also been requiring since 2019 that imams must prove knowledge of German in order to receive a residence permit.

    Ditib has already reacted to this development and, for its part, has also opened a training center for imams in Germany.

    Since the beginning of 2020, she has been running an institute in the Eifel that will primarily teach in German.

    However, most of the prospective imams continued to study Islamic theology in Turkey.

    With government aid of millions

    The establishment of the Islam College in Osnabrück can be read as an attempt to reduce the influence of foreign states on the mosque communities in Germany in the long term. The federal government and the state of Lower Saxony are supporting the institute with 5.5 million euros over five years. In addition, the first graduates should be offered professional prospects as pastors in the Bundeswehr or Federal Police or in the penal institutions of the federal states.

    The state does not have any direct influence on the content of imam training - due to its religious and ideological neutrality it is not allowed to.

    The Islam College is therefore supported by an association that was founded in 2019 by academics, Muslim personalities and Islamic associations.

    The associations are the Central Council of Muslims, the Islamic Community of Bosniaks, the Central Council of Moroccans, the Alliance of Maliki Communities and the newly founded Association of Muslims in Lower Saxony.

    "Model for all of Europe"

    However, the state financial aid for the Islamic College already indicates that the five associations are not even remotely comparable with the organizational and financial strength of the Ditib. In order for the institute in Osnabrück to be able to work at all, the German state, with its assistance, goes to the limits of what the constitutional religious law in Germany allows. In addition, the question remains whether there will be enough mosque communities in the future who want to take on graduates of the Islamic College and can afford to do so.

    However, the politicians involved are confident. Filiz Polat, Member of the Green Party, attributes the Osnabrück institute, of which she is a member of the Board of Trustees, “a model for imam training throughout Europe”. Former Federal President Wulff told the Neue Osnabrücker Zeitung that more and more Germans of Turkish descent were protecting themselves “against an encroaching kind of interference” from abroad. It is “long overdue” that imams are now being trained “in the midst of us in the German language and on the basis of the Basic Law”.