Three years ago, the green-black state government in Baden-Württemberg was proud to have finally found a solution for organizing Islamic religious education by founding the "Sunni School Board Foundation".
Transferring responsibility for Islamic religious education to a foundation, because there are no Islamic religious communities responsible for Islamic religious education, was seen as a new attempt at a solution.
After laborious discussions, the state government had found the "State Association of Islamic Cultural Centers in Baden-Württemberg" and the "Islamic Religious Community of Bosniaks" as contractual partners. The board of the foundation should decide which teaching materials
Ruediger Soldt
Political correspondent in Baden-Württemberg.
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The Frankfurt ethnologist and head of the research center "Global Islam", Susanne Schröter, now considers the foundation model to have failed.
In an interview with the "Stuttgarter Zeitung" she said: "The Sunni school board has shown that it abuses its power to ignore theologians who represent a modern, constitutional Islam.
He represents a backward-looking, undemocratic understanding of Islam that has no place in state schools.” The reason for this judgment is the dispute that has been simmering for months about the two university teachers Abdel-Hakim Ourghi from Freiburg and Abdel-Hafiez Massud from Weingarten.
What follows under secularization among Muslims?
The "Sunni School Council" had not granted the Ijaza to either of the two scholars, explaining that both were only Islamic scholars and not theologians.
However, there are still no theologians who train religion teachers at either of the state's educational colleges.
The fact that only Sunnis and thus only a minority of the Muslims living in Baden-Württemberg are represented on the school board was a weakness of the foundation model that has existed since it was founded.
It is doubtful whether the foundation model will be a lasting solution for organizing Islamic religious education.
At the time, the state government introduced it under great time pressure, because otherwise numerous model projects to test Islamic religious education could not have continued.
The conflict between traditional association representatives in the foundation and the extremely liberal Islamic scholars at the universities was also foreseeable.
But the political approach of offering Islamic religious instruction to improve the social integration of Islamic students and to ward off Islamist teachers in schools has become questionable overall.
Because secularization is also progressing rapidly among Muslims: Only 20 percent of people who profess Islam are still close to the Islamic associations.
Only seven percent of Muslims are represented by the two associations on the school board of the Baden-Württemberg foundation.
As in Bremen and Hamburg, the future could also lie in offering cross-denominational religious education for Christians, Muslims and Jews.