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Germany will no longer accept imams trained in Turkey

2023-12-15 08:22:00, Kosova & Bota CNA

Germany will no longer accept imams sent from Turkey and will instead train Muslim clerics on its own soil in a bid to better integrate.

A training program that sends Turkish imams to German mosques will be phased out as Germany seeks to prepare its Muslim clerics to encourage integration, Germany's Interior Ministry announced on Thursday.

According to a new agreement between the ministry, the Turkish religious authority Diyanet and the Turkish-Islamic coordination group DITIB, around 100 imams will be trained in the western German town of Dahlem each year. These imams will gradually replace the approximately 1,000 clerics trained and employed by the Turkish Diyaneti. "We need religious leaders who speak our language, know our country and defend our values," Nancy Faeser, Germany's interior minister, said in a statement.

"We want imams to participate in interfaith dialogue and discuss matters of faith in our society," Faeser added.

According to the German Islamic Conference (DIK), about 5.5 million Muslims live in Germany, or approximately 6.6% of the population. "This is an important step for the integration and participation of Muslim communities," Faeser said.

Germany has about 2,500 mosque communities, of which 900 are managed by DITIB. An offshoot of Ankara's Presidency of Religious Affairs, DITIB is Germany's largest Islamic association, but it has been accused of acting as an arm of the Turkish government.

A member of the Taliban spoke at a mosque in Cologne

The latest controversy over DITIB arose when a member of the Afghan Taliban spoke last month at one of the organization's mosques in the western city of Cologne.

In 2017, German officials asked DITIB to undertake fundamental reforms following allegations that imams sent by the Diyanet had spied on behalf of Ankara, following the failed coup against the government of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The Diyanet denied any involvement and the investigation was closed without any charges being filed.

Former Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke for the first time in 2018 in favor of training imams on German soil, telling the parliament that this "will make us more independent and is necessary for the future". The training of 100 imams per year in Germany will be carried out within the existing DITIB program, as well as through an additional program, the ministry said. For this purpose, she said she was looking for "cooperation with the German College of the Islamic Religion" in Osnabrück./ DW