21 March 2016 A visit of the sheikh of Al-Azhar, Muhamad al-Tayeb, has elicited polarised responses in the German media and among German Muslims. Al-Tayeb visited the German parliament (Bundestag), speaking in front of parliamentarians about the necessity for religious dialogue and stressing the nature of the Islamic message as a message of peace and…
22 March 2016 How to give recently arrived Syrians an insight into the workings of German society and the issues animating contemporary German politics? Ramy al-Asheq, himself a Syrian of Palestinian origin living in Germany since 2014 has set out to facilitate this process by founding the country’s first free-of-charge Arabic newspaper catering to the…
22 March 2016 In a landmark ruling on the role of religious symbols in public schools in March 2015, the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht) decided that a generalised prohibition of the hijab in schools was unconstitutional, as was any privileging of Christian or Jewish symbols. The Court asserted that neither the rights of third…
21 March 2016 The newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung has published a survey in which both Germans and long-settled immigrants in Germany were asked to assess the situation of immigrants in the country. In this survey, the non-immigrant respondents painted a somewhat sceptical picture of what, according to their perception, being an immigrant in the country…
21 March 2016 The Qantara magazine provides an insight into the challenges and possibilities of interfaith dialogue in the Rollberg disctrict of Neukölln, one of Berlin’s rougher neighbourhoods. 80 per cent of the area’s population are mostly Muslim immigrants; and Neukölln has made the headlines nation-wide as a putative example of the failure to integrate…
