Abu Bakr Rieger, the president of the EMU Foundation, an umbrella organization for informing about and promoting Islam in Europe, comments in an interview on the German Islam conference. According to him, the whole project has had its downsides from the beginning, when former German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble invited “liberal Muslims”, who were very…
In an article for Qantara.de, Hilal Sezgin addresses the peculiar and questionable composition of the German Islam Conference. First, she criticizes the invention of “secular Muslim” that are so welcome at the Conference: either they are in favor of separating church and state, which applies to roughly all German Muslims, or they are not religious,…
The German Islam Conference, a much-valued institution that brings together Islamic associations, the Interior Ministry and representatives from politics and public life, is currently at stake. It will take place – probably on May 17 – but the list of participants has not been finalized, after a controversy between Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière and…
Far-right German organization Pro Köln will organize an “Anti-Islam Conference” on May 9, only nine months since the last conference. The organization, which is against the mosques being built in Köln and Frankfurt, called far-rightist groups from all around Europe to participate in the conference. The group argues that society in Köln is gradually becoming…
Europe’s right-wing populists want to build a united front to battle what they call the continent’s creeping Islamization at a conference set to take place in Cologne this weekend. Powerless to stop the event, local officials are anticipating the arrival of thousands of counterprotesters. Cologne’s Heumarkt, a cobblestone square in the city’s Old Town, is…
