In an article appearing on Qantara, Deutsche Welle‘s online platform seeking to foster cross-cultural dialogue with, broadly speaking, the Islamic world, journalist Tonio Postel takes stock of Muslim life in Germany between participation and exclusion, integration and Islamophobia. Growing participation of Muslim migrants in society The exercise is a welcome one. Given the plethora of more…
In flashy advert campaigns, Berlin, Germany’s capital city, vaunts itself as the world’s “capital of freedom” defined by the coexistence of the widest possible array of diverse lifestyles.1 On a more mundane level, however, successive city administrations have struggled to come to terms with the implications of ethnic and religious diversity. Berlin’s ‘laic exceptionalism’ Unsurprisingly,…
Germany’s federal elections of September 24th have propelled the far-right AfD party into parliament with 13 per cent of the popular vote, making it the third-largest group in the Bundestag. Given the AfD’s anti-immigrant and anti-Islam platform, German-Turkish political scientist Said Rezek observed that for many German Turks the AfD’s rise poses an “existential” challenge.1…
As Germany prepares to go to the polls, there are many inside the country who will not be able to cast a ballot on September 24th: roughly 10 million of Germany’s 82 million inhabitants do not hold German citizenship. Of these, 5.7 million residents have a non-EU nationality.1 No vote at the end of an…
Kamel Kabtane, rector of the Grand Mosque of Lyon, published a communiqué before the first round of the elections in which he called on the Muslim community to assume its “duty” to vote. “Our responsibility, as citizens of this country, commands us to take part in France’s future at a time when certain irresponsible persons attempt…
