| Muslim Extremism In Germany
Riad Barakat sits in a small restaurant shaking his head at the almost entirely Muslim clientele. "Look at the women, their shoulders showing," he says. "They will not go to heaven. These people are dirt."
But one former local Muslim, he says, is surely in paradise: Mohamed Atta, thought to be the pilot of the first plane that hit the World Trade Center. "After the attacks, 71,000 people converted to Islam. That will give him a pass to heaven," Mr. Barakat says. "He was a true martyr."
Mr. Barakat is a regular at al-Quds Mosque, spiritual home to three of the Sept. 11 pilots. It was in this extremist setting, where imams advocated death and al Qaeda recruiters paid frequent calls, that Mr. Atta and his two friends embraced terrorism. Police and intelligence services have watched, bugged and searched al-Quds and several dozen other mosques across Germany, trying to prevent future attacks. Worshipers have been detained and arrested.
But more than a year after the attacks, German cities are still home to extremist Muslims. That's raising the question here of what, if anything, should be done about men such as Mr. Barakat: immigrants who live off welfare, hold their new homeland in contempt and are in awe of bloody martyrdom. On the eve of national elections, it is clear that Germany -- even though it served as an incubator of the Sept. 11 plot -- hasn't figured out the answer.
Some local populist politicians have gained support with calls for forced assimilation. Local governments across the country have denied building permits for new mosques. And writers such as Hans-Peter Raddatz, a former banker who worked in the Middle East, have gained a wide following by arguing that Islam is inherently violent and must reform itself.
But in light of Germany's fascist-tainted history, most national politicians and elite media outlets shy away from suggesting curbs on the country's liberal immigration practices. The topic has arisen only fleetingly in campaigning for Sunday's elections. "If you dare to speak out and suggest something different, you are branded a Nazi," says Mr. Raddatz.
One reason Muslims flock to Germany from the Middle East and Central and South Asia is that it is relatively easy to get into the country and stay indefinitely. Germany has some of the most tolerant asylum and guest-worker laws in the world. Many immigrants are allowed to bring over their families and are provided with generous welfare benefits. Moreover, the country's universities charge only nominal tuition, even to foreigners. It was higher education that initially attracted Mr. Atta and some of his colleagues to Hamburg, before they turned to terrorism.
"It's no coincidence that the hijackers came from Germany," says Bassam Tibi, a scholar of Islam at Goettingen University, who is himself a Muslim immigrant from Jordan. "Here, they could live outside of society. No one even expected them to work." Historically, Germany hasn't made much effort to integrate immigrants. For example, it remains more difficult for foreigners to become citizens there than in many other Western countries.
Many academics, who play more of a role in shaping opinion here than their counterparts do in the U.S., disagree with Mr. Tibi, asserting that the Sept. 11 plot was an anomaly and that Germany doesn't have a Muslim-extremist problem. "They are harmless," says Werner Schiffauer, a sociology professor at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt on the Oder, who has written extensively on Islamic radicals.
Investigators, however, say the threat is increasing. Thursday, police across Germany stormed houses and offices, seizing documents, and froze bank accounts after outlawing 16 groups tied to a jailed Islamic militant. "The aggressiveness, the hate, the lack of reconciliation, the belief that jihad is right -- that's stronger than ever," says a senior German intelligence officer.
Investigators estimate that of Germany's total Muslim population of 3.3 million, 1%, or 33,000, hold extremist views. Overall, Germany has a population of 83 million. In Hamburg, police have narrowed the list of Muslim men they are keeping track of to about 100. The cell that helped spawn last year's attacks on New York and Washington had just seven members.
Mr. Barakat, whose gray and black beard flows over his white cotton tunic, came to Germany in 1979 as a visitor from Syria. Like many men in the Muslim-extremist scene, he married a German woman, which gained him permanent residency. He fathered five children with her. Citing incompatibility, he says he divorced and remarried a Moroccan immigrant, with whom he has had two more children. For Mr. Barakat, who is 52 years old, work and success are unimportant. He says he has training in television repair and industrial electronics but hasn't held down a regular job since 1996. "The most important thing," he says, "is to do good deeds."
Welfare checks help make such benevolence possible. Mr. Barakat receives about $2,500 a month in payments from the government. He says he feeds his extended family's nine mouths on that and still managed to make a pilgrimage earlier this year to Mecca, in Saudi Arabia.
Every morning, he catches the 4:04 bus from his cramped apartment in eastern Hamburg to be at al-Quds in time for morning prayers. For much of the day, he stays at the mosque, which is in a scruffy low-rent neighborhood frequented by drunks and prostitutes. Between prayers, he sometimes does odd jobs at the mosque.
Sipping tea in the cafeteria of the nearby Central Mosque in Boeckmannstrasse, Mr. Barakat says he knew some of the Sept. 11 hijackers. He praises jihad and specifically approves of the al Qaeda terrorist network. "It is like other organizations -- a way to organize your life," he says. Untroubled by seeming contradiction, he also says, "I am against all forms of violence and am only interested in victory for Islam."
Most Germans would say they favor greater integration of immigrants. The debate over how to do that -- or whether it is feasible -- is particularly acute in Hamburg, because of its tie to Sept. 11.
The city's Central Mosque is run by people close to Milli Goerues, a Turkish group that promotes an orthodox form of Islam. The group is officially listed as extremist by the German government, which says that imams at the Central Mosque have delivered anti-Semitic sermons.
One of the Central Mosque's lay leaders, Mustafa Yoldas, says he cannot account for what everyone says in his mosque. Regulars, he says, are encouraged to learn German and naturalize. But the 32-year-old medical doctor dismisses Germans' view of integration with a caricature: "Germans want you to dye your hair blond, wear blue contact lenses and sit in the pub after work, eating pork sausages, swilling beers and shouting, 'Foreigners out!' "
In his spare time, he has organized the larger Islamic community in Hamburg into a centralized council representing 43 mosques, which has facilitated some dealings with Christian groups and the government. In June of last year, the state-sponsored Protestant Church chose Mr. Yoldas to help organize an annual street festival on the block of the Central Mosque. The festival has allowed beer stands, as long as they are kept respectfully away from the mosque's front door.
The mosque and the nearby St. Georg Protestant Church were planning a joint religious service when the Sept. 11 attacks took place. Later the same week, the two went ahead with the joint service in the mosque. Prayers were said for the victims -- and the hijackers.
"The reality is we're neighbors, and we have to get along," says Gunter Marwege, St. Georg's pastor. The mosque says it receives 10,000 visitors a year, many of them non-Muslims.
Joint services and the like strike some as naive. Mr. Tibi, the Muslim scholar from Jordan, says German churches have sponsored "intercultural dialogues" with Muslim groups for decades but never have really challenged Islam to be more accepting of pluralism and to condemn anti-Semitism. "These discussions are well meaning, but they are usually empty exercises," he says.
Some mosques that are members of Mr. Yoldas's council, such as al-Quds, have not curbed their anti-Semitic messages. Videotapes are still for sale at al-Quds extolling jihad and denouncing Jews, Israel and the U.S. Even the well-polished Mr. Yoldas lets his guard down sometimes. He says at one point that he can't blame members of al-Quds for refusing to talk to journalists, because they don't know who the journalists really are. "They might be Jews or American provocateurs," he says.
While many Germans accept their Muslim-immigrant neighbors, an undercurrent of skepticism has become more pronounced. "I like diversity in a city," says Steffen Haber, a salesman from Germany's Ruhr Valley on a business trip to Hamburg. "But some of these people don't just have different cultures, they have a culture opposed to ours. How is this supposed to go on?"
Despite the spread of such concerns, discussion of immigrant extremism has been all but taboo during the national election campaign. Only during this final week, with his support dropping, did conservative chancellor candidate Edmund Stoiber dare to raise immigration. He suggested a seven-point program to open the country's borders only to people whose skills were needed in the German job market.
Such plans are popular among voters but also make Germans uneasy. After World War II, Germany wanted to show that it had renounced Nazism by becoming a beacon for the world's oppressed. So, Mr. Stoiber's plans were immediately attacked. Berlin's centrist Tagesspiegel newspaper branded his proposal "xenophobic." Churches issued critical statements. Mr. Stoiber immediately dropped it.
Regional and local populist politicians have been less shy. Two weeks after last year's attacks, Hamburg, which has the status of a state, held parliamentary elections. The big winner was populist Ronald Schill, whose anti-immigrant pitch won him 19% of the vote -- about twice what he had been polling before the attacks. It was enough to catapult him and his right-wing allies into power in Hamburg for the first time in 44 years.
Officials "let things go so far that I was ashamed to tell people that I'm from Hamburg," says Caroline Streit, a train-station clerk who voted for Mr. Schill. She says she was embarrassed when new acquaintances said, " 'Oh, you're from that terrorist nest.' "
One of the new government's first moves was to abolish an ombudsman office for foreigners. The office had possessed the authority to intervene on behalf of foreigners in disputes over welfare and housing. But the ombudsman was seen as too accommodating to Muslims and others, so the office was replaced by an advisory "integration council" of 44 volunteers, who meet every other month and have no formal powers.
Half of the new group's members are foreigners, but no one represents Muslim organizations. Publicly, city officials say Mr. Yoldas wasn't invited to join the council because everyone couldn't be included. Privately, the officials say his advocacy for integration was outweighed by his ties to Milli Goerues, the extremist Turkish group.
A new national law enacted last year in response to Sept. 11 also has hurt Muslims. The measure is designed to block extremist groups from using claims of religious discrimination to hinder police investigations. Bias claims had been a critical tool used by Muslim groups to force reluctant German landlords to rent them space. Now, many mosques find they can't expand. "No one wants to rent to us, and we can't claim religious discrimination anymore," Mr. Yoldas says bitterly. Last year, his own mosque's application to build an extension, including a 165-foot-high minaret, was rejected by the Hamburg planning board, which said the spire would be a provocation.
Hamburg's new government is unapologetic for its tougher line. "There was no success before in integrating Muslims," says Birgit Schnieber-Jastram, the minister for social affairs. "So we thought that this was a better way."
These new policies, however, have done nothing to ease tension. In July, police caught on tape six young men meeting in a Muslim bookstore. One of them, Abdelghani Mzoudi, had lived in the same apartment as Mr. Atta, the alleged hijacker. "I wish to die a martyr's death," Mr. Mzoudi said. "Yes, with God's will," the bookstore owner responded.
Mr. Mzoudi later got his wish for martyrdom blessed by an imam at al-Quds, according to a police tape made there. Police detained the six men in July as a warning but set them free, saying they hadn't broken the law.
Mr. Barakat is dismissive of the raid and its targets. "All the people at the bookstore are just beginners," he says, toying with his cellphone. "They talk too much." The police, though, are worse, he adds. They are motivated by racism, hoping only to cause trouble for pious men like himself, he says.
Eternity obsesses Mr. Barakat. He expects to earn his way into heaven by properly raising his seven children. His eldest daughter, 16, has already memorized all 604 pages of the edition of the Koran he gave her. Now, he says, she is ready for marriage. He has betrothed her to a Saudi man he met during his pilgrimage to Mecca.
Mr. Barakat says the city around him is of no interest. Walking down Steindamm on his way home, he ignores a dazed junkie combing her hair. "I don't care where I live," he says. "I could be anywhere." | |
