Photo Gallery Paving the Road to Integration
Germany is home to more than 3 million Muslims. And though Muslims have lived in the country for decades, the first proposal to offer religious instruction for Muslims first came in 1978. Still, Islam classes have only been introduced in recent years, and in a small number of schools.
There are 800,000 school-age Muslim children living in Germany. Educators and government policy-makers hope that by offering courses on the Muslim religion in German, they can help to better integrate these students. But their prospects for advancement in society are poor -- at least if you look at the statistics. Only 2.3 percent of all Muslim high school students finish school ...
... and their grades generally aren't high enough to enter university. Now, there are an estimated 120 Islam teachers in Germany, who are trying to give these kids a push ahead. By teaching about the Koran in the German language, they hope to pull them from the margins to the center of society.
At this school in Bonn, Germany, teacher Havva Yakar offers fifth-grade students a course in Islam. The initiative has received the political support of the Islamic community. Ayyub Axel Köhler of the Coordination Council of Muslims in Germany has called for such courses to be introduced all across Germany. "We need the quickest possible negotiations to ensure that Islam as a subject in schools is offered in every state," he told the newspaper Ruhr Nachrichten.
One problem with introducing Islam courses is that the Muslim religion is not as well organized as Catholic and Protestant organizations. The vast majority of Muslims in Germany are not organized at all, because hierarchies are not traditionally part of Islam, which has no pope, no bishops and no synods.
At the Albert Scheitzer Primary school in Hanover in the state of Lower-Saxony, a basic course on Islam is offered to 21 students.
The country hopes to change that, though. German universities in Münster, Erlangen and Osnabrück recently began offering Islamic religious studies programs in the hope of training future teachers who could offer the subject in schools. But only a few dozen university students have registered for the programs at a time when hundreds, if not thousands are needed to fill the need of a fast-growing Muslim immigrant population.
