Translated material
Blessing on the mosque
German bishops will support Muslims
Residents of Cologne taught a lesson to right-wing extremists last weekend, who convened the “Congress against Islamization” in the city . Thanks to the efforts of the townspeople, the action of 1.5 thousand European right-wing populists, whom people, not without reason, called “neo-Nazis”, was actually disrupted. The people rallied against right-wing extremists under the slogan “Cologne is being crossed.” Taxi drivers refused to take “anti-Islamists” from the airport to the city. City bus drivers did not allow people into their buses, decorated with calls to resist the construction of a large mosque in Cologne. In the pubs there were posters: “No Kölsch (the name of the most popular local beer - Ed. ) for neo-Nazis!" A wall of tens of thousands of protesters against intolerance towards foreigners and people of other faiths became an insurmountable obstacle for the organizers of the rally at the Heumarkt - the Haymarket of Cologne.The main object of the dispute was the project to build a large mosque in the Ehrenfeld district of Cologne, where representatives of various cultures and non-traditional religions for Germany settled compactly. The customer for the construction is the local Turkish-Islamic Religious Union. The architects of the mosque are Germans - Gottfried and Paul Boehm. They proposed erecting a five-story building with a 35 m high dome and two 55 m minarets, with a total area of 16.5 thousand square meters. m will be able to accommodate 1,200 believers. It will have its own library, premises for religious schools, shops, an underground garage, as well as “service enterprises”, including Turkish baths.
Such a huge Muslim center is considered too big for a “Western Christian” city on the Rhine not only by the far right. The local faction of the Christian Democratic Party in the city parliament also opposed the new mosque. This did not stop the mayor of the city from speaking out against fellow party members and supporting supporters of the construction of the mosque. In August, the city council, with the support of the SPD, the Greens, the Free Democrats and the Left Party, decided in favor of building a grandiose Muslim temple.
Meanwhile, resistance to the construction of new mosques has also developed in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich, with residents of the neighborhoods closest to the planned construction resisting the most. But nowhere else has the confrontation between supporters and opponents of “Islamization” manifested itself as sharply as recently in Cologne. After all, even such well-known public figures here as the Jewish writer and public figure Ralph Giordano or the women's rights activist Nejla Kelek, a Turkish woman from Istanbul by origin, are categorically against the future mosque.
After the noisy failure of the protests in Cologne, the leadership of the Catholic Church in Germany is preparing to declare its attitude towards the project. Yesterday the annual autumn bishops' conference opened in Fulda, where it is planned to develop a unified attitude to this problem. Cardinal Karl Lehmann of Mainz acknowledges that “freedom of religion protects the right of Muslims to build decent mosques where they live.” At the same time, he points out, plans for the construction of mosques must be agreed upon “on a long-term basis through intensive discussions with the population and authorities.” In their preliminary statements on the eve of the conference, the Catholic bishops counted themselves among the supporters of a future large mosque in Cologne.