In Germany, Xenophobia Diverted by Open Doors

VÖLKLINGEN, Germany - Everything seemed to be in place for a protracted xenophobic row and attendant media frenzy in this depressed industrial town near the French border.

A Muslim congregation applied in November to build a minaret and three golden cupolas on the roof of the old movie theater it had converted into a mosque. The far-right party here in the state of Saarland, emboldened by last year's ban on minarets in Switzerland, seized on the issue, calling the proposed 28-foot minaret "the bayonet of Islam."

But after a quick turn in the media spotlight, the pending furor fizzled out. A neighborhood group recently issued a statement with mosque leaders calling for "peaceful and constructive" cooperation, while the mosque's leadership agreed to temporarily shelve the plan for the minaret.

They will spend the rest of the year reaching out to the non-Muslim community, opening their doors to promote understanding before moving ahead. "Whether it comes to building the minaret or not, we've started the dialogue and we're going to continue it," said Atnen Atakli, the mosque's chairman.

Analysts say that strong social safety nets have kept intolerance toward Europe's Muslims from growing significantly through the economic crisis, at least so far, with the worst sparring coming between countries - in particular Germany and Greece - rather than within them.

"Governments have been willing to cushion the blow and expand the deficits, so the debate has not heated up," said Justin Vaïsse, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution's Center on the United States and Europe, who studies Muslims in Europe. "You're not looking at a 1930s situation where a social crisis derives from an economic crisis."

Acrimonious debates and disputes over Islam - particularly the most visible manifestations like women wearing head scarves, veils and burqas and the construction of mosques - continue apace. But researchers have not seen a correlation between economic woes and Islamophobia.

"The economic crisis hit the immigrant population, many of them Muslims, harder than it did the majority population," said Werner Schiffauer, professor of social and cultural anthropology specializing in Muslim populations in Europe at the Viadrina University in Frankfurt an der Oder. "As they are dependent on welfare benefits, there was the accusation of blaming them, in a way, that Islam is responsible for a lax working morale."

Völklingen welcomed migrants, especially from Turkey, who came in the 1960s and '70s as guest workers in the industrial boom years. Now, the rusting ironworks known as the Völklinger Hütte are defunct, a Unescolandmark but also a constant reminder of better days.

The city's population shrank to just below 40,000 last year from over 48,000 in 1974. Migrants and their children and grandchildren now make up 12 percent of the populace, with Turks the largest group. For immigrants who have worked here for decades, raised families and are now retired, a small prayer tower did not seem too much to ask.

"All the churches here have big towers, and there are many churches in Turkey," said Ihsan Urgaci, 65, a retiree who has lived in Germany for 40 years.

But many local Muslims, like Ridvan Carpar, said it was better not to press the issue. Mr. Carpar, 35, came from Turkey when he was 5 years old and works in a kebab stand across from the mosque, which itself is evidence of the city's changing face. Above the sign for Pasha kebabs, grimy letters on the facade still spell out "Schreiner's Drugstore."

"Until now, we've never had any problems," Mr. Carpar said. "A mosque is a mosque, whether it has a minaret or not."

Mr. Carpar inadvertently echoed the same sentiment as Frank Franz, the state chairman in the Saarland of the far-right party, the National Democrats, which has two seats on the city council. "A minaret has nothing to do with freedom of religion; it isn't necessary," Mr. Franz said. At a party meeting in Völklingen last month, red and white fliers declared, "Thank you, Switzerland. Minaret ban here, too!"

In November a Swiss referendum banning the construction of minarets passed with 57.5 percent of the vote. The Swiss minaret ban showed, Mr. Franz said, "that the opinion of the people is not sufficiently respected in other parts of Europe."

The National Democratic Party - which the government has tried unsuccessfully to ban as a neo-Nazi party - may be represented on the city council in Völklingen, but their two seats are down from five before the last election in 2009, when the economic crisis was at its worst.

So far, at least in Germany, the far right has not been able to capitalize on economic turmoil to gain a larger foothold. But the debate in Europe over visible symbols of its sizable Islamic population, with estimates ranging from between 15 million and 20 million in European Union countries, remains unsettled and fraught.

The Dutch anti-Islam leader Geert Wilders had a strong showing in recent local elections in the Netherlands, just three months ahead of the June 9 national election. In France, Jean-Marie Le Pen's National Front provoked outrage ahead of regional elections in southern France with a veiled woman standing in front of an Algerian flag in the shape of France, studded with minarets.

President Nicolas Sarkozy has led debates over French identity and the Islamic veil, which many experts say is a strategic move to head off challenges from the far right. But that backfired in the first round of regional elections, when voters for the National Front stuck with their party and Mr. Sarkozy had trouble motivating his own base.

Völkingen's mayor, Klaus Lorig, from Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Christian Democratic Party, who faces an election in September and came out against the minaret, has struck a more conciliatory tone.

"Purely as a matter of building code, it could be approved," he said. "What I fear is that this effort, this attempt to come closer, that the delicate buds we've nurtured in the area of integration might be endangered if they insist on building the minaret."

(www.nytimes.com)