Building the Berlin Mosque: An Episode inWeltpolitik

Abstract

The Berlin Mosque was the first permanent place of Muslim worship in Germany. Never a purely local affair, the construction of the Berlin Mosque depended on the legacies of imperialism and the shifting geopolitical contexts of the 1920s. International diplomats and former Wilhelmine and Ottoman agents living and working in Weimar Berlin made sense of the mosque project through categories and ideas forged in the decades before the First World War. They gradually recalibrated their ambitions when confronted, as they were, with radical transformations of the Muslim world, from the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the abolition of the caliphate to the emergence of new political leaders from Arabia to Afghanistan. This article demonstrates how the construction and uses of the Berlin Mosque closely followed how diplomats and other actors, both German and non-German, assessed the geopolitical potential of a German–Muslim alliance in the post-Ottoman, post-Wilhelmine moment.

The Role of Parliament in the Implementation of Shariah in Western Europe (Belgium, France, and Germany)

“…However, Chebli's comments on Sharia law have been criticized by his party, the Social Democrats. [18] "Chebli is one of those who want to build bridges for Islamic society. This does not seem right.…”

The Responses of Muslims in Weimar Germany to the Abolition of the Caliphate

“…As Robert Terell noted, 'despite the radical transformation of the post-Ottoman Muslim world and Germany itself, the idea that Islam could be allied with and mobilised in the service of geopolitics, nonetheless continued to resonate with a number of former imperial diplomats and non-German activists'. 16 Both sides sought new approaches to Germany's relations with the Muslim world, but the ideas proposed at this time drew on existing ideological constructs that had been formed before and during the war and the idea of Germany's special attitude to Islam and Muslims in particular. Some Muslim activists ended up in Germany during the war as political émigrés 'who had been formerly associated with the German-Ottoman propaganda and intelligence machinery', while others came after the end of the Great War.…”

“…57 During the 1920s, 'he became one of the strongest advocates for anti-imperialism, national self-determination in the Arab world and the continued application of academic knowledge of Islam to foreign policy'. 58 Berlin became a key node in an extensive network that included Istanbul, Moscow, Kabul and other European and Middle Eastern capitals traversed by the Pan-Islamists and the revolutionaries. 59 Many Pan-Islamists considered Turkey to be the driving force behind the Pan-Islamist movement, and Mustafa Kemal was regarded as the leader who 'heroically defended the Ottoman Caliphate from external assaults upon its lands and sovereignty'.…”