No space for Allah as German unis tighten request rooms
“Practising Muslims will find a approach to urge one approach or another and they’ll find a place,” Ender Cetin, authority during a Sehitlik Mosque in Berlin, told The Local.
If a mosque is too distant away, they’ll find a dilemma to do it in, he says.
“You simply feel discriminated opposite by people if they don’t speak to we and afterwards say, ‘you can’t use your sacrament as we are used to’,” Cetin warns.
But several heading universities see things differently and a spate of decisions to tighten request bedrooms has led to claims of discrimination.
‘Security threat’
The Technical University in Dortmund has henceforth sealed down a request room – that was dictated for people of all faiths – Die Welt reported in February.
The university says that Muslim group had attempted to take it over by commanding gender separation (with a request space for group incomparable than that for women) and storing request mats inside.
“The try to emanate a pan-religious imagining space has failed,” pronounced a spokesperson.
But Muslim students credit a university of fixation them underneath ubiquitous guess and 400 names were collected for a petition accusing a university administration of cultured opposite them.
Particularly upsetting was a university’s reason that a room was sealed for “security reasons” – potentially heading people to trust a Muslims regulating it were practising radical forms of Islam such as Salafism.
‘Not adequate space’
At a university of Essen-Duisburg, a room for Muslim students that existed for some-more than 20 years has also been closed.
Officials settled in an central letter that a room had to be sealed due to “matters of space for a students to study”.
“With some-more than 130 nations during a university, we can’t offer a room for each sacrament or culture,” a university said. “The room was commissioned in a time in that there were no places for Muslims to go nearby. This has altered in a past dual decades.”
But partial of a reason could also be that a establishment perceived complaints from non-Muslim students that during request times certain activities became taboo, such as regulating a lift and toilets in a vicinity.
The request area is now to be transposed by a neutral “room of silence”.
At a Technical University in Berlin – an establishment with 34,000 students – a Muslim request room that had been there for years has unexpected been closed.
Again, a evidence seems to be one of space.
“The room was combined in a time where a Muslim students had no place circuitously to go for prayers,” Christian Thomsen, boss of a university, said to Süddeutsche Zeitung (SZ).
“The subsequent places for Muslim students to urge might be not in walking distance, though with a train it’s only dual or 3 stations away,” he added.
Unis not authorised to record religion
Just how most direct there is for request bedrooms is formidable to quantify.
German universities are not authorised to ask students about their religion, creation it tough to know how many Muslims investigate during a sold institute.
“If we knew how many Muslim students there were here, we could use that to disagree with a administrators,” one TU Berlin tyro told a SZ.
But not each university is selecting to symbol itself as a place where sacrament has no role.
The University of perfume is set to open a new request space in a summer.
“As a university, we always face dispute between secularism and eremite freedom,” a orator told a SZ.
But he pronounced that many people of faith have certain necessities concerned in praying “and they need a special room for these.”
Reporting by Raphael Warnke
Article source: http://www.thelocal.de/20160311/no-place-for-allah-as-german-unis-close-prayer-rooms