On Wednesday and Thursday, the controversial Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CDU) is for the first time hosting the Islam Conference in Berlin, with integration as a top theme.
Shortly after becoming Interior Minister in March, Horst Seehofer announced that Islam "doesn’t belong to Germany" - a statement he has sought to reverse after the sharp criticism it generated.
The Bavarian interior minister, the host of this year’s Islamic Conference in Berlin, has said that Germany’s 4.5 million and growing Muslim population should live as part of German society rather than separately or even in opposition to it.
Namely, the Bavarian politician is pushing for mosques in Germany to train their imams in Germany rather than abroad, and depend less on foreign contributions, he announced in his opening talk on Wednesday.
Seehofer did not concretely say how mosques would receive funding in the future. He announced, however, that existing funding programmes for integration projects within the mosque communities would be expanded.
He wants to see that "German Muslims replace foreign influence not only organizing and financing their communities themselves, but also adapting imam training to their needs," Seehofer wrote in a guest article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung on Monday. [The Local] Read more
