Half of Turkish Germans hold Islam above state law

From the German edition of The Local

A wide-ranging new study by the University of Münster shows that Germany’s Turkish community still has very conservative views on the role of religion in society. The survey provides an often contradictory picture of social attitudes among Germany’s 2.7 million people of Turkish origin.

A total of 47 percent of the 1,201 respondents said that “following the tenets of my religion is more important to me than the laws of the land in which I live.”

One in three respondents, meanwhile, agreed that “Muslims should strive to return to a societal order like that in the time of Muhammad.”

Twenty percent said that the threat which the West poses to Islam justified violence. Seven percent said violence was a justifiable means of spreading Islam.

The report’s authors assessed that 13 percent of people they spoke with were religious fundamentalists based on the answers they provided.

The study also revealed a radically different perception of Islam among Turks as in the wider German population. While 6 percent of Germans as a whole associate Islam with human rights, 57 percent of Turkish Germans do. Similarly the 65 percent of Turkish Germans who think of Islam as standing for peacefulness is in marked contrast to the 7 percent of the wider population who hold this view.

While respondents expressed anger that Islam is falsely understood in Germany “quite a few of them hold onto religious positions which don’t do much to counter the magnitude of suspicions and mistrust.”