Daniel Abdin, director of the Islamic Center Al Nour in Hamburg, Germany, at a former church that is being converted into a mosque to accommodate Al Nour’s 2,000 congregants. Credit Gordon Welters for The New York Times
Source: NY Times
JULY 23, 2015
HAMBURG, Germany — There were cracks in the steeple, and the southeastern wall would somehow have to accommodate a niche pointing toward the holy city of Mecca, in Saudi Arabia, but those were not the biggest misgivings Daniel Abdin had about buying the Capernaum Church here in 2012.
More daunting than the millions of dollars in renovation costs was how residents of Horn, the working-class district where the church has stood since 1961, would react when they learned that Mr. Abdin and his thriving Muslim congregation planned to turn the derelict building into a mosque.
A church was “the last thing that we wanted,” said Mr. Abdin, 52, the director of the Islamic Center Al Nour in Hamburg, during a recent interview outside the former Lutheran church, a squat modernist structure of concrete and red brick that construction workers were slowly encasing in scaffolding.
But a church is what Mr. Abdin got, much to the dismay of some residents of this historically Protestant city in northern Germany, who view the building’s conversion into a mosque as a symbol of the so-called Islamization of the country.
“A breach in the dam” is how Helge Adolphsen, a retired pastor from another congregation, described Mr. Abdin’s church conversion plans in early 2013.
The local branch of the conservative Christian Democratic Union party called for the conversion to be halted. Another local pastor suggested that it would have been better simply to demolish the building, which was deconsecrated in 2002, rather than to let it become a mosque.
In 2013, a right-wing group obtained permission to hold a protest in front of the building. Organizers expected 100 participants, but only 16 people showed up. And, as has happened at other anti-Muslim demonstrations across Germany in recent years, they were far outnumbered by counterdemonstrators, who were estimated at 700.
The early cries of opposition to the conversion have since quieted, and the renovations are continuing. For now, some neighbors say, they are waiting to see how things turn out once the mosque opens.
Additional Reading
Promoting Islam as Religion and Secularism as Politics in France
