Germany: Should Muslims pay religious tax?
Foreign radicals are funding Germany’s mosques, said Georg Mascolo in the Süddeutsche Zeitung. A government inquiry has found that Saudi Arabia in particular has poured billions of dollars into spreading Salafism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, throughout Europe. The government fears that “the money could be used to radicalize the refugees” who entered Germany en masse in 2015, many of them Muslims from Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And the Saudis aren’t the only foreign influence: The Turkish government has sent imams to preach in hundreds of German mosques, and many of them overtly encourage German Muslims to be loyal to Turkey, not Germany. Berlin began trying to clamp down on foreign funding last year by requiring countries to disclose their donations to German Islamic groups. But now it’s considering a further step. Several members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition government have proposed instituting a religious tax for Muslims, similar to the one paid by practicing Catholics, Protestants, and Jews.
That religious tax is “a peculiarly German phenomenon,” said Katharina Schuler in Die Zeit. It has ancient roots in the customs of pagan Germany, where tribal chieftains were responsible for priests’ pay and the maintenance of religious cults. In most countries, religious communities are funded directly through donations, but observant Germans mark their religion on their tax forms, and the state collects a tax—about 9 percent of their income tax—on behalf of that religion, which it then distributes to the relevant church or synagogue authority. Germans can opt out, but they then can be denied access to church schools or day care centers, or even be refused communion and burial services. For this tax to be extended to Muslims, Islamic groups would have to register as public corporations, as Christian churches and Jewish denominations have done.
That’s not possible, said Lamya Kaddor in T-Online.de. Islam doesn’t have a hierarchical church system, or even a cooperative network of religious communities as Judaism does. Instead, German Muslims come from a diverse set of belief systems and traditions, with “a theological range from liberal to fundamentalist.” If the government simply anointed the largest German Muslim groups as recipients of the tax monies, that would benefit the very radicals it seeks to displace, since the biggest groups were established by Saudis and Turks. Taxing Muslims and dispersing their money seems like “the 50th step” in organizing Islam here, when we haven’t even taken “step one.”
Then take that step, said Martin Lutz in Die Welt. Seyran Ates, the female founder of a liberal mosque in Berlin, says that “a silent majority” of German Muslims feel alienated from the big Muslim associations. She advocates the establishment of “a democratic Islamic council” to represent moderate German mosques. A religious tax may not be possible yet, but we must lay the foundation to free German Islam from foreign influence.