Berlin, Germany - A German public broadcaster has launched a new series of Islamic sermons to complement its existing Christian and Jewish broadcasts. The sermons have been criticized by conservative politicians but welcomed by church leaders.
Christian and Jewish mini-sermons known as "Thought for the Day" have long been a feature of public broadcasting in Germany and elsewhere. Now a German public broadcaster has started an Islamic version.
The publicly-funded broadcaster Südwestrundfunk (SWR), which serves the south-western states of Baden-Württemberg and Rhineland-Palatinate, launched its Islamic sermons service -- the first of its kind in Germany -- on Friday.
The sermons, which are in German, will be broadcast on the first Friday in the month. Friday is the day of prayer in Islam.
The messages will be composed by a team of four experts on Islam. The station has already recruited Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of Germany's Central Council of Muslims (ZMD), and the Mannheim-based imam Bekir Alboga as authors, and is in the process of recruiting two women to join the team.
The sermons will be published on the station's Web site as audio files and transcripts. At the moment there are no plans to broadcast them on radio or television.
In the first sermon, which went online on Thursday evening, Mazyek talked about the quality of mercy within Islam. "Do we have the strength to be merciful even in extreme cases?" he asked. "It is an extremely difficult question and an almost insurmountable challenge, in particular for victims of hate and destruction." He said this was illustrated by the current debate in Germany about releasing convicted left-wing Red Army Faction (RAF) terrorists from prison.
"We want to make a small, modest contribution to the integration of Muslims in German society," Johannes Weiss, head of the SWR's religious broadcasting department, told SPIEGEL ONLINE INTERNATIONAL. He said Muslims have greeted the new sermons as a "sign that they have arrived in German society and that they belong here."
Weiss explained that SWR wanted to start the sermons to serve the around 600,000 Muslims who live in the station's transmission area. "It's important that their voices are also heard," he said. An estimated 3.3 million Muslims live in Germany.
He emphasized that the German-language sermons are aimed at non-Muslim Germans as well as practicing Muslims. "We want to help Germans learn about what Muslims believe," he said.
The sermon service has already proved controversial, however. "Germany doesn't need a mosque station," said Markus Söder from the conservative Bavarian party the Christian Social Union (CSU) in recent comments, while Baden-Württemberg politician Stefan Mappus, who belongs to the CSU's sister party the Christian Democratic Union, said that license fees should not be spent on the broadcasts. However Weiss pointed out that Muslims also pay license fees and deserve to be represented in public broadcasting.
Weiss said that reactions to the new series have been overwhelmingly positive since the launch, with representatives of Germany's Christian churches in particular praising the idea. Baden-Württemberg's conservative governor Günther Oettinger, who was recently in the headlines after he delivered a controversial eulogy at the funeral of a Nazi-era judge, has also welcomed the plan.
A second German public broadcaster, ZDF, is planning to follow suit with regular Muslim sermons later this year.
The new service reflects the growing self-confidence and public profile of Germany's Muslim community. Germany's four main Islamic organizations recently formed an umbrella group called the Coordination Council of Muslims (KRM) to represent their interests with a unified voice. In recent remarks to DER SPIEGEL, Mazyek called for Islam to be "put on an equal footing" with Christian religions. This could mean Islamic instruction in German public schools or even tithing of Muslims through the German tax office.