The Cologne Central Mosque has been making headlines recently, and the effects have not all been negative. On the contrary: An especially large number of curious, non-Muslim visitors attended this year’s mosque Open Day.
“If not now, then when?” thought Dana and Julia. The two young women have travelled from their hometown of Olpe to the Central Mosque in Cologne, not despite but precisely because of the negative headlines surrounding its opening by the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan.
It’s already hard enough for Muslims, Dana and Julia say. Too many people are going around with prejudices and irrational fears. For these two women, participating in the mosque open day was also a way of signaling that Islam is part of Germany.
Dana, Julia and the other visitors have been sitting on the soft blue carpet in the big prayer room of the Central Mosque, listening to the speaker’s words of welcome.
Read more: Islam in Germany: Muslim prefer to be talked to rather than talked about
The atmosphere is relaxed and peaceful. Many of the visitors are busy snapping photos, tilting their heads back to admire the 35-meter-high (115 feet) transparent dome. Light floods in, filling the room and lighting up the gold calligraphy on the walls.
The “Open Day at the Mosque” has taken place every year since 1997. This year, around 900 houses of prayer opened their doors to visitors, including the Central Mosque in Cologne — the largest mosque in Europe outside Turkey. The prayer room can hold up to 1,200 worshippers, but it doesn’t have many visitors yet. Little by little other guests start arriving. At first journalists seem to be in the majority. No surprise there — this mosque is famous, not just because of its size.
Finished at last after nine years, this impressive building of steel, glass and concrete is the central mosque of the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB). The association has long been regarded as an instrument of Ankara, rather than an independent German organization. The fact that it was the Turkish president who opened the mosque last Saturday has caused a lot of displeasure.
Missed opportunity
Today, the integration minister of North Rhine-Westphalia, Joachim Stamp, also gives an address — and he takes the opportunity to criticize DITIB. “I would have liked the inauguration of the mosque to have been a symbol of German Islam,” he said, while having the Turkish president open it had given a different impression.
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