Muslims in Germany: Life post-Hamas-attack 'like after 9/11'

"I experienced the weeks that followed September 11. I feel like I've been taken back there," said Suleman Malik, a Muslim from the eastern German state of Thuringia, as he recalled the terror attack on the United States that took place in 2001.

He added that sometimes he felt as if he was "being led through the circus on a nose ring."

Malik said he knows that Muslims across Germany have been suffering new recriminations since Israel's war on Hamas began: women being yelled at for wearing headscarves, for instance, or communities receiving hate mail.

"What is missing," he told DW, "are people who say, 'you Muslims belong here with us, we'll protect you.'"

The Pakistani-born 35-year-old is, as one says in Germany, a well-integrated Muslim from the Ahmadiyya community, which began as a reform movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Malik speaks fluent German, works as a personnel consultant and is the deputy district mayor of the Erfurt neighborhood of Reith. For the past several years, he has also been engaged in the construction of a small mosque in an industrial park on the city outskirts.

Muslims: partners in the fight against antisemitism

Malik said people who felt and articulated empathy for the suffering of innocent Palestinian civilians in Gaza were immediately, "seen as being antisemitic, even though not every Jew thinks the Israeli government is doing the right thing."

He condemned the terror Hamas directs at Israel and quoted a passage from the Quran that forbids attacks on the religious sites of others.

He emphasized that "Muslims are obliged to protect Jewish life," and that those who didn't had failed to understand the lessons of Islam.

German society, he said, should view Muslims as partners in the fight against antisemitism.

Malik also spoke to DW about his home state, Thuringia, and the Alternative for Germany (AfD), the Thuringia branch of which German domestic intelligence agencies have labeled a right-wing extremist organization.

"We have a party that has declared Islamophobia part of its political program, and it is currently winning approval from nearly one-third of voters in opinion polls," he said, adding that right-wing extremists protest in front of his community's mosque every week.

Study confirms anti-Muslim sentiment in Germany

In June 2023, after years of research, experts presented a comprehensive study titled "Anti-Muslim Sentiment — Germany Takes Stock." Germany's federal government tasked the Independent Expert Group on Anti-Muslim Sentiment (UEM) with compiling the report after a racially motivated attack in the city of Hanau. Located in the state of Hesse, Hanau was the scene of a February 2020 attack in which a right-wing extremist killed nine individuals with migrant backgrounds.

The study clearly delineates the scale of anti-Muslim sentiment in German society, but, above all, it shows how little is known about it. That means, for instance, that for a long time, anti-Muslim hate crimes were rarely classified as such.

Moreover, the report makes clear that "anti-Muslim sentiment is not a marginal phenomenon in society but is widespread in large parts of the German population, remaining at a consistently high level for many years."

But in the wake of Hamas' bloody October 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel, in which militants killed 1,200 people and took 240 more hostage, and especially since protests on German streets — some celebrating the attacks and even denying Israel's right to exist — the study has garnered little discussion. It was even relegated to a cursory role in the federal government's "German Islam Conference" held at the Interior Ministry in November. The political agenda, it seems, has been reshuffled.

Was a recent arson attack in Hesse racially motivated?

This relegation of importance is happening despite reports of increases in attacks on mosques, property damage and threatening anti-Muslim messages across the country in the weeks after the Hamas attack. The most dramatic of these instances played out when a home in Wächtersbach in Hesse was torched shortly before Christmas.

Graffiti reading "foreigners out!" was scrawled on the house, causing authorities to question whether the crime was racially motivated. An investigation is ongoing. The house was home to a family from Pakistan that has long resided in the village and the members of which, like Malik, are well-integrated.

Malik said he is frustrated that there are too few statistics and too few facts when it comes to anti-Muslim attacks in Germany. New statistics tracking anti-Muslim crimes over the last few months of 2023 have yet to be published, for instance, but staff at information centers say there has been a significant increase.

"There is a sizable Muslim population that happily lives here in Germany and that shares the country's societal values," said former journalist Suleyman Bag in Berlin. "We're losing sight of that normalcy."

Muslims are often cast as the problem in German society, but intelligence services reports clearly show that right-wing and left-wing extremism pose a far greater threat than Islamic extremism.

One form of hate shouldn't blind people to other forms of discrimination

Even Güvercin of the liberal Alhambra Society said it is not enough to simply look at anti-Muslim sentiment as it only represents one isolated form of hate.

He said that although anti-Muslim sentiment was naturally an "important issue," we needed to avoid "victimhood competition," in which one form of hate blinds people to other types of hatred and discrimination.

Güvercin said that if Muslim society fails to openly discuss its own problems, such as antisemitic stereotyping and the hatred of Jews, it will be unable to move beyond the discrimination it experiences itself.

The same, Güvercin said, goes for the whole of Germany.

"Politicians and society must get more serious about how to confront the increase in racism," he said.

That is why the June 2023 report on Anti-Muslim Sentiment and the findings and suggestions it puts forth for politicians are so important. Güvercin said that politicians must also finally address the issue of racism more earnestly than they have in the past.

This article was translated from German by Jon Shelton.

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