Foreign funding of places of worship threatens Germany’s security

Nahla Abdel Moneim

Germany is seeking to regulate foreign funds for places of worship, religious and cultural centers to prevent them from being targeted by extremist forces, especially the international organization of the Brotherhood, which controls a number of institutions in the country.

Germany is the most prominent European country in which the Brotherhood has been interested in establishing organizations. Since the emigration of the group’s leaders from Egypt in the 1950s and 1960s, the Brotherhood has established institutions such as the Islamic Community of Germany (IGD) and other entities whose influence on society has increased over time.

With the return of major terrorist operations to the European arena at the end of 2020 and extremists affected by the Brotherhood’s agenda, the German government fears a growing radical influence in religious entities.

Mosque financing and laws that undermine extremism

Debate rages in Germany about preventing mosques from receiving funds from outside the country for fear that terrorists will exploit suspicious financing networks to transfer funds to carry out terrorist operations or recruit troubled people. What the government fears most is the exploitation of foreign funding for places of worship and religious centers through the intelligence services of rival countries seeking to threaten Germany’s security.

The German Bundestag is discussing a bill known as the mosque tax, which requires that citizens in the country finance places of worship without the need to receive foreign financial support, with the aim of preventing foreign influence from controlling religion in the country.

This bill raises a lot of confusion in the country, which is evident in the length of time it is taking to discuss its articles, as decision-makers have been discussing the provisions of the law since 2018 until now, but it has not yet been approved.

Burkhard Lischka, a member of the Internal Affairs Committee of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in parliament, told DW on December 26, 2018 that the Green Party strongly supports the proposal and has a positive reaction to it, but there is opposition among the country’s religious institutions.

For its part, the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) rejects calling the law a mosque tax, but they suggest naming it zakat instead. Between the interactions of the different parties, the law remains without approval until now, amid great debate that escalates from time to time, with calls for tightening control over the financing of religious and cultural entities to prevent them from being exploited by terrorists.

Foreign funding and Germany’s security

The problem of foreign financing of religious entities comes as a crisis for Germany’s security not only because of the growing influence of the Brotherhood in the country and its control over the Central Council of Muslims, the German Muslim Community (DMG), the Muslim Student Association, the Islamic Center of Aachen and other institutions spread across the country, but also due to another influence tied to Iran, which is aggressively seeking political pressure on Europe to pass the disputed nuclear deal.

In July 2020, the German authorities discovered that the Al-Mustafa Center, which is active among the Shiites in the country, exploited foreign and domestic funds to finance Hezbollah and its members in Lebanon, which happened months after Germany’s decision to ban Hezbollah in the country following the discovery of an affiliated cell possessing explosives.

The suspicious financing crisis of the growing extremist currents in Germany shows the extent of the threat posed by the opposing intelligence as a link that can exploit the situation to carry out terrorist operations at home or pressure Germany by threatening it with possible explosions.