IGMG Employs 40 Imams Sent by Turkish Religious Authority

Ger­man media is report­ing that the Sec­re­tary Gen­er­al of the Islamis­che Gemeinde MIl­li Görüs (IGMG) said in an inter­view that the IGMG employs 40 imams across Europe sent by the Turk­ish reli­gious author­i­ty Diyanet. Accord­ing to the Ger­man news­pa­per Die Welt, Ali Mete said:

Jan­u­ary 10, 2023 These are only about 40 out of well over 600 imams and thou­sands of reli­gious edu­ca­tors in our com­mu­ni­ties, and are replaced where pos­si­ble by spe­cial­ly trained imams. They work for us for one year and are only paid by us. This means that the author­i­ty to instruct these imams lies exclu­sive­ly with the IGMG and not with Diyanet. By the way, we had to hire Diyanet imams from Turkey because Ger­many changed the entry reg­u­la­tions for imams in 2010. (Trans­lat­ed using deepl.com)

Read the rest here.

In the inter­view, Mete also declines to take a posi­tion on whether he con­sid­ers Hamas, a ter­ror­ist orga­ni­za­tion. In 2010, the Ger­man Inte­ri­or Min­istry banned the Inter­na­tionale Human­itäre Hil­f­sor­gan­i­sa­tion e.V. (IHH), an aid orga­ni­za­tion belong­ing to the IGMG. It was accused of hav­ing for­ward­ed dona­tions to Hamas.

Mil­lî Görüş is a Turk­ish polit­i­cal move­ment whose aim is to trans­form Turkey into an Islam­ic state. The move­ment was found­ed in 1969 by for­mer Turk­ish Prime Min­is­ter Necmet­tin Erbakan, who, until his death, head­ed the Islamist Felic­i­ty Par­ty in Turkey. The ide­ol­o­gy and polit­i­cal agen­da of Mil­lî Görüş has called for an end to the sec­u­lar regime in Turkey through edu­ca­tion and preach­ing. In Ger­many, Mil­lî Görüş oper­ates as the IGMG, which over­sees the work of Mil­lî Görüş chap­ters in at least 12 Euro­pean coun­tries and states that it has over 127,000 mem­bers world­wide. Der Spiegel report­ed that between 2004–2009, IGMG offi­cers fun­neled at least €9.5 mil­lion to the Felic­i­ty Par­ty. The IGMG is repeat­ed­ly con­front­ed with accu­sa­tions of antisemitism.

The Diyanet or Direc­torate of Reli­gious Affairs (Turk­ish: Diyanet İşl­eri Başkan­lığı or Diyanet) is a Turk­ish state insti­tu­tion respon­si­ble for man­ag­ing reli­gious affairs. The Diyanet was found­ed in 1924 to monop­o­lize con­trol of Sun­ni Islam in Turkey under the state. The Diyanet drafts a week­ly ser­mon deliv­ered at all of Turkey’s mosques, and their imams are civ­il ser­vants employed by the state. Start­ing in the 1980s, the Diyanet began to man­age mosques abroad and send imams there to pro­mote Turk­ish Islam. After the Jus­tice and Devel­op­ment Par­ty (AKP) came to pow­er in 2002, it quadru­pled the Diyanet’s bud­get and installed lead­ers who sup­port­ed its posi­tions, where­as it pre­vi­ous­ly had been sec­u­lar and inde­pen­dent of state interference.