German Study Claims Devout Islamic Youth More Violence-Prone

The more devout a young Muslim male in Germany is, the more likely he is to resort to violence, according to a federally financed study seen Saturday by the German Press Agency dpa.

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The as-yet-unpublished research was jointly conducted by the federal Interior Ministry and the KFN criminology research institute in Hanover headed by Christian Pfeiffer. Dpa obtained a copy in Berlin.

In a conclusion, the authors said the finding might be explained by hypotheses of Rauf Ceylan, an ethnic Turkish scholar in German who studies religion.

They said Ceylan had discovered that a majority of mosque clergy in Germany encouraged their congregations to practice a conservative form of Islam and to preserve their ethnic roots.

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The findings characterised imams or clergy as men working only temporarily in Germany with no knowledge of the German language, preventing them from developing a positive attitude to German culture or from questioning male dominance.

The study suggested those views were transferred to young people at the mosque, whereas non-devout boys picked up more liberal German attitudes. Pfeiffer wrote: ‘This is not a problem with Islam, but a problem with their education in Islam.’

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