An unusual voice for Muslims By Mark Landler The New York Times FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 2006
COLOGNE Ayyub Axel Köhler pads around his snug apartment here these days with three telephones, which ring ceaselessly from sunrise until well after dark. What, the callers from the German news media want to know, does Köhler think of the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper, lampooning the Prophet Muhammad? How should the nearly four million Muslims in Germany respond to this attempt at satire? "One has to understand how much we love our prophet," he said, sitting in a tidy living room furnished with Moorish antiques. "Our prophet was a very mild man. He was not a terrorist." Köhler deplores the eruption of violence. "I tell Muslims, 'please don't be provoked,"' he said. "This is not a civilized way to protest blasphemy." In case there is any misunderstanding, he adds, "I am in favor of press freedom. I know what it means to live in a society without it." On that last point, certainly, there is no dispute. Köhler is not just the newly elected chairman of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany. He is also a German who grew up in Communist East Germany before fleeing to the West in the 1950s and converting to Islam. A plump 67-year-old who wears a paisley bow tie and a pair of Birkenstocks, Köhler is an improbable choice to speak for German Muslims, who are predominantly Turkish. He shares a last name with the German president, Horst Köhler, while his adopted Muslim name is the Arabic form of Job, the long-suffering Old Testament figure. He was baptized a Protestant, though he says religion played scarcely any role in his life until he went from Axel to Ayyub. Little in Köhler's life has followed a predictable path, including his current post, which he says he took only reluctantly, after his predecessor, a Saudi doctor, decided to retire after 12 years. Köhler took office on Feb. 5, just as the firestorm over the cartoons ignited. The Muslim council's first impulse, he said, was to avoid getting into the dispute, so as not to stir up its members. When European diplomatic outposts in the Middle East came under a hail of rocks, Köhler realized he could not stay above the fray. He embarked on a media tour of Berlin and Hamburg, facing television cameras to preach a message of moderation. "I wasn't prepared for this at all," he said, shaking his head. "It wasn't my goal in life to be a public figure." At first, his goal was simply to survive. Born in 1938 in Stettin, now the Polish city of Szczecin, Köhler's earliest memories are of bombing raids. In 1943, his family fled to a remote village south of Berlin, thinking it would be safer. Köhler's parents rarely went to church. His father, an architect, struggled with Christian tenets like the Holy Trinity. Childhood innocence ended for Köhler in May 1945, when Red Army troops marched into his village on their way to Berlin. He recalls a night of paralyzing terror, when the Russian soldiers rampaged through the community, raping women. He and his mother hid with 30 others in a potato cellar. As soldiers stomped on the floorboards above them, one of the women delivered a baby. The others knelt and prayed that it would die, so the soldiers would not hear its cries. Finally, the baby was quiet. "That is the religion I grew up with," Köhler said, his voice catching. After the war, his family learned to live under communism. But in high school, Köhler said he was asked by party functionaries to inform on his teacher. He and other students tipped off the man, who fled to the West. Köhler decided he, too, would leave. "For me, that was the first step toward becoming an informant for state security," Köhler said, referring to the notorious Stasi. "I had the feeling that I would have been broken by it." After getting out of East Germany, Köhler bounced between refugee camps, finally landing in the southern German state of Baden-Württemberg. The parochialism of the region, with its thick German dialect, made him feel more alienated than he ever had in the East, he said. Köhler's world opened up after he went to study geology at the University of Freiburg. There he fell in with a circle of Muslim students from Egypt and Iran. While they were not fervent, Köhler said they piqued his curiosity. He bought a book with the title "Religions of the World." "It was the deep humanity of these people that attracted me," Köhler said. "For me, it was a process of gliding into Islam. It wasn't as though a light-bulb suddenly went on over my head." Köhler also met and married an Iranian woman, and moved to Tehran to teach there; the marriage ended in divorce. He said he did not convert to Islam just because of his wife, though she was a factor. Back in Germany in 1973, Köhler joined the Institute for German Economics in Cologne, where he worked for the next 26 years. Among other things, he published a survey of Islamic economies, which he now dismisses with a grimace as a minor work. It did, however, arouse the interest of a young Turkish-German teacher, who would become his second wife. Köhler also plunged into municipal politics and Muslim causes. He joined the Free Democratic Party and a group that sought to unify the disparate Islamic organizations in Germany to lobby the government on issues like teaching Islamic studies in public schools. German Muslims are a fractious crowd, however, and the efforts to forge a united front failed. Today, Köhler's central council is the smaller of two Islamic umbrella groups. It is less Turkish and more Arab than its rival, the Islamic Council for Germany, which includes the largest Turkish group, the Islamic Community of Milli Görus. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/02/17/news/german.php Post message: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe : [EMAIL PROTECTED] List owner : [EMAIL PROTECTED] Homepage : http://proletar.8m.com/ Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/proletar/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
