An advertising flier for the exhibition

By Ahmed Al-Matboli, IOL Correspondent

BERLIN, January 10 (IslamOnline.net) – The Protestant Lutheran Church in the northwestern German city of Hannover is organizing an exhibition to acquaint the Germans with Islam and enhance the integration of the Muslim community into society.

The exhibition, entitled “The Faces of Islam”, kicked off on Sunday, January 9, and runs through February 5.

Its program is the work of the female students of the Protestant Studies Institute in the western city of Aachen.

The mobile fair will move around 10 German states with the main focus being the everyday life of German Muslim women.

It organizes interviews with Muslim women, who answer questions from curious Germans about issues like hijab and how they can adapt to western societies.

In each state, the organizers give the floor to local Muslims to take about their faith.

They also schedule visits to mosques and churches to beef up the dialogue between Muslims and Christians in German society.

The exhibition is part of a wide-ranging project until 2007 and is championed by the church’s Islam and immigration department.

It invites non-Muslim Germans to attend seminars on women and human rights under Islam, fundamentalism, integration and the obstacles facing illegal Muslim immigrants.

The project further prints brochures like “Islam in Germany,” “Burial in Islam,” and “Muslims and Christians Worship One God.”

Inter-faith

The church said on its Web site that the exhibition is a prerequisite to the success of the Christian-Muslim dialogue.

“The Protestant Lutheran Church is trying to bridge the gap between the different communities in Germany,” it added.

The church said the project is, in effect, a golden opportunity to discuss religion and express divergent viewpoints.

It said mutual respect is a must for peaceful co-existence between Muslims and Christians in Germany.

The Lutheran movement is a group of denominations of Protestant Christianity, according to Wikipedia encyclopedia.

Lutheranism as a movement traces its origin to the work of Martin Luther, a German cleric who sought to reform the practices of the Roman Catholic Church in the early 16th century.

Though the anti-Muslim voices spoke louder than ever in Germany in 2004, some officials, rights activists and Christian clerics, however, opposed the anti-Muslims campaigns.

President Horst Kohler stressed in May the importance of entering into a dialogue with Muslims, warning that Muslims were felling a “crusade” was being launched against their religion.

His predecessor Rau had said that Muslims in Germany should not be treated as second-class citizens, asserting that they have become part and parcel of the German society.

Some 40 Muslim youths, aged 18-30, set up a kiosk in central Hamburg on December 21-24, distributing illustrative materials on Islam among attentive and enthusiastic passers-by.

Islam comes third after Protestant and Catholic Christianity. There are some 3.4 million Muslims in Germany, including 220,000 in Berlin alone.

Two thirds of the Muslim community are of Turkish origin.