Germany Advances Taxpayer-Funded Islamic Curriculum Despite Warnings
30th July 2025
The recent call by the German Association for Education and Training (VBE) to establish comprehensive Islamic religious education in schools across the country has reignited the debate on institutionalised Islamisation in Europe. Gerhard Brand, the VBE’s federal president, urged political authorities to plan “adequate human and material resources” to implement such instruction in the short term, stressing that existing pilot projects must be evaluated, optimised, and rapidly expanded.
Federal states such as North Rhine-Westphalia and Bavaria already offer confessional Islamic teaching, while others rely on non-binding Islamic studies or have no consistent programs at all. This disparity has been used as an argument to demand a “comprehensive national offer” that, according to the VBE, would allow Muslim students to express their faith in a controlled school environment.
However, warnings have not been long in coming. The German Teachers’ Association, through its president Stefan Düll, acknowledged the risk that radical preachers are exploiting the absence of state-regulated Islamic education online and within closed family circles. In his view, a model supervised by the state could counterbalance the more extremist currents.
But the core problem lies not only in the form but also in the content of such education. Numerous experts have denounced that organisations such as DITIB, which still maintain structural ties with Ankara and the Turkish religious authority Diyanet, continue to influence Islamic education in Germany. Journalist Eren Güvercin, one of the most vocal critics, has warned that even if imams are trained on German soil, they continue to spread a nationalist and religious mentality alien to European values. The Bundestag has also come under fire for failing to sever ties with these entities.
The German case is not isolated. In France, the phenomenon is even more concerning.