German Muslim Leader Speaks Peace to Provocation
By MARK LANDLER
COLOGNE, Germany
AYYUB AXEL KÖHLER pads around his snug apartment here these days with three telephones that ring ceaselessly from sunrise until well after dark.
What, the callers from the German news media want to know, does Mr. Köhler think of the cartoons published in a Danish newspaper lampooning the Prophet Muhammad? How should Germany's more than three million Muslims 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."
Yet, Mr. Köhler says Muslims should not allow their anger to mutate into 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 added: "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. Mr. 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 1950's and converting to Islam.
A plump 67-year-old who wears a paisley bow tie and a pair of Birkenstocks, Mr. Köhler is a supremely improbable choice to be a leading voice for Germany's predominantly Turkish Muslim population.
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 at most an episodic role in his life until he went from Axel to Ayyub.
Little in Mr. Köhler's life has followed a predictable path, including his ascension to his current post, which he says he took only reluctantly following the retirement of his predecessor, a Saudi doctor. Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
He was born in 1938 in Stettin, in what is now the Polish city of Szczecin, and his earliest memories are of bombing raids. In 1943, his family fled to a remote village south of Berlin, thinking it would be safer. Mr. Köhler's parents rarely went to church. His father, an architect, struggled with Christian tenets like the Holy Trinity.
Childhood innocence ended for Mr. 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 town, 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 the soldiers would not hear its cries. Their prayers were answered, but by the baby's death.
"That is the religion I grew up with," Mr. Köhler said, his voice catching.
AFTER the trauma of the war, his family had to learn to live under the spiritual emptiness of Communism. In high school, Mr. Köhler said, he was asked by party functionaries to inform on his teacher. He and other students tipped off the man, who fled to West Germany. At that moment, Mr. Köhler decided he, too, would leave.
After getting out of East Germany, Mr. Köhler bounced between refugee camps, finally landing uncomfortably in Baden-Württemberg, in the south, a parochial place with a bewilderingly thick Schwabish German accent.
Mr. Köhler's world opened up, though, 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, Mr. 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," he 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."
Mr. Köhler also met and married an Iranian woman, even moving to Tehran to teach there (the marriage ended in divorce). He said he did not convert to Islam because of his wife, though she was a factor.
Back in Germany in 1973, Mr. 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 became his second wife.
Mr. Köhler also plunged into municipal politics and Muslim causes. He joined the Free Democratic Party, as well as an association that sought to unify Germany's disparate Islamic organizations to lobby the government on issues like teaching Islamic studies in public schools.
Germany's Muslims are a fractious crowd, however, and the efforts to forge a united front failed. Today, Mr. 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 Gorus.
Mr. Köhler's group once claimed to represent 800,000 Muslims, though experts say the true number is much smaller. He speaks of having links to between 400 and 500 mosques in Germany.
UNLIKE his rivals, who tend to keep close political and cultural ties to Turkey or other countries, Mr. Köhler said his council seeks to foster a European brand of Islam, unfettered by nationalism or sectarianism. Mr. Köhler is a Sunni, but he said there were Shiites on his board.
The German police keep Muslim groups under surveillance, and have banned some, including one led by Metin Kaplan, a Turkish militant who calls himself the caliph of Cologne and who was jailed for four years for the murder of a rival Muslim cleric. He has since been deported to Turkey.
From his balcony in a middle-class neighborhood, Mr. Köhler can peer down at Mr. Kaplan's former house. The two men knew each other, and even now, Mr. Köhler defends him.
"He was just a nice old man," he said. "If there was no Kaplan, they would have had to invent him."
Mr. Köhler believes Germany's Muslims showed their true colors in the peaceful way they reacted to those provocative cartoons. Yet German officials, he said, are quick to brand Muslims as dangerous extremists. It is a politically popular tactic, and goes hand in hand with legal campaigns, like forbidding Muslim teachers to wear headscarves in schools.
"It is an old story in Germany," Mr. Köhler said, showing his visitor to the door. "We've always had problems with foreigners."
ers start with conclusions and work your way backwards, scampering to find evidence of what you already hold to be true ("Religion of Peace" and all that).
