Muslims in Germany Receive Threat Letters

A few hours before I flew to Turkey I was in the office at my neighborhood DITIB mosque talking to the son of the religious attache.  I had run into Metin (not his real name) a couple times before, but this was our first chance to sit down and have a conversation by ourselves.

There were papers scattered all across the desk between us, but one in particular caught my eye as we talked.  Sticking out of a pile was one of the caricatures of Muhammad that had been printed in a Danish newspaper last year (for those who saw the cartoons, it was the one depicting Muhammad with a bomb in place of a turban).

I wasn’t too surprised to see it because DITIB had issued a press release about the controversy several months ago, but when I asked Metin what it was and he pulled the paper out from the stack, I was stunned by what I saw.

There were three of the Danish caricatures of Muhammad on the bottom of the page and above them in bold-faced type was the message, “Türken geht nach haus, so bald ist’s noch aus,” which means something like “Turks will go back home, and soon it will be so.”  (Feel free to correct both my German and the translation; I wasn’t able to write down the message right when I saw it.)

Stapled to the page was the envelope it had come in.  The mosque’s address was printed on a label but there was no return address and the stamp was postmarked in Bonn.

Metin told me that DITIB receives threat letters and harassing mail like this pretty regularly, at least once a month or so.  That’s not a huge number, but enough to be discouraging.

I had asked DITIB officials about relations with Germans, but I never thought to ask specifically about letters and other forms of harassment.  Certainly no one volunteered to tell me about them before.

It was an upsetting note to go out on as I left Berlin for Istanbul.