Mosques across Europe Push Turkish Agenda on Anniversary of Coup Attempt

A series of spon­sored events and social media posts sug­gest that the Turk­ish gov­ern­ment is using local groups to spread its mes­sage on the sixth anniver­sary of the July 2016 attempt­ed coup in Turkey. In Stuttgart, Ger­many, for exam­ple, the Women’s Branch of the  pro-AKP lob­by­ing orga­ni­za­tion Union of Inter­na­tion­al Democ­rats (UID) tweet­ed a video with the text:

UID Würt­tem­berg Region­al man­age­ment and wom­en’s branch­es had an emo­tion­al pro­gram under the mod­er­a­tion of our youth. We com­mem­o­rat­ed our mar­tyrs of July 15, and said that we have not for­got­ten and will not let them for­get… (trans­lat­ed by deepl.com with edits)

The video indi­cates the DITIB Mosque in Stuttgart Feuer­bach was the even­t’s site. DITIB made sim­i­lar tweets in Milano, Bonn, Stras­bourg, and the Mil­lî Görüş youth asso­ci­a­tions in Brus­sels and Rot­ter­dam, among others.

The Turk­ish-Islam­ic Union for Reli­gious Affairs (DITIB) man­ages over 900 mosques in Ger­many. At the same time, the Turk­ish  Direc­torate of Reli­gious Affairs  (Diyanet)  deter­mines the the­o­log­i­cal guide­lines for imams’ ser­mons, and the Turk­ish con­sulate pays their salaries. DITIB, how­ev­er, main­tains that it is inde­pen­dent of the Turk­ish state.  Ger­man politi­cians have sought to have imams trained in Ger­many instead of sent over from Turkey, part­ly to reduce Turkey’s influ­ence in the country.

Mil­lî Görüş is a Turk­ish reli­gious and polit­i­cal move­ment found­ed by Necmet­tin Erbakan, Erdoğan’s polit­i­cal men­tor, which has called for an end to the sec­u­lar regime in Turkey. In Ger­many, Mil­lî Görüş oper­ates as the Islamis­che Gemein­schaft Mil­lî Görüş (IGMG), which over­sees the work of Mil­lî Görüş chap­ters in at least 12 Euro­pean coun­tries and states that it has over 127,000 mem­bers world­wide. The GIOR has report­ed about the Ger­man government’s asser­tion that Turk­ish Pres­i­dent Erdoğan’s AKP par­ty has inten­si­fied its rela­tions with Mil­lî Görüş in Germany.