German ex-Muslims launch group to renounce Islam

Berlin, Mar 1: A group of human rights campaigners have set up an organisation to encourage Germans to renounce Islam and criticise the country's Muslim bodies, the founders said.

Iranian-born Mina Ahadi said she established the Central Council of Ex-Muslims as a counterweight to groups she said wrongly claimed to represent 3.3 million Germans.

Germany's Central Council of Muslims, one of the bodies targeted by the new group, declined to comment, but the association's head Ayyub Axel Koehler told the Tagesspiegel daily newspaper earlier this month he did not understand the motives of the new group but defended its right to exist.

Ahadi, speaking at a news conference, said Muslim groups interfered in people's lives.

''We have to criticise these organisations and we have to criticise Islam which degrades women -- that is why we have founded this movement,'' she said. Ahadi has been under police protection for several months.

While fears of radicalism are growing in Germany it has experienced nothing on the scale of the riots which took place in Paris suburbs in 2005 or the tensions that exist in some British cities with big Muslim populations.

Ahadi said the Central Council of Ex-Muslims was also sceptical about German integration policies.

''The tolerant policies of the German government, and of other European countries, make Muslim organisations accepted in society and that means they do not change,'' co-founder Arzu Toker, born in Turkey, told a news conference.

''That in turn means more girls will grow up not playing sport and not enjoying equal rights.'' Chancellor Angela Merkel has sought to improve the integration of Germany's Muslim population.

The country 3.2-3.5 million Muslims comprise around four percent of the population of Europe's biggest country. More than half of them are of Turkish descent.

''In Germany there are only about 30,000 people who are strict believers. We are the rest,'' said Toker.

The government hosted a conference last year with representatives of various German Muslim groups to try to find ways of dealing with anti-Islam sentiment and to tackle thorny issues such as imam training and equal rights.

There have so far been no concrete results from the conference which set up working groups on various topics.

Reuters