The Church tax is controversial. To extend the model now to Muslims to modernize Islam?
comment by Heribert Prantl Heribert Prantl
Prof. Dr. Heribert Prantl is a member of the editorial Board of the süddeutsche Zeitung, he has led for 25 years, the Department of the interior policy and is now the head of the departments opinion. He teaches as an honorary Professor for legal studies at the University of Bielefeld. He’s right, history and philosophy studied, in parallel, a journalistic training, and in copyright and competition law a doctorate. Before he left in 1988 as political editor for the SZ, he was a Prosecutor and judge in Bavaria. He loves the music of the upper Palatinate, compatriot Christoph Willibald Gluck. When he hears the put by he novels, history books, the “pure legal doctrine”, and even the Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Heribert Prantl has written the price of numerous political books and, for the first book, “Germany, flammable” he received the Geschwister-Scholl -. Among its other awards including the science award of the house of Thurn and Taxis, the Kurt-Tucholsky-prize of the rhetoric-the price of the University of Tübingen, Germany, Hildegard Hamm-Brücher-price, of the seven Pfeiffer award, the Wilhelm-Hoegner-price and the Brüder-Grimm-prize of the University of Marburg. For his editorials on the major Christian holidays of the faculty of theology of the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, he was awarded the Dr. h. C. theology. Recent book publications: “In the name of humanity. Save the refugees” (2015); “in Spite of all of this. Europe, you got to love” (2016) and “instructions for use of the populists” (2017).
The collection of Church tax by the state is an anachronism. As the Catholic social ethicist Nell-Breuning fifty years ago. It would be strange, this controversial model in which the state acts as a paid provider of services for the collection of the member’s contributions to the Church, even in the Form of a mosque-tax on the Muslims to extend. The Church tax requires each taxpayer member of the Church of eight to nine percent of its income tax. The reason for the call to the mosque tax, the same treatment with Christian churches is not. You want to oppose in this way the fundamentalism in Riyadh and Ankara, is currently funding a lot of German mosque communities. The goal is not good, but the means. The mosque is expensive, is not a political instrument of control, to force the Reformation. If anything, the claim of the Muslim communities would have to come.
The Islamic associations have to organize themselves as a Corporation under public law. You would then find that there are many secular Muslims who do not want to register and then undenominational. And it would give the Muslim associations, which are financed rather different, and gratefully do without.