Via Eurasia Review:
A European form of Islam needs to develop before a meaningful interfaith dialogue can take place on the continent, the new leader of Germany's 24 million Protestants has said.
"We are only at the beginning of a serious inter-religious discussion on a theologically high level and that is because there are problems with finding counterparts," the Rev. Nikolaus Schneider told ENInews in a 17 November interview in Trier.
"The imams who come from Turkey to Germany can hardly speak German and that means that we need to train imams in Germany at our universities," said Schneider, who was elected the new chairperson of the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD) on 9 November during a meeting of its governing synod in Hanover.
(...)
We need an Islam that has an academic formation in our country and at our universities, an Islam that is able to enter into dialogue with the social sciences and with the natural sciences in our country," said Schneider.
Referring to imams, he said, "They don't know our cultural background, and they cannot preach in such a way so that they can provide orientation to the conditions of our society, but they preach as if the people are still living in Turkey."(source)
