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In 1986, in the middle of the IranâIraq War, I arrived in Germany as a refugee child. My mother, my two younger brothers and I came first. My father followed two months later.
A German Christian family, the Hirths, welcomed us into their home. We lived upstairs in their yellow-painted middle-class house, with its adorable little garden, three rather overweight cats and an elderly dachshund.
Mrs Hirth guided my parents through German bureaucracy, found language classes and sat patiently with us over our homework. To me, she embodied the best of German Christian culture: love of oneâs neighbour, civic duty and an instinct to help. She volunteered constantly, cooked wonderful German food and kept an impeccably organised home. Nobody could have introduced us to Germany better.
Integration was not an abstract government programme. It was a relationship. But it depended upon a host culture confident enough to introduce newcomers to itself.
I noticed the first cracks in the mid-1990s. Small gangs of North African and Turkish boys at our school regularly caused trouble and committed petty crimes. But they were still a minority. German culture remained the setting everyone else was expected to fit into.
After finishing school, I moved to Cologne to study. I spent my wasted youth in the heart of the city, in the shadow of its magnificent Gothic cathedral, between the Old Town and Cologneâs notorious gay quarter. The streets smelled of freshly brewed Kölsch from the MĂŒhlen brewery, Greek gyros, bratwurst and bread from old German bakeries. The city was unmistakably German, yet culturally vivid and anything but ethnically uniform.
When I returned to my old neighbourhood years later, the smell of kebab dominated the streets. Turkish kiosks and bake-off shops selling reheated frozen dough had replaced many of the old bakeries and butchers. Most of the gay bars had moved elsewhere, making way for still more kiosks. Veiled women carrying groceries from the halal market passed the places where drag queens once stumbled out of the iconic Timp bar in the early hours of the morning.
The old Cologneâwith all its contradictions, eccentricity and colourâhad largely disappeared. What replaced it calls itself multicultural but looks increasingly monotonous: the same kebab shops, halal markets, kiosks and cheap bakeries repeated from one European city to another.
The demographic transformation is even clearer in the schools. At several Berlin secondary schools, more than 90 per cent of pupils have a non-German language of origin: 94.7 per cent at the Walter Gropius School, and over 90 per cent in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. These numbers do not reveal religion, but they show that German culture can no longer be assumed to constitute the surrounding majority. However, a culture cannot integrate newcomers once it has stopped being the world they arrive in.
And here the great misconception becomes impossible to miss: multiculturalism is not diversity. A multiethnic society is.
A multiethnic society brings different people into a common culture. Multiculturalism deconstructs that common culture and, in the case of Islam, legitimises separation. Other major immigrant communities integrated. The Muslim community built a parallel societyâand it has proved remarkably rigid.
Halal and haram no longer govern only the believerâs plate when parents demand halal food and the removal of pork from school menus, and Muslim pupils pressure classmates to throw away sandwiches during Ramadan.
What Islamâs apologists ignore is that religious freedom cuts both ways. It protects the right to practise a religionâand the right to reject, criticise or ridicule its beliefs, commands and...
Top 11 reasons why I left Islam.
1. Irrational hate of the Christianity.
2. Irrational hate of the Jews.
3. Irrational hate of the Hindu.
4. Quran is badly written, very incoherent and without any sense of spirituality like the religion.
5. Prophet was a sexually depraved warmongerings pedo (that became the first top reason the more I uncovered it).
6. Not allowing any dissent or to leave.
7. Irrational hate of all polytheists.
8. There is no respect for women in Islam.
9. The religion combined with Sharia is not much different to Communism
10. Subjugation and restriction of women to be free, as they want to be.
11. In Islam a man can marry 4 times and woman can marry 1 time and they can also do Halala with them?
đšđâŒïž | En una votaciĂłn apretada, el Parlamento de Zurich prohibiĂł el uso de velo islĂĄmico en colegios y guarderĂas pĂșblicas, tanto en alumnas como profesoras. La votaciĂłn acabĂł con 87 votos a favor y 82 en contra. âEl uso va en contra de los valores de la escuela. Discrimina y obstaculiza la igualdad de derechos. No es un sĂmbolo religioso, sino polĂticoâ, señalĂł Domenik Ledergerber, diputado suizo.