March 19, 2024 10:46 (IST)
Follow us:
facebook-white sharing button
twitter-white sharing button
instagram-white sharing button
youtube-white sharing button
Death toll in Kolkata's under-construction illegal building collapse rises to 9 | LS polls: BJP to contest 17 seats in Bihar, JDU gets 16, Chirag Paswan's party 5 | PM Modi twisting my 'Shakti' remark: Rahul Gandhi issues clarification after receiving flak | Supreme Court asks SBI to disclose 'all information related to electoral bonds' | Telangana Governor Tamilisai Soundararajan resigns
Many Dutch mosques funded by foreign organisations seeking to promote hardline Islam, warns committee

Many Dutch mosques funded by foreign organisations seeking to promote hardline Islam, warns committee

India Blooms News Service | @indiablooms | 06 Jul 2020, 04:19 am

Amsterdam: A committee of Dutch lawmakers have warned that  several mosques in the Netherlands are being funded by foreign organisations seeking to promote a hardline, anti-democratic version of Islam.

The committee is headed by  Michel Rog.

Accordion to media reports, the Rog-led committee voiced concern about the influence of countries such as Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar on the Dutch Muslim community.

The list of donors is dominated by Salafi organisations, who overwhelmingly fund mosques that share their fundamentalist interpretation of Islam. Donors also influenced the appointment of mosque leaders, imams and preachers, as well as the type of education and literature on offer, the committee said in its concluding report to parliament, reports Dutch News.

It found that the Diyanet, the Turkish state’s religious arm, exerted a strong political influence on the Turkish religious community in the Netherlands. All Diyanet preachers are appointed and employed by the Turkish government. Conservative religious groups also used social media extensively to promote their message, reports the newspaper.

The report said mosques tended to use unorthodox financial constructions to obscure who their backers were and how much they received, while government organisations lacked the resources to investigate them, the newspaper report further said.

However, the committee did not make any recommendation on the issue.

Some members of the Islamic community attacked its remit as ‘prejudiced’ because it focused exclusively on foreign donations to mosques and not churches, reports Dutch News.

‘It is for political parties now to draw conclusions and to decide how far it is necessary or to take more measures than there are currently,’ the committee was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

Representative image of a mosque from Pixabay

Support Our Journalism

We cannot do without you.. your contribution supports unbiased journalism

IBNS is not driven by any ism- not wokeism, not racism, not skewed secularism, not hyper right-wing or left liberal ideals, nor by any hardline religious beliefs or hyper nationalism. We want to serve you good old objective news, as they are. We do not judge or preach. We let people decide for themselves. We only try to present factual and well-sourced news.

Support objective journalism for a small contribution.