After the latest of his sermons denouncing the Islamic State, Mohamed Taha Sabri stepped down from an ornate platform at the House of Peace mosque. The 48-year-old chief preacher then moved to greet his congregation, steeling himself for the fallout.
Soon, two young men - they are almost always young, but not always men - were calling him out. Only moments before, Sabri had derided the militants’ tactics, saying “it is not our task to turn women into slaves, to bomb churches, to slaughter people in front of cameras while shouting ‘God is great!’ ”
One young man in a black leather jacket angrily chided him for challenging “Muslim freedom fighters.” His companion in a yellow shirt then chimed in: “What is your problem with the Islamic State? You are on the wrong path!”
“No,” said Sabri, embracing the surprised young men. “My brothers, you are the ones on the wrong path.”
In the era of the Islamic State, the wrong path has become all too familiar ground at the House of Peace. Nestled between the kebab restaurants and bric-a-brac shops of an immigrant neighborhood in south Berlin, the liberal mosque stood for years as a temple of tolerance where battered Muslim women could find help divorcing their husbands and progressive imams preached a positive message of religious tolerance.
But as a ruthless brand of Islamic ideology radiates from the battlefields of the Middle East, the House of Peace has become a microcosm of the new fault lines developing inside countless mosques in the West. It illustrates the daily battle being fought against the militant group’s message by thousands of moderate religious leaders in Europe and beyond.
It is a fight that is sowing fresh divisions, and one the moderates do not always win. At least two youths who used to worship at the House of Peace - including Denis Cuspert, a former German rapper recently filmed holding the head of an enemy in an Islamic State video - have already left to wage jihad in Syria and Iraq. Another former worshiper here - an 18-year-old female convert to Islam - is now actively making plans to travel to Syria with an Islamic State fighter.
Roughly 16 worshipers have stopped attending prayer services in protest of Sabri’s stance. Two others were banned from the mosque for spreading radical views. Surveillance cameras have been installed and unauthorized gatherings prohibited to thwart radical recruiters. One burly 20-year-old worshiper became so enraged with Sabri’s Friday sermons against the Islamic State that he twice assaulted the slight preacher, once leaving him bleeding on the floor in need of emergency medical treatment.
“The Islamic State. It is like an invisible arm, coming to poison the wells where our children drink,” Sabri said. “We are losing something precious. We are losing our young people.”
Leaving for the caliphate
Three weeks ago, Imam Ferid Heider, a part-time preacher and coordinator of a youth group at the House of Peace, received an anonymous note asking if it is okay to kill Christians and Jews. Not long afterward, the author of that note - an 18-year-old girl who gave her name as Meryam - was wandering down a Berlin street with a journalist.
She wore a full Islamic covering known as a niqab, with only her green irises and pale skin visible through an eye slit. Even in a heavily Muslim neighborhood, she attracted the attention of passersby. “Let them watch, I’m used to it,” she said dismissively. “I don't care.”
Meryam is making plans to move to Syria with a Tunisian-born fighter for the Islamic State. A friend of hers has told leaders at the House of Peace of her intentions, but so far, the friend has honored Meryam’s request not to reveal her identity to the mosque, whose leaders still hope to stage a family intervention that might prevent her flight.
Meryam agreed to tell her story to The Washington Post at the friend’s urging on grounds that her name be changed and that her real identity not be revealed to the mosque or German authorities.
She has a friend, she said, an Afghani girl, who has already traveled to Syria where she is living in a house with other single women waiting to marry a fighter. From that friend’s reports, the caliphate is an Islamic utopia, a place wholly different than the “lies” in the Western media that tell of repression and fear.
“It is our duty to leave the land of the unbeliever, to go and live in the caliphate,” she said.
Her awareness of the Islamic State has grown in recent months, she said. She has watched their videos on YouTube. Though she turns away from the ones with graphic beheadings and mass executions, she calls those acts righteous vengeance against nonbelievers.
Meryam is jobless. She first married at age 16. She fits a profile; large numbers of Western jihadists have come from socially disadvantaged homes, their lives plagued by unemployment and family turmoil.
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