Muslims hope for ease in tensions

Muslim leaders in the Czech Republic have said they hope relations with the rest of Czech society will improve as a result of the death of Osama Bin Laden.

Reacting to the al-Qaida leader's death, Munib Hasan, chairman of the Brno-based Islamic Foundation, said he believed it would be a source of satisfaction to relatives of the victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks against the United States.

However, he argued that it "would have been better if Bin Laden were caught and brought to court" so that more could be learned about the terrorism threat facing the world.

Lukáš Lhoťan from the Czech-Muslim Institute agreed with Hasan, commenting that while individual Muslims here have different political views, as a group they are neither sad nor rejoicing at the news, the Czech News Agency (ČTK) reported.

Separately, Hasan has sought to distance his members from the recent arrests in Prague of foreigners suspected of supporting terrorism in Russia's volatile north Caucasus region.

He said he believed the group involved consisted of underworld figures who had nothing in common with the mainstream Muslim community.

Karel Müller, a professor on civil society at the political science department at University of Economics in Prague, said he did not expect Bin Laden's death to have a significant impact on Czech attitudes toward Islam.

He told The Prague Post it was difficult to generalize about the Islamic community since it is relatively small, and Muslims are based sporadically around the country.

Müller said Czech attitudes to Muslims were similarly varied and disparate, adding they tended to fluctuate depending on people's personal experiences and socio-economic background.

"The general stance toward Muslims is predominantly one of indifference," he said, "something which could turn to either negative stigmatism or positive tolerance."

Hasan argued, however, that Islamic terrorism and people linked with it have caused tension in relations between Muslims and Czechs.

He said negative stances taken toward the possible construction of a second mosque in Brno as well as other projects were a reflection of this tension.

For example, earlier this year, some residents raised objections to plans for a Muslim cultural center in Hradec Králové.

Valentin Kusák, chairman of a small protest civic association called AntiMešita (AntiMosque), told a local meeting about the project in February he feared the project could start the Islamization of the city.

Also at the Feb. 21 meeting attended by 100 locals, Hasan defended the center as being intended mainly "a place for foreign students to pray," adding that a potential site had not yet even been chosen.

Although the country's first mosque was erected in Brno in 1998, Islam was not an officially recognized religious community - making it eligible for state subsidies here - until six years later, because of a legal requirement that a petition with 10,000 signatures be lodged.

Estimates for the size of the Czech Muslim population range between 10,000 and 20,000 people, of which just a few hundred are Czech-born, mostly the wives of foreign-born Muslim men. A precise population figure is not available due to the noncompulsory status of the religion question on the census.

A 2007 study by the now Deputy Foreign Affairs Minister Jiří Schneider for the Budapest-based Open Society Institute pointed out that while almost all of the Muslims in the country are foreign-born, they include people from Turkey, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Central Asia as well as Arab countries.

Urging for a better informed, open debate on Islam in the Czech Republic, the study pointed out that one of the main planks of protest in the Czech anti-Islam camp was the extreme notion that cultural centers, if approved, would become "hotbeds of terrorism."

Bill Lehane can be reached at
blehane@praguepost.com