A rising number of young German women are being converted to Islam through hardline Salafist outreach on social media, according to Berlin’s domestic political intelligence agency.
The fundamentalist Salafism branch of Sunni Islam is making gains in Germany through increased proselytising on social media, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) has said.
According to figures shared with Die Welt, the number of Salafist followers in Germany in 2023 stood at 10,500. This rose to over 11,000 last year, nearly three times the number recorded in 2011.
The political spy agency claimed that conversions of German women were driving the growth of the radical branch of Islam, which the BfV said shares the “same ideological base with jihadism”.
Outreach on social media has played a decisive role in this, with Professor of Security Studies at the War Studies Department of King’s College London, Peter Neumann, telling the paper: “Social Media is what the radical mosque was 20 years ago.”
Susanne Schröter, Emeritus Ethnology Professor and Head of the Frankfurt Research Center for Global Islam at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, said that radical Islam seduces many young women because of the structure and social networks it provides.
“You get a clear peer group, a fixed value system – with the promise: if you stick to it, you will have many sisters by your side and God with you,” she said. “Many Women Believe that they are more respected as human beings in this religious worldview – not reduced to their sexuality, not viewed as objects.”
One German woman who had converted to Islam said that had given her stability and structure after having previously been involved in partying and the “queer” community.
Some have converted their turn towards Islam into large audiences on social media, such as ‘Hansen’ (Viktoria Stadtlander), a former kickboxer and model turned Muslim influencer, who has amassed 190,000 followers on her Instagram page and over 1.3 million likes on her TikTok account where she recites verses from the Qur’an.
In addition to the growing radicalisation of some German natives towards hardline Islam, Germany is also facing a significant issue with imported radicals. According to recent research from the University of Münster, there are over a million Muslims with a “migrant background” — either foreigners or those with at least one migrant parent — who are at risk of becoming Islamic extremists in Germany.
The spread of hardline Salafism in Germany has long been tied to the migrant crisis, with reports emerging in 2015 that Salafists were specifically targeting asylum centres in the country to recruit newly arrived migrants to their cause.
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