The Gideons in Germany give away 2,000 Bibles a day and nobody complains. The Koran is another matter. A group called the True Religion has handed out 300,000 copies, many from “information stands” in shopping areas. All told, it wants to give away 25m in German-speaking Europe. Intelligence agencies are alarmed; politicians have condemned the plan. The printing firm has even cancelled its contract. “The public pressure was too great,” it explained.
The problem, critics say, is not the gift but the giver. The True Religion espouses Salafism, a fundamentalist branch of Islam. Its leader is Ibrahim Abu Nagie, a Palestinian-born, Cologne-based preacher with intolerant views and a knack for getting others to embrace them. The Cologne prosecutor wanted to try him for inciting violence against Christians and Jews but could prove nothing worse than predictions that they would end in hell. The case was dropped in January.
There is nothing wrong with distributing religious texts, said Günter Krings, a Christian Democrat member of the Bundestag, but this “aggressive action” disturbs religious peace. Salafism would replace the “sovereignty of the people” with a theocratic state, declared North Rhine-Westphalia’s interior minister, Ralf Jäger. The domestic intelligence agency has been watching Mr Abu Nagie. Mainstream Muslims object to “instrumentalisation” of the Koran.
Guido Steinberg, a terrorism expert at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs in Berlin, sees the project as a reflection of competition inside the Salafist camp. Some 50 preachers vie for pre-eminence. They include Pierre Vogel, an ex-boxer who fell out with Mr Abu Nagie in 2008. Free books may not be such a good recruiting tool, but the Salafists’ simple answers and promise to invest lives with meaning are seductive to alienated young Muslims. Their number is growing “exponentially”, says Mr Steinberg; he guesses there are up to 10,000, many more than the intelligence agency’s estimate of 3,000.
The True Religion is seen as a propaganda-based “political” Salafist group, not a violent “jihadist” one. But even the political variant can inspire violence. Arid Uka, who murdered two American soldiers last year, had internet contacts to groups similar to Mr Abu Nagie’s. When the Koran row broke, supporters of its distribution posted a video cursing critical journalists as “apes and pigs”.
Fundamentalists are delighted by the shift in attention away from their ideas to their rights. “Where is religious freedom? Where is your democracy?” demands a spokesman in a video posted on the True Religion website. Pro-NRW, an anti-Islam party that is standing in the state election taking place on May 13th, wants to display caricatures of Islam near mosques. That could win the Salafists even more recruits than handing out any number of free Korans.