Europe’s first Islamic theology faculty opens in Germany, aiming to model an ‘Islam of love’ against a rising far right

MÜNSTER, Germany (MNTV) — Europe’s first full Faculty of Islamic Theology at a state university has been established in Germany, placing the academic study of Islam on the same institutional footing as Christianity for the first time on the continent and marking what its founders describe as a milestone in the recognition of Muslims in European public life.

The faculty, at the University of Münster in western Germany, formally came into being last month, elevating what had been the university’s Centre for Islamic Theology into an independent faculty. 

It becomes the university’s sixteenth faculty and now stands alongside its long-established Protestant and Catholic theology faculties, with full academic teaching due to begin in the winter semester of 2026-27 once its governing committees are in place.

What changes

The upgrade from centre to faculty is more than a change of name. The new faculty has the power to award its own doctoral and habilitation degrees, appoint its own examination boards, and set its own academic direction through independent governing bodies — autonomy it did not possess as a research centre attached to the philology faculty. Its first elected faculty council is expected to be constituted in the summer semester of 2027.

Around 450 students are already enrolled across its teaching-qualification and theology programmes, and the faculty will be staffed by eight professors — four women and four men — teaching subjects that range from Islamic philosophy to a newly introduced master’s programme in Islam and social work, aimed at professionals who work with Muslim communities in hospitals, care homes, prisons, and youth services. 

It will share facilities such as a library and canteen with the university’s other theology faculties.

The faculty also plans a department devoted to what it calls “public theology,” addressing contemporary questions including environmental ethics, gender justice, the relationship between Islam and democracy, and radicalisation and its prevention.

Milestone welcomed and politically backed

The university’s leadership has framed the establishment in explicitly civic terms. 

Rector Johannes Wessels called it a milestone for Islamic theology and a “call for more tolerance in society and politics” that would be noticed far beyond Münster. The move received political backing from North Rhine-Westphalia’s state science ministry and was welcomed by the Greens, among others.

Its creation was years in the making. 

The Centre for Islamic Theology was founded in 2011-12; a taskforce began developing the idea of a faculty in 2015; and the university’s leadership decided to pursue the conversion in 2019, subject to negotiations with the state, the university’s senate and board, and the confessional advisory board that oversees Islamic theology at Münster.

Leading the new faculty as founding dean is Mouhanad Khorchide, a sociologist and religious-education scholar who has held the chair for Islamic religious education at Münster since 2010 and directed its Centre for Islamic Theology. 

Born in Lebanon in 1971 and raised in Saudi Arabia, he studied in Beirut and Vienna and has become one of Europe’s most prominent — and at times controversial — advocates of a progressive, European-rooted approach to Islamic scholarship. He has described the faculty as an important signal of recognition for Muslims in Germany.

Mission shaped by political moment

The faculty opens at a tense juncture for German Muslims. 

The far-right Alternative for Germany has continued to gain ground at state and federal level, campaigning on “remigration” and, through its leadership, casting Islam as incompatible with the German constitution. 

Surveys have repeatedly found that a large share of the German public associates Islam with terrorism, violence, or the oppression of women.

Khorchide has positioned the faculty as a direct response to that climate — not by confronting anti-Muslim sentiment head-on, but by trying to understand and defuse it. 

Speaking to the outlet Qantara, he said his aim was to raise the profile of a cosmopolitan Islam of compassion, an “Islam of love,” while taking public anxieties seriously rather than dismissing them. Instead of condemning those drawn to the far right, he argued, the better approach was to listen: “I take your fears seriously,” he said, before asking whether the religion itself was really the problem, “or is it the people — the terrorists — who act in the name of Islam who frighten us all, including me as a Muslim?”

He has framed the faculty’s very existence as part of a longer trajectory of acceptance — from the introduction of Islamic religious education in German schools in the early 2000s, to the president’s annual Ramadan iftar, to the eight centres for Islamic theology now operating across the country.

Looking toward Cairo

Beyond Germany, Khorchide has expressed the hope that the Münster model — an Islam articulated within a free, pluralistic, democratic society — could serve as a reference point for the wider Muslim world, developing scholarship in harmony with human rights and democratic values.

That ambition sits in careful tension with the traditional centres of Islamic authority. Khorchide has noted a general openness toward Münster’s work at Al-Azhar in Cairo, the most prestigious seat of Sunni learning, whose Grand Sheikh visited the university in 2016 and himself championed an understanding of Islam centred on compassion. 

But he has acknowledged clear limits: on questions such as the ordination of female imams and aspects of gender equality, he told Qantara, Al-Azhar would not agree with the positions taken at Münster.

That gap captures the space the new faculty intends to occupy — progressive enough to argue that Islam can flourish naturally within a European democracy, yet distinct enough from established religious authorities to remain, for now, a genuinely experimental undertaking. 

For Germany’s roughly five million Muslims, and for Muslim communities across Europe watching how it unfolds, the significance lies in the institutional fact itself: a European state has, for the first time, chosen to treat Islam not as a subject to be studied from the outside but as a living tradition worthy of the same scholarly standing long granted to Christianity.