Muslim leader demands new analysis of German "violence" finding

Jun 7, 2010, 13:34 GMT

Berlin - A German Muslim leader demanded Monday a re-analysis of data which suggests that young Muslim males develop violent attitudes when they become more devout attenders at mosque.

The data, to be presented at a government conference in Berlin, was leaked in advance and was front-page news in the German media.

'It lacks an expert interpretation on the cause of the phenomenon,' responded Aiman Mazyek, general secretary of the Central Council of Muslims in remarks reported in the newspaper Frankfurter Rundschau. He called for another analysis of the data.

The study, based on interviews with 45,000 boys and girls aged 14 to 16, also concluded that male supremacist views and a preference for violent videos and computer games link closely with mosque attendance among the young.

The as-yet unpublished research was jointly conducted by the Federal Interior Ministry and the KFN criminology research institute in Hanover headed by Christian Pfeiffer.

The authors' interpretation was that youth developed aggressive attitudes because a majority of mosque clergy in Germany did not speak German and encouraged their congregations to practice a conservative form of Islam and to preserve their ethnic roots.