The Bavarian State Parliament decided on Tuesday evening to introduce the compulsory elective subject “Islamic teaching, but critics complain that the constitutional prerequisites for this are lacking and are taking action before the Constitutional Court.
Only one day after the state parliament’s decision to introduce the new compulsory optional subject “Islamic teaching” in Bavaria, critics filed a complaint with the Constitutional Court. A spokeswoman for the court confirmed receipt of the lawsuit on Wednesday. The pedagogue Ernst-Günther Krause, the Federation for Freedom of the Spirit Bavaria and the Munich Regional Group in the support group of the Giordano Bruno Foundation complain that the constitutionally required prerequisites for the introduction of the school subject are missing.
On Tuesday evening, the state parliament, against the votes of the Greens and the AfD, approved the transfer of the previous state-wide model experiment into a regular school subject. In future, pupils of the Muslim faith in particular should be able to choose this instead of religious studies and ethics at around 350 schools. It is a state offer in which state teachers are supposed to impart knowledge about the Islamic religion as well as a basic value orientation “in the spirit of the values of the Basic Law and the Bavarian Constitution” in German.
Krause criticized the law weeks ago in a press release that the law confused a state-responsible Islamic studies course with religiously denominational Islamic instruction in a non-transparent and impermissible way. The AfD had already announced that it would go to the Bavarian Constitutional Court.
