What Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer likes to do best – and probably does best – he likes: he sings. And is therefore a minor celebrity in his home country. The prayer leader became known as a “rocker imam” a few years ago. After work, he sang Islamic lyrics to pleasing rhythms and toured with the band Fi Rock through Turkey, performed in New York in 2014. Tüzer added Sufi elements to his pieces, borrowing from suras and azan, the call to prayer. Songs like “Come to God” caught on. “The goal is to touch the souls, the hearts,” says Tüzer. “I was an imam at the time, and music was my means.”
The religious authorities fired the imam because they did not see him as a role model
But then everything went wrong. Not musically, but theologically, politically, humanly. The rocking imam was fired in 2018 by his employer, the arch-conservative Turkish religious authority Diyanet. The state theologians had taken offense at the behavior of the mosque board from Kaş on the Mediterranean. They claimed they didn’t care about the music at all. But an imam must be a role model for the believers and comply with a code of conduct: the singing imam was obviously considered unsuitable as a civil servant mosque leader.
The 51-year-old, married to a Romanian and father of a son, sees things differently: “When I performed and sang with the band, I strengthened both the reputation of Turkey and that of Islam. I want to go back to mine Job.” And he’s persistent. He has already complained throughout the Turkish judicial system, all the way up to the constitutional court. But the courts rejected the “rocker imam’s” complaints.
Which is why he now relies on the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), where he recently filed a lawsuit. Tüzer hopes that after a verdict by the Strasbourg judges in Turkey, his case will be reopened and that he will even be compensated.
“The state and the Diyanet have destroyed my life,” says the imam, who now works as a librarian in the central Anatolian city of Eskişehir and about whom it has become pretty quiet musically. Tüzer, who studied Arabic, suspects that he was undesirable because of his liberal view of Islam. He describes himself as a supporter of a tolerant Sufi way of thinking, thinks universally, and rejects the Turkish Sunni state Islam: “The Diyanet and the orthodox religious orders are damaging to Islam,” he says. “The damage is irreparable.”
The state theologians can hardly like the kind of provocations he utters. “Even someone like the US inventor Edison will go to paradise, even though he wasn’t a Muslim,” he told fellow imams. “But Edison invented good things for people, like the light bulb.” For the orthodox, something like that doesn’t fit: a non-Muslim, maybe even an atheist, to paradise? Which is why the rocker imam says about himself as a religious thinker: “I’m dangerous for the Diyanet. I’m a Martin Luther for them.”
That may be a bit far-fetched. But the Diyanet has become more and more powerful in recent years, the religious orders are also supported by the state, they are often strongholds of orthodoxy. Imam Tüzer says: “The religious orders have long been enforcing state institutions, including the Diyanet. They reject me from the bottom of their hearts.”
Whether the ECtHR accepts the lawsuit, when it judges, is a long way off. But Tüzer is persistent and doesn’t give up. Not musically either: “I’m working on a new song, something with ‘progressive metal’https://www.sueddeutsche.de/meinung/.” So a mixture of the aggressive rhythms of heavy metal rock with elements of classic rock music. Underlaid with Kassids, poetic Islamic texts, Tüzer is certain: “It will be an absolute success. Then the picture of the rocking imam completes.”