There will be no official imam training due to disagreement among providers

NOS News•today, 00:30

There will be no officially recognized training for imams in the Netherlands, writes outgoing Minister Van Gennip (Social Affairs) in a letter to the House of Representatives. This higher professional education course would start in September next year, but the various educational institutions that would develop the course together with the Contact Body for Muslims and Government (CMO) cannot agree on its content.

The Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences and the Ipabo University of Applied Sciences had been working with the CMO since September last year to design such a training course for imams, but due to “an insurmountable difference of opinion” they were unable to reach an agreement. writes the minister. “The ideas about the educational content and the legal feasibility of the proposed collaboration structure were too far apart.” The minister does not report exactly what the parties differed in opinion about.

Van Gennip says he “very much regrets” that the training will not happen now, also because all parties involved say “that they fully support the social need for a Dutch imam training.” The minister says that she will continue to make efforts to get such a training course off the ground.

Official training as an imam is a long-standing wish of the House of Representatives, which already adopted a motion in 2015 by Denk MP Kuzu that this should be introduced. From 2006 to 2013, Inholland University of Applied Sciences offered a higher professional education course to become an imam, but that ended because the course was loss-making. According to Kuzu and other MPs, government-recognized training in the Netherlands was important, because imams now often come from abroad and therefore have little regard for the living environment of Dutch Muslims.