HAMBURG – Opening their doors to shelter people fleeing war in the Middle East, many mosques across Germany are struggling to cope with refugees, offer them religious and psychological support to overcome trauma.

“It was our duty,” Daniel Abdin, the chairman of Al-Nour mosque in Hamburg told Deutsche Welle on Thursday, July 28.

Until last May, the dimly-lit mosque in a converted underground car-park in central Hamburg used to house from 400-600 refugees,  crowding its small space every night.

“Just imagine how stuffy it would get when all those people slept here!” Abdin said.

The huge number came with refugee waves entering Germany last year, with the number of refugees reaching 1.1 million.

While German authorities struggled to accommodate them, the influx of refugees has put a strain on mosques like this one, which opened their doors to those coming to Germany.

Using donations from people and other organizations helped mosque to alleviate the strain to some extent.

Other Muslim communities, who like this mosque rely on unpaid volunteers were also finding it hard to cope.

Yet, many volunteers were often stretched to breaking point as hundreds of refugees streamed into the city, many in transit to Scandinavia.

“I was afraid some of the younger volunteers might have a burnout,” Özlem Nas, an eloquent member of the Alliance of Islamic Communities in Northern Germany, told DW.

“It’s hard to be confronted with so many stories of war and violence.”

Though the number of refugees dropped significantly, Abdin said his mosque congregation is now made up of more than 40 percent refugees, most of them from Syria and Iraq.

He has even had to introduce a second Friday prayer to accommodate the many new worshippers.

Healing Trauma

Arriving Germany, Abdilfatah Youssef, who fled Damascus with his wife and two daughters when the war broke out, said he felt at home at the mosque.

“It’s good to know you have a place to go when you have problems or maybe need money in an emergency,” Youssef, a polite, softly-spoken 28-year-old businessman, told DW in almost fluent German.

Others turn to the mosque because they are struggling to deal with the trauma of violence and bloodshed.

Imams, Abid said, play an important role in giving pastoral care or even professional psychological help.

This help is usually hard to access as some refugees had to wait for a year to get the first appointment, which many psychologists and psychiatrists are reluctant to take on patients whose language and culture they don’t share.

Using his network of personal contacts, including doctors and health care experts, Nas was able to provide the much-needed counseling.

Without these contacts, she admits, “it would be very hard.”

Psychological trauma was not the only problem facing refugees as the Muslim community struggle to counter misconception and condemn atrocities in the name of their religion.

“Look, I’m sick of having to justify myself every time a criminal who has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam commits a crime,” Abdin said.

His comments come at a time when Germany is reeling from a spate of violent attacks, which were committed, according to Abdin, by “criminals abusing our religion.”

At the same time, anti-Muslim sentiments have reached an all-time high in Germany, with more than a third of respondents saying they’re believed that Muslims strongly supported Islamic terrorists, according to a poll conducted by the University of Bielefeld and published this month.

“Fighting Islamophobia is incredibly hard work, particularly when we have so many other tasks,” Abdin shrugged.