Is there a Muslim community? research among Islamic associations in Germany
p. 183-201
Entrées d’index
Index géographique : France
Texte intégral
COMMUNITIES, PARISHES, OR CONGREGATIONS: THE TROUBLE TO FIND THE RIGHT NAME FOR SPACES OF RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL PRACTICE
1In the beginning of 2005 the commissioner for Integration of the Berlin Senate asked me to update a publication on mosques in Berlin from 1999. Half a year later Alexa Färber, a colleague from the social anthropological department, and I started a second survey on Berlin’s Islamic prayer rooms that was finally published in December 2006. We departed from and focused on Islamic prayer rooms to approach Islamic communities in the German sense of the word Gemeinde, which depicts rather congregation or parish than Gemeinschaft.1 With the focus on religious life and practice as well as on questions of representation and participation of communities in society and politics we tried to elude the essentialization of people with Muslim background in Europe as exclusively religious, since this is how people with Muslim background are presented in the public as well as in the recent academic discourse. The second research on Islamic communities in Berlin was able to learn from some of the critiques that have been addressed after Gerdien Jonker and Andreas Kapphan had published the first research in 1999. Furthermore, it could relate to changes since the late 1990ies in Berlin by comparing results and even work out some trends.
2One of the changes concerned the title of the publication. While the first research appeared under the name ‘Moscheen und islamisches Leben in Berlin’ (Mosques and Islamic Life in Berlin), the second research was published with the heading ‘Islamisches Gemeindeleben’ what could be translated as “Islamic community life”, still, parish-life would be a better translation, since ‘Gemeinde’ here means the religious congregation anchored in the rooms for prayer. This grave change was made to include or rather not to exclude the Alevi congregation — not just in the research but in the title and on the cover as well.2 Representatives of the Alevi association in Berlin had told us that they congregate in a ‘Cem evi’and did not feel recognized when only mosques are mentioned in the title. Even though publicly the “Mosque-research” had a certain recognition in Berlin we then spoke of prayer-rooms, which had the advantage that they could include all places of worship in Islam, no matter of how different they were including as well places were Sufis congregate.
3We used the adjectives Islamic and Muslim in a distinct way: To show the difference between Islamic, an adjective that for our understanding characterizes a theological reference or context, and the adjective Muslim, another linguistic derivation of Islam following the pattern of the Arabic participle active and therefore referring to the actor rather than to his or her religion. Our contacts in Alevi communities, however, did not consider themselves to be “Muslims” but “part of Islam”. When referring to themselves and their institutions they used the adjective “Islamic” instead of “Muslim”. Given that the Alevi’s had been interviewed and because of the political significance of the publication it seemed important to us, not to exclude any of the already marginalized groups in Islam, nevertheless, we could not find a title that followed all the suggestions made by the Alevi representatives and mention the Alevi ‘Cem evi’ in the title.3
4This negotiation, with a marginalized “Islamic congregation” shows different aspects of Islamic life and its representation in an urban socio-political sphere: a) the significance of visibility in everyday life as well as in official and semi-official publications on marginalized groups, b) the interest of those groups in being represented, c) their fight for the power to define the terms that are used to describe them, and d) the strive for subtle differentiation between subgroups especially in the case of marginalized groups among the marginalized.
IMPORTANCE AND INFLUENCE OF RELIGIOUS COMMUNITIES IN GERMANY
5It is noteworthy that the commissioner for migration as a government official is interested in distributing knowledge on Islamic associations. One reason for this is the rather active influence and participation of religious organisations in German social and political life.
6The German perception of associations in general is rather positive. The sociologist Friedrich Heckmann characterizes associations as important links and interlocutors between individuals and society. This means that they are integrative by nature. Their main functions are to locate and represent the interests of their members and to utter them towards the public and political authorities. Besides, they foster subsidiarity and self-organization (Selbst-organisationen). Segregation and separatism are, according to Heckmann, dysfunctions of associations. Immigrant’s self associations, however, are perceived very differently (Heckmann, 1992, p. 114-115). This is true not only for religious organizations. The sheer possibility that they could support integration is questioned in the German public and academic discourse. (Friedrichs, 2006, p. 34). The functions of immigrant’s associations are to cover the needs of immigrants that are insufficiently or not at all covered by offers from state institutions and the representation of immigrants in socio-political context. In the meantime those associations do support the development of ethnic or religious identities and use these to mobilize and compete on resources. (Heckmann, 1992, p. 114-115).
7Religious communities like the protestant and Catholic Church as well as the Jewish congregation (Jüdische Gemeinde) are engaged in many ways in German politics and civil society. The relations between Christian Churches and the Jewish congregation are arranged through church-state contracts (Kirchenstaatsverträge) between the German states (Bundesländer) and the religious communities (Religionsgemeinschaften). Churches send representatives similar to ambassadors to keep contact with parliaments and political authorities. Accordingly, the concept of German state-church relation is described as one where the state gives certain duties, like welfare or youth work, into the hand of religious communities. This is why church institutions in Germany carry out multifaceted social tasks, from social work, education, to civic education and lobbying while the government awards and supports a great number of those tasks financially.
8In Germany many activities of public life, be it in the field of culture, religion or sports, are organized by associations (Vereine). Workers from Turkey who came in the late 1960ies found the first associations right after they reached Germany (Schiffauer, 2004, p. 147-157). Among them were ethnic and religious associations. Until today, associations uphold mosques and prayer rooms. Many of them joined to establish umbrella organizations and councils for the representation on a higher level and to offer better religious and social services, for example by hiring personnel or building mosques. Local associations could not accomplish those tasks.
9Muslim associations and their mergers are even today predominantly seen as both immigrant’s self-organizations and religious organisations. This mixture seems to exponentiate the danger of segregation and disintegration originating from them. Since the 1980ies Islamic umbrella organizations were asking to be accepted as partners in the political discourse, treated and given the same rights like established religious communities (Religionsgemeinschaften) for instance the right to give religious instructions at public schools. However until recently this request was rejected.
OFFICIAL NEGOTIATIONS WITH ISLAMIC ORGANISATIONS
10In 2006, the German government started a “long-term process of communication between representatives of the German state and representatives of Muslims in Germany” to generate a social consensus on the integration of Islam (‘langfristig angelegten Verhandlungs-und Kommunikationsprozess zwischen Vertretern des deutschen Staates und Vertretern der in Deutschland lebenden Muslime zu initiieren’). This is how the Federal Minister for Interior Affairs describes the Islam Conference, the first formalized communication of Islamic representatives and government officials on the federal level, a set of recurrent meetings of working groups and plenary sessions, accompanied by enormous media coverage.4
11Even though the demand for one interlocutor was not expressed explicitly during the Islam Conference it served as a catalyst and half a year after its beginning four of the biggest mosques associations and umbrella organizations got together. The institutionalisation of Islam in Germany, as well as in other European countries, is lead by the idea that a political representation of Muslims is needed and that therefore the differences of regional origin like language, ethnicity or even religious orientation can be and need to be overcome. Already in 2005 some of them had started what they called the “unification process5”. One important umbrella organization was not engaged in this engagement for a congregation with other Islamic organizations: the association with the biggest number of mosques in Germany (more than 400), the DITIB, which is supported by the Turkish agency for religious services, Diyanet, and which has strong ties to Turkish consulates in Germany. DITIB rejected many invitations for communication and cooperation by pointing out that it would not share invitations with representatives of other Turkish-Islamic organizations because DITIB had the ability to represent all Turkish Muslims if not all Muslims in Germany. An important reason for that has been the assessment of other Turkish Islamic associations as having deviated from the Turkish state’s understanding of Islam and/or entertaining relations to the political opposition in Turkey (see Schiffauer 2004b). For a long time this was the case with the second largest mosque association in Germany “Islamic Community Millî Görüş” (IGMG). It had strong links in form of its networks and ideas to the Turkish politician Necmettin Erbakan and his Refah partisi and later to the AK-partisi after the split in 2001, which now holds the majority in the current parliament and provides the Turkish president Tayyeb Erdogan. The coming to power of a different political party in Turkey seems to have paved the way to unification for Islamic organizations with Turkish background in Germany. And here we can see that transnational ties clearly have had an influence. In April 2007 the four federal umbrella organizations founded the council for coordination of Muslims in Germany (Koordinierungsrat der Muslime in Deutschland, KRM)6.
12For Germany the turn of the century marked a new self-definition as an immigration country after long and intense political debates (Talke 2007, Yurdakul 2009). The question whether immigrants and their descendants would be able to stay for good and participate as equals in economic, social and political life of the country was finally agreed upon. In the late 1990ies, the government had enforced an intense debate on a change in citizenship law. The ruling parties were proposing the possibility of double citizenship. Christian Democrats opposed heavily arguing that this would mean creating citizens with dual loyalties.
13Nevertheless, the decision for the last big change in citizenship law in 2000 marked the beginning of a major shift from a citizenship based on blood to one based on place of birth and thereby opened up possibilities for immigrants to become fully recognized citizens. This was only the starting point for new contemplations on German national identity.
14Immigrants who came as guest workers, refugees, students or through family reunion have been discussed for a long time in terms of their ethnic or national difference. In European countries like France or Great Britain where immigrants had the possibilities to acquire the citizenship earlier the wording was slightly different than in Germany where children of immigrants are granted the German citizenship when born in Germany only since 2000.
SOCIAL DIFFERENCES ARE STILL FRAMED IN ETHNIC AND INCREASINGLY IN RELIGIOUS TERMS
15The social anthropologist Peter Niedermüller attested during the German discourse on immigration in the late 1990ies that social disparities were discussed in the terminology of cultural and ethnic differences (Niedermüller 1998). A decade later the real issues remain to be social differences; however, we can acknowledge a shift in the discourse from ethnic to religious differences. Since then two-to three hundred thousand foreigners became German citizens every year. A great part of immigrants therefore disappeared from the statistics by adopting the German citizenship and could not be categorized any longer according to their citizenship, as Turks or foreigners7. At the same time religious affiliation especially to Islam gained importance in the discourse. The public opinion reacted with a shift in the perception of the new Germans of former Turkish, Arab and other citizenship. They did not become Germans but Muslims. However, the vehemence of this development seems only understandable in the context of the discourse on Islam and security in the aftermath of 9/11/2001. Looking at the construction of Muslim minorities in the European context Nina Clara Tiesler is showing also other reasons and similarities in Western Europe (Tiesler, 2007, p. 27). Most of these countries were much more inclusive concerning equality in the political arena. So the change of citizenship law is very unlikely to be the only or even the main reason for the developments under consideration here. It rather seems that the citizenship debate is the specific German shape of something that happened in other European countries just in a different way and at different times8.
16Immigrants of Turkish origin tend to be frustrated about the fact that the integration process through naturalization for which they had been struggling for a long time, was contradicted by an ongoing stigmatization of Muslims. Nearly seven hundred thousand out of 2,4 Million immigrants from Turkey have been naturalized and in total the number of naturalized immigrants from Muslim majority countries superseded one million in 20059. Foreign Turks became German citizens, still, in public debates they do not appear as Germans but as Muslims: even by adopting the German citizenship foreigners with a Muslim background did not get recognition as full and equal citizen. The German discourse found a new way of ‘Othering’ them.
HOW GERMAN STATE OFFICIALS DEFINE A MUSLIM
17The Muslims in a good example for the construction of Muslims as a group and the basis of an essentializing policy. I will spend some time here reflecting on how the statistics are organized. The question of how many Muslims are living in Germany occurred to government officials first in 1999, when the oppositional Christian Democrats demanded official accountings. A follow up report from 2007 about Islam and Muslims in Germany, given in response to a question of the Green party in the Bundestag by the Federal Government, states that approximately 3,2 to 3,4 million Muslims are living in Germany. We have to go back to the first report of this kind from 2000 to understand how the number is derived and how being a Muslim is defined from a bureaucratic perspective. Like most European countries, Germany does not ask questions on religious affiliations, since this would contradict the German concept of religious freedom. Official statistics assess the numbers of members in the Catholic and Protestant church only because the German state collects the church-tax (Kirchensteuer). Except for some numbers taken from the 1987 census in which it was possible but not obligatory to state religious membership and affiliation, the numbers were estimates that do not refer to the actual religious belief or affiliation of individuals. The size of the Muslim population can therefore only be derived from immigration statistics. Jytte Klausen, Jocelyne Casari and others revealed that these kinds of calculations miss out bi-national children, the growing number of immigrant’s children with a naturalized status and converts (Klausen, 2005, p. 6; Cesari, 2004, p. 9-18). The method of calculation used by the interior ministry for this governmental report counted the migrants and naturalized citizen from countries with Muslim populations — in accordance with the proportional share of Muslims in the populations in their countries of origin. In the year 2000 approximately 2.8 million people with the citizenship of a country with a Muslim majority permanently lived in Germany, hence, 2.5-2.7 million foreigners were estimated to be Muslims. Next, the number of naturalized and an estimate of German born Muslims was added up to the final number of 2.8-3.2 million Muslims in 2000 (Deutscher Bundestag 2000, 4). With the numbers given in 2007 that go back to the immigration statistics from 2005 we are having 2.4 million people in Germany with the citizenship of a majority Muslim country and more than one million naturalized Germans from one of those countries.
18The sources and exact numbers of the proportions taken as being the Muslim population of these countries were not given by the reports. We can only assume that they too are recurrently derived from numbers of ethnic groups, like in most estimates for Central Asia, Africa, South East Asia or even Turkey (see also Heine and Spielhaus 2005). The definition of Muslim used here is clearly one of descent and not of practice or even belief. It is decisive, which family or ethnic group one is born into and not which religion one follows.
19The definition of Muslims by German authorities appears to be derived from their ethnic origin but is used as a religious category. Those who compile statistics and mould public opinion define borders and characteristics of the newly constructed group. These are employees of the Interior ministry who set up the only existing official estimation of Muslims in Germany. While they broadened the borders to include all people of Muslim origin, the importance of their religious background is exaggerated.
20With the survey “Muslim life in Germany” (orig. ‘Muslimisches Leben in Deutschland’) the Office for Migration and Refugees, in mid-2009 the first nationwide, random sample survey of immigrants from countries with a relevant Muslim population in Germany. The survey is based on 6004 interviews that raised data on approx. 17000 individuals. Respondents here had the possibility to declare themselves non-religious or adherents of another religion than Islam. From these results the researchers deduce that 3,8 to 4,3 million Muslims are currently living in Germany, i. e. approx. 5 percent out of 82 million inhabitants of the country and 45% of the Muslim immigrants in Germany have the German citizenship. (Haug et alii, 2009, p. 11) Unlike the previous estimates it did not limit the assessment to immigrants from 20 Muslim majority countries but included immigrants form a broader range of 50 countries as well as the offspring of naturalized inhabitants from these countries. Noteworthy, Muslims of German background were not included in the survey (Haug et alii, 2009, p. 58). The answers of respondents from majority Muslim countries are demonstrating that among the immigrants there is a high percentage of people without religion and from religious minorities. Still, the survey continues patterns from earlier statistics, as the basis for the selection of respondents for this research was the country of origin. And even though a relevant number of the respondents declared not to be Muslims the survey has been published under the name “Muslim Life in Germany”.
21Olivier Roy pointed out that we are witnessing the process of “neoethnicization” of Muslims, “the construction of an ethnic group, which previously did not exist as such”. He argues, that “the culture of origin is no longer relevant” but is substituted by the reference to a newly constructed group: the Muslim community, and the latter is “not related to a person’s spiritual life” and therefore “not to faith and genuine religious practice” but to a “set of cultural patterns that are assumed to be inherited”. (Olivier Roy, 2004, p. 124.)
22This all happens next to ongoing debates on the question “Who is a Muslim?” among Muslims themselves. Is a person Muslim only when performing what is considered to be the Islamic duties? Are marginalized groups among Muslims like Ahmadis and Alevis who do not share core theological details with dominant Muslim groups part of the community? What about people who do not practice any recognizable Muslim ritual but still feel at home in Islam and attached to Muslim culture. And what does the Muslim community stand for with all its diversity in practice?
23Especially in times when Islam made it on the front pages and established individuals identify themselves with statements like ‘ I am one of those people’ and thereby express their solidarity with stereotyped Muslims, this constructed group grows to be more than a religious parish. More than one of the politicians in Europe Jytte Klausen spoke with during her research expressed their evolution from individuals with explicit distance to religious parishes to defenders of certain Muslim groups in times of perceived prejudices. (Klausen, 2005, p. 25) Elsewhere I have described how so called “secular Muslims”, well-known individuals with roots in Muslim majority countries struggled with their identity and had their “Coming out” as Muslims after they had been steadily presented as Muslim politicians, writers or actors because they wanted to have a word in how Muslims in Germany are pictured (Spielhaus, 2009b).
24Some prominent individuals reflected on their “Coming out” as Muslims after public debates and their feelings about being ascribed to a community that has been alien to them before (Zurechnungsgemeinschaft). Examples are Intellectuals and Politicians like the author Navid Kermani, the MEP Cem Özdemir or the MP Lale Akgün, who stated that they became Muslim after 9/11/2001 during post-9/11 anti-Muslim debates. Another example is the newly founded central Council of Ex-Muslims — with the idea that Islam became too important in the debate, and the Community of Turks in Germany (TGD), a secular rather anti-religious organization, that proclaimed at the Islamconference (DIK) in March 2007 to create a Liberal Fatwa Council. One of the most urgent demands uttered by Germans of Muslim background is the equal treatment in politics and society and this point is the target of most criticisms from Muslims in the current situation. They don’t question Democracy or the German system but they question being excluded from decision-making.
25Olivier Roy describes believers as a minority identity group and analyses a “process of drawing lines between true believers and the rest of the world” (Roy, 2004, p. 36). This is a process of minimizing the ummah by declaring certain individuals and groups as outside Islam. People who run mosques describe their problems with extremist visitors. Even if they don’t want them and their political ideologies in the mosque they are unsure whether they can deny the access. The uncertainty stems from theological reasons: since the Friday prayer in a mosque is a religious duty, to deny access to it would be a denial of exercise of a person’s religious duty. However, to deny Ahmadi’s, Alevi’s or queer Muslims their “membership” in the Muslim ummah seems to less questered.
ISLAMIC TERMINOLOGY IN THE DEBATE
26During the last years many Islamic terms and concepts have entered European debates yet most of them changed their meaning on the way or only one interpretation — the extremist — made it. It seems en vogue to adorn book titles with Arabic words contextualizing and thereby framing them with one or if generous two words of explanation while, Islamic judicial, philosophical and theological literature on those concepts fill libraries. Two examples besides ummah are the terms jihad and sharia. This way, theological terms are not only reinterpreted and used against Muslims to stereotype and demonize. The introduction of Islamic terms in the European discourse on Islam both reiterates extremist’s narratives and falls in the backs of Muslims that use those terms in a non-extremist way, be it Islamic mainstream or reformism, where sharia might be understood as Islamic ethics or corpus of juridical tradition and jihad as endeavor. Attempts to regain theological terms and the power of definition are countless. One outstanding example is Amina Wadud and her concept of “Gender Jihad”, which she explains as the endeavor for gender justice (Wadud 2006).
27The term ummah could be seen as a positive term when construed as the concept of all Muslim believers as equal regardless of their social, ethnic background, age or gender. One could even detect an enlightened concept behind it. In the Quran ummah refers to communities sharing a common religion, later in history it almost always means the Muslim community (Denny, 2000, p. 862). However, in the context of debates on citizenship, loyalty to and political participation in European states its transnational dimension is stressed, when critics of Islam presume that Muslims are “making up a community excluding membership in any other group” (Roy, 2007, p. 42).
28A “Muslim community” in Germany seems to have been imagined among influential individuals outside Muslim groups whereas the sense of belonging and social interaction between Muslims of different ethnic or social background started to grow only recently (see also Schiffauer, 2004). Among German Muslims the term ummah or Muslim community rather seems to be used as an ideal or a euphemism that brushes away the differences between several national, ethnic, occupational and religious groups of different social status and political ambitions. Transnational connections of German associations to Nationalist, separatist, Islamist or terrorist groups do play an important role in the analysis of the Offices for protection of the constitution (Verfassungsschutz, 2006) and relations to family, similar political, religious or ideological groups or networks at many levels including politics are without any doubt important to immigrants in Germany. Current examples for the political context are recent demonstrations and riots between Turks and Kurds in major German cities that are fuelled by the discussion on military interventions of the Turkish army against Kurdish separatists in northern Iraq. Yet, the idea of a global Muslim community did not seem to play a bigger role in security agencies’ perception of extremist groups and not in the practice of those groups, instead various, in some cases competing ideologies were legitimated by referring to Islamic texts and the claim to genuinely serve the ummah. Especially in the cases of extremist groups that separate from Muslim communities during their radicalization we can see that while the tights to Muslim parishes are loosened the idea of serving the imagined ummah is emphasized. Ummah, here, is used in an ideological way for extremist ideas and actions, an Islamic concept exploited for self-legitimization.
FIRST MINORITY, THEN COMMUNITY
29At the conference of one of the biggest Islamic umbrella associations in Germany Stefano Allievi stressed that the ummah had much more chances to become visible and to be experienced in Europe than in Muslims majority countries. The pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina is one of the few possibilities to experience and celebrate the ummah, and this is what it’s standing for, since all kinds of Muslims come together, wearing the same pious cloth thereby hiding and forgetting their cultural background, social status and profession, thus coming together as equals10. In Europe, however, Muslims from utterly diverse parts of the world and all kinds of religious currents are actually living together at relatively small spaces, often in the same neighborhoods and have the possibility to recognize each other as belonging, a community of a common fate, as Schicksalsgemeinschaft. But this idea of a religious community is challenged by the encounter of national and traditional understanding and practice of Islam as well as it is challenging to the national and traditional concepts of Muslim subgroups. For instance when Muslims meet for prayer and acknowledge differences of religious performance.
30I find two definitions of community suggested by Benedict Anderson useful to approach the Islamic field(s). Community is some sort of collective identity either characterized by face-to-face-contacts and tangible interaction or imagined, when people know and believe in a connection and belonging with other individuals that they neither even heard of nor had personal contact with. Thus, we can observe both the genesis of associations (foremost to represent Muslim groups in the political sphere) and the development of the feeling to represent a religious rather than an ethnic community, e. g. a community of Muslims rather than of Turks, Kurds and Arabs etc. Two instances may exemplify this argument: 1. the founding of a coordination committee by the four biggest Islamic umbrella organizations (Koordinierungsrat) in March 2007; 2. the attempts and failing of Turkish and Arabic representatives to agree on common dates for religious feasts.
31Islamic life in Berlin mostly takes place in divided parishes with few social contacts. Muslims visiting Berlin’s Islamic parishes are still separated into congregations that follow linguistic, ethnic or national ties. Most strongly prayer rooms are separated through the languages that are spoken there: we counted 54 Turkish prayer rooms and mosques11, 10 Arabic, 4 Urdu and each one Kurdish, Bosnian, Albanian and Farsi mosque. Arabic remains the language of prayers and Quran recitations; however the Friday sermon (khutba) and religious teachings are given in the lingua franca of the parish. The only language that reaches the majority of Muslims in Berlin is German and the number of mosques (3) offering a German translation of the Friday khutba is rising slowly. Beside the language and ethnic background Berlin’s mosques mirror the religious diversity of the population and so we counted 72 Sunni (among them 9 Sufi and 9 Sufi Reform orders), 7 Shi’i, 2 Alevi parishes and one Ahmadi Qadiani parish. The majority of Turkish Sunni mosques have congregated in three major umbrella organizations on the local level and on the federal level. Only 6 other mosques are represented by an association based on various nationalities and religious ties. Four Turkish Islamic umbrella associations at the country level of Berlin and one association of Arab, Bosnian and German mosques represent Muslims in the political sphere. This covers only 50 percent of the Islamic prayer rooms. More than 40 associations running a space for worship are not represented on the local or country level. Out of the more than 80 Islamic prayer rooms, 42 are represented on the federal level through umbrella organisations and thereby included in the German Islam Conference.
32Most Islamic prayer rooms are neither on the city nor on the federal level organized and consequently lack this opportunity to negotiate their situation with political authorities and other Muslims. Opposite to Qadiani Ahmadis and also Alevis12 are excluded from associations on theological reasons, they are voluntarily not engaged in participating in activities outside their spaces, because of lack of either interest or capability to send a person that could participate in a German discussion and at the same time speak for the congregation. Mosques are found along religious, ethnic, and linguistic lines, new mosques are found by Muslims of the 2nd generations across ethnic and religious differences with German as the common language.
33Muslims from different national and religious understandings, who meet in political discussions or formal communication settings, might build and find short or long term, implicit or overt alliances among each other and still not pray together. Muslim in this context is understood and practiced as a group with similar political interest but not as a group that shares religious praxis like a religious parish or community.
34The Islamforum of Berlin gathers 25 representatives of Islamic associations including Islamic minorities like the Alevis and the Ahmadiyya, representatives of Christian, Jewish communities, of civil society and of relevant ministries13. In accordance with their percentage among Berlin’s immigrants from Muslim majority countries Sunni Muslims from Turkey make up the majority of Muslim representatives in the Islamforum. Though they might not be delighted about the participation of minorities that sometimes criticize them, they never made this an issue or asked to exclude participants whom they wouldn’t consider part of their community. When the Ahmadi association was facing a quite aggressive public debate about their project to build a mosque in the outskirts of Berlin all members of the Forum supported them and agreed to publish a press release stating the similar right of all religious communities to build houses of worship. One of the reasons mentioned by the representative of a Muslim organization for this move was that the Ahmadis were attacked because they were perceived as Muslims and that his community would face similar hostility for the same reason. This gave the impulse to stand up to the Ahmadis even though they are not accepted as part of the general Muslim community. This means the identification here is not coming from within, from a self-description, but from being seen and attacked as a community from outside.
THE RELIGIOUS TURN
35After 2000, the public debate turned immigrants from Turkey and Arab countries and their descendants into Muslims, highlighting their (assumed) religious rather than their ethnic or national identity. Religious identity and its representatives thereby gained important with reference to ethnic identity and associations organized along ethnic lines. Some ethnic representatives however, changed their arguments in the struggle for recognition towards a representation of a religious community during the last years. Here we can see that the German debate is following the pattern of what Olivier Roy calls Neoethnicization: the construction of a Muslim community from within and from outside similar to other constructions of ethnic communities. The term Neoethnicization is pointing at the process of ethnicization rather than on the construction of the Muslim community as an ethnicity. Though, at the end of the process the emergence of a community based on a shared religion as the only communality might be the consequence. Both academic and political debates have been criticised for their focus on ethnicity. Both, ethnicity and religiosity do play a role in social and political life without doubt and therefore need to be considered. However, in the current situation they seem to be misleading as descriptive terms and categories for research frames. It has been argued, that the construct of ethnicity becomes dangerous when overrated as basic characteristic of every individual, of numerical minorities or subaltern groups and the same is now true for the use of the category religion as a research frame for surveys on immigrants.
36As Peter Niedermüller stated in 1998, ethnicity serves as one of the very few available resources and strategies for immigrants to engage in debates for economic, cultural, or political participation. The discourse on immigrants has shifted from one based on national and ethnic to one based on religious terminology (see also Yurdakul 2009). During the last years, ethnic communities, especially the fairly well established Turkish groups, had to come up with new arguments in the struggle for recognition and changed towards a representation in terms of religious and cultural differences. As a significant example, the call for a homogeneous representation of Muslims shows how dominant groups in society, represented by politicians, government officials, media, and influential/vocal intellectuals, are setting the rules of these negotiations (see also Schiffauer, 2006 and Amir-Moazzami, 2008, Satilmis, 2008). In this case, the inhomogeneous structure of Muslim communities in Germany made it nearly impossible to meet the expectation and present a common interlocutor, not for all organized Muslim groups and especially not for all people coming from a country with a majority of Muslims. The description of Islamic congregations in Berlin exemplified the diversity (in terms of ethnicity, language, religious subgroups and practices, migration history etc.) of Muslims on an empirical level. Résumé: “The trouble with community”.
37The “discovery” of Muslims in Western Europe through public discourse has led to an academic trend of focussing on Muslims. Academics are confronted with a tremendous demand for information about Muslims and at the same time financial resources opened for researches in this field. The risk here is constructing Muslims as a coherent group by ignoring the common characteristics that some of them share with other groups. It seems to be very difficult to find research designs that are able to circumvent the danger of either devaluating the term or stereotyping Muslim populations. The latter happens when causes for action of a Muslim are searched foremost and only in their religiosity or within his or her religious background.
38Researchers have to keep in mind that Muslim congregations in Germany are not always immigrant communities; though most people with a Muslim affiliation do have roots outside this country. Muslim individuals might not live in one but in several communities and subgroups of society simultaneously and they might share identities as well as characteristics and problems in everyday life with other groups, be it because of similarities in their social, economic, or educational status, because of sharing living space in the urban quarters or the political vision they pursue. Researches aiming at answering questions of broader social significance, which are not strictly tight to the ethnic or religious specificity but using frames that focus on one religious or ethnic category run the danger of perpetuating the research question and in the meantime contributing to the construction of this very group they are studying. This is even more so when the group identified with this category is already under suspicion of being different, strange and a threat.
39For her description of queer oriental clubbing in Berlin Kira Kosnick prefers “scene” to “community” to portray the shifting social praxis in urban space where participation is both open and limited. As she points out the term community both in academic and political contexts refers to subaltern minorities only. It therefore is not just a descriptive term but also one that assigns a certain place in society and as I have shown for the case of Islamic communities one that is not at all naturally given but constructed and negotiated about in the discourse. However, not only a concept behind the term and a succeeding identity are constructed but in the meantime also real groups develop with great influence and effects on social praxis.
40In a critical examination of communities as research frames, Veret Amit points out that while locality and place lost their importance collective identity and community have “become an even more crucial anchor for the efforts of anthropologists attempting to locate transnational or ethnographic fields”(Veret Amit and Nigel Rapport, 2002, p. 3). The “discipline seems in danger of reproducing the fictitiously integrated fields that were once derived from an association between place and culture” (Veret Amit and Nigel Rapport, 2002, p. 3). Interestingly Muslims come into the foreground as a category of the cultural other that is referred to as displaced, as disconnected from its territorial space (the Muslim or Islamic world) and as socially underprivileged.
41The researcher is left in a troubled situation. On the one hand, the concept of community is used throughout the discourse and it seems to be a valid term to illustrate the social life in and around religious parishes, on the other hand, it locates Muslims outside the “normal” society in a different, hidden, and suspicious sphere and thereby splits society. Muslim life (the life of Muslims) has many more aspects than the engagement in religious congregations. Muslims are engaged in the city in various ways. Nevertheless, the sociological category “Muslims” has made its way into academic research and here lies another danger: that all people with an Islamic affiliation are pictured and analysed as if this is their only identity or as if this identity their only or dominant identity or as if this identity overrules all others like their social, political, or economic situation. Even researches on Muslim individuals and groups, aiming at showing their great level of “integration” or how they are parts of society, are finally contributing to the marking and labelling as Muslim or to the politics of identity of social or political movements. Apart from the appropriation of concepts beyond the academic sphere14, focussing on religious practice leaves out other aspects of Muslim life; concentration on non-religious aspects of life still might perpetuate a discourse on Islam, which Nina Clara Tiesler calls Islamization of individuals and debates.
42Hence, the concepts of researches in this field and their frames need to be reflected on both due to their impact on running debates and with reference to their academic consistency. Concerning the first aspect, political, civil society and academics are facing the same dilemma when it comes to the depiction of Muslims. On the one hand Muslim activists are asking for acknowledgement and are trying to become visible parts of society and voices in the discourse. On the other hand they are running the danger of being stereotyped and reduced to one identity – the religious. The strategy of highlighting their religious affiliation as a tool of integration into wider society thereby conveys the risk of being marked as an alien community.
43The second aspect leads us to the question: how to approach Muslim life adequately? Can the representations of Muslims in political debates and in academia take into account multiple identities and subjectivities of Muslims (defined by gender, ethnic, economic, social, religious diversity) and their different situations defined by economic status, violence, lack of education and job opportunities, to mention only a few? Is religion a useful category for research to raise dependable data on non-religious aspects of life? Is academic research involved in the creation of a new “community” or is it capable to describe and reflect on this process? So we need to answer two questions: what is the way to study a community and the other is, whether a certain category – here: being Muslim – really represents a community.
44As I have shown in the description of Islamic associations in Berlin and the formalized communication between Islamic and governmental representatives, we can observe the development of a political community of Muslims in Germany. Religious affiliation thereby is used as a resource to mobilize adherents and gain influence in public and political discourse. Following Niedermüller we can interpret this as a strategy of representation. Nevertheless, Muslims are far from being or even becoming the homogeneous community as which they are sometimes portrayed in political and media debates. I would even argue that the New Muslim community is not a religious - if this is understood as characterized by shared religious practice - and only partial a social community - understood as a group with social interaction or even greater solidarity. It is a lobby group, dealing with difficulties that are to a great part resulting from politically mismanaged immigration and lack of participation. However, their representatives are fighting for recognition as religious communities and for the possibility to practice religious faith in a time when this is sometimes comprehended as an impertinent or even threatening demand.
Bibliographie
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Notes de bas de page
1 Rauf Ceylan followed a different approach while exploring the Turkish prayer rooms and cafés in a smaller German city in North-Rhine-Westphalia. Rather than the religious life he was exploring the existence of spatial segregation and concentration of immigrants with a Turkish background (Ceylan, 2006).
2 As most Muslims in Germany have their roots in Turkey, they mirror the religious diversity of Asia Minor. Alevism developed there from the roots of Shi’ism and until today forms a relevant minority. Whether the Alevis are a religious, political or cultural community is under dispute in Turkey as well as in Germany among people that feel attached to Alevism. (Sökefeld, 2006 and 2008).
3 Martin Sökefeld is giving a detailed description of what he calls the Alevi movement in Germany looking at it from a diasporic perspective (Sökefeld, 2006 and 2008).
4 The Federal Interior Ministry launched a Website with a great amount of quotations and reasoning on the formalized communication with Islamic organizations in and beyond this Conference. For a first analysis of the Islam Conference concerning Gender representation see Schirin Amir-Moazami 2008. The Turkish born women’s rights activist Seyran Ates and the Iranian born writer and scholar on Islam Navid Kermani share their participant’s views in publications of a series of essays (Ates, 2007; Kermani, 2009). Ayla Satilmis evaluates seven dialogue projects in Germany and reflects chances and hindrances of practiced concepts for communication with Islamic organizations (Satilmis, 2008).
5 With a closer look on an early stage of the process I described the effects of the German headscarf debate that brought diverse Islamic associations together to issue a joint press release in 2004 (Spielhaus, 2009a).
6 The council was found by the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD), the Turkish-Islamic Union (DITIB), the Islamic Council of Germany (IR) and the Association of Islamic Cultural Centers (VIKZ).
7 Marianne Takle gives a concise description of the concept of ‚ foreigner’as a legal and social category in Germany.
8 The headscarf debate in France and the Salman Rushdie Affair in the UK, both starting in 1989 are often marked as the beginning of the New Islamic Presence or the Islamization of debates and people (Tiesler, 2006).
9 Deutscher Bundestag 2007, p. 8.
10 One important exception has to be made, since gender remains to play a profound role during the pilgrimage.
11 In our research we defined a mosque as a space where the Friday khutba is given together with the communal Friday prayer. Only three of Brelin’s mosques are located in purpose-built edificies. Sufi parishes run the four other spaces for their meetings without offering Friday prayers. The two places of Alevi worshippers complete the list of Islamic prayer rooms in Berlin.
12 The situation of Alevis in Gremany is ambivalent since they are presenting themselves as not being Muslims but part of Islam. This behavior clearly locates them on the boarder.
13 Formalized communication with Muslims in Berlin on the city level started in November 2005: Commissioner for Integration, Senator for Interior affairs, representatives of Police, Senator for education, other religious communities, social workers, immigrant communities.
14 In the introduction to Struggeling for Recognition Martin Sökefeld dedicates some notable thoughts to the most difficult context of the research on collective and exxentialized identities, which is always entangled in an arena of contemporary identity claims and ascriptions that the reseacher cannot possibly evade becoming part of (Sökefeld, 2008).
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