By Özkan Ezli
The history of Islam in Germany started at the end of the 1960s. Without any to-do and invisible to the German public, Turkish working migrants performed their ritual prayers in small rooms of factory buildings or workers' residences. The Turkish migrants remained invisible in their religious practices also because they did not regard Germany as a new home or a place to stay. Their intention was to work only for a short period of time in Germany, and they were emotionally much more connected to the political debate and public life in Turkey. They said and strongly believed that, next year, they would certainly return to Turkey.
The first generation of migrants understood their practicing of their religion as a homecoming. They practiced it in their homes or intimate, invisible places shielded from the outside, because the outside was conceived of as foreign, as a foreign land, or - in Turkish - "gurbet." The invisibility of Islam in the 1960s and 1970s has everything to do with the migrants' notion of a dichotomy between the public or foreign and the private sphere. This division of public and private in the reality of migrants' lives is often expressed by a metaphor of coldness which we can also find in Turkish literature by migrants in the 1970s and early 1980s:
I learned their language
but that changed hardly anything
Is it my dark eyes?
Do they disapprove of my clothes?
They look at me
as if I was a stone
or a tuft of grass
The cold and the winter set in
In an empty fear
my voice seems
frozen up
I escape
to the homey pub
in a rail station
I hear the voices
of my compatriots
hear their greetings
see our newspapers
Soon I will be well again
and my head won't hurt
Homesickness and society's coldness and ignorance - these topics are characteristic of the so-called "Gastarbeiter"-literature until the beginning of the 1980s.
These experiences of the first generation, as they are represented in this excerpt from a poem by Sabri Cakir, resulted in a withdrawal into the private sphere and the cultivation of religious values in this publicly invisible realm. The way in which Islam was, in this time, perceived in Germany and in Turkey is intricately linked with the defensive, passive nature of exile Islam. Germany, the immigration country, had conceived of immigration exclusively as working migration in which an ever fluctuating and always renewed population of workers would be involved.
The cultural, and thus religious, dimension of immigration was not deemed important enough to warrant any special attention. Remarkably, neither was Turkey interested in the manifestations and development of Islam in Germany. Turkey left it up to Muslim groups such as Nurcu and Süleymanci to shape Islam in Germany. These groups were mainly interested in establishing Koranic schools where religious knowledge would be taught.
Turkey's politics of neglect only changed at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s when it became clear that most of the first generation migrants would, for economic reasons, not return to Turkey. In the early 1980s, DITIB, the Turkish-Islamic Union of the Association for Religion, was founded as a European branch of the Department of Religion.
The founding of DITIB marked the transition from Turkey's obliviousness of Turkish migrants in Germany to an active conservative cultural politics. DITIB's central political goal, which has hardly changed until today, was the preservation of laicistic thought in the Diaspora - and hence a restriction of religion to the private sphere.
The second important organization that shaped Islam in Germany is, of course, the Islamic Communion Milli Görüs. In Europe, it is the largest non-state organization of Turkish Islam with 27,000 members and more than 100,000 sympathizers. One of the central characteristics of Milli Görüs is its modified understanding of its political role toward Turkey and Germany since the 1990s.
The organization was founded in Turkey in the 1960s and later settled down in Germany. Under the slogan 'adil dozen,' or 'just order,' its goal was the islamization of Turkey. In the 1990s, then, Milli Görüs began to work towards a legitimization and space for Islam in German society. The third influential organization that was founded in Germany is the radical Community of Cemaleddin Kaplan, also known as the 'Caliph of Cologne,' which promotes an Islamic revolution in Turkey.
This extreme diversity of Muslim communities in the Diaspora - different from Islam in Turkey - allowed for many variations of Turkish Islamic practice and rendered diasporic religious culture much more complex. This differentiation of Islam leads almost automatically to a more different relationship to religion than is common in Turkey.
Against the background of the Islam of the first generation of immigrants, a more complex Diaspora Islam of the second and third generation emerges. It is more complex, as Schiffauer demonstrates, because opinions on the course of Islam in
Turkey continue to divide the second generation, but new and equally divergent positions on Islam cross over and combine with them. These new positions result from an active engagement with the German immigrant society and culture and with the pluralism within 'German' Muslim communities.
When Turks in Germany had turned from migrant workers into immigrants in the second generation, however, it was not only their institutional disposition which became transformed, but also their individual religious ones. For the first immigrants, the so-called Turkish 'People's Islam' was a formative influence for their practice of religion in Germany. The People's Islam was oriented towards and shaped by the practicalities of everyday life. It was bound up in Turkish social life at large, it was there for everyone to be followed or not to be followed, and it was defined by distinct phases of an individual's life. Certain religious duties, like prayer, fasting, and the pilgrimage, are reserved for adult life and should not be followed in earlier years. This kind of religious practice was still rooted in the oral pragmatic tradition of a People's Islam. In Olivier Roy's terms, it can be said that the People's Islam was embedded into the culture at large, while in the Diaspora, religion later became 'de-culturalized.' The migrant's practice of religion, under the forces of de-culturization, slowly began to turn from an applied religion to a scripture-oriented, purist Islam. To give you a concrete example of the challenges to their religion that migrants have been confronted with and why they needed to integrate a study of the Koran in their practice of Islam, many Turkish migrants responded similarly in interviews: "The Germans tell us that our religion oppresses women. I know that that is not true. But how can I explain it to them? And the Germans say that it says so in the Koran..."
Thus, the migrants begin to study the Koran in Turkish, which is a radical change to their religious lives because the Koran, in Islamic culture, is considered untranslatable.
To argue for their religion, the Turkish readers not only read the Koran, but also religious commentaries. Looking for answers to, for example, the role of women in Islamic society, they discover new aspects of their belief; they are impressed and become proud of the clarity and meaningfulness of their religion.
Today, nearly every migrant family owns a Koran in the Turkish language. The Koran, which carries only a ritual meaning as an object in the People's Islam, slowly has become profaned. The traditional People's Islam, in the eyes of the migrants, is devalued because it is practiced without any deeper knowledge of the religion and is only practiced in specific phases of life. In Germany, Islam is not only practiced by Muslims in their middle phase of life, but increasingly becomes a question of lifestyle and shapes every single day.
Young Muslims in Germany often declare that they "have discovered Islam for themselves." Most members of the second generation do not consider themselves systematically educated in religion because their parents did not have close ties to Islam, or only to the practices of the People's Islam. The Islam of the first generation was thus somehow simply 'there' in practices like prayer, without being truly tangible or visible. In the second and third generations, Turkish migrants systematically develop a coherent Islamic way of life. Their biographies, in this sense, are often comparable to Western biographies of self-actualization. The notion of self-actualization through Islam is particularly highlighted by Sigrid Nökel in her study Die Töchter der Gastarbeiter und der Islam. As Nökel says, Turkish women's biographies of the second and third generation display parallels to Western models of personhood or individuality; personal growth and the increasing independence from others, no matter on which side, are central to self-descriptions of phases in young Islamic women's lives. The decision to wear a head-scarf and to model their lives individually, and out of their own free will, according to Islamic principles becomes young women's means towards self-actualization and dominates their relation to Islam.
In contrast to the first generation which practiced Islam defensively and invisibly, the second generation uses Islam as an instrument to give meaning to their everyday, individual lives. As I have illustrated, they do not only study the Koran, the Hadiths, or religious commentaries to find solutions to their everyday problems in Western society. One important element of structuring their religious lives is to argue for their religion and counter Western discourses about Islam. This new relationship of the second and third generation to Islam significantly transformed their relationship to Turkey as well as their presence in German society. The founding of so many different Muslim clubs, associations, and communions and their status as legal corporations within the German system, the increased participation in German society at large, and the differentiation of their own, cultured lifestyle in terms of clothing, kosher food and so on constitutes a distinct Islamic culture that has expanded into German public space. It has become a highly visible and irreversible part of German society.
This transformation of Turkish Islam has not taken place as a transformation unconnected to dynamics in German society - as the term 'parallel society,' which has gained much currency in the arts sections of newspapers as well as in academic discourse since 2004, tries to suggest. Rather, the development of a more systematic Islam in Germany is a result of an interaction with German society. Since the 1960s, this interaction has been configured in changing hierarchies. Jörg Hüttermann shows that in the 1960s, the German citizen granted the immigrant a highly delimited space in German society and considered the migrants as peripheral, foreign guests. Islam then was practiced defensively and as a version of the People's Islam. In the 1970s and 1980s, this hierarchy between the German citizen and the migrant was questioned and shaken. On the one hand, groups like 'die Grünen' criticize Germany's patronizing attitude and describe the migrants as victims of German society. On the other hand, and in reaction to Germany's irritation and now shaky position vis-à-vis the immigrants, Germany enacted the 'Rückkehrförderungsgesetz' in 1984. This law was mainly an attempt of the German side to reinstate the original hierarchy between the Germans as the heads of the household and the immigrants as the guests, and to cement the notion that Germany was no immigration country. This is, by the way, a law which Turkish migrants have not yet forgotten. The Turkish community was split into politically left and right fractions - you may remember 'die Grauen Wölfe' - and religion was not a central or uniting force. The migrants' belief that they would soon return to Turkey was slightly weakened, but still enjoyed wide currency.
When second-generation migrants began to give up on the idea of a return to Turkey and distanced themselves from their parents' home country, this not only changed their status as 'guest' to a status as immigrants, but also helped to shift the power balance between immigrants and Germany. Germany has been forced to meet the immigrant on eye-level, consider him a new citizen, and communicate with him in discussion about integration and conferences on Islam. The immigrant is no longer a peripheral guest or a victim of society, but actively articulates his desires and rights. For one part of the Turkish community, these desires and rights are implicit in their Islamic religion and are articulated to the public through the active, visible practice of that religion through institutional and life-style choices. For another part of the Turkish community, the desires and rights of Turkish immigrants find their voice in the arts and in literature - which, if time had permitted, I would have liked to talk about today as well. Let me close by saying that, after forty years of the history of migration in Germany, it is only today that integration can truly start because Germans and immigrants have begun to meet, discuss and negotiate their desires and rights in German society on eye-level with each other.
This essay was written for the AICGS Workshop on "Transatlantic Perspectives on Religion and Politics in Global Affairs," which was held in Berlin on April 20, 2007.