Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race,
Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe.
Princeton University Press, 2014)))())00.
Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to one hundred thousand German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. Being German, Becoming Muslim explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society’s fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today’s Europe.
Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment.
Endorsement:
"Through thoughtful portraits, Özyürek explores the dilemmas faced by converts to Islam in Germany, where new Muslims are seeking nonethnic forms of the religion. She shows how these converts are finding an original way to be German through their Islam--a discovery that seems dangerous to some in the German state. A clear, convincing account of new Muslims in a European land."--John Bowen, author of Can Islam Be French?
"In a society where 'Muslim' has come to imply 'nonwhite immigrant,' and where German-Islam for many is a contradiction of identity, how do native German Muslims tread across these conundra? Özyürek's engaging and penetrating book leads us through the issues and reveals as much about Germany and a select group of Germans as it does about Islam."--Ruth Mandel, University College London
"This book offers both a call and a hope. Özyürek shows the tremendous role of Muslim converts in making Islam a German and European religion, and she calls converts to meet this challenge. She also presents the common hope of everyone 'living together' in unity, and her book is an important contribution to the achievement of this goal."--Tariq Ramadan, University of Oxford
"Given the current position of Islam in Europe, why do Europeans convert? What do the experiences of converts reveal about contemporary life, particularly in Germany? This rich book offers a new perspective and entrée into the discussion of religion in Europe."--Damani J. Partridge, University of Michigan
"Özyürek has written an engaging, highly readable portrait of German converts to Islam who have become key figures in public debates over the future of the country as a multireligious, multiethnic polity. The book serves as a primer on the history of Islam in Germany and plumbs the limits of European secularism. A pleasure to read."--Paul Silverstein, Reed College
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Germanizing Islam and Racializing Muslims 1
Chapter 1 Giving Islam a German Face 24
Chapter 2 Establishing Distance from Immigrant Muslims 51
Chapter 3 East German Conversions to Islam after the Collapse of the Berlin Wall 69
Chapter 4 Being Muslim as a Way of Becoming German 87
Chapter 5 Salafism as the Future of European Islam? 109
Chapter 6 Conclusion 132
Notes 137
References 149
Index 163
Introduction can be read here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10404.html
Princeton University Press, 2014)))())00.
Every year more and more Europeans, including Germans, are embracing Islam. It is estimated that there are now up to one hundred thousand German converts—a number similar to that in France and the United Kingdom. What stands out about recent conversions is that they take place at a time when Islam is increasingly seen as contrary to European values. Being German, Becoming Muslim explores how Germans come to Islam within this antagonistic climate, how they manage to balance their love for Islam with their society’s fear of it, how they relate to immigrant Muslims, and how they shape debates about race, religion, and belonging in today’s Europe.
Esra Özyürek looks at how mainstream society marginalizes converts and questions their national loyalties. In turn, converts try to disassociate themselves from migrants of Muslim-majority countries and promote a denationalized Islam untainted by Turkish or Arab traditions. Some German Muslims believe that once cleansed of these accretions, the Islam that surfaces fits in well with German values and lifestyle. Others even argue that being a German Muslim is wholly compatible with the older values of the German Enlightenment.
Endorsement:
"Through thoughtful portraits, Özyürek explores the dilemmas faced by converts to Islam in Germany, where new Muslims are seeking nonethnic forms of the religion. She shows how these converts are finding an original way to be German through their Islam--a discovery that seems dangerous to some in the German state. A clear, convincing account of new Muslims in a European land."--John Bowen, author of Can Islam Be French?
"In a society where 'Muslim' has come to imply 'nonwhite immigrant,' and where German-Islam for many is a contradiction of identity, how do native German Muslims tread across these conundra? Özyürek's engaging and penetrating book leads us through the issues and reveals as much about Germany and a select group of Germans as it does about Islam."--Ruth Mandel, University College London
"This book offers both a call and a hope. Özyürek shows the tremendous role of Muslim converts in making Islam a German and European religion, and she calls converts to meet this challenge. She also presents the common hope of everyone 'living together' in unity, and her book is an important contribution to the achievement of this goal."--Tariq Ramadan, University of Oxford
"Given the current position of Islam in Europe, why do Europeans convert? What do the experiences of converts reveal about contemporary life, particularly in Germany? This rich book offers a new perspective and entrée into the discussion of religion in Europe."--Damani J. Partridge, University of Michigan
"Özyürek has written an engaging, highly readable portrait of German converts to Islam who have become key figures in public debates over the future of the country as a multireligious, multiethnic polity. The book serves as a primer on the history of Islam in Germany and plumbs the limits of European secularism. A pleasure to read."--Paul Silverstein, Reed College
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction Germanizing Islam and Racializing Muslims 1
Chapter 1 Giving Islam a German Face 24
Chapter 2 Establishing Distance from Immigrant Muslims 51
Chapter 3 East German Conversions to Islam after the Collapse of the Berlin Wall 69
Chapter 4 Being Muslim as a Way of Becoming German 87
Chapter 5 Salafism as the Future of European Islam? 109
Chapter 6 Conclusion 132
Notes 137
References 149
Index 163
Introduction can be read here: http://press.princeton.edu/titles/10404.html
Nostalgia for the Modern: State
Secularism and Everyday Politics in
Turkey.
Duke Univ. Press, 2006. ( also in Turkish translation by Boğaziçi University Press, 2008)
Description
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the unity and authority of the secularist Turkish state were challenged by the rise of political Islam and Kurdish separatism on the one hand and by the increasing demands of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank on the other. While the Turkish government had long limited Islam—the religion of the overwhelming majority of its citizens—to the private sphere, it burst into the public arena in the late 1990s, becoming part of party politics. As religion became political, symbols of Kemalism—the official ideology of the Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923—spread throughout the private sphere. In Nostalgia for the Modern, Esra Özyürek analyzes the ways that Turkish citizens began to express an attachment to—and nostalgia for—the secularist, modernist, and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.
Drawing on her ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara during the late 1990s, Özyürek describes how ordinary Turkish citizens demonstrated their affinity for Kemalism in the ways they organized their domestic space, decorated their walls, told their life stories, and interpreted political developments. She examines the recent interest in the private lives of the founding generation of the Republic, reflects on several privately organized museum exhibits about the early Republic, and considers the proliferation in homes and businesses of pictures of Atatürk, the most potent symbol of the secular Turkish state. She also explores the organization of the 1998 celebrations marking the Republic’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Özyürek’s insights into how state ideologies spread through private and personal realms of life have implications for all societies confronting the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and politicized religion.
Endorsement
“Esra Özyürek equips us to see modernity as both an ongoing invention and an object of nostalgia. Her analysis, exceptional for its ethnographic richness and ideological nuance, shows how power struggles between secular and Islamist political movements are reconfiguring popular notions of citizenship and the sacred in Turkey. Few scholars have devised such a compelling framework for assessing the mutual transformations of nationalism, Islam, and the state. This is exciting, innovative work.”—Andrew Shryock, author of Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination
Table of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Elderly Children of the Republic: The Public History in the Private Story 29
2. Wedded to the Republic: Displaying Transformations in Private Lives 65
3. Miniaturizing Ataturk: The Commodification of State Iconography 93
4. Hand in Hand with the Republic: Civilian Celebration of the Turkish State 125
5. Public Memory as Political Battleground: Kemalist and Islamist Versions of the Early Republic 151
Conclusion 178
Notes 183
References 199
Index 217
Parts of the book can be read here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nostalgia-Modern-Secularism-Everyday-Politics/dp/0822338955
Duke Univ. Press, 2006. ( also in Turkish translation by Boğaziçi University Press, 2008)
Description
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the unity and authority of the secularist Turkish state were challenged by the rise of political Islam and Kurdish separatism on the one hand and by the increasing demands of the European Union, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank on the other. While the Turkish government had long limited Islam—the religion of the overwhelming majority of its citizens—to the private sphere, it burst into the public arena in the late 1990s, becoming part of party politics. As religion became political, symbols of Kemalism—the official ideology of the Turkish Republic founded by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in 1923—spread throughout the private sphere. In Nostalgia for the Modern, Esra Özyürek analyzes the ways that Turkish citizens began to express an attachment to—and nostalgia for—the secularist, modernist, and nationalist foundations of the Turkish Republic.
Drawing on her ethnographic research in Istanbul and Ankara during the late 1990s, Özyürek describes how ordinary Turkish citizens demonstrated their affinity for Kemalism in the ways they organized their domestic space, decorated their walls, told their life stories, and interpreted political developments. She examines the recent interest in the private lives of the founding generation of the Republic, reflects on several privately organized museum exhibits about the early Republic, and considers the proliferation in homes and businesses of pictures of Atatürk, the most potent symbol of the secular Turkish state. She also explores the organization of the 1998 celebrations marking the Republic’s seventy-fifth anniversary. Özyürek’s insights into how state ideologies spread through private and personal realms of life have implications for all societies confronting the simultaneous rise of neoliberalism and politicized religion.
Endorsement
“Esra Özyürek equips us to see modernity as both an ongoing invention and an object of nostalgia. Her analysis, exceptional for its ethnographic richness and ideological nuance, shows how power struggles between secular and Islamist political movements are reconfiguring popular notions of citizenship and the sacred in Turkey. Few scholars have devised such a compelling framework for assessing the mutual transformations of nationalism, Islam, and the state. This is exciting, innovative work.”—Andrew Shryock, author of Nationalism and the Genealogical Imagination
Table of contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1. The Elderly Children of the Republic: The Public History in the Private Story 29
2. Wedded to the Republic: Displaying Transformations in Private Lives 65
3. Miniaturizing Ataturk: The Commodification of State Iconography 93
4. Hand in Hand with the Republic: Civilian Celebration of the Turkish State 125
5. Public Memory as Political Battleground: Kemalist and Islamist Versions of the Early Republic 151
Conclusion 178
Notes 183
References 199
Index 217
Parts of the book can be read here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Nostalgia-Modern-Secularism-Everyday-Politics/dp/0822338955
The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey.
(Syracuse Univ. Press, 2007).
Turkish society is frequently accused of having amnesia. It has been said that there is no social memory in Turkey before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey after World War I. Indeed, in 1923, the newly founded Turkish Republic committed to a modernist future by erasing the memory of its Ottoman past. Now, almost eighty years after the establishment of the Republic, the grandchildren of the founders have a different relationship with history. New generations make every effort to remember, record, and reconcile earlier periods. The multiple, personalized representations of the past which they have recovered allow contemporary Turkish citizens to create alternative identities for themselves and their communities. Unlike its futuristic and homogenizing character at the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish nationalism today uses memories to generate varied narratives for the nation and its minority groups.
Contributors to this volume come from such diverse disciplines as anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology, but they share a common understanding of contemporary Turkey and how its different representations of the past have become metaphors through which individuals and groups define their cultural identity and political position. They explore the ways people challenge, reaffirm, or transform the concepts of history, nation, homeland, and "Republic" through acts of memory- effectively demonstrating that memory can be both the basis of cultural reproduction and a form of resistance. The introduction of comparative material to other societies is rare and adds an important new dimension to the analyses.
Table of contents
Illustrations vii
Contributors ix
1. Introduction The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey
Esra Özyurek 1
2. Weaving Modernity, Commercializing Carpets: Collective Memory and Contested Tradition in Orselli Village
Kimberly Hart 16
3. Stories in Three Dimensions: Narratives of Nation and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum
Asli Gur 40
4. Remembering a Nine-Thousand-Year Old Site: Presenting Catalhoyuk
Ayfer Bartu Candan 70
5. An Endless Death and an Eternal Mourning: November 10 in Turkey
Nazli Okten 95
6. Public Memory as Political Battleground: Islamist Subversions of Republican Nostalgia
Esra Ozyurek 114
7. Memories of Violence, Memoirs of Nation: The 1915 Massacres and the Construction of Armenian Identity
Cihan Tugal 138
8. Polyphony and Geographic Kinship in Anatolia: Framing the Turkish- Greek Compulsory Population Exchange
Asli Igsiz 162
References 191
Index 211
Parts of the book can be read here: http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Public-Intellectual-Political-History/dp/0815631316
(Syracuse Univ. Press, 2007).
Turkish society is frequently accused of having amnesia. It has been said that there is no social memory in Turkey before Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded modern Turkey after World War I. Indeed, in 1923, the newly founded Turkish Republic committed to a modernist future by erasing the memory of its Ottoman past. Now, almost eighty years after the establishment of the Republic, the grandchildren of the founders have a different relationship with history. New generations make every effort to remember, record, and reconcile earlier periods. The multiple, personalized representations of the past which they have recovered allow contemporary Turkish citizens to create alternative identities for themselves and their communities. Unlike its futuristic and homogenizing character at the turn of the twentieth century, Turkish nationalism today uses memories to generate varied narratives for the nation and its minority groups.
Contributors to this volume come from such diverse disciplines as anthropology, comparative literature, and sociology, but they share a common understanding of contemporary Turkey and how its different representations of the past have become metaphors through which individuals and groups define their cultural identity and political position. They explore the ways people challenge, reaffirm, or transform the concepts of history, nation, homeland, and "Republic" through acts of memory- effectively demonstrating that memory can be both the basis of cultural reproduction and a form of resistance. The introduction of comparative material to other societies is rare and adds an important new dimension to the analyses.
Table of contents
Illustrations vii
Contributors ix
1. Introduction The Politics of Public Memory in Turkey
Esra Özyurek 1
2. Weaving Modernity, Commercializing Carpets: Collective Memory and Contested Tradition in Orselli Village
Kimberly Hart 16
3. Stories in Three Dimensions: Narratives of Nation and the Anatolian Civilizations Museum
Asli Gur 40
4. Remembering a Nine-Thousand-Year Old Site: Presenting Catalhoyuk
Ayfer Bartu Candan 70
5. An Endless Death and an Eternal Mourning: November 10 in Turkey
Nazli Okten 95
6. Public Memory as Political Battleground: Islamist Subversions of Republican Nostalgia
Esra Ozyurek 114
7. Memories of Violence, Memoirs of Nation: The 1915 Massacres and the Construction of Armenian Identity
Cihan Tugal 138
8. Polyphony and Geographic Kinship in Anatolia: Framing the Turkish- Greek Compulsory Population Exchange
Asli Igsiz 162
References 191
Index 211
Parts of the book can be read here: http://www.amazon.com/Politics-Public-Intellectual-Political-History/dp/0815631316