eJournals Colloquia Germanica 47/1-2

Colloquia Germanica
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
2014
471-2

Introduction

2014
Heidi Denzel de Tirado
Faye Stewart
Introduction Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Georgia State University Islam. Jihad. Koran. Sharia Law. Today these words are on the tongues of many, but few who utter them take into consideration the diverse forms of Islamic faith, beliefs, and practices around the world. Attending to different experiences and embodiments of Muslim being and belonging, this issue engages in a scholarly discussion about various dimensions of Islam and Muslim identities as they emerge in twenty-first-century German visual and literary culture. Central to the seven articles in this issue are both the ways in which Islam is constructed and framed through cultural texts, and the manifold reactions that Muslims— whether real or fictional—elicit in the popular German-language imagination, ranging from fascination to fear, from Islamophilia to Islamophobia. Since 9 / 11, the global turning point in public discourses about Islam, the open question of Muslim belonging has been at the center of increasingly heated debates around the world. Europe has found itself at the center of such discussions, largely due to its colonial legacies, asylum laws, and proximity to North Africa and the Middle East. Recent attacks in London, Madrid, Paris, and Istanbul have only intensified these debates and the concomitant focus on Islam and Muslims in discourses on migration, integration, assimilation, and ostracism. Like other European countries which have witnessed a discernible shift to the political right in the last two decades, Germany too has seen the evolution of an openly xenophobic and Islamophobic public culture, as evidenced by the dramatic rise of Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes ( PEGIDA ) and its multiple regional offshoots in late 2014. At the same time, despite the hypervisibility of such movements, Germany is also the world-renowned home of a highly mediatized Willkommenskultur and plays a leading role in endeavors to provide vital protections for Muslim refugees and integrate Muslim citizens. Since 2006, when Germany hosted the soccer World Cup, the emergence of new forms of patriotism has ushered in multifaceted discussions about how to reconceive German belonging in ways that include binational citizens and migrants from Muslim-majority countries such as Turkey, Bosnia, and Iran. 4 Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Despite former President Wulff’s declaration in 2010, “der Islam gehört inzwischen auch zu Deutschland,” which implied that this is a relatively recent phenomenon by qualifying it with the adverb inzwischen, Islam in Germany is not a new theme in national discourse. Germany’s geographical position at the heart of the European Union, its short colonial history, and its comparatively low percentage of Muslims inhabitants notwithstanding, Islam has played a pivotal symbolic role in the German imagination since the eighteenth century. This is evidenced in the works of authors from Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing to Nurkan Erpulat and Navid Kermani. Likewise, political leaders of the past and present, from Frederick the Great to Richard von Weizsäcker, have repeatedly acknowledged Muslim belonging in Germany. On the other hand, former politician Thilo Sarrazin asserted the incompatibility of European values and Muslim faith, capitalizing on Islamophobic sentiments in his 2010 bestseller Deutschland schafft sich ab. Sarrazin’s work is noteworthy for marking another turning point in the Islam debate by sparking scholarly and critical interventions in a wide range of academic disciplines and sociocultural contexts. The articles in this special issue of Colloquia Germanica were all written before the “crisis of migration” that escalated in and around the European Union in the second half of 2015. However, recent events have made scholarly investigations of these matters all the more crucial and pertinent. The problems and depictions that these articles analyze resonate deeply with current developments, even if there are differences between the historical and geographical factors in question. In contrast with earlier waves of migrants unilaterally perceived as “Muslim,” who came predominantly from Turkey in connection with West Germany’s Gastarbeiterprogram in the 1960s and early 70s and from Bosnia during the Yugoslav Wars in the early 1990s, more recent waves of “Muslim” immigrants and refugees are more diverse. While the majority of today’s asylum seekers are fleeing civil war, oppression, poverty, and otherwise unlivable conditions in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya, their original citizenship status is often undocumented or unidentifiable. In this context, a simultaneously reductive and expansive notion of “the Muslims” has emerged as a catchall umbrella category for labeling the nationally and ethnically unspecified newcomers of Middle Eastern and North African origins. Here we witness a slippage of the identifier “Muslim” from a descriptor of religion and faith to a label for non-European cultures, physiognomies, and lifestyles. This seemingly recent rhetorical trend is interrogated by the various articles in this special issue, which demonstrate that the conflation of “Islam” with racialized stereotypes is no new phenomenon. Central to our contributors’ analyses are endeavors to diversify and differentiate among nuanced politics of representation and the ways in which particular discourses on Muslims are framed and reframed in cultural texts. Introduction 5 The focus of this special issue is on representations of Muslim being and belonging in Germany, with particular attention to negotiations of both religious and cultural Islam as a wide continuum of lifestyles, beliefs, and practices. In contrast with the trend in mainstream media of projecting Muslim migrants as threatening, uncontrollable masses, our contributions focus on individuals— whether real or fictional—and their personal experiences of living, working, writing, and seeking asylum in Germany and Austria. Moreover, the articles here emphasize not only the one-dimensional constructions of “Turks,” “Arabs,” and “Middle Easterners” in which the mass media relentlessly traffic, but also the specific valences of nationality and citizenship in the agency and mobility of Muslim Iranian, Palestinian, and Lebanese migrants and binationals. In addition to the overt focus on Islam in this issue, another common denominator among our contributions is the investigation of genre-specific narrative structures and strategies of representation. They examine how medium and form interface with politics of identity in literary, visual, and popular culture; their primary texts range from novels, children’s literature, dramas, and memoirs to television shows, fiction films, and documentaries, and on to activist rhetoric, branding, and marketing. Our point of departure in the first two articles is a return to Enlightenment traditions in order to build the framework for discussing Muslim-German citizenship by studying the intersections between literary conventions and contemporary texts. We begin with David Coury’s analysis of Navid Kermani’s essayistic and fictional writing, which locates the German-Iranian author within the “Muslim turn” in German literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. Coury explores the intellectual contributions of scholars and critics who re-center Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Stari Most, deconstructing the prevailing discourse on der Islam as a one-dimensional, external reference point and positioning it as central to European self-understanding. By examining essays from Kermani’s collection Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime side by side with his fictional works, such as the novel Kurzmitteilung and the children’s book Ayda, Bär und Hase, Coury demonstrates that Kermani’s oeuvre participates in humanistic traditions challenging Islamophobia and valuing Islam’s cultural and religious legacies in Germany. Coury describes Kermani’s narratological and analytical interventions as explorations of “ways of belonging”—which are necessarily plural, shifting, and dialogically constructed—in post-secular, post-national Germany. While Coury’s article takes Islamophobia as its point of departure, Priscilla Layne frames her contribution as a critique of the “racialization of Islam.” Layne’s comparative analysis of the intersecting preoccupations of drama, cinema, and aesthetic critique brings Nurkan Erpulat and Jens Hillje’s theater play 6 Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart Verrücktes Blut into conversation with the diverging politics of the film that inspired it, Jean-Paul Lilienfeld’s La journée de la jupe, and seventeenthand eighteenth-century intertexts by Molière and Schiller. Layne’s reading of the humanist integrationist politics of Erpulat and Hillje’s play stresses genre-specific techniques used to dissolve the conceptual boundaries between actor and role, Turkish and German identities, and Islam and Christianity. Layne draws on postcolonial theory to bring performance, embodiment, and agency to the fore in discussing the effects of racial profiling and discrimination on Turkish-German Muslims. Layne’s critical assessment of “racialization of Islam” resonates with Berna Gueneli’s interrogation of what she describes as the “entanglement of ethnicity and religion”—specifically Turkishness and Islam—in mainstream German culture. Surveying a range of progressive German-Turkish counter voices in various media, from Fatih Akın’s film The Edge of Heaven and an episode of Lars Becker’s Hamburg-based Tatort crime series, to the satirist Serdar Somuncu’s television appearances and Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel’s play Schwarze Jungfrauen, Gueneli problematizes the presupposed link between Islam and non-German ethnicity. Gueneli also explores the workings of gender and sexuality in constructions of Muslim and Turkish-German identity that reframe mysogynistic and Islamophobic stereotypes, in particular as they come to expression in Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s play and the provocative music videos of rapper Lady Bitch Ray. Gueneli’s case studies map out a wide spectrum of Turkish-German relationships to religion in general and Islam in particular, including pro-secular and agnostic stances, as well as “Islamo-feminist” and radical “neo-Muslim” voices. Olivia Landry’s jumping-off point looks beyond Islamophobia to its amplified affect in panic and its reverberations in fear and familiarity in documentary film. Documentary, Landry argues, performs the double function of authenticating and performing, and is thus ideally positioned to reappropriate the visceral threat projected onto Muslims. Exposing Islamophobia as the West’s “new racism,” Landry demonstrates that the two 2010 documentary films Love During Wartime and Neukölln Unlimited offer critical points of subversion for uncovering the devastating repercussions of anti-Islamic sentiments on vital asylum, citizenship, and belonging. Landry’s comparative analysis of the films’ intimate portraits of young, artistically inclined, and ambitious Muslim asylum-seekers in Austria and Germany attends both to the intersections of form and content in the documentary genre, and to the power of emotions and affect in fashioning resistance narratives against Western anti-Islamic panic. Heidi Denzel de Tirado, by contrast, highlights a countertrend to panicked reactions to threatening Muslims in German visual media, namely the strategic Introduction 7 defanging of Muslim protagonists in television sitcoms. Early twenty-first-century series like König von Kreuzberg, Alle lieben Jimmy and Türkisch für Anfänger, Denzel de Tirado argues, present characters that embody “Islam light,” a concept she borrows from Hamed Abdel-Samat to designate an “enlightened” Islam without jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension. Her analysis stresses gender and genre in locating these German series within the new global trend of the Muslim sitcom, arguing that the German variants follow identifiable patterns in constructing characters from Muslim-majority countries: whereas male protagonists are typically atheist, effeminate, and hyperassimilated, their intellectual and self-confident teenage daughters deliberately choose Muslim lifestyles. Denzel de Tirado mobilizes a comparative study of character development in the above-mentioned sitcoms to argue for a genre-specific interpretation of Islam as a rationally chosen spiritual sanctuary amidst the turmoil of post-secular German society. From Denzel de Tirado’s analysis of liberal and liberated Islam, we then move on to the deployment of Islam as a marketing brand, where it takes on distinctly precarious contours. Lindsay Lawton’s article discusses the emergence of the “post-Muslim woman” as a consumable commodity through the intersecting engagements of autobiographers, publishers, booksellers, reviewers, and activists. In her analysis of the book covers and marketing of several memoirs by female post-Muslim activists, Lawton finds that the autobiographies’ diverging representations of faith are glossed over by an entire industry with a vested interest in casting the female author as a gendered victim of male-embodied Muslim religious oppression. At the same time, Lawton demonstrates that the virtual networks that have evolved around post-Muslim women’s memoirs also provide an important public space in which tropes of Muslim faith and belonging can be discussed, complicated, and challenged. While Lawton’s article traces the commodified evolution of the Muslim female victim into the post-Muslim subject in a liberating Western environment, Faye Stewart’s contribution investigates the limitations of human rights and asylum laws in Germany by focusing on the more tenuous distinctions between Muslim and non-Muslim, heterosexual and queer, and agency and voicelessness. Stewart contends that Angelina Maccarone’s 2005 film Fremde Haut interrogates the perceived incoherence between homosexuality and Islam, instead asserting that Muslim faith and queer desires coexist, although sociocultural factors in both Western Europe and the Middle East can trouble their mutual expression. While German-embodied Islamophobia represents one object of the film’s critique, Stewart argues that homophobia plays a more central role in plot and character development, thus questioning Germany’s presumed liberalism. Her reading of Maccarone’s film highlights different dimensions of Muslim visibility 8 Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart and queer invisibility in the context of contemporary sociopolitical developments in Iran and in Germany. Taken together, the contributions in this issue contribute to the discussion on a politically, ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse Muslim population in twenty-first-century Germany. We anticipate that these kinds of studies will become all the more numerous and necessary with the influx of migrants from Muslim-majority countries and the rapidly changing demography of the Federal Republic of Germany and the European Union today.