Islam and the Making of Turkishness: Turkish Teachers and Imams and in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1961-2006
This manuscript examines the transnational history and politics of knowledge about Turkish-origin migrants in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) from the 1960s through the 2000s. This was knowledge not only about what differentiated Turkish Germans from the German majority, but also about what interventions were made necessary by these differences. The project centers teachers and imams from Turkey working in the FRG. Teachers trained in Turkey worked in German schools, offering language and culture courses to Turkish pupils, while imams taught religious lessons and led prayers in mosques and “Qur’an schools”. The project demonstrates that these relatively small vocational groups were crucial, underrecognized vernacular experts providing information for audiences in both countries about Turks in the FRG: about culture, Islam, Turkishness, and racialized difference. They not only produced this knowledge, but were called to act upon it, implementing policies based on what German or Turkish officials saw as the particular needs of the Turkish population, thereby indexing changing visions of Turkish German difference in policy, law, and popular and academic discourse in Turkey and West Germany. Unpacking this transnational web of knowledge helps push toward a more complex account of the history of Islam, the nation, and Turkish German migration, one inescapably embedded in larger currents in German and in Turkish history.
The manuscript is structured as a comparative and intertwined history of teachers and imams, drawing on three years of research and archival and oral sources in both languages. Chapters focus on topics ranging from Turkish-language education and educational segregation in German schools, to Turkish education policy in the diaspora, to controversies surrounding extracurricular Qur’anic instruction, and the dispatching of Turkish state imams to the Federal Republic. In treating these varied topics and in keeping with a salutary push in recent migration historiography, the project seeks to integrate Turkish migrants into the narration of German history. Where it moves beyond existing approaches is by integrating Turkish and German histories of nationalism, secularism, and education. These are histories typically written separately, with migrants disappearing from Turkish history and arriving as actors in German history, writing out their continued engagement with Turkey and with Turkish history beyond the nation’s borders. By treating the web of knowledge surrounding teachers and imams as a unified field that brings in migrants themselves and two states, societies, and histories, the project offers a more comprehensive model of Turkish German migration history that centers migrants as actors shaping developments like the “Muslimization” of perception of migrants otherwise assumed to emanate from German majority perceptions or from the receiving state. The manuscript seeks to demonstrate that the making of Turkish difference, including Muslim difference, was contingent, contested, and transnational in ways other studies have been ill-equipped to recognize.
Professor Brian Van Wyck is conducting research during his stay at the ZZF in Department IV: Regimes of the Social Sphere.
Prof. Dr. Brian Van Wyck forscht während seines Aufenthalts am ZZF in Abteilung IV: Regime des Sozialen.