Enlivening the ‘open city’: from a politics of divisibility to the making of Muslim cityzens in Berlin

ABSTRACT

In this piece, Becker explores how, in facing the failure of national belonging, specifically a politics of divisibility that sets them negatively apart from the German mainstream, Muslim Berliners enliven ‘cityzenship’: that is, they turn to the city itself as a place of identification and self-articulation. They do so by engaging with and shaping what Richard Sennett calls ‘the open city’, a city that is open to pluralism and plural encounters at the grounded level. Grappling with the histories of their parents and grandparents as guestworkers to Germany, experiencing long-term limbo in terms of belonging, they root themselves primarily in the urban terrain through critical encounters both with others and with the city itself. What emerges, in mosque life, slam poetry, Jewish–Muslim encounters and political protests alike, is a proactively self-driven articulation of Muslim placemaking in the present that contests past exclusions while ultimately looking towards, and shaping, a more open and inclusive future in the German capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Berlin
• Muslims
• open city
• placemaking
• urban space

Notes

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3 Anne Norton, On the Muslim Question (Princeton, NJ and Woodstock, Oxon.: Princeton University Press 2013); Nasar Meer and Tariq Modood, ‘Refutations of racism in the “Muslim question”’, Patterns of Prejudice, vol. 43, no. 3/4, 2009, 335–54.

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5 Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, ‘Thinking Europe’s “Muslim question”: on Trojan Horses and the problematization of Muslims’, Critical Research on Religion, vol. 10, no. 2, 2022, 200–20 (200); Sara R. Farris, ‘From the Jewish question to the Muslim question: republican rigorism, culturalist differentialism and antinomies of enforced emancipation’, Constellations, vol. 21, no. 2, 2014, 296–307 (296–7).

6 Bracke and Hernández Aguilar, ‘Thinking Europe’s “Muslim Question”’; Norton, On the Muslim Question; Elisabeth Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2021).

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10 Norton, On the Muslim Question; Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis.

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22 Becker, ‘Good mosque, bad mosque’.

23 Alissa J. Rubin, ‘French school deems teenager’s skirt an illegal display of religion’, New York Times (online), 29 April 2015, available at www.nytimes.com/2015/04/30/world/europe/french-school-teenagers-skirt-illegal-display-religion.html (viewed 10 October 2023).

24 Jouili, Pious Practice and Secular Constraints.

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27 Oliphant, The Privilege of Being Banal.

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29 Zygmunt Bauman, Intimations of Postmodernity (London: Routledge 1992), 178; Tilman Schiel, ‘Modernity, ambivalence and the gardening state’, Thesis Eleven, vol. 83, no. 1, 2005, 78–89.

30 Schiffauer, ‘Enemies within the gates’.

31 Simmel, ‘The stranger’, 176.

32 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity Press 1991), 60–1.

33 Simmel, ‘The stranger’.

34 Beaman, Citizen Outsider.

35 Sennett, Building and Dwelling.

36 Georg Simmel, ‘The metropolis and mental life’ [1903], trans. from the German by Kurt H. Wolff, in Jan Lin and Christopher Mele (eds), The Urban Sociology Reader, 2nd edn (London and New York: Routledge 2012), 23–31.

37 Sennett, Building and Dwelling, 162.

38 Ibid.

39 Christine Hentschel, ‘Postcolonializing Berlin and the fabrication of the urban’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, vol. 39, no. 1, 2015, 79–91.

40 Richard Sennett, The Craftsman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2008); Richard Sennett, Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2012); Sennett, Building and Dwelling.

41 Sennett, Building and Dwelling, 22.

42 Frantz Fanon, ‘Algeria unveiled’ [1960], in Prasenjit Duara (ed.), Decolonization: Perspectives from Now and Then (London and New York: Routledge 2004), 42–55.

43 Gümüşay, Sprache und Sein.

44 Tom Cheesman, Novels of Turkish German Settlement: Cosmopolite Fictions (Rochester, NY: Camden House 2007, 52).

45 Castles, ‘Guestworkers in Europe’.

46 Fatima El-Tayeb, Undeutsch: die Konstruktion des Anderen in der postmigrantischen Gesellschaft (Bielefeld: transcript Verlag 2016).

47 Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis.

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49 Stefan P. Dudink, ‘Homosexuality, race, and the rhetoric of nationalism’, History of the Present, vol. 1, no. 2, 2011, 259–64, (260).

50 Dekel and Öyzürek, ‘The logic of the fight against antisemitism in Germany in three cultural shifts’.

51 Paola Bacchetta, Fatima El-Tayeb and Jin Haritaworn, ‘Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, vol. 33, no. 5, 2015, 769–78 (774).

52 Yurdakul, ‘Jews, Muslims and the ritual male circumcision debate’; Schirin Amir-Moazami, ‘Investigating the secular body: the politics of the male circumcision debate in Germany’, ReOrient, vol. 1, no. 2, 2016, 147–70.

53 Armin Langer, ‘Die Salaam-Schalom-Initiative: Ein Bündnis von Juden und Muslimen’, PaRDeS: Zeitschrift der Vereinigung für Jüdische Studien, vol. 22, 2016, 195–8.

54 Danny Ben-Moshe, ‘The new anti-Semitism in Europe: the Islamic dimension of, and Jewish belonging in, the EU’, Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations, vol. 26, no. 2, 2015, 219–36; Dekel and Öyzürek, ‘The logic of the fight against antisemitism in Germany in three cultural shifts’.

55 Özyürek, ‘Rethinking empathy’.

56 Sennett, Building and Dwelling, 385.

57 Sennett, Building and Dwelling.

58 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn (London and New York: Verso 2006); Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging: Autochthony, Citizenship, and Exclusion in Africa and Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 2009).

59 Yasemin Nuhoğlu Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press 1994).

60 Jeffrey C. Alexander, The Civil Sphere (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press 2006); Beaman, Citizen Outsider; Schiel, ‘Modernity, ambivalence and the gardening state’.

61 Sennett, Building and Dwelling, 245.

62 Toni Morrison, ‘The fisherwoman: introduction to A Kind of Rapture: Photographs’, in Toni Morrison, What Moves at the Margin: Selected Nonfiction, ed. Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press 2008), 138–42.

63 Sennett, Building and Dwelling.

64 Loïc Wacquant, ‘Marginality, ethnicity and penality in the neo-liberal city: an analytic cartography’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 37, no. 10, 2014, 1687–711 (1692); Nitzan Shoshan, ‘Time at a standstill: loss, accumulation, and the past conditional in an East Berlin neighborhood’, Ethnos, vol. 77, no. 1, 2012, 24–49.

65 Sennett, Building and Dwelling, 33.

66 Hentschel, ‘Postcolonializing Berlin and the fabrication of the urban’.

67 Richard Sennett, ‘The spaces of democracy’, 1998 Raoul Wallenberg Lecture, 44, presented at the University of Michigan College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ann Arbor, 1998.

68 Bacchetta, El-Tayeb and Haritaworn, ‘Queer of colour formations and translocal spaces in Europe’, 776; Anderson, Imagined Communities.

69 Sennett, Building and Dwelling; Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. from the German by Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2006).

70 Becker, Mosques in the Metropolis.

71 S. Sayyid, ‘Introduction: BrAsians: postcolonial people, ironic citizens’, in N. Ali, V. S. Kalra and S. Sayyid (eds), A Postcolonial People: South Asians in Britain (London: C. Hurst & Co. 2006), 1–10 (5).

72 Tariq Modood, ‘Muslims and the politics of difference’, in Peter Hopkins and Richard Gale (eds), Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press 2009), 193–209.

73 Simmel, ‘Metropolis and mental life’; Simmel, ‘The stranger’.

74 Hentschel, ‘Postcolonializing Berlin and the fabrication of the urban’.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Elisabeth Becker

Elisabeth Becker is a Freigeist Fellow at the Max Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University. She is author of Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe (University of Chicago Press 2021), and has published extensively on religion, race and ethnicity in, for example, Ethnic and Racial Studies, the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Cultural Sociology and the American Journal of Cultural Sociology, specifically focusing on Jewish and Muslim experiences in the context of Europe. As a public scholar, she also runs Inscribing Plurality (supported by the Landecker Foundation) and writes for mainstream publications such as the Washington Post, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and Tablet Magazine. She is co-editor of Patterns of Prejudice. Email: [email protected] http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7010-5957