Mosques as Spaces of Everyday Geopolitical Tensions

ABSTRACT

Mosques in Europe have long been and are still at the centre of political debates, despite the decades-long presence of migrant Muslim communities in Europe. Scholars within geography and other disciplines have studied mosques extensively with a focus on urban space politics, and examined tensions and conflicts between migrant mosque communities and the broader segments of the local people. In this paper, I focus on DITIB, a Turkish umbrella mosque organization in Germany, and I carry these debates into a transnational terrain, re-theorizing mosques not only as political sites, but also everyday geopolitical spaces where national imaginaries and territorial struggles take place in the daily lives of mosque communities. Through this approach, I draw on the studies of feminist geographers who have provided a renewed perspective to classical geopolitics discussions by revealing how geopolitical relations, struggles, and interactions also operate in everyday spaces, relations, and bodies of ordinary people by reproducing the deep-seated exclusions, discriminations and contestations. This paper contributes to critical geopolitics and geographies of religion literatures as well as to broader discussions on the geopolitics of religion by analysing how a mosque organization is situated at the centre of geopolitical tensions, and how transnational and transregional controversies operate on the walls and properties of mosques and in everyday social/cultural activities of mosque communities.

Acknowledgments

This study is ostensibly supported and funded by the Center for European Studies, the Graduate School, and the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I also would like to express my deepest gratitude to Dr. Banu Gökariksel, Dr. Elizabeth Betsy Olson, and Dr. Sara Smith for their extremely helpful insights and suggestions about the ideas in this paper. I am also very grateful to Betül Aykaç and Alexis Strang for their thorough readings, editing and constructive comments on the original manuscript. Finally, many thanks to the anonymous reviewers for the generous and clarifying comments.

Notes

1. Alevis constitute the largest religious minority in Turkey. Alevism is a branch of Shia Islam that is practiced in Turkey.

2. In a similar vein, some of my other interviews with representatives of Alevi organizations showed how they engage in lobbying activities in municipality councils to prevent the construction of new DITIB mosques.