The Limits of Multicultural Tolerance? Liberal Democracy and Media Portrayals of Muslim Migrant Women in Germany

Abstract

This article examines how Muslim migrant women's sexuality is instrumentalised to erect gendered and cultural boundaries of citizenship and liberal democracy in Germany. German newspaper articles on forced marriages and honour killings for a period of 10 years (1998–2008) are analysed to show how constructions of social, religious and spatial differences serve to homogenise the space of liberal democracy and the exclusion of Islam from it, thereby undermining such ideals of liberal democratic citizenship as equality.

Acknowledgements

The idea for this paper stems from a conversation with Günter and Hildegard Thieme at the 2008 AAG in Boston. The author thanks both of them for making her think about the issues discussed here. An earlier version of this paper was presented as a colloquium in the Department of Geography at the University of Kentucky. The author wishes to thank Ole R. Gram, Caroline Nagel, Peter Hopkins and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper. All remaining errors are the author's.

Notes

With the exception of the Land Berlin which enacted the most far-reaching law, banning all religious symbols in schools—including the Jewish Kippa, the Christian cross and Muslim headscarves.

It is quite common for politicians and media representatives to conflate Turkish/Kurdish and Muslim although only about two-thirds of migrants of Turkish origin are considered Sunni Muslims, many of whom are not organised in any formal religious association.

Necla Kelek's 2005 book Die fremde Braut is the author's reworked dissertation in sociology. Several reviews have pointed out that Kelek, in this book, significantly reframes her scholarly arguments to make a blatant case against Islam and her Muslim Turkish compatriots in Germany. Her book alleges an across the board refusal to integrate among second- and third-generation Muslims of Turkish origin. By contrast, her dissertation provides a much more differentiated account of younger Turkish migrants and portrays them as willing and able to integrate into German society (for excerpts from and links to these reviews, see http://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/20151.html last accessed 3 June 2008). One reviewer, Terkessidis (2005), accuses Kelek of reworking her dissertation for profit because, according to him, lurid accounts of Muslim women's suffering are a better sell than a differentiated account. Seyran Ates is a lawyer representing women who allegedly were victims of forced marriages and Serap Cileli wrote a book about her experience overcoming forced marriage.

The Green party (and more recently the newly founded party Die Linke on Germany's left) is still advocating notions of multiculturalism, but debates have shifted towards immigrant integration.

Razack (2008) is highly critical of such notions of Muslim women as needing to be rescued. She argues that “the extent to which Western feminists have begun to share conceptual and political terrain with the far right is troubling” (Razack, 2008, p. 107). The difficult challenge is to “confront patriarchal violence within Muslim migrant communities without descending into cultural deficit explanations and without inviting extraordinary measures of stigmatization, surveillance, and control” (p. 107). One avenue towards this a goal may be to consider violence against women more broadly as outcomes of patriarchy (because Western liberal democracies are far from free of violence against women). (See also Okin, 1998; for a detailed review of existing scholarship on the complex relationship between feminism and multiculturalism, see Phillips, 2007.)

These newspapers represent a broad political spectrum in Germany, ranging from the left (taz) to the centrist/conservative (Die Zeit) to the right (Die Welt, Welt am Sonntag).

Another note on the use of newspaper articles in this manuscript seems necessary. The article database contains commentaries, editorials, news articles and brief news notices issued by the Deutsche Presseagentur (dpa), a news agency. These articles are qualitatively different and I have sought to clarify in the analysis that follows whenever an article quoted is a commentary or editorial. Because there are no comprehensive data or studies available on either honour killings or forced marriages, I also had to rely on newspaper reports as sources of information on the topic of forced marriages and honour killings. The German government expects a comprehensive study on forced marriages to be completed in the autumn of 2010; see Deutscher Bundestag, 2009).

The new citizenship law was enacted in 2000, the immigration and integration laws in 2005.

In cases where the alleged perpetrators were from countries other than Turkey they were usually depicted according to national origin—i.e. Albanian, etc.

These types of portrayal are not limited to women from Turkey. In a WamS article from November 2007 on forced marriage, Stoldt (2007) emphasises that the prospective husband lived “in a tiny village in Albania” and the prospective (under-age) wife was to “manage his household and bear his children”, again emphasising a traditional lifestyle the author contrasts to getting an education in ‘the Rhineland’ (Stoldt, 2007).

Albanians residing in Germany are primarily refugees from Kosovo. While there are, of course, massive differences between Albanians and Turks and Kurds, newspaper reports frequently lump these groups of migrants together.

Contrary to such portrayals, the anthropologist Werner Schiffauer insists that honour killings are an effect of the immigration situation. For him, they are part of a sub-culture among immigrant youths of the third and forth generations intent on marking their position as a minority (as reported in an interview published by Focus Magazin, 28 February 2005, No 9, pp. 44–45). Similar scholarly arguments have been advanced by criminologists studying immigration-related crime.

This is only one of numerous articles that uses the phrase “Tragödien, die sich hinter verschlossenen Türen abspielen” (tragedies that play out behind closed doors) and only rarely surface to the public realm.

I only encountered one article that discussed the consequences of marriage migration for a Kurdish man in the Netherlands (Kalnoky, 2008). Yet it is a quite common phenomenon for Turkish women who grew up in Germany to meet their husbands when vacationing in Turkey, or through family/friendship connections. Women I interviewed for a related research project proudly spoke of ‘importing’ their husbands.

The Basic Law is Germany's constitution.

There certainly are critical voices in the media that question such dominant portrayals as too often undifferentiated and homogenising immigrant (Muslim) women. Polat (2005), for example, criticises the debate as absurd and suggests instead approaching problems of socioeconomic integration such as employment and education. Literary critic Terkessidis (2005) exposes the ways that Seyran Ates refashioned her more nuanced research findings into a book about the suffering of Muslim women that serves as a wholesale accusation of Islam as oppressive. Such voices were few and far between, however. There is an entire debate between migration researchers and Seyran Ates about the credibility and validity of her accusations and her research. Renowned researchers that questioned Ates' findings and conclusions were subsequently accused by Ates to be worrying only about their research funding and not to know what they were talking about. A large portion of these debates played out on the pages of the German weekly Die Zeit and can be accessed on-line at www.Zeit.de (using the search archive).