Rethinking the daˆr al‐harb: Social Change and Changing Perceptions of the West in Turkish Islam

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, many observers have directed their attention to what they perceive as the escalation of an older conflict between the West and Islam. The orientalist Bernard Lewis, for instance, builds much of his analysis on the classic Islamic contrast between daˆr al‐Islam and daˆr al‐harb (‘house of Islam’ and ‘house of war’), which, in his reading, demonstrates the inherent hostility of Islam toward non‐Muslims. Conflict, however, is only one aspect of the complex relationship of Islam to ‘Western’ society, and for the great majority of Muslims daˆr al‐Islam and daˆr al‐harb are no longer relevant categories for defining their relationship to non‐Muslim societies. Nevertheless, the problematic addressed by the conceptual opposition of daˆr al‐Islam/daˆr al‐harb points to an issue that has remained important to religious Muslims and has been answered in different ways at different times: in what kind of a society can one live a Muslim life? In Germany, many religious Muslims have recently undergone a significant shift toward a more ‘integrational’ stance. To understand this shift I examine the transnational experience of Turkish Muslims in Germany, particularly that of a ‘second generation’ of Turkish migrants, alongside recent developments in Turkey itself, where there has been an accelerated integration of Islam into modern Turkish society. In so doing, I sketch a historical process in which, for many religious Muslims in the Turkish Islamic tradition, liberal society has come to appear as a social context conducive to the practice of Islam.

Keywords:

• Diaspora
• Islam
• Germany
• Turkey
• Transnationalism

Notes

Heiko Henkel has just completed his Ph.D at Princeton University and is now ESRC Post‐Doctoral Fellow at the University of Sussex. Correspondence to: Department of Anthropology, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9RH, UK. E‐mail: [email protected]

One indicator is membership in Muslim organisations. The Islam‐Archiv Deutschland e.V. claims that the cumulative membership of its member‐organisations in 1998 has reached one million (Oeckl 1999: 896). This number is viewed with scepticism by other commentators (Lemmen 2002: 57). Another estimate is that 20 per cent of Muslims of Turkish descent are organised in one of the Turkish cemaats (Karakas¸og˘lu 1996: 24).

I do not mean to say that historically everybody ‘previous’ or outside this modern public was ‘unreflectedly traditional’. However, I want to mark a distinction between my interlocutors in Istanbul and what is often described as the relatively straightforward transmission of local cosmologies and worldviews in village studies such as Schiffauer (1991) and Delaney (1991).

The names of my interlocutors as well as some markers of their identity are changed to protect their identity.

Islam, an elaborately produced glossy magazine, in appearance a bit like an Islamist Newsweek, was for a long time the flagship of the Iskenderpas¸a Cemaat's publishing venture. In the 1990s it reached a monthly circulation of up to 100,000 copies (Cakır 1990). The cemaat was forced to close the journal after a failed attempt to launch a major newspaper project and today concentrates on web‐based publications. Cos¸˚'s contributions to the cemaat's journals were sometimes accompanied by an English translation. I use here my own translation, which differs slightly from that printed in Islam.

Cos¸˚'s position mirrors the move of the leading Muslim activists in 1998 to align the case of religious Muslims with the ‘real’ West against the repression of religious practice by the Turkish secularist establishment when they appealed to the European Court of Human Rights against closure of the Islamist party by the Turkish authorities (European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, 31 July 2001).

Cos¸˚ left Turkey in the context of the coup‐like intervention staged by the military to oust N. Erbakan as prime minister, which also led to a wave of repression against many Muslim organisations.

Among the most important developments of this period is the re‐emergence of Muslim civil‐society organisations in the form of associations, foundations and political parties—for instance, the Iskenderpas¸a Cemaat under Sheik Mehmet Zahit Kotku, the formation of Turkey's political Islam (encouraged by Kotku) led by Necmettin Erbakan, as well as the formation of the Nurcu movement (C¸alıs¸lar and C¸elik 2000).

See Talal Asad (2002) for a critical examination of the question if liberal states can, in fact, represent Muslims as Muslims.

This disenchantment with political Islam is foreshadowed by a bitter dispute between Sheik Cos¸˚ and Erbakan in 1990, which brought to an end the close relations between the tarikat and the party (C¸akır 1990).

The only other party in parliament is ironically the CHP, the original Kemalist party. The Ak party has nearly a two‐thirds majority of seats.

Die Tageszeitung, 16 January 2002.

For useful information about the Islamische Fo¨deration Berlin see www.islamische‐foederation.de/

Bundesverwaltungsgericht, 4 July 2002 [BverwG 2 C 21.01—Urteil 4.7.02], also Su¨ddeutsche Zeitung, 5 July 2002.

This faultline of ethnic or racial difference is determined by numerous interlocking factors. As Ann Stoler (1995) notes, notions of racial difference are primarily discursive distinctions that draw on changing markers of distinction. In the German context, overt commitment to Islam is part of this configuration of racial difference.