Conversion to Islam in the West has become a growing field of academic interest. Initially the question why people, particularly women, embraced Islam captured the attention of scholars. Female converts’ motives and narratives were illuminated as well as their gender discourses. By now research has turned to everyday lived realities of converted Muslims, to the ways they embody Islam and try to fashion a pious self, as well as to how they organize themselves in order to gain and transmit Islamic knowledge. This developing field of study reflects the fact that converts have taken root within Europe. Although the way in which converts develop a European Islam has been reflected upon previously, how this shaping of a European Islam positions converts vis-à-vis born Muslim communities has hardly been explored. Esra Özyürek’s Being German Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe fills this gap. It is a welcome contribution and an important monograph on the political consequences of converts’ crossing and challenging the boundaries between “Being German” and “Being Muslim”.
Özyürek’s book is an engaging, thought-provoking, well-written and concise monograph that grasps the reader’s attention till the very last page. The book aptly opens with a commonly-heard argument among converts that “they would never have become a Muslim if they had met Muslims before they met Islam”. Whereas they are usually introduced to Islam by born Muslims, converts eventually dissociate themselves from immigrant communities. Most researchers on conversion to Islam will have noticed this and I regularly heard this discourse not only among converts who live in Europe but even among those who travel to Muslim majority countries. Yet this book is the first to systematically explore this theme in its political complexity.
Özyürek convincingly argues that – although apparently contradictory – for converts, becoming Muslim is felt as a particularly proper way to be a good German citizen. Yet within this understanding of German and European culture, they also distance themselves from immigrant communities and tend to reproduce cultural racism. She enquires into converts’ contradictory experiences of becoming a Muslim in a society that marginalizes Muslims and engages in exclusionary practices towards them. One of the outcomes of converts’ search for a legitimate space within an increasingly Islamophobic climate is the call for a purified Islam – a call that is shared by some second-generation born Muslims as well – while simultaneously stigmatizing the “cultural and traditional Islam” of immigrants.
In the introduction, Özyürek not only advances the main questions and the core argument, but also offers a short excursion on “Islamophobia” and the “racialization of Muslims” to provide a theoretical and political backdrop to the study. These issues could have been conceptually further explored. The thorny issue of (cultural) racism, racialization or ethnicization of religion remains somewhat underdeveloped. The introduction further highlights historical changes in the converts’ background in Germany. While in the 1990s they consisted of a small group of people, mainly women, who came into contact with either migrant Muslim workers, or encountered Muslims on tourist destinations, from the 1990s onwards converts reached a critical mass and began to organize themselves. In the 2000s Germans of color, particularly teenage males, and individuals from more marginalized groups, including former East Germans, were attracted to Islam. This gendered transformation reflects the general marginalization of Islam in German society, making Islam attractive to alienated young men who also feel attracted to an oppositional identity. For her research, Özyürek interviewed 66 converts and 14 born Muslims, all of them active in German-speaking Muslim organizations in Berlin and dedicated to giving Islam a German face.
The first chapter is particularly interesting for its exploration of the German Enlightenment discourse. In mainstream media the argument is often advanced that one of the problems with Islam is that it never had the Enlightenment. More intellectually inclined converts, however, consciously inscribe their Islam in the German tradition of Aufklärung. They go back to German Enlightenment figures such as Lessing to search for an alternative authentic German identity that embodies a tolerant and open attitude towards all religions and thus incorporates Islam. In this exploration Özyürek goes beyond the well-known discourse of Islam as a rational, logical and natural religion. She shows that for German converts, Islam becomes even a better embodiment of the moral values of the Enlightenment discourse than present mainstream German society with its exclusionary discourse. Therefore they consider themselves model Germans. They also have a disproportionate share in organizational and leadership positions within the German-speaking Muslim space. From this position of claimed superiority, converts also feel they are best positioned to help immigrant communities purify their Islam from traditional interpretations. Converts thus feel that they not only have transformed mainstream German society but also ameliorated immigrant communities’ Islam.
The second chapter deepens our understanding of the familiar discourse among reform Muslim movements worldwide of a “true” and “authenticated” Islam devoid of local or cultural practices. Yet Özyürek persuasively argues that the political implications of this discourse among converts in Europe strongly differ from those in Muslim-majority countries or even of second-generation born Muslims in Europe. Rather than distancing children from the parents’ cultural understanding of Islam, converts try to (re)connect with their parents’ German background by purifying Islam. In this way not only Arab and Turkish cultural practices are stigmatized, but also the incompatibility between immigrant Islam and German-ness is reinforced. Özyürek gives several examples of how converts disconnect from immigrant communities: e.g., by their choice of non-Muslim neighborhoods or style of dressing and head covering so as not to be mistaken for a Turkish Muslim. Although these mechanisms and discourses are familiar from case studies on conversion in other European countries as well, in the German case the positive ties between born and converted Muslims, e.g. by marriage and shared family life, including in-laws in the countries of origins, seem to be rather weak – or perhaps underdeveloped in Özyürek’s analysis. Closing the chapter, she states that a “significant number of German Muslims thus believe that especially if one can eliminate immigrant Muslim traditions – if not traditional Muslims themselves, who give Islam a bad name – Germany is the best place to live an Islamic life” (p. 68), a closure that leaves the reader wondering whether this perhaps overstates the case.
The third chapter focuses on the specific situation of East Germans converting to Islam after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Ossis felt marginalized and reduced to second-class status. Coming into contact with Islam and Muslims opened up new avenues beyond being evaluated in terms of (lack of) material success. Their sense of relative deprivation with regard to West German life styles was less sharp among equally deprived immigrants. Muslim immigrants valued them as simply German, without their East German background being foregrounded. Although a highly interesting chapter, it partly deals with the extensively elaborated theme of motives for and trajectories of conversion, an analysis that could have been strengthened by referring to the existing body of work on this theme.
The first three chapters focused on how converts “Being German” were “Becoming Muslim” and how they solved the contradictions within these conflicting identities. The fourth chapter takes an opposite approach and deals with how “Being Muslim” can also be a way for born Muslims and converted Germans with other immigrant backgrounds to “Become German”. It provides a case study of the MJD, a Muslim youth organization that promotes a strong German identity as well as Islamic lifestyle by organizing Islamically appropriate activities and celebrations. A growing body of literature exists on halal entertainment and Islamic hip-hop or rap. Yet Özyürek provides an additional perspective. The literature on youth culture in Muslim majority countries particularly analyses the way an affluent and consumerist lifestyle is combined with religious commitment. In Özyürek’s case study, the tensions within youth culture revolve around being a pious Muslim and a commitment to being a good German citizen. These efforts to merge the categories of German and Muslim are, however, treated with suspicion and perceived as a security threat by the German authorities. Özyürek’s argument that the youthful Islam of the MJD is under surveillance precisely because they conflate the categories of insiders and outsiders could have been more elaborate.
The final chapter tackles the question of why Salafism appears to attract many German-speaking Muslims, including converts. Current functionalist explanations show how racism, exclusion, and alienation can partly explain why some immigrant Muslims turn to Salafism. However, for understanding the attraction Salafism holds for German converts this thesis appears to fall short. Özyürek argues that within the anti-Islam climate in Germany, the theological aspect of Salafism, which preaches that they are “better Muslims than all those who follow national traditions, and that Salafis do not need to associate with traditional Muslims in order to embrace their new spiritual path” (p.114), is attractive to new Muslims of diverse backgrounds. The Salafist literalist, anti-culturalist interpretation also offers them an easy path to study Islam and to become an authority in their own right, while bypassing traditional religious hierarchies and institutes of learning. Given the anti-Islam discourse in mainstream German society, for both born Muslims who returned to the faith and German converts, Salafism offers an avenue to embrace Islam without feeling an object of this anti-Muslim sentiment, while simultaneously feeling superior not only to non-Muslims but to traditional Muslims as well.
Herewith Özyürek returns to her core argument and concludes that purified Islam, as preached not only in Germany but worldwide, in the European context turns out to reproduce cultural racism: “It brands the ways of ethnic Muslims as not properly Islamic, and hence not fitting for life in Germany and Europe” (p. 133). However, German converts by their choice to become Muslim also challenge fixed boundaries between “Being German” and “Being Muslim”.
The book thus elegantly provides an in-depth analysis of the complexities of the emergent European Islam. It provides brilliant analyses and case studies. Perhaps the reader would like to have more elaboration of its many interesting observations. The ethnography could have been “thicker”, but on the other hand, the conciseness of the monograph keeps the reader captivated till the very end.