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Turkish-Islam has become a part of Europe today more than ever. Turkish immigrants and their religious institutions are the leading cause of this new situation, and they have been trying to legalize their belonging with their claims for recognition, especially in Germany. This article mainly elaborates on the recognition process with a focus on the reflections of European Islam discourse on the German scene and attempts to understand the reasons behind the current crisis around the recognition of Turkish-Islam. Even though the current perception of Islam in the host countries is the primary reason for many, this article approaches the issue from a historical institutionalist (HI) point of view and develops further arguments. Analysis of the empirical data shows that the lack of a unified voice in the Muslim society, structural inefficiencies of Islamic organizations, and politicizing of Islam-related issues could be counted as obstacles in the frame of recognition. However, the path dependency concept of HI allows this work to go beyond these visible problems and highlights the transnational linkages created in the foundation processes of these institutions as the main reason behind the failure. Türk-İslam bugün tarihte hiç olmadığı kadar Avrupa’nın bir parçası haline gelmiştir. Bu durumun temel sebebi olan Türk göçmenlerin dini kurumları ise özellikle Almanya’da bu durumu resmiyete dökmek ve eşit haklar ele edebilmek için uzunca bir süredir mücadele etmektedirler. Bu çalışma temel olarak mezkur tanınma sürecini, Avrupa İslamı şeklinde ifade edilen kavramın Almanya’ya yansımaları ile birlikte ele almakta ve tanınma süreçlerinin başarısız olmasının sebeplerini irdelemektedir. Her ne kadar İslam çevresinde oluşan siyasi atmosfer, olumsuz durumun ilk akla gelen sebebi olsa da, ortadaki tek sorun bu değildir. Bu bağlamda çalışmamız toplanan ampirik yığının işaret ettiği tanınmanın önündeki çok seslilik, yapısal yetersizlikler ve siyasal etkenler gibi sorunların temeline tarihsel kurumsalcı bir bakış açısı ile yaklaşarak özgün bir iddia ortaya atmaktadır. Buna göre Türk-İslam’ın Almanya’da tanınmasının önündeki engeller başlangıç durumunda oluşturulan transnasyonel bağlantıların sebep olduğu “izlek bağımlığının” bir sonucudur.

The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy.

The article investigates the transformation within a specific branch of German Salafism from a publicly-assertive da'wa (proselytizing) to a politically accommodating and legal advocacy movement. In doing so, a process analysis that focuses on internal and reflexive narrations among Salafi leaders and lay members, through a three year-long mosque-based ethnography (2018–2021) and textual analysis (2008–2022), is employed. Previous studies focused predominately on the “Salafi growth phase” (2005–2015) in Germany that is associated with the attraction of exclusive group boundaries, flat hierarchies and informal networks. Less research exists on the current “decline phase”, which has commenced a re-orientation and critical reflection on past strategies and new ways of civic engagement and legal pragmatism. By exploring this new phase, the article integrates a longitudinal dimension into conventional research protocols on contemporary Salafism. The paper concludes with a discussion on the converging struggles for recognition among Muslim and other religious minorities in Europe, while linking these transformations to domestic opportunity structures rather than transnational reconfigurations of so-called “global Salafism”.

In the southern German city of Stuttgart lives a pious Muslim population that has merged with the local population to create a meaningful shared existence. In this ethnographic account, the author introduces and examines the lives of ordinary residents, neighborhoods, and mosque communities to analyze moments and spaces where Muslims and non-Muslims engage with each other and accommodate their respective needs. These accounts show that even in the face of resentment and discrimination, this pious population has indeed become an integral part of the urban community.

In Ali Samadi Ahadi's feature film Salami Aleikum (2009), the director negotiates transnational conflict through humor and stereotypes. Ahadi exaggerates and simultaneously negates the stereotypes of men and women, East and West Germans as well as Muslims, Iranians, Poles etc. in Germany. Through their grown children, an Iranian family from the West German city Cologne meets an East German family that lives in a smalltown village where stereotypes of Muslims rage. The inter-ethnic couple at the center of the movie forges an exceptional bond that overcomes lies and disappointments in order to succeed as a possible diverse role model for the current and future Germany. I argue that the movie uses humor and satire to engage with the ethnic, religious and cultural integration of Muslims into Germany to offer the audience a way to engage with the serious topic of a peaceful integration of Muslims that has been challenged in public debates for years. My article also investigates the underlying theme of a search for a safe \"Heimat\" within German borders in which the parents and children of both non-Western German families feel at home. Keywords: Comedy, Gender, Islam in Germany, Muslims in Germany, Stereotypes, GDR

This article explores self-ascriptions, processes of inclusion and exclusion, and senses of belonging in the everyday lives of German Muslims who orientate themselves towards the Salafiyya. Based on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews taking place over a year and a half, we draw on two case studies to show how demarcation lines between ‘us’ and ‘others’ can be established within the diverse Salafi communities and Salafi self-positioning in non-Muslim surroundings. The article sheds light on what orientation towards the life of the Prophet and the salaf sālih (the pious ancestors) means for the informants, especially focusing on their negotiations of being Salafiyya-oriented Muslims and citizens of Germany. Looking at their reasoning behind their own standing towards other persons labelling them Salafis, towards non-Salafis and towards possible opponents of Salafism, we provide insight into negotiations of political action, citizenship, identity and belongingness from an emic approach.

This article focuses on the ways in which Muslims actively participate in media debates about Islam and Muslims in Germany, and how they challenge or reinforce representations of themselves. It questions the narrative of powerlessness versus dominant actors in media and politics. Even though they were already perceived as part of a Muslim community, several prominent individuals in the German cultural and political sphere took an explicit position as Muslims—some insisting on their distance to religion. This paper aims at describing the various reasons and reflections accompanying this decision and argues that media images of Muslims steered individuals, who are not members of Islamic organizations let alone representatives of them, to become active or change their self-representation and act as Muslims. By demanding recognition as active members of German society, prominent Muslim individuals are creating new images of Muslims beyond an imaginary that is reducing them to their (alleged) religiosity and positioning them outside German national identity.

This article considers the legal institution of mahr in Islamic family law from three research perspectives in order to provide insights into the phenomenon's complexity, particularly with regard to current legal practices. In particular, emphasis is placed both on countries where family law is shaped by Islamic traditions (e.g., Morocco) and on countries whose legal traditions do not have a mahr counterpart (e.g., Germany). First, the social and economic function of dower will be described. As a special form of property transfer, mahr will be analyzed in its historical and present shape in theory and practice. Second, the legal conceptualization of mahr in the German legal context will be discussed. The example of Morocco serves to illustrate the changes with regard to mahr because of the process of incorporation of Islamic legal concepts into a national statutory law system. Given the Muslim diaspora, these insights are important contributions to the legal intepretation of mahr in a transnational context.

This book compares how different Islamic communities assert their authority to represent \"True Islam\" for Muslims living in Europe and how they cope with challenges from rivals with different interpretations and fields of activism. It focuses on five Islamic communities active among Muslims originating from Turkey that represent the spectrum from moderate to revolutionary Islamic opinions: representatives of \"official Islam\" (Diyanet), political Islamists (Milli Görü?), a mystical Sufi order (Süleymanl?), Turkish civil Islam (Gülen) and a movement seeking an Islamic revolution in Turkey (Kaplan). The research included twelve months of intensive ethnographic fieldwork among Turkish Muslims in Germany and the Netherlands.

German-Turkish relations, which have a long history and generally unrecognized depth, have rarely been examined as mutually formative processes. Isolated instances of influence have been examined in detail, but the historical and still ongoing processes of mutual interaction have rarely been seriously considered. The ruling assumption has been that Germany may have an impact on Turkey, but not the other way around. Religion, Identity and Politics examines this mutual interaction, specifically with regard to religious identities and institutions. It opposes the commonly held assumption that Europe is the abode of secularism and enlightenment, while the lands of Islam are the realm of backwardness and fundamentalism. Both historically and contemporarily, Germany has treated religion as a core aspect of communal and civilizational identity and framed its institutions accordingly; the book explores how there has been, and continues to be, a mutual exchange in this regard between Germany and both the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey. The authors show that the definition of identity and regulation of communities have been explicitly based on religion until the early and since the late twentieth century; the period in between- the age of secular nationalism- which has always been treated as the norm, now appears more clearly as an exception. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of sociology, politics, history and religion.