The Muslim Makers

At the beginning of 2006 the German state of Baden-Württemberg introduced a test especially for Muslim citizenship applicants in an attempt to determine their attitude to the German constitution and to ‘western values’. While this so-called ‘Muslim test’ attracted a lot of criticism from all sides for its contradictory and openly racist approach, the underlying profile of Muslims was only questioned by a minority of the critics, the whole debate soon being integrated into the escalating conflict over the cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed. This essay argues that both the test and the ensuing political and media debate reflect a significant shift in the public perception of immigrants and particularly of the large Turkish community in Germany. The image of Turkish immigrants is increasingly ‘Islamized’, thereby taking up and reshaping older discourses which focused on their ethnic and cultural ‘otherness’ as foreigners or on the vision of a second generation ‘caught between two cultures’. Growing diversification of lifestyles and hybrid identifications among Turkish-Germans are reduced to the imagination of a Muslim collective living in ‘parallel societies’, attributing social exclusion, educational shortcomings and forms of patriarchal violence (e.g. forced marriages or ‘honour killings’) to the immigrants' Islamic origin. The imaginary separation of Muslim/Turkish and Western/German social spheres and value systems is characteristic of a re-evaluated German integrationism which makes allegiance to ‘our values’ a necessary precondition for belonging. As an essential part of this integrationism the public ‘Islamization’ of immigrants is predominantly pushed and reinforced by politicians of different camps, together with the mass media and some academic ‘Islam experts’, uniting conservatives seeking to modernize traditional German anti-immigration policies with some former liberal and left adherents of an essentialist multiculturalism in an effort to conceptualize democratic and secular German identity against a vision of Islam untouched by the Enlightenment and liberal emancipation.