Turkish Women, West German Feminists, and the Gendered Discourse on Muslim Cultural Difference
Since the 1950s, a massive influx of labor migrants has dramatically transformed the demographic makeup of Europe. Whether they came as guest workers or former colonial subjects, migrants from North Africa to France and the Netherlands, from South Asia to Great Britain, and from Turkey to West Germany produced the first significant Muslim communities within Europe. During the half century that these groups have resided in Europe, the national public debates about their presence have changed radically. Broadly speaking, public discussions initially focused on the economic manpower that migrants provided and the impact of their employment on the native working class. As Europeans began to acknowledge that temporary laborers had become permanent residents (a process that took place earlier in Britain than in Germany or France), political discourse shifted to migrants’ cultural differences based on their nationality. Since the 1990s, though, the emphasis has been on religion — and especially Islam — as the primary characteristic that separates these migrants from the societies in which they reside. “Islamophobia,” the anthropologist Matti Bunzl argues, “is rapidly emerging as the defining condition of the new Europe.”1
One of the most striking aspects of the contemporary European debates about immigrants is the focus on the Muslim woman as a key figure through which objections to Islamic cultural difference have been articulated. This gendered framing of difference is not a new phenomenon. Indeed, the distinctive gender norms of postwar migrants became a major theme for journalists, social scientists, and policy makers once significant numbers of family reunions had taken place in the early 1970s. But recent pronouncements by figures such as the Somali-Dutch politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the Turkish-German sociologist Necla Kelek about the place of women in Islam have inflamed the debate.2 Their highly sensational testimonials of female oppression sanctioned by Islam have fueled the growing tendency to characterize tensions between Muslim immigrants and Europeans as irresolvable. Muslim gender relations, in short, now serve as the most telling symptom of the supposedly intractable clash between European civilization and Islam.
Precisely because sexual politics plays such a critical role in defining the terms of the current pessimism about Muslims in Europe, it is important to trace when and how this process began, especially in relation to the shifting national public discourses on labor migrants over the past fifty years. My focus here is on the debates about women and Islam as they developed in West Germany. These issues became a major topic of public discussion in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at precisely the moment that West German officials first openly acknowledged the long-term presence of guest workers and initiated a campaign for their integration. Turkish women quickly became a central trope for representing the apparently incommensurable cultural difference between Turks and Germans, and West German feminists had a somewhat surprising hand in facilitating this line of thinking. The issue of gender was by no means absent in earlier German public discussions about the guest worker, but this moment marked a major shift in the ways that migrant women were perceived and understood. By the early 1980s, the putative “oppression” and “victimization” of Turkish women offered evidence of an unbridgeable chasm between guest workers and Germans. The treatment of women, in short, became a crucial litmus test to determine whether Turks possessed the capacity to integrate and function effectively in the liberal-democratic Federal Republic.
Significantly, West German debates over the plight of Turkish women prefigured many of the questions and doubts raised about Algerian assimilability in the contentious French discussions of the foulard beginning in 1989. They also lent substance to new concerns about the religion of Islam as a highly problematic, differentiating social force, concerns that began to be voiced throughout Europe in the early 1990s. Examining the German discourse about the perceived predicament of Turkish women, then, not only helps us understand the specific preconditions for guest worker integration set out by left-wing progressives in the Federal Republic, but it also sheds light on the emergence of a broader European phenomenon: the current skepticism about the basic compatibility of Muslims with Western civilization.
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Notes
This article originated as a paper that I delivered at a conference organized by Judith Surkis at Harvard University’s Center for German and European Studies. I thank her, Éric Fassin, and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar for insightful comments that pushed me to extend and sharpen my arguments.Thanks also go to Jay Cook for his feedback and acute editorial skills.
- Matti Bunzl, Anti-Semitism and Islamophobia: Hatreds Old and New in Europe (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2007), 4.
- See, for example, Hirsi Ali’s blunt and sweeping statements about Islam’s problem with sexuality and women as the root cause of its failure to absorb the lessons of the Enlightenment and be more compatible with European society. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam ( New York: Free Press, 2008), 1 – 26. Kelek is the author of an account of the underground practice of selling women in Turkey to Turkish men in Germany on the market for wives. See Necla Kelek, Die fremde Braut: Ein Bericht aus dem Inneren des türkischen Lebens in Deutschland (The Foreign Bride: A Report from the Inside of Turkish Life in Germany) ( Cologne: Kiepenheuer and Witsch, 2005).