Abstract: Muslims across Europe have been labeled as uncivil since the migration waves of postcolonial and guestworker migrants in the mid-20th century. In this paper, I bring the Muslim experience in the German capital into conversation with Civil Sphere Theory (CST), which analyzes how senses of cultural boundedness are supported, shaped, and contested through the interrelations between the institutions of civil society and social movements aimed at expanding civic inclusion. Drawing on two years of ethnographic research in a Berlin mosque, I move from Muslim associations with incivility to the actions these associations provoke in relation to the civil sphere: exploring how those deemed uncivil exert agency in response to, and also in spite of a civil/uncivil divide. Through the voices and experiences of my interlocutors, I show that Muslims are not simply a victimized out-group excluded from the German civil sphere, but are also agents of change who actively seek to gain full inclusion within it. Specifically, I trace how my German Muslim interlocutors contend with their negative social status by drawing on narratives, and enlivening connections that link them to the German Jewish experience: seeking incorporation in the civil sphere through identifications with another “Other,” and through this other, also mainstream society.
Abstract: Religious minorities have always been at the centre of the German nation-state’s self-understanding, as it came to define itself vis a vis, and often against, them. Historically, this can be seen specifically in the Jewish experience, and today reverberates in the experience of Muslims grappling with a position of alterity in German society. We will move beyond the scholarship on these two religious minority groups to that of these two religious minority groups—that is the intellectual milieu of German Jews and German Muslims. Both have confronted the insider-outsider status of religious minorities in Germany, while themselves occupying—and thinking from—this position of alterity. As Jewish intellectuals a century prior, Muslim intellectuals are confronting the (im)possibility of fully belonging to the society at hand. In so doing, they are, at times inadvertently, coming into conversation with Jewish intellectuals past on ideas surrounding the practice of religion, pluralism, minority-state relations, and social ethics.
