12 - Intimacies both Sacred and Profane: Islam in the Work of Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Zafer Şnocak, and Feridun Zaimoğlu

Summary

There is a new wall rising in Berlin. Looking over that wall, one sees the parallel world of the Islamic suburbs. It's a world in which women, unlike some Muslim women in Europe who have risen to expansive lives, are still subject to arranged marriages and the control of their families.

THESE ARE THE WORDS of novelist Peter Schneider, published in the New York Times on 4 December 2005, in an article that warns of the recent rise of radical Islam in Germany. The author of Der Mauerspringer (1982), whose protagonist fantasized away the Cold War division of Berlin, now fears the development of another parallel world, of unassimilable, alien Muslim communities. And he is not alone in this anxiety. Despite significant changes to German citizenship legislation since 2000, which now acknowledges territorial as well as ancestral affiliation as the basis for German identity, the countermanding force of increased national security and decreasing tolerance of dual citizenship since September 2001 are signals of the troubled state of German multiculturalism today. Such antagonistic scenarios and fears of the emergence of a “Parallelgesellschaft” render all the more important the imaginative labor of Turkish-German authors in envisaging new kinds of German community, and in overcoming simplistic and homogenizing ideas of Islam in Europe.

Contemporary perceptions of Islam like Schneider's continue to rely on a tradition of dichotomous thinking in terms of global versus local, traditional versus modern, where Islam belongs immutably on the side of authentic local cultures and is pitted against global modernity.