Managing the stigma: Islamophobia in German schools.

• Author: Muhe, Nina
• Position: Report

Islamophobia in Germany

Decades before Germany officially declared itself an immigration country and opened up its citizenship law in the year 1999 it had been an important destination for migrants from a variety of different countries and for various reasons of migration. One of the biggest immigration movements was that of the so called Gastarbeiter (guest workers), who had initially been invited to Germany from Turkey, Italy and many other countries to stay for a certain time during the prospering years of the Wirtschaftswunder (economic miracle) and help rebuild the war-torn country's economy.

Other people have come to Germany for example as refugees fleeing persecution or wars, the latest being the war in Syria. In 2015 alone 1.1 million refugees registered in Germany, about two thirds of whom came from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. (1)

Apart from language and other cultural differences, many of these immigrants and their families also adhere to non-Christian religions and belief systems. As the largest immigrant groups came from Turkey and other Muslim majority countries, Islam has become the largest religious minority in Germany, developing from around 6000 in 1945 to something between 3.8 and 4.3 million in 2009. According to a quantitative governmental survey 45 percent of Muslims are German nationals. The largest ethnic groups among them are people with Turkish roots at 63 percent and people from the South East European countries like Bosnia, Bulgaria and Albania at 18 percent. The largest religious denominations are Sunni Muslims and Alevis at 74 and 13 percent respectively. The survey also found that a considerable number of people from Muslim majority countries do not consider themselves as Muslims, for example 40 percent of people with Iranian roots do not claim to be Muslim, even though they are perceived as such by the society at large. (2)

The diversification of society in terms of language, culture and especially religion does not always meet welcoming attitudes on the side of the autochthonous groups, and Germany seems to be particularly vulnerable to hostility towards people perceived as others. Regarding the hostility towards people perceived as Muslims Germany even seems to be on the forefront according to certain academic surveys. Just quoting one of the many examples, the Bertelsmann-Foundation presented the findings of their survey Religionsmonitor early in 2015, in which they asked Muslims and non-Muslims in Germany, among others, about the place of Islam and Muslims in the society. They found that 57 percent of the non-Muslim Germans perceived Islam as threatening and 61 percent thought, it did not fit into the "Western world." (3)

That this hostile attitude towards Islam is also affecting the people who adhere to the religion is shown for example in the survey of the Berliner Institut fur empirische Integrations--und Migrationsforschung (Berlin Institute of empirical Integration and Migration Research) BIM in 2014. 60 percent of the interviewees would like to forbid the male circumcision, 48 percent the wearing of Islamic headscarf by female teachers and 42 percent would restrict the construction of mosques. 38 percent of the participants of the survey thought, a woman wearing hijab could not be German. (4)

Even people, who are not religious or don't even identify as Muslims, but are perceived as Muslims due to their Turkish or Arab origin, become victims of these hostile and even racist attitudes.

Islamophobia has recently been mainly analyzed as anti-Muslim racism in Germany as well as in the Anglo-Saxon debates. German scholars like Iman Attia, Yasemin Shooman (5) and others have shown how the hostility towards Muslims is based on historically established stereotypes of the Muslim other. They analyze anti-Muslim racism as a structurally operating form of cultural racism that is deeply rooted in the European memory reaching back to the times of the crusades and the colonization of Muslim countries. The rejection and exclusion of groups of others play an important part in the formation and stabilization of nation states. Especially Muslims and all people who are perceived as such due to their looks, names or countries of origin are ascribed a variety of negative character traits, like anti-Semitic, homophobe or misogynist, that not only label the strongly marked group as negative but thus justify its exclusion from privileges and access to social and monetary resources. They also tend to be the projections of all negative character traits that Germans don't want to identify with themselves. The projection of negative attributes onto another group that is constructed as absolutely different from their own helps in relieving the German or European national identity from a lot of attributes that were formerly found to be commonplace, like anti-Semitism. This positive identification with the nation and simultaneous negative demarcation from a group perceived as outsiders also helps unifying the nation--at least those parts of the nation that don't define as Muslim. In Germany the term Islamophobia is largely criticized for not capturing the phenomenon of cultural racism and instead focusing too much, and in a pathologizing manner, on the perceived fears of the majority. (6) The editors of the European Islamophobia Report 2015 Enes Bayrakl? and Farid Hafez however use the term Islamophobia synonymously to anti-Muslim racism and state: "As Anti-Semitism studies have shown, the etymological components of a word do not necessarily point to its complete meaning, nor to how it is used. Such is also the case with Islamophobia studies." (7) In general the Anglophone debates increasingly perceive Islamophobia as a kind of racism and view Muslims mainly as a racialised category. (8)

The analyses of this article is located in the same theoretical approach of viewing Islamophobia as a kind of cultural racism that constructs people as Muslims and at the same time as significant others to the national 'we.' This construction of Muslims does not depend on real religious affiliation and also targets people, who do not consider themselves Muslims. The findings of my research however suggest that together with the aspects of racism, hostility towards the religion also plays an important part in the exclusion of Muslims in Germany and Europe. Whereas Meer and others argue "that religious discrimination in most Western European societies does not usually proceed on the basis of belief but perceived membership of an ethno-religious group," (9) I largely agree with this point but want to argue for a stronger focus on specifically anti-religious aspects of Islamophobia. They are in my perception not mainly a marker of an ethno-religious group, but carry aspects of specifically anti-religious attitudes that target Muslims also as a specific (non Christian) religious group. Whereas my young Muslim interviewees certainly had experiences with discrimination due to their Arab names or their seemingly Turkish appearances, many times the quality of discrimination became more severe the moment they openly identified as religious. It is the daily prayer, the fasting in Ramadan and most importantly the decision to wear hijab that make Muslims appear as religious and potentially problematic in the eyes of big parts of the German society. This group easily associates Islam and Muslims with violence and terrorism and feel threatened by a perceived "Islamisierung des Abendlandes" (Islamisation of the Occident), as the steady number of people joining the movement PEGIDA (Patriotische Europaer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes---patriotic Europeans against the Islamization of the Occident) and their regular anti-Muslim demonstrations in various German cities prove.

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I thus use both terms of anti-Muslim racism and Islamophobia, (resp. Islamfeindlichkeit in the German context, translating as 'hostility towards Islam and Muslims') taking care to include both the culturally racist and the specifically anti-religious aspects of the hatred against Muslims.

Islamophobia in Education

The area of education is especially vulnerable to any form of discrimination or racism. (10) Students from minority ethnic groups are generally taught by teachers from the ethnic majority, of whom many reflect the above mentioned views about Islam and Muslims. The hierarchical nature of school education makes it even more difficult to object to discriminatory treatment than other situations, where adults are the victims of discrimination and at least theoretically can defend themselves and ask for support. In addition experiences of discrimination and racism in school can be especially detrimental to the development of the young people, because the institution and its staff are perceived as reflecting the values and principles of society and teaching the children morals and good conduct besides knowledge. If a teacher now talks or acts in a way perceived by the students as discriminatory or even racist, this behavior can potentially destroy much of the trust, that was not only put in the teacher but in the institution of the school as such and so into the whole society.

In a survey that I had conducted for the Open Society Foundations' program "At Home in Europe" about Muslims in Berlin many of the Muslim respondents reported some kind of discrimination in public schools and some of them also spoke about a climate of low expectations and discouragement of Muslim students by certain teachers. The respondents, especially the girls wearing headscarves, felt that this behavior of the educators originated in their ethnic, social and mainly their religious backgrounds. More than half of the Muslim respondents of the survey...