On the relevance of ‘Muslim’ as a social category in pre-unification Germany

Abstract

ABSTRACT Sterphone’s article engages with the relevance and consequentiality of ‘Muslim’ as a social category for everyday Germans during the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, it examines commonsense knowledge about the characteristics and actions bound to the category ‘Muslim’ and (re)produced in newspapers and speeches. It demonstrates that the German essentialization of ‘Turks’ following the end of the guest worker programme in 1973 deployed and (re)produced their simultaneous categorizability as ‘Muslims’. Thus Germans employed ‘Muslim’ as a resource for (re)producing category-tied knowledge about irreconcilable civilizational difference. Sterphone’s analysis combines discourse analysis with an ethnomethodological approach to studying categories and categorization practices. Since categories are ‘inference rich’ and act as storehouses for commonsense knowledge about the social world, they constitute resources for a variety of social actions. This paper demonstrates that not only did politicians and news journalists demonstrably orient themselves to the relevance of ‘Muslim’ as a means for (re)constructing and emphasizing incommensurable social difference, they also called on readers to participate in seeing these traits and behaviours as the kind of thing done or embodied by Muslims. Such practices produced the category ‘Muslim’ as mutually exclusive with ‘German’ long before the influx of refugees in the 1990s or the post-9/11 securitization. Thus Sterphone’s paper contributes to studies of German nationhood and its intersections with race, ethnicity and religion. Specifically, it highlights Germany’s post-war movement towards alignment with ‘the West’ and, consequently, the Muslim Turk’s position as a salient Other in Germany’s westernizing project. It therefore contributes to both theoretical and empirical discussions of anti-Muslim racism that demonstrate how Germans employ and (re)produce ‘Germanness’ (Deutsch-Sein) and ‘Muslimness’ (Muslimisch-Sein) so that they preclude one another.