Governing Islam Abroad by Benjamin Bruce

Author:Benjamin Bruce
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783319786643
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

However, not long after construction of the mosque had been completed, a conflict broke out between the meeting centre and the mosque association, resulting in Kaykin’s departure. As the director of the meeting centre recounts, “there really was a war. [People were] really washing dirty laundry in public […] it was a bad situation” (Interview, DITIB Duisburg Meeting Centre). The conflict arose as a power struggle between the two associations, which was intimately linked to the genesis of the project and the changes in the respective resources and symbolic capital of both groups over time. Initially, the meeting centre made a claim to overall leadership thanks to its German social capital, which had succeeded in securing funding from local, regional, and supranational sources. This accomplishment offsets the fact that the meeting centre had 10 times fewer members than the mosque association. However, the funding was only for the construction and the initial start-up phases, meaning that financial problems quickly ensued. Moreover, the meeting centre was not a Muslim association and counted very few members of the mosque association in its ranks. There was thus a latent potential for conflict between these two associations given their different interests: one group was primarily focused on the Turkish Muslim field and providing religious services, while another saw the mosque as a focal point for a wider variety of social and cultural activities oriented towards German society in general.

The conflict is also symptomatic of German partial governance. Given that the state cannot assist financially with the construction of a mosque, its funding necessarily had to encourage non-religious activities in a religious building. Paradoxically, it is only when the activities of religious actors are not exclusively religious that state authorities find a way to finance them. These non-religious activities were perceived as forms of German cultural capital that displaced the primary mission of the mosque, leading to a conflict between two different visions of the role that a mosque should fulfill. Moreover, it also set off a generational conflict concerning the desired forms of cultural capital in the mosque, as half the members of the mosque association were senior citizens who considered DITIB’s traditional mix of Turkish nationalism and Turkish cultural capital to be essential in uniting the diaspora and preserving its Turkish identity.

At the same time, the example of Ender Acar, one of the mosque’s two imams, illustrates well that the question of generational conflict and cultural capital is not as straightforward as it seems. Acar, a “very different” imam, who composes Sufi (tasavvuf) music and has released three albums, attracted the attention of the mosque association president due to his artistic talents, which the latter saw as beneficial to the youth and children who attended the mosque (in Ergül 2012). Despite being characterized by German observers as a conservative and a “resolute Turkish patriarch” (Deuter 2011), the mosque president was in fact welcoming of an innovative and artistic approach to reaching younger generations—as long as that approach combined religious capital with Turkish cultural capital, as opposed to the vision promoted by the meeting centre.

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