Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 59 Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media Berna Gueneli Grinnell College abstract: In Germany, ethnicity and religion—specifically Turkishness and Islam—are often viewed as one and the same in public discourse. 9 / 11 and recent violent events in Germany / Europe seem to have revitalized this link in the public imaginary. Current Turkish-German cultural productions offer critical reevaluations of this problematic automatism and provide a counter weight to the stereotypical popular imaginations about Muslims in Europe. My examples include work by Fatih Akın, Mehmet Kurtuluş, Serdar Somuncu, and Feridun Zaimoğlu. By problematizing an often-presupposed link between Islam and ethnicity and in tracing current media reactions to this issue, this article will contribute to the ongoing debate on a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse Germany / Europe. As my examples suggest, for the debate on a diverse Europe to advance successfully, the diversity within religious beliefs needs to be acknowledged and Islam needs to be freed from ties to a particular ethnicity. Keywords: Serdar Somuncu, Feridun Zaimoğlu, Fatih Akın, Mehmet Kurtuluş, Lady Bitch Ray In Germany (as in other European countries), ethnicity and religion—specifically Turkishness and Islam—are often viewed as one and the same in public discourse. 9 / 11 seems to have revitalized this link in the public imaginary, as have other more recent violent events in Germany and Europe, such as the bombings in London on July 7, 2005; the killing of two US soldiers at the Frankfurt am Main airport in Germany on March 2, 2011; and the attacks in Paris on January 7 and November 13, 2015. This ethno-religious link can be seen in particular in public reactions toward an Islam that has increasingly become visible through fashion, lifestyles, and architecture. It is this visibility that different governments have tried to tone down—for example, through the ban on full-face hi- 60 Berna Gueneli jabs in France or on minaret-building in Switzerland. The perceived connection between Islam and Turkishness also has an effect on gender perceptions and expectations. Most stereotypically, this results in images of passive, submissive, and veiled femininities, and aggressive, virile, and violent masculinities. 1 Recent Turkish-German cultural productions, however, offer critical reevaluations of this problematic automatic fusion of religion and ethnicity. They provide a counterweight to the stereotypical, popular imaginations and xenophobic fantasies about Muslims in Europe. This article focuses on counter voices in German media. Counter voices, as I call them, generally come out of a diversity of media outlets that dismantle, disrupt, or merely unsettle mainstream media images, in this case about the imagined relationships between Islam, ethnicity, and gender. The counter voices in this article are progressive—and at times provocative—media representations of Islam that support the following two reconceptualizations of Islam: first, that Islam in Europe is not a homogeneous religion, and second, that ethnicity is not a correlate of religion. My case studies highlight a differentiated view of Muslims and Islam in Europe and emphasize that conceptions about Muslims, including gender, cannot be generalized. At the same time, some of my case studies criticize general assumptions about religion, gender, and sexuality in German and European media landscapes. In my analyses, I draw on examples that, in their renderings of this complex problem, vary drastically from previously established images of Islam and ethnicity: they go across a continuum from various forms of lived sexualities, to different practices of lived Islam, to modes of secularism across multiple ethnicities. Fatih Akın’s Auf der anderen Seite ( The Edge of Heaven, 2007) presents Islam as differentiated rather than monolithic and ultimately depicts religion as decoupled from ethnicity. In the Hamburg- Tatort series, especially in Der Weg ins Paradies (The Path to Paradise, 2011), the character of detective Cenk Batu actively tries to undo generalizing assumptions about Islam, masculinity, and Turkishness. Promoting secularism, satirist Serdar Somuncu directly attacks and rejects orthodox Islam and religious dogma as well as clichéd ideas about Turks, Germans, and gender roles in his interviews and shows. Finally, Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel’s play Schwarze Jungfrauen ( Black Virgins, 2006) 2 stages a provocative, controversial view on Islam and femininity. By placing diverse female Muslim voices in conversation with one another as well as with traditions and current events, Black Virgins undoes generalizing conceptions about Islam and forces its audience to rethink their own misconceptions about religion, ethnicity, and gender. By problematizing an often-presupposed link between Islam, ethnicity, and the associated gender roles, and in tracing current media reactions to this com- Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 61 plex problem, this article aims to contribute to the ongoing debate on a linguistically, ethnically, and religiously diverse Germany and Europe. To successfully advance the socio-political and cultural discussion about a diverse Europe, the public discourse on these issues needs to acknowledge the diversity within religious and spiritual beliefs and it needs to free Islam (as other religions) from ties to any particular ethnicity. Today, Islam is often perceived as a religion whose place in a presumably secular Europe, a Europe whose culture is grounded in Judeo-Christian traditions, is still contested and cannot be assumed. Questions about Islam and its place in Europe are still under debate across the continent. After the French government banned religious symbols from state schools in 2004, former French president Nicholas Sarkozy (2007-2012) added the ban of the burka in 2009 from public places in France under the pretense of secularism (Chrisafis 2009). 3 This move simultaneously aligned “Frenchness” with secularism, a cultural policy since the French Revolution, and religious symbolism with foreignness and the Maghreb. The French ban was discussed in England as a “victory” for tolerance, as William Langley writes in the British newspaper The Telegraph. According to Langley, the French public sees the ban even as “beneficial to its Muslim communities and justified—if on no other grounds—as a statement in support of liberalism against darkness.” Langley himself justifies the ban by describing the French banlieues as repressive places for women in particular: “Women who refuse to wear the hijab, and, increasingly, the burka, are intimidated and brutalized by gangs whose ideas about female emancipation are on an exact par with those of the Taliban.” Reminiscent of Gayatri Spivak’s theories in the British colonial context, the French ban on the veil represents a mission to rescue oppressed “brown women” (Spivak 296). In other words, with the national ban on the veil, “white [French]men” free “brown women” from those [foreign] “brown men” who violently try to enforce the veil. While in France it was around a garment that the discourse about Islam in Europe was politicized and framed, in Germany it was a much more general political event that led to a public discourse on Islam’s place in the nation. When former Federal President of Germany Christian Wulff stated in his controversial speech for the twentieth anniversary of German reunification on October 3, 2010, that Islam belongs in Germany, he received much criticism from the center and conservative parties and opened up a debate in Germany about the role of Islam (Drobinski and Preuβ; “20 Jahre”). Yet, this Othering of Islam in a European context is not a recent development. Traditionally, Islam has been linked to the “Orient”: already in the Middle Ages, as the Ottoman Empire flourished, Islam was seen as an Other, as a threat to Europe. German religious leaders and politicians from Martin Luther to Thilo Sarrazin have propagated countless 62 Berna Gueneli fantasies and misconceptions about Islam and Muslims, many of which persist today (e. g. Uysal Ünalan 12, 44-46; Winkler 3). That is, Muslims, together with Islam as a religion, have been perceived as the absolute Other of Europe and Europeans for centuries, often taken to be opposed to Western civilization (Uysal Ünalan 12). Muslims today continue to be excluded from Europe, to be denied a European identity, even though they have been living on the continent for generations. Fatima El-Tayeb points out that “[t]he Muslim presence in Europe […] is acknowledged in order to define a new, unified Europe characterized by a tolerant secularism—a tolerance, paradoxically, that is manifest not in the inclusion but the exclusion of the continent’s largest religious minority” (El-Tayeb, European Others xxviii). As the reactions to Wulff’s remarks above exemplify and as Uysal Ünalan reminds us, European self-understanding is built on the foundations of Judeo-Christian tradition (54). This understanding of a Judeo-Christian tradition implies a particular religious background that is compatible with, or perhaps even a prerequisite for a modern, democratic lifestyle to flourish in Europe. At the same time, this understanding of a modern Europe also implies secularism. It seems to suggest that for a secular mode of living and a daily democratic operation within Europe, a Judeo-Christian background is necessary, while an Islamic background is not compatible with modern, democratic values. Paradoxically, it is precisely these preconceived ideas about the Otherness of Islam that have misguided democratic institutions in Europe in the past. A courthouse ruling that Yasemin Yıldız discusses shows how misconceptions about “cultural” and “religious” differences can even alter judicial opinions in democratic, secular Germany. In Yıldız’s case study, a German judge ruled in favor of an abusive Moroccan husband, who was beating his Moroccan-German wife, because of differences in “religion” and “culture” (Yıldız 70-71). Yıldız takes this controversial and much-discussed ruling as an example to state that gender and sexuality are the “crucial dividing line between liberal Christianity and conservative and repressive Islam” (74). Certainly, current media representations of Islam in Germany and elsewhere in Europe, particularly after 9 / 11, share responsibility for constructing today’s clichés about Muslims (Uysal Ünalan 51; Winkler 5). Media coverage often links certain stereotypical and gendered images when covering a topic about Islam or migrants from predominantly Islamic countries—images most prominently include women in headscarves and long, wide coats, and men with long beards. This focus on different attire and hairand lifestyles often foregrounds a cultural Otherness of Muslim migrants (Uysal Ünalan 51). Uysal Ünalan points out that such selective and one-dimensional perceptions of migrants with an Islamic background reduce their identities to a particular Muslim identity. However, Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 63 not all media representations are the same. There are, as I will discuss below, a wide variety of voices within the German media landscape. These counter voices challenge the one-dimensional, clichéd images about Islam; some do so in more subtle ways, while others quite vehemently undo the mainstream images and truisms about Islam, ethnicity, and gender roles within these diverse communities. The four case studies in this article consider images, videos, and texts from cinema, television, the internet, theater, and MP3s. Together they portray different forms of Islam in Germany. They differ from common stereotypes prevalent in German and European media and therefore could be framed as counter voices to the mainstream media images of Islam. 4 Although the individual media texts are very different from each other in form, style, genre, and narrative, they nevertheless develop similar messages by disentangling Islam from ethnicity and calling for a differentiated and diverse understanding of Islam within Europe, and of Islam and gender identities as well as gender roles. The first case study is Fatih Akın’s cinema. Since the success of Head-On ( Gegen die Wand, 2004), Akın has become the most renowned and internationally celebrated Turkish-German director. In mainstream media reception, he has long been a spokesperson and representative for Turkish-German issues through his films. While, in Akın’s earlier career, film critics and academic scholarship focused on the representational aspects of his films (Ezli, “Von der Identität”; Gallagher; Knopp; Pratt-Ewig; Schäffler), today, scholarship is rather dedicated to the aesthetics, that is, the music, sound, and mise-en-scène in his cinema (e. g. Göktürk, “Mobilität”; Gueneli, “Challenging” and “The Sound”; Hillman and Silvey; Mennel, “Überkreuzungen”; Kosta). I will mainly use Akın’s film The Edge of Heaven, and to a lesser extent Head-On and Short Sharp Shock ( Kurz und schmerzlos, 1998), to briefly demonstrate how his cinematic work dismantles a generalizing view on religion in general (and Islam in particular) and challenges any automatic link between religious and ethnic identities. Akın’s protagonists are defined through their actions, interpersonal relationships, and lifestyle choices—that is, through the music they listen to, the languages they speak, the clothing they wear, and the interactions they have. None is defined by an actively lived religion; none of the primary Turkish-German protagonists is overtly religious in dress or lifestyle: here we see none of the headscarves, beards, and five daily prayers so often imagined in a mainstream popular culture that links religion and ethnicity. The characters in Akın’s films are not very different from most other secular German filmic characters, who generally do not define themselves through Christian or other religious values in their daily lives. Akın’s cinematic universe is therefore one in which religion is decidedly disentangled from ethnicity. Explicit references to religion are gen- 64 Berna Gueneli erally depicted through minor characters or as part of a side story or subplot, as I show in my discussion of The Edge of Heaven. The non-linear, intertwined narrative of The Edge of Heaven seems to put very little emphasis on religious themes. Instead, the film depicts the stories of rather matter-of-fact realities: sex work, manslaughter, incarceration, illegal immigration, deportation, and human interactions and relationships. Telling the interwoven stories of three complicated parent-child relationships across generational, gender, national, and ideological lines, the film shows how the characters’ transnational paths cross (or fail to cross) between Hamburg, Bremen, Istanbul, and the Black Sea coast of Turkey. There are only two brief instances in which the film references religion. Within the context of Turkish-German cinema, I argue that this quasi exclusion within the filmic script already disentangles (gendered) ethnicity from religion. At the same time, aside from the lesser importance that is given to religion in character development, both ethnic masculinities and femininities are diversified in their modes of representation. This includes a lived Turkish-German female sexuality, whether as sex worker (Yeter, played by Nursel Köse) or in a same-sex romantic relationship (Ayten, played by Nurgül Yeşilada); the single-parenting of Nejat (played by Bakı Davrak) by a Turkish father, Ali (played by Tuncel Kurtiz), who says that he was both father and mother for his son; as well as caregiving across generational and ethnic lines, if we consider the German 68er, Susanne (played by Hannah Schygulla), who takes care of the Turkish activist Ayten, toward the end of the filmic narrative. In the two instances in which religion is mentioned or alluded to by the characters, it is quickly drowned in mockery or ignorance. The first instance is early in the film’s narrative, following the introduction of Yeter as a Turkish sex worker in Bremen. After her customer Ali, a retired guest worker, leaves the red light district, two young Turkish men—frequenters of the red light district, presumably procurers or suitors—overhear Yeter say good-bye in Turkish, thus exposing her heritage. A few minutes later, she is depicted in a train, where she is harassed by the same two men. They threaten her and demand that she abandon her profession as a sex worker. They dogmatically argue that as a Turkish and Muslim woman, she must refrain from such businesses. This is the only time that the words “Muslim woman” and “Turkish” are mentioned in the film directly and together. While both men are depicted as a serious and real danger for Yeter, their worldview, a stereotypically one-dimensional view of Islam, is ridiculed through their anachronistic, clichéd, macho enactment of religious dogma. According to Islamic doctrines, it would be as much a sin for the men to frequent the red light district as it would be for Yeter to engage in extramarital sexual activity. Their religiousness is therefore highlighted as hypocritical. Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 65 This particular type of religious machismo is similarly depicted in several scenes in Head-On. Here, it is the domineering brother (played by Cem Akın) of the female protagonist Sibel (played by Sibel Kekilli) and his friends who are shown in a comparably paradoxical manner. On the one hand, they speak about the honor of their presumably pious and asexual wives, and seem to be hiding behind Islamic doctrines. On the other hand, the men themselves blithely talk about prostitution and their experiences with sex workers in brothels. This lifestyle, just like the lifestyles of the two men threatening Yeter in The Edge of Heaven, would be considered sinful and dishonorable for an observant Muslim. The motivation for their declarations and actions is therefore not religion as such, but rather their clichéd, patriarchal machismo. They seem to uphold conservative gender norms differentiating between active, experienced men and passive, chaste women. This gendered double standard for Turkish men and women is, however, held up for ridicule in the next scene. A simultaneous conversation among their wives in an adjacent room destabilizes the men’s claim: the women are freely discussing and making fun of their husbands’ sexual performance, including details about oral sex. The second scene in which religion comes up in The Edge of Heaven is during a conversation in Istanbul between Susanne, a former German 68er, and Nejat, a former German professor from Hamburg. Susanne verbally addresses the topic of religion. In this particular scene, Susanne and Nejat look outside Nejat’s Istanbul apartment and see a group of men going to the mosque, following the call to prayer by a muezzin. Since it is a religious holiday, Nejat tells her the story of Ibrahim and his son. Susanne responds: “Diese Geschichte gibt es bei uns auch,” and not only points out a religious similarity between Christianity and Islam but understands this religious story as a dialogue of cultures. Nejat, on the other hand, ignores Susanne’s comment and the religious aspect of the story and instead is inspired by its father-and-son theme to remember his own father and his conflicted personal relationship to him (Ezli, “Von Lücken” 83; Tezcan 63-64). This scene suggests that filmic details in a Turkish-German production, even if they seem religious in nature, do not need to be read in religious terms. An ever-present religion, particularly a fundamentalist religion, does not play a significant role in the lives of many of Akın’s central Turkish-German filmic characters. This does not mean that religion in Akın’s films is represented solely either in a mocking tone, as with the machismo in the first example, or as a symbolic element that is only relevant as a reminder of a real-life relationship, as in the last example. Religion as such does occasionally play a role in characterization, but in these cases it is usually embodied by an elderly generation, especially men, who represent a sincere and pious religiousness. Older male piousness often 66 Berna Gueneli takes non-threatening forms, such as the religiousness of Gabriel’s (played by Mehmet Kurtuluş) father (played by Mustafa Enver Akın) in Short Sharp Shock. Gabriel’s father is depicted as an observant Muslim, and is shown praying at home, but he does not push his religiousness aggressively onto his children. Yet there are also depictions of religion in Akın’s films that are both earnest and serve to drive the plot forward: in Head-On, for instance, Sibel’s father (played by Demir Gökgöl) represents an Islamic piousness, but at the same time, his patriarchal practices are revealed as anachronistic and oppressive in juxtaposition with the libertine lifestyle of his daughter. Due in part to his faith, Sibel’s father thus functions as a character foil for the hedonistic Cahit through whom Sibel aims to escape from her family’s conservative expectations. Taken together, Akın’s films depict transnational protagonists as people whose emotional and personal relationships—and not their religion—are in the foreground. Islamic religion and lifestyles are largely irrelevant to them; this is true especially for the younger generations in his films. 5 His Turkish-German protagonists’ lives do not show a specifically religious, Islamic lifestyle. While they might or might not be religious as characters, religion does not take center stage in Akın’s films, and, therefore, a more secularized ensemble of filmic characters come to represent Turkish-Germanness. Their secularism decouples preconceived religious imagery from their ethnicities. The next case study in visual culture similarly disentangles ethnicity from religion, moving us from the cinema to television. While Akın’s films often make suggestions about lifestyles of both transnational masculinities and femininities that are not on par with common misconceptions about Muslim migrants (e. g. the lived female sexualities of Ayten and Yeter as well as the soft-spoken, timid masculinity of Nejat), my next counter voice example primarily focuses on masculinities and Islam. Though the film discussed below first introduces religious dogma as belonging to a particular masculinity and ethnicity, it slowly undoes this association by providing a more diversified perspective on Islam, Islamic terrorism, and a variety of ethnic masculinities. This analysis centers on an episode from the television show Tatort (Crime Scene, 1970-present), the quintessential feature-length German detective series that has a history of taking up socially critical and relevant topics since the 1970s (Brück et al. 11, 33). This section focuses on the representation of Islam in Lars Becker’s Tatort episode, Der Weg ins Paradies, with Mehmet Kurtuluş starring as the main character, an undercover police detective. By introducing the character Cenk Batu (played by Kurtuluş) to the Tatort roster of detectives (2009-2012), this show made an initial move to normalize non-white ethnicities on the German screen (Gueneli, “Mehmet Kurtuluş”). 6 While the show’s pilot Auf der Sonnenseite (On the Sunny Side, 2007) does not emphasize Islam, 7 this particular episode focuses Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 67 on explicitly religious themes such as Islamic religious devotion, conversion, and fundamentalism. In Der Weg ins Paradies, detective Batu directly speaks out against the stereotyping of Islam and any unreflected intermingling of ethnicities and particular forms of religion. In fact, Batu is portrayed as exposed to xenophobic generalizations about religion in general, and particularly about Islam and Turks, by colleagues and supervisors at work, which he is then shown to oppose. This initial, provocative association of Turkishness with Islam as well as the later connection to a white ethnicity (as portrayed by the German converts to a fundamentalist Islam) in this episode is to be expected: the episode’s title, Der Weg ins Paradies, is the same title of a YouTube video clip, in which Pierre Vogel, a German convert to Islam and Salafist, promotes an extremist and fundamentalist Islam, as (television) audiences might know from German media and news coverage of the time of airing. In the Tatort episode Der Weg ins Paradies, an Islamic terrorist group in Germany is being observed by the Hamburg police. The group consists of the leader, a highly intelligent and zealous German convert to Islam, ironically named Christian Marschall (played by Ken Duken), and his two followers, the Afghan student Akbar (played by Murali Perumal), whose family was killed by US soldiers during an attack on the Taliban, and the divorced, unemployed, overweight German Rolf-Peter Sperling (played by Tristan Seith), who is seeking meaning and guidance in life. The group is believed to be planning a major bombing in Hamburg to show their contempt for non-believers of Islam, especially Americans. Batu is assigned a new undercover role as a pious Muslim. In his undercover persona, who fulfills certain stereotypes about devout Muslim youths (he grows a beard, reads and cites the Koran, prays five times a day, and has a temper, among other things), he tries to get recruited to the terrorist group. Der Weg ins Paradies attempts to undo religious generalizations and preconceptions about Muslims. In the show, Batu’s reaction toward his new undercover character is uneasy. Batu differentiates between his own secular personality—the show does not characterize him as particularly religious—and a fundamentalist definition of religion. Batu has to explain to co-workers and supervisors who at times question his ability to cope with his undercover role that they must also make this distinction. At the same time, the show depicts a pious and devout imam as a moderate Muslim. The imam is in fact highly suspicious of Christian, the radical German convert who presumably tutors children in science while he essentially promotes a radical Islam in the imam’s mosque. Christian shows the children videos that propagate extremist activities. This Tatort episode has generally received positive reviews, in particular for its differentiated perspective on Islam. Popular reviews have praised the edu- 68 Berna Gueneli cational and diversified depiction of Islam, congratulating director Becker as well as actor Kurtuluş for the portrayal of this complex theme. The following review, for instance, conveys an appreciation of the show’s depiction of ethnic and ideological diversity: “Was Cenk Batu in diesem Milieu erlebt, geht auch gegen ihn selbst, gegen seine Herkunft und seine Überzeugung: ‘Das was ich hier lerne, hat nichts mit Spiritualität zu tun. Geschweige denn mit dem Islam,’ sagt er.” (Krüger). Though the writer of this comment assumes that Batu has a certain “Herkunft” and “Überzeugung,” these presumably religious beliefs coupled with his ethnic background are not overtly conveyed in the five Tatort episodes, as there are hardly any references to any particular form of religion in his character. However, it is correct to infer from the dialogue, and the quote above, that Kurtuluş’s character knows to differentiate between religious fanatics and observant Muslims. The educational and socially ambitious show thereby conveys this point of differentiation to the audience. Once more, ethnicity becomes separated from religion, in this case religious extremism. Ultimately, Der Weg ins Paradies variously links Islamic fanaticism with several ethnicities, including German, Arabic, and Turkish. On the one hand, the film manages to differentiate between radicalism and religiousness. On the other hand, it further shows the ambivalence of a link between any particular ethnicity and Islam. While Tatort engages in an enlightened dialogue to complicate the discourse on religion and ethnicity, I would like to end this case study by pointing out that the show chooses a Turkish-German male character, who is perceived as easily passing as a radical Muslim and possible future terrorist, and not a white German male or female detective to get the undercover assignment as an Islamic fundamentalist. Cenk Batu, a sexualized, enlightened figure in the other Tatort episodes, whose character is generally not portrayed with religious imagery, is still reduced to a one-dimensional construction of his body and color when he is tasked with passing for a religious extremist. Nevertheless, this show tries with good intentions to differentiate between ethnicity and religion. This point of differentiation is not only made in serious television shows and films like Tatort or The Edge of Heaven, but also in different genres such as comedy and satire. My next case study shows how Serdar Somuncu’s world of comedy, satire, and political commentary vigorously advocates the active decoupling of ethnicity from religion. Serdar Somuncu is a contemporary Turkish-German satirist, cabarettist, author, and singer, and has reached a status of critical public spokesperson for questions concerning Turkish-German issues. As an artist he appears on talk shows, in theaters, and across all sorts of media (print, internet, television, and radio). As a public figure, he is a regular guest on public television’s news channels as both a provocative critic and valued expert on Turkish-German Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 69 themes. Although Somuncu is mainly known for his satire within Turkish-German contexts, by now he is also recruited as a satirist beyond an ethnic context, as, for example in the ZDF ’s heute-show —the German equivalent of The Daily Show. His artistic work is particularly tied to “recurring debates on integration, immigration, and citizenship in Germany” (Bower 194). Somuncu, who started his career as an actor mainly cast for stereotypical roles as Turk, soon rejected this form of type-casting by leaving television acting for political cabaret and satirical comedy (Bower 198). He first became widely known through his notorious Mein Kampf tour (1994-2001), which saw more than 1400 performances in and around Germany. The tour demystified Adolf Hitler’s infamous book of the same title, combining Hitler’s own anti-Semitic and racist prose with Somuncu’s unique performance, mimicry, and critical interpretations during these satire shows (Bower 198). Today, Somuncu, “self-styled philosopher of transnational humanism in Germany” (Bower 194), is actively promoting his ideas of differentiation on a wide variety of platforms as a satirist, actor, critic, writer, host, and guest of internet shows. In order to illustrate Somuncu’s contribution to the decoupling of ethnicity from religion in Turkish-German media, I concentrate on four brief exemplary television appearances from 2012. In 2012 the discourse on issues related to Islam and integration of Germany’s minority population had reached new heights. It was the year of several dialogical meetings between Muslims, Turks, and state officials in Germany. One such meeting was the third plenary meeting of the German Islamic Conference ( Deutsche Islamkonferenz ) on April 19; another was the Hamburger Vertrag mit Muslimen, an official meeting that took place in November in Hamburg between city politicians and officials and religious delegates of several Muslim organizations who signed a treaty, including themes such as religious education in schools (Philipp-Claussen). At the same time, the public debates on Salafism and Islamic extremism in Germany were intensifying due to increased media attention to Salafist protest movements on German streets. These events coincided with Somuncu’s career peak. In each of these exemplary television appearances, Somuncu spoke about the current themes of Islam, religious education, and integration in Germany. The talk show clip from Anne Will and two clips from the news show Nachtmagazin are from the public television station ARD , and a fourth clip is from the private news channel NTV . In these shows, Somuncu was not performing one of the satirical characters he is known for, but rather appearing as himself. However, as a satirist and artist, he generally does not shy away from using his particular provocative and witty language and idiolect. His trademark style allows the audience to reflect on his intellectual prose, which alternates between eloquent, high standard language, street colloquialisms, and vulgarisms. 8 Although 70 Berna Gueneli Somuncu’s comments referred to different current events and stories at the time of airing, all of the four examples below highlight Somuncu’s advocacy of disentangling religion from ethnicity, as well as his call for a more diversified perception of Turkish-Germans. This advocacy can also be found in his artistic work: as Bower notes, “Serdar Somuncu stands out […] for his […] insistence on differentiation and balanced comparison when discussing integration ” (198, italics are mine). Ultimately, Somuncu’s satire and artistic performances overlap with his reactions and comments on the talk shows that turn him into a counter voice of common media depictions of Islam and ethnicity. That is, Somuncu’s Turkish-German public persona, with his stance on mosques, religious education, and religious groups, actively separates religion from ethnicity, as do his performances on stage. I will now illustrate this with television samples, all retrieved from YouTube. My first example is an episode of the Anne Will show entitled “Allah statt Grundgesetz: warum werden junge Muslime radikal? ” which aired on October 10, 2012, on ARD . The occasion for this special issue of the show is the sentencing of a young Salafist in Germany to six years in prison after attacking two police officers during a fight with members of a radical right-wing party. In discussing this event on Anne Will, the host and several of the other guests (politicians from the CDU , SPD , and Green party) focused on the Salafi protests and violence, while Somuncu repeatedly sought to destabilize their framing of the event as an escalation of Islamic extremism and violence in Germany. He opposed the generalization and over-problematization of individual events such as the Salafists’ protests. Instead, he tried to reframe the discussion on a meta level, asking the media to engage in a non-generalizing discussion about such instances. Somuncu perceived the discourse around the Salafist movement as creating overgeneralizing assumptions about Islam as a religion and, ultimately, hysteria in public discourse. Similarly, in the short YouTube clip, “ SERDAR SO- MUNCU wettert stark gegen Pierre Vogel und Islam! ! ” taken from a NTV news broadcast, Somuncu stated that he does not take religious extremists like Vogel seriously, because he considers them an unthreatening minority. Somuncu attacks and rejects fundamentalist beliefs, and this includes Islam. Acting as an “expert commentator” in such shows, Somuncu vehemently deconstructs the presumed ethno-religious Turkish-German-Muslim connection and thereby advocates a diversified view on Turkish-Germans as well as religion. In a Nachtmagazin interview on integration, for example, Somuncu appealed for an acknowledgement of a “Vielfalt der hier lebenden Menschen.” Somuncu highlighted that both Turks and Turkish-Germans are of diverse faiths and lifestyles: “es gibt ja nicht nur gläubige Türken, sondern auch Atheisten, Homosexuelle, buddhistische Türken.” Somuncu thereby rejects an essentialist Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 71 notion of Turks as Muslims. He pointed out that, even if it is true that most Turks or Turkish-Germans in Germany are Muslims, they are nonetheless still not a homogenous group. For each individual Muslim has a different relationship to Islam, and varying conceptions of what it means to be a believing, practicing, or nonpracticing Muslim. In addition to advocating a differentiated view on Turks and Muslims, Somuncu also proposes a secular education system. He voiced his critical perspective on religion in the Nachtmagazin episode on the Hamburger Vertrag mit Muslimen. Instead of integrating Islam into public schools, as recommended in a widely debated statewide proposal for Hamburg, Somuncu advocated an enlightened education of students, including the teaching of the concept of “secularism.” Opposing political measures that sought to bring Islam into the social fold by including it in the curriculum, Somuncu contends that religious education and religion in general have no place in classrooms. With this stance, Somuncu, who has a Turkish-German-Muslim background, voices his opinion against any religious education in schools, and proposes a secularization of all education; thereby he clearly strives to disentangle ethnicity from religion. For Somuncu, integration means active engagement in German and Turkish language classes, education about ethics, and the creation of a common value system. None of these, he claims, needs a religious basis. Somuncu’s recurring theme in terms of religion and integration is the vehement advocacy for a diversified and balanced view on Turkish-Germans and on Muslims. Somuncu unabashedly demands a decoupling of ethnicity from religion: in conversations with and in reactions to the media, politicians, and state officials, he promotes a non-generalizing view on Muslims, Turks, and Turkish-Germans living in Germany, one that both complicates and deconstructs the one-dimensional representation of the Turkish Muslim that is predominant in the entire public discourse. These views critically inform his stage performances, skits, and commentaries in television shows. Somuncu therefore forcefully demands that which is only subtly portrayed through the protagonists in Akın’s cinema and that which is more pedantically articulated but only partially actualized in the narrative of the Tatort episode Der Weg ins Paradies. What Somuncu voices through his provocative tone and biting satire, authors Feridun Zaimoğlu and Günter Senkel write, perhaps even more provocatively, for the German theater stage. Zaimoğlu, who began his literary career as the enfant terrible of German literature with Kanak Sprak (1995), Abschaum (1997), and Koppstoff (1999), has long moved to the foreground of contemporary German literature by receiving recognition through prestigious awards and scholarships ranging from the Adelbert von Chamisso Prize to the German Academy Rome Villa Massimo fellowship for artists. His collaboration with Günter Senkel on 72 Berna Gueneli Black Virgins, staged by Neco Celik, once more reminds his audiences of his literary beginnings: Zaimoğlu states that the play is the artistic outcome of several interviews conducted with “Neomuslims,” an artistic framing reminiscent of the imagined ethnographic voyeurism of his earlier work, such as Kanak Sprak (Uysal Ünalan 112). The expression “Neomuslims” seems to be an umbrella term Zaimoğlu himself uses to describe the diverse, self-confident Muslims he interviewed. Zaimoğlu’s cast of Neomuslims in Black Virgins defies classification into existing categories by combining the—at times fundamentalist—Islamic faith with modern, urban lifestyles that include living sexuality, praising terrorism, and being politically incorrect. I further suggest that, especially in the context of Zaimoğlu’s work, the term “Neomuslims” also refers to a dialogic identity that forms as individuals relate to each other through their very personal renderings and interpretations of Islam and their individual but socially embedded lifestyles. In Black Virgins, the last counter voice case study in this article, gender takes center stage. Although the titular word “black”—which might refer to darkness, to the unknown and mysterious, and to non-transparency—also connotes to race and ethnicity, as well as to the hijab and veil, which in itself has a large cross-section of connotations ranging from the exotic to the Islamist, the play does not seem to emphasize race over gender. The characters self-identify as German, Turkish, or Bosnian, for example, but their concern lies with their Islamic femininity, which goes beyond their ethnicity. This group of female characters performs through their voices and stories diverse and radical Islamic femininities that might provoke their audiences, with their at times paradoxical and violent ideas, images, and ideologies. Islamic theologist and journalist Nimet Seker uses the term “Islamo-feminism” to describe the characters of Black Virgins. The term seems to connote different radical, and even fundamentalist, interpretations of Islam by a variety of women, all of whom challenge previously prescribed religious rules as disseminated by Muslim men. The titular Black Virgins are female characters who identify as Muslim and give angry, violent, and occasionally vulgar monologues in colloquial discourse about their lifestyles and beliefs. 9 In other words, the provocative content of their monologues is voiced in a confrontational tone and language that runs throughout the play. Discussing femininities and sexualities, for example, several monologues include vulgarisms and street colloquialisms such as “Pornonutte” or “Fick” (24, 25). Others, talking about worldviews, express contested ideas such as praise and respect for Osama Bin Laden (60, 73) or their approval of the oppression of women whose opinions they disagree with (53-54). Although Zaimoğlu groups them in the same umbrella category of “Neomuslims,” they are all distinct from each other, and none of the stage characters believes in the Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 73 same Muslim lifestyle. They each speak in different ways about sexuality, love, family, the Germans, foreigners, the headscarf, female bodies, and various other topics. They also do not fit any existing clichéd categories of Muslim women, such as the obedient, silent, oppressed, and asexual Muslim daughter, sister, or wife of an oppressive brother, father, or husband in a patriarchal community. The provocative Black Virgins convey Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s critique of essentialist notions of Islam. They further help to expose what I call the “ethnovoyeurism” of audiences, who experience pleasure in looking at and observing the ethnic Other, particularly if it is a representation that they might perceive as “authentic.” An expectation of authenticity seems to be justified, especially when the representation of the Other is created by a “legitimate” Turkish-German insider, and particularly one who based the play on the biographical accounts of Muslim women whom he interviewed. Certainly, Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s piece explores the variety of Islamic positionalities, Islamic extremisms, and the so-called Western or non-Western lifestyles of his characters. However, I argue that the diversity and non-generic versions of these extreme voices from within Germany are not supposed to elicit sympathy for or an understanding of the Other, but rather to help the audience to see through their own judgments and generalizing attitudes regarding Islam and ethnicity. Julian Preece and Frank Finglay make a similar argument about the play in their introduction to Religion and Identity in Germany Today : This [ Back Virgins ] is pseudo-documentary theater because the point is not that these women somehow exist and dictate their speeches to the anthropologist dramatist whose role is to reproduce them. Zaimoğlu confronts German audiences with something like the inverse of what he perceives their perception of young female Turks living in their midst to be. It is a play about images reflected in images and as such shows how a literary treatment of an essentially ideological question cuts through that ideology. (5-6) Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s characters become examples that diversify and demystify the clichéd images about Muslim women. These protagonists are images of missing originals, they are poetic renderings of actual interviews. Nevertheless, by their violent and uncensored verbal interventions, the German, Bosnian, or Turkish characters destabilize the ethno-religious link on stage. They have different ethnicities and cannot be linked to any specific nationality group, any one religious practice, or any unified educational, professional, or familial background. They also challenge dominant gender stereotypes about Muslim women as headscarf-wearing, pious, silent, passive femininities. Some state in their monologues that they do not wear headscarves, or are proud of their veils, or that they are educated (one is a law student), have extramarital sex, support 74 Berna Gueneli terrorism, admire Osama Bin Laden, or use a wheelchair. These are just a few examples of the ways in which the play foregrounds the diversity within the characters who are grouped together as “Neomuslim.” The sheer range of differences in their opinions on disabilities, religious lifestyles, sexism, extremism, and terrorism challenges any gesture toward categorizing or generalizing any form of Muslim faith or culture. In this way, the titular Black Virgins connect radical Islamism with cosmopolitan lifestyles, defying stereotypical social gender roles. Seker also observes in this context that a differentiation between “traditional” and “modern” Islam does not function (Seker, “Feridun Zaimoglu: Islamo-Feminismus”). The play thereby serves as a counter voice that depicts a diversified view not just of Muslims and Islam, but also of religious extremism, women, and even Europeans. Scholars and critics agree that through this play Zaimoğlu and Senkel challenge clichéd ideas about Islam in Europe. Frauke Matthes observes that the play makes the audience “cringe, reject, disagree, or do the opposite of all that—by, effectively, making the audience react to the women’s voices” (210). It thereby connects the audience to an ongoing discussion of Islam in Europe (Matthes 210), while also criticizing preconceived notions of Muslims and Islam (Uysal Ünalan 14, 111, 112, 116 ff.). By now, Black Virgins has been staged multiple times and has consistently received praise by critics and commentators ( Bericht ; Meierhenrich; Schwankhalle; Schnell). The success and controversy of this play reinforces the need for a platform to discuss differentiated views on Islam. Additionally, this case study, like the others above, suggests that Islamic faith has long become a part of the global cities of Europe and cannot be linked to any particular ethnicity. The play’s realism, or perceived realism, is a major discussion point. While negative criticism might have come from audiences and critics expecting an inside view into a particular Islam (Matthes 201), theater critics, journalists, and scholars of Turkish-German and transnational studies showed positive interest in the work (Uysal Ünalan 112). Seker, for example, who sees a certain realism in the characters, states, “[Sie] sind böse, problematisch und widersprüchlich. Aber gerade das macht sie realistisch. Mit ihrem Islamo-Feminismus verleihen sie der Emanzipation und dem Feminismus gewiss neue Impulse.” While other scholars also discuss the play’s relationship to various forms of feminism, the accuracy of Seker’s statement about the realism of the characters is up for debate. I argue that the characters are art figures who are not realistic renderings of Muslim voices, but rather representations thereof who perform poetic and aestheticized versions of actual interviews. They thereby synthesize, respond to, criticize, and provoke discussions of Islam, religion, and gender in Europe. The question of feminism and Otherness, on the other hand, is at the foreground. Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 75 Claudia Breger, for example, states that in the Zaimoğlu / Senkel / Celik production of Black Virgins gender is pivotal to the Black Virgins ’ critical cultural intervention, which is positioned within a feminist framework of interrogating and deconstructing the social meaning and exchange value of “virgin” sexuality, among other feminized roles. The focus is on provocative difference and Otherness: “[T]he figure of difference dominating the public stage is no longer the ‘Turk’ (or ‘Kanaksta’) but the observant radical Muslim” (Breger 231). Breger continues that the women on stage, who “remain strangers even without folkloristic accessories,” comment critically on gender inequalities as experienced in contemporary expressions of Islam (236). They are “satirical ‘virgin’ voices” and “counter dominant conceptions of the presumed homogeneity of political Islam” (237). I suggest that their gender criticism goes beyond Islam-feminism, that is, that it is not limited to Muslim femininities, but also extends to the perception and exploitation of female sexuality beyond a Muslim context, one that resonates with the work of other contemporary Turkish-German artists. Of further interest in this context would be, for example, the controversial Turkish-German rapper Lady Bitch Ray, the stage name used by linguist Reyhan Șahin. In her academic professional life, Şahin is an award-winning scholar who has published on the semiotics of the headscarf, Muslim self-representation, as well as on youth language, culture, and hip-hop. She argues in Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuchs (2014), for example, that hijab-wearing Muslim women are a heterogeneous group of people and that the hijab in itself does not imply a state of repression. While in her academic work she criticizes the overgeneralizing opinions on Muslim femininities, in her performances as Lady Bitch Ray (LBR), she overtly criticizes sexism and misogyny by bringing an aggressive and provocative persona to the stage, television, and internet screens. Unlike her academic persona, LBR ’s stage persona creates a harsh polemic (“Lady Bitch Ray”; Sand; Welt-Bremen). In her rap performances—particularly through her lyrics, styles, and costumes—she re-appropriates sexist terminology and imagery widespread among misogynistic rap acts. With these controversial “anti-porno” performances foregrounding the exploitation of female sexuality, she is both entering and challenging a male domain—namely misogynist rap. To give an example, in her videos and photography, she replicates a transformed version of images known from rap videos such as “Candy Shop” or “Just a Lil Bit” by internationally successful American artist 50 Cent. LBR ’s reappropriated images known from such videos are empowering the females as subjects, rather than objects, of pleasure. Her performances unabashedly and provocatively demand sexual (and non-sexual) self-determination. Thereby, juxtaposed with 50 Cent’s music videos, LBR ’s bluntly sexualized performances create a castrating audio-visual aesthetic and intervention into sexist media. 76 Berna Gueneli LBR therefore unabashedly brings to the foreground the miscegenation and sexism that she perceives as dominating the media landscapes. 10 At the same time, her videos most forcefully defy any linkage between preconceived images about Turkish-German passive femininity and Islam in Germany (“Lady Bitch Ray”; Sand). In this regard, LBR not only espouses a differentiated view on Muslim and Turkish femininities, but she is also exposing the commercialization and exploitation of women’s bodies and sexuality in Germany in general. As a Turkish-German artist, she vigorously and consistently identifies and exposes the misogynist value system prevalent in German and European media (Sand). That is, a Turkish-German performer, LBR does not directly discuss Islam, she rather concentrates on more global issues of gender, empowerment, and pleasure, thereby disentangling religion from ethnicity in her performances. With her thusly politicized performance, LBR not only reappropriates and revalues images of sexualized and objectified femininities in misogynistic rap acts, but also tackles stereotypes and expectations of Muslim female passivity, thereby linking these two (very different) dimensions of contemporary media. By highlighting her ethnic background, for example with songs such as “Kanackenbraut,” LBR also makes a political statement about the post-religious and post-ethnic society that LBR herself belongs to. Her implied critique of the exploitation of female sexuality as well as the representation of Muslims—as expressed through her online and television performances—therefore resonates, even if in a far more frontal, direct, and inclusive way, with my previous case studies, such as Zaimoğlu and Senkel’s Black Virgins or Akın’s films. The counter voices examined in this article may be at times polemical, vulgar, or unnerving, but they articulate a much-needed critique of contemporary culture by addressing current events and calling for both progressive and radical measures such as nonsexist media and secular education. However, many do not share these views: counter voices on (general) religious symbolism in education, for example, do not seem to be well received by a general audience, as can be seen in the case of Turkish-German CDU politician Aygül Özkan. Like Somuncu, Özkan suggested that classrooms should be secular and free of religious symbolisms, including crosses. However, Özkan’s suggestion was heavily criticized and silenced by her own Christian Democratic Party: “‘Frau Özkan akzeptiert, dass in Niedersachsen in den Schulen Kreuze willkommen und gewünscht sind. Sie trägt diese Linie mit. Damit ist das Thema erledigt,’ sagte [Präsident Christian] Wulff” (Öztürker). While another European country, France, was more rigorous in its ruling against any religious symbolism in schools, in Germany this type of pan-religious ban proves to be more complicated, as the above response to Özkan shows. Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 77 Reactions toward LBR as well as Yıldız’s illustrations about her Moroccan case study referenced above also exemplify different ways of actively challenging or discrediting Turkish-German counter voices. LBR ’s mode of criticizing sexism in German media and society came itself under fire by German actress Michaela May, who stated in the Maischberger talk show episode “Keuschheit statt Porno: Brauchen wir eine neue Sexualmoral? ” on ARD that German women are already emancipated and do not need the type of intervention that LBR performs. May consequently opposed LBR ’s performances (“Lady Bitch Ray bei Maischberger 1”). LBR ’s work was similarly discredited by her former employer Radio Bremen / Radiowelle Funkhaus Europa, which labeled her work pornographic. Ultimately, she lost her job as moderator at the radio station due to her stage persona. In this context, let us recall the earlier discussion of Yıldız’s case study. The case of a Moroccan woman was discredited because it did not fit the preconceived images about Muslim women. Hence, the media told a flattened story, leaving out information that would have complicated the stereotype of the silent, passive, abused Muslim woman. 11 Ultimately, counter voices become important moments to intervene and diversify mainstream media coverage of Islam in Germany and Europe. Beyond the scope of my examples presented above, there are many voices in the German and European media landscape that challenge and in some cases even overrule mainstream media representations of Muslims, Islam, and migrants living in Germany and Europe. In an attempt to study European diversity and integration, future scholarship needs to further examine and discuss in depth these diverse counter voices within German media (including their growing presence in the internet). They highlight the vast array of different opinions and expressions that continue to shape contemporary Germany and Europe, both of which have long left behind the overbearing, hegemonic, monocultural, and monolingual fantasies of mainstream media. notes I would like to thank the guest editors Heidi Denzel de Tirado and Faye Stewart for their tireless editorial feedback and suggestions that tremendously improved this article. 1 In the case of Maghreb masculinities in France, Fatima El-Tayeb has made a similar argument (“The Birth”). 2 My discussion of Schwarze Jungfrauen is based on the 2008 audio book and the 2013 ebook editions of the play. All quotations are from the Rowohlt ebook. The play had its theater premiere in 2006. 78 Berna Gueneli 3 For a discussion of the 2004 ban regarding public schools but also of France’s relationship to its former colony and Islam, see Joan Wallach Scott’s 2010 book The Politics of the Veil. 4 This article adds to the discussion Claudia Winkler started in her 2013 article on Kübra Gümüşay’s blog ein fremdwörterbuch. Borrowing from Nancy Fraser, Winkler discusses the blog as a “subaltern counter public.” In this space, Gümüşay disseminates texts and opinions that are opposed to mainstream media representations of femininity and Islam in Germany / Europe. Gümüşay is an activist and journalist, and a cosmopolitan Muslim woman wearing a headscarf (in itself this is opposed to clichéd ideas about silent, passive Muslima). I use the term counter voice, to more generally refer to any voice, coming from a diversity of media outlets that dismantle, disrupt, or merely unsettle mainstream media images about Islam, gender, and ethnicity. 5 This is particularly explicit in the portrayal of the cosmopolitan travelers and their interfaith love stories in In July. 6 The ethnic normalization of a Turkish-German character in the script comes at the price of an overtly eroticized and sexualized masculinity on the screen (Gueneli, “Mehmet Kurtuluş”). 7 With the series’ pilot show, I am referring to the first episode with Mehmet Kurtuluş as detective Cenk Batu in Auf der Sonnenseite (2007)� 8 Bower describes Somuncu’s change in tone in his performances since his stage show Hitler Kebab as “Aggro-Comedy.” This type of comedy also includes crude insults and a particularly vulgar language (208 ff.). 9 For a detailed analysis and an insightful discussion of the play, see Maha El Hissy’s 2012 book Getürkte Türken (110-44). 10 In her videos, LBR uses lyrics, sounds, costumes, and body postures to promote her own brand of feminist criticism, which she calls “Bitchsm.” LBR ’s 2012 book Bitchsm further contributes to the multimedia distributions of her critique of sexism and provides a feminist life-style manifesto. Carrie Smith-Prei and Maria Stehle observe in the context of literary postfeminism that Bitchsm “employs the violent language of pornography and the sexist imagery of pop culture to create its pleasure-obsessed, hedonistic, and aggressive voice” (148). With her “Bitchsm lectures” the performer-critic LBR / Şahin introduces a new dimension of her performances (“Bitchsm”). 11 Yıldız pointed out that there seems to be a willful turning away from non-mainstream images of Muslims in the media. The abused Moroccan-German woman’s story was not framed as a case of domestic violence, as Yıldız reminds us, but as a story of an abused Muslim woman whose Arab husband was acting according to archaic Islamic rules. She describes the Reframing Islam: The Decoupling of Ethnicity from Religion in Turkish-German Media 79 paradoxical flattening of the ethnicity of the woman in question, despite her unstereotypically Muslim background and gender position: “a German citizen of Moroccan descent […] born and raised in Germany, presents herself as strong-willed and independent-minded. She emphasizes that she married her husband […] against the advice of her skeptical family […]” (Yıldız 80). In this example, the Moroccan-German woman did not completely fit the stereotypes of the silent, abused, female Muslim, whose Arab family forced her into marriage. Therefore the media did not focus on that part of her story that went beyond and complicated the image of the abused Muslim woman (Yıldız 80). Works Cited “20 Jahre Deutsche Einheit. Dokumentation: Christian Wulffs Rede im Wortlaut.” sueddeutsche.de. 3 Oct. 2010. Web. 12 Sept. 2014. “50 Cent—Candy Shop ft. Olivia.” Online video clip. YouTube. 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