Grounding religious geopolitics: The everyday counter-geopolitical practices of Turkish mosque communities in Germany

Abstract

Mosques in Europe have been at the center of (geo)political debates about terrorism, radicalism, and the integration of Muslim communities. Mainstream EU political leaders and pundits often express suspicion of the transnational connections of Muslim populations and Islamic organizations in Europe, portraying mosques as foreign territories and mosque communities as vulnerable to foreign influence. At the same time, studies on how Middle Eastern states use mosques as foreign policy instruments also depict mosque communities as simple receptors of influence. Both approaches erase or flatten mosque communities’ dynamism, heterogeneity, and critical agency in relation to the geopolitical projects of their ancestral countries and the European countries where they have made their home. More specifically, we focus on mosques affiliated with DITIB, a Turkish-Sunni religious organization in Germany, and demonstrate how mosque communities develop a critical stance towards both German and Turkish states’ attempts to domesticate mosque spaces. Drawing on interviews and participant observation conducted between 2016 and 2018 in Germany and Turkey, we trace how mosque members respond to state projects and engage in everyday counter-geopolitical practices to make mosque spaces their own. Through a feminist geopolitical analysis, our grounded focus on DITIB mosques illustrates how mosque communities negotiate and dismantle geopolitical projects rather than accept or implement them wholesale. While posing a challenge to Islamic organizations’ geopolitical construction as passive territories under foreign influence, this study also suggests a more robust conversation between geopolitics of religion scholarship and feminist geopolitical theories.