Negotiating Religion and Identity; Muslim Refugee Women in Berlin

• In Event: Poster Session: Women and Politics Research I

Abstract

Since August 2015, with the open-door refugee policy initiated by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, it is estimated that approximately 350,000 women arrived in Germany, mainly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, many of whom are religious and are members of traditional Muslim communities. Based on interviews conducted with 20 such women who currently live in Berlin, it is the purpose of this paper to investigate the complex and nuanced engagement of these religious Muslim refugee women with the largely secular German citizenship community. The paper focuses on the ways they narrate the complex process of entry and engagement with German society, focusing on their perceptions of their own agency.
The narratives reveal a conflicted duality in the lives of these women constituted by the sense of hope and empowerment afforded by new opportunities such as driving, attending university, and working outside of the household, alongside a deep sense of vulnerability and disadvantage as a result of the visibility of their identity through the signifier of the hijab. The sense of vulnerability is posed both from without – by the exposure to German anti-Muslim sentiments and provocations, and from within – as the women face demands from members of their own community and of their families for increased seclusion, in order to avoid the temptations of secular society and preserve the coherence of their religious community. In this manner, the narratives reveal the dual role of the hijab in the women’s lives: it protects them and makes them feel safer and more independent in the public sphere, and therefore serves as a tool of empowerment and as a key to integration, but at the same time it creates a clear distinction between them and secular German society serving as a signifier of subjugation. The tension between these two dual positions complicates their relationships both with the men in their community, as well as with their younger daughters, and creates emotional confusion with regard to their identity. Finally, this duality has also resulted in an ambivalent and complex relationship between these women and German feminists whose actions are mediated mainly through a liberal, secular and civic discourse.
Our analysis is built on and contributes to recent critical theoretical discussions of women’s agency amongst religious women (Mahmood 2005; Abu-Lughod 2013; Norton 2013) and to discussions regarding the challenges to patterns of membership and citizenship in Europe, posed by recent Islamic immigration (Joppke 2007; Brubaker 2010). Building on Mahmood’s concept of Pious Agency we argue that the particular context of refugee status and statelessness both complicates and refines expressions of women’s agency that are at one and the same time expressions of resistance against civic and political exclusion and xenophobia, as well as efforts to mediate the boundaries of religious compliance. We argue that the analysis of their narratives exposes a unique sense of agency which derives both from their identity as pious Muslim women and from their legal status as refugees, excluded from the political arena of citizenship. Their agency reflects their need to maneuver between family life, motherhood and religious piety on the one hand, and their life as stateless women in a refugee camp, lacking any civic or legal status, on the other.

Authors

• Ayala Paz, Ben-Gurion University

• Rebecca Kook, Ben-Gurion University