The Politics of Believing and Belonging: Symbolic Boundary Making among Mosque-Going Immigrants and Refugees in Germany

This project explores the making and unmaking of the religious in relation to other grounds of categorical difference. More specifically, it analyses the relationship between religion, ethnicity, and nationalism by focusing on symbolic boundary formation among immigrants and refugees from Muslim-majority countries in Germany. Through mosque-based ethnographic research and in-depth interviews, the project scrutinizes how the multi-layered identities of these communities play out in religious settings. It especially focuses on why certain immigrant groups preserve and prioritize their ethno-nationalist identity to the extent that they form ‘ethnic mosques’ while others embrace Islam as a supranational identity and blend in as ‘Muslims’ only, downplaying their ethnic background. How do mosque-going immigrants and refugees draw the boundaries of religious and ethnic identities? To what extent do they see religion and ethnicity converging and to what extent do they see the two as diverging? Exploring these questions in detail, the project sheds light on the strategies Muslim immigrants use to navigate their way through the complex web of identity categories that become available to them upon their arrival in their host countries

Project staff: Dr. Gülay Türkmen Dervisoglu
Project publications:

Turkmen-Dervisoglu, Gulay. 2018. “Negotiating symbolic boundaries in conflict resolution: The interplay between religion and ethnicity in Turkey’s Kurdish conflict.” Qualitative Sociology (forthcoming).
Turkmen-Dervisoglu, Gulay. 2018. “Religion and civil War: The case of Turkey”. In: Djupe, Paul and Teczur, Gunes Murat (eds.). Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics and Religion (forthcoming).
Turkmen-Dervisoglu, Gulay and Kirbasoglu, Hayri. 2018. “Political Islam in Turkey”. In: Ozyurek, Esra, Altindis, Emrah and Ozpinar, Gaye (eds.). Authoritarianism and Resistance in Turkey: Conversations on Democratic and Social Challenges (forthcoming).