Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe

By Elisabeth Becker

Mosques in the Metropolis offers a unique look into two of Europe’s largest mosques and the communities they support. Elisabeth Becker provides a complex picture of Islam in Europe at a particularly fraught time, shedding light on both experiences of deep and enduring marginalization and the agency of Muslim populaces. She balances individual Muslim voices with the historical and structural forces at play, revealing, in all their complexity, the people for whom the mosques are centers of religion and community life. As her interlocutors come to life in the pages, the metropolis emerges as a space alternative to the nation in which they can contend with degrading images of Islam and Muslims. Ultimately Becker insists that caste is a crucial lens through which to view Muslims in Europe, and through this lens she critiques what she perceives as the failures of European pluralism. To amplify her point, she brings Jewish history and twentieth-century Jewish thought into the conversation directly, drawing on scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Zygmunt Bauman, and Hannah Arendt to describe both Jewish and Muslim life and marginality. By challenging Eurocentric notions, from “progress” to “civility,” “tolerance” to “freedom” and “equality, what is at stake, Becker insists, is the possibility of a truly plural Europe.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Sep 20, 2021
• ISBN: 9780226781785

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Cover Page for Mosques in the Metropolis

Mosques in the Metropolis

Mosques in the Metropolis

Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe

Elisabeth Becker

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago & London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2021 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations in critical articles and reviews. For more information, contact the University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th St., Chicago, IL 60637.

Published 2021

Printed in the United States of America

30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21    1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78150-1 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78164-8 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-78178-5 (e-book)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226781785.001.0001

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Becker, Elisabeth (Sociologist), author.

Title: Mosques in the metropolis : incivility, caste, and contention in Europe / Elisabeth Becker.

Description: Chicago ; London : The University of Chicago Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020051231 | ISBN 9780226781501 (cloth) | ISBN 9780226781648 (paperback) | ISBN 9780226781785 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: East London Mosque (London, England) | Şehitlik Moschee (Berlin, Germany) | Islam—Europe. | Cities and towns—Europe—Religious aspects—Islam. | Muslims—Germany—Berlin. | Muslims—England—London.

Classification: LCC BP65.A1 B43 2021 | DDC 297.094—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051231

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

For my late father, Ted E. Becker Jr., who taught me how to love cities in their fullness of life, their sparrows as much as edifices, how to tell—that is, how to hear—other people’s stories, and the beauty of writing to the muddled sound of garbage trucks and waking birds, searching between the angels at dawn.

So I have erected one of his dwellings, with books as the building stones, before you.

Walter Benjamin

Contents

Preface: Spirit Meeting Stone

1   The European Metropolis: Where Doors and Walls Meet

2   Caste, or the Order of Things Defied

3   Kaaba in Papier-Mâché: Inside the Şehitlik Mosque

4   Ordinary Angels: Şehitlik Mosque and the Metropolis

5   Messianic Horizon: Inside the East London Mosque

6   Hope, Interrupted: The East London Mosque and the Metropolis

7   Unsettled Europe: On the Threshold of Remembrance

Afterword: The Memory of Trees

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface: Spirit Meeting Stone

Raised in New York City, I have always experienced the shape of the metropolis as home: a place that knows little darkness, and where the lights in all of their phantasmic power obscure the stars. Beyond bright lights and twenty-four-hour bodegas, I have become intimately familiar with the metropolis as a place of myriad cultures, languages, and longings—its human density and speed uniting us strangers and, just as quickly, pulling us apart.

Snippets of the world live and lived together on our small and glowing island, bobbing between two murky rivers. For this reason, my childhood in Morningside Heights, a thin strip of upper Manhattan, was just as—if differently—idyllic as those of my friends who grew up in small towns and rural villages. In the 1980s and 1990s, everyone in my neighborhood, from the fishermen on 125th Street risking their lives to eat their catch to the dry cleaner who handed off gossip along with freshly pressed clothes, knew one another’s names. The spirit of our neighborhood was embracing, reflected in its body of wide avenues hugged by two verdant parks, its churches rising from the ground to split the sky. I rode the subway from the 110th and Cathedral Parkway station and frequented its namesake, Cathedral St. John the Divine, close to my home, where saints looked on with wary eyes; there candles burned and choirs sang, pigeons perched on the gaping mouths of gargoyles at rest, closing their wings. Peacocks in the adjacent gardens splayed their majestic tails beside a peace fountain, presided over by Archangel Michael, his own wings open towards the sky. I often watched these peacocks from across the street, sat at the Hungarian Pastry Shop, a neighborhood institution owned by a Greek family, managed by Ethiopian New Yorkers, and filled with Columbia University students fanning their faces with literature as they looked for love. Something about that space on my childhood street—its heavy, refillable coffee mugs, its refusal to install internet or outlets, its vista of cathedral and rainbow bird tails beside whizzing cars—made me know in childhood, as I still know today, that the city could speak to me from deep in its soul.

New York was never, to me, a lonely city, with its trees inhabited by fowl and its buildings by the globe. Yet it was always far more than a place of settlers and settledness, an island of comings and goings, marked by Lady Liberty in her robes of rusty green, perched on her own island in the bay. Evidence of the diverse crossings that made the city was also etched onto the face of my neighborhood—from the Lebanese grocers to the Albanian Kosovar refugees who pointed out their fatigued brothers, in both senses of the word, on the cover of the daily news. It was, and is "in so many ways, the exilic city par excellence," words written by the late Edward Said, long a resident of the same neighborhood.¹ New York City not only offered respite to, but was built by so many experiencing exile and estrangement, with their unbridgeable rifts and wounds unhealed. Another local resident in exile, the late Hannah Arendt, was perhaps one of the greatest thinkers on such estrangement, and appeared throughout my life, in books gifted to me by mentors and family members, prose that I imagine written where she once lived, on the bending Riverside Drive corner not far from my own.

Of the many faces of displacement in the city, I knew most intimately my Jewish neighbors whose parents and grandparents fled the Holocaust. My own Jewish family members migrated from Europe earlier, and my late grandfather, Benjamin, owned a button store in New York City’s Garment District. According to our family stories, he made the first plastic button in the city. During my research, when I came across the commemorative Stolperstein (stumbling stone) of Eduard Salinger, who sold fabrics in Berlin before being murdered by the Third Reich, or the park memorializing Altab Ali, a textile worker murdered by white nationalists in East London, I thought of our lives interwoven by the fates of fabrics, the colorful threads of great metropoles.

Not only Benjamin, Eduard, and Altab, but all urbanites today and yesterday are connected by the threads of the city. In fact, most on Manhattan island live within the bounds of an eruv, a Jewish ritual enclosure made out of thin, almost translucent wire attached to eighteen miles of utility poles. The point of the eruv is to mark the space of home, so that Jews do not violate the rule of carrying things in public on the Sabbath. Few of us have ever heard of it, and it’s almost impossible to see with the naked eye. While there are no eruvin in the neighborhoods at the center of this book, East London and West Berlin, the markings of home—Jewish, Muslim, and many other forms—abound in both. And although Morningside Heights is geographically distant from metropolitan Europe, they remain intertwined through the threads of estranged and exiled lives.

From Manhattan’s cathedral spires and fishing docks to Europe’s diverse metropolitan mosques, I have carried a specific vantage point endowed by my own Jewishness and my own urbanity into the writing of this book, the former of which Zygmunt Bauman describes as always on the outside even when inside, examining the familiar as if it was a foreign object of study, asking questions no one else asked, questioning the unquestionable and challenging the unchallengeable.² The latter, my urbanity, has been as vital as the former, my Jewishness—both forms of belonging, ways of being in the world—to this text. Or perhaps, they are really one and the same. As Leonard Barkan writes in Berlin for Jews, a tragically beautiful love letter to the city, Jews are fundamentally cityfolk, relegated to this position through restrictions on owning property, limitations on livelihoods, and segregation in ethnic enclaves. In the case of Italians, he explains, if you have a city for a surname—Ancona, Milano, Bassano—you are probably a Jew.³

CHAPTER 1

The European Metropolis: Where Doors and Walls Meet

Thinking the city moves towards thinking the world.

Henri Lefebvre¹

This is the story of flesh, bone, spirit, and stone. It is the story of two mosques, and their inhabitants called to the European metropolis by countries that wanted their bodies but never their souls. "Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen—We called for labor, but people came instead," Swiss writer Max Frisch famously wrote of the post–World War II (WWII) wave of immigration in 1965.² It is the story of the shells they fashioned to protect and cultivate those souls.

I begin this book on the threshold between what is, what was, and what might have been. I am standing where the Puerta de Moros once stood in Madrid, Spain, off of Cava Baja, the street where I reside. Destroyed in 1412 during the Reconquista, this door to the city and its surrounding plaza were rebuilt a century later.³ The door is now long gone, the plaza dotted with coffeeshops, bakeries, and discount clothing stores: a center of commerce and social communion, where the city’s residents sip café con leche and chew on brined sausage, charred pepitas, and oranges ripened by the sun. Yet each street evokes a sense of suspension in time, the past etched into the architectural face of the metropolis. As I walk through the neighborhood, I imagine the city in another time, this district once inhabited by Muslims and Jews. Although it is only by chance, by circumstance, it feels fitting for myself, a Jewish ethnographer of European mosques, to live and to pause here.

My book project is thus born, paradoxically, in the very place where my research cannot come to fruition. It is my failure as an ethnographer in Spain, itself a geographical threshold on the southern edge of Europe, where the straits of Gibraltar meet the land, that allows me to see and to feel this history, stretching from the present in a temporal backbend towards the Reconquista. This book begins to take its shape here in early 2015. It is, more precisely, early January, the week after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, when I come to recognize the deep and enduring liminality of Muslim lives. Uncertainty is alive across Europe. Muslim men and women rally at Atocha, the main train station in Madrid, holding signs above their heads: Islam equals peace; I am a Muslim not a terrorist. There is a certain unsettledness not only in their words on this square, but across the city. In its streets, its stores, its mosques, a condensation of fear hovers in the air.

I have set out to comparatively study three capital city mosques across Europe, in London, Berlin, and Madrid, to understand both the constraints and the interstitial opportunities endowed by marginality on Muslim bodies and institutions. While the unraveling of my Spanish case is both sudden and unsettling, it is preceded by premonition-like moments. First, I cannot find a research site. In the largest mosques of the city, women claim that no activities take place, and security guards man entrances dually surveilled by video cameras. In a small mosque close to my home, those who have agreed to meet me never arrive. When I ask about the city’s mosques, non-Muslim city dwellers shake their heads, advising me to travel south to Córdoba, once heart of the Umayyad Dynasty in Spain (756–1031).⁴ Later, my interlocutors in both Berlin and London will tell me their own stories of Córdoba, the prohibition of prayer they encountered upon entering the Mosque-Cathedral. I went to Córdoba on my honeymoon and a guard took me aside and warned me ‘you cannot pray here,’ says Imani, a medical resident who I meet one afternoon at the East London Mosque (ELM). Tuba, a law student who leads tours at the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin, similarly explains,

I had the weirdest experience. I entered the Mezquita and literally a guard in the section came close to me and walked by me. When I left his vicinity, someone else came, then someone else came. So I was accompanied the entire duration of my stay in the Mezquita by someone in close range, and I had a feeling they were looking out to see if I was attempting to pray.

In her ethnography of Muslim encounters in Granada, Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar writes about deep historical memories of the Moors, inscribed as much into the bodies of edifices as into the collective memory of Spain’s southern cities.⁵ Chris Lowney calls this a vanished world.⁶ Yet in southern Spain, as in the Spanish capital, we can still see—and feel—the reverberations of this history, the blurring of boundaries between present and past. The unraveling of my research in Spain does not occur in Córdoba nor in Granada, however, but in a nearby southern city, where I am suddenly enmeshed in a day of questioning by those who appear to be covert security forces. They simply cannot make sense of my interest in Spanish Muslims. When I call the United States (US) embassy, diplomats castigate me without pause for trusting Muslim communities, and warn me not to join a terrorist organization. I am suddenly caught in the web of uncertainty and surveillance that constrains Muslims’ everyday lives, the labyrinth of the minotaur-like security state—part monster, part man—guarding a blinding maze of sacrifice.

The next day, I return to Madrid. In place of ancient doors opening to the city, I now see the walls, just as old, closing it off. And I find myself at one insurmountable, immaterial wall: that of Muslims deemed uncivil. In the central neighborhood of Lavapiés, I watch West African refugees calling out the name of Allah, beating drums in rhythm with their hymns of discontent. In my own neighborhood, once inhabited by Muslims and Jews, I notice remnants of a history that castigated both: from forced conversions to expulsions and murder determined by a single drop of Muslim or Jewish blood. Standing on the Plaza Mayor, an early trade market and center of executions during the Inquisition, I now see something that I had somehow overlooked: depictions of this history carved into its lightposts, the strata of the metropolis inscribed onto its modern body in miniature form. The city as palimpsest.⁷

My experience in Spain splits the skin of its capital open, revealing threads of continuity that weave the present to the past in its upright and crumbling body of iron welded to glass and stone. Residents speak of the Moors as if alive in the metropolis, while ignoring the architectural remnants of Islamic empire buried all around us, right beneath our feet (Madrid’s Royal Palace, for example, erected at the very site where the Alcazar stood from the ninth century until 1734).⁸ As I walk through Madrid one last time and night sets in, the city comes alive. I visit the Fountain of the Fallen Angel in Retiro Park, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost.⁹ I continue south of the park, entering the Barrio de las Letras, and glance down at the ground. My eyes together with my feet settle on a sonnet written by seventeenth-century poet and novelist Francisco de Quevedo. Inscribed onto the cobblestone streets in gold, it begins with the words "I looked upon my native country’s walls." Setting out in Madrid with a quest to find the ghost of a door built by the Moors, my time in Spain ends with a sonnet to the walls of the Spanish imaginary. I am acutely aware in this moment, in a city so bright that I cannot see the stars, that the door and the wall can never be pulled apart; they meet and unite at the site of the threshold, a liminal point of entry, exit, history, and new beginning.

Metropolis as Labyrinth and as Palimpsest

Stars are invoked at the conclusion of the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—to symbolize coming into the light, into the presence of God.¹⁰ The modern metropolis obscures the stars, just as it often obscures the lives of its many residents.¹¹ Much is in fact obscured by the city, with its incongruent passageways and glass that cuts into rubble. Still more can be gleaned from its daily life as a built environment made into home, where physical nearness and affective remoteness bind private and public lives.

The very word polis, denoting the ancient Greek city-state, references the form of the walled city, with fortifications built as a physical barrier to entry or attack. The European metropolis is both ancient and future-looking, inward- and outward-facing, today metaphorically walled off in the imaginary rather than surrounded by material walls. I primarily use the word metropolis to reference the urban arenas at the heart of this book, drawing on its two meanings: (1) mother city, signifying a city of import, and (2) the colonial or imperial core.¹² The term metropolis is often employed in reference to cities as economic hubs during the height of the colonial era. I instead draw attention to the ways in which metropoles are today cultural hubs in Europe’s uncertain postcolonial/postimperial age, and an evocative microcosm of global struggles over how plurality is bounded and lived. The mosque in the metropolis invokes both the colonial/imperial and postcolonial/postimperial connotations of the term, as at once spatial, temporal, and cultural threshold.

When I leave Madrid, I do not go home, but instead to Berlin to continue my research. As the plane lands in the German capital, I am left ruminating over the place, and limits, of the modern European metropolis. This soon draws me to the work of Walter Benjamin. Fascinated by modern cities, how they intertwine present and past, Benjamin’s collected works on Berlin and Paris are often read as a manifesto on the failures of capitalism. They can alternatively be read as critical theory¹³ written from a position of liminality, from exile, or as a love letter to the fragmented form of the city itself. Benjamin laments, The pathos of this project . . . I find every city beautiful.¹⁴ It is not only splendor, however, that Benjamin finds in urban life, but also a sense of betrayal: his childhood Berlin—the city god itself—in ruins, and the shattered Paris of his dreams.¹⁵

The modern metropolis emerged in staggered timelines across Europe from early to late modernity. Like the nation-state, it has always functioned as both idea and material reality. In Thinking with History, Carl Schorske traces the idea of the city in European thought, evoking a productive tension between the city as virtue and the city as vice. For Voltaire, nineteenth-century London was particularly virtuous, allowing men to transcend social hierarchies by bringing enlightened reason and taste to the masses; finding lost paradise in the German city of the same era, philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte came to understand the city as an enlightened, civilizing agent of the nation.¹⁶ In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, intellectual social reformers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, shifted from the city as virtue to the city as vice in their writings on urban poverty.¹⁷ As a geographical condensation of imperial remnants, aftermath, and Muslim afterlives, today the metropolis rises as a lived form suspended between virtue and vice, the devastations and utopic strivings of European modernity. It rises as both palimpsest, a text to be read, with the traces of its many pasts never fully washed away, and labyrinth to carefully tread.¹⁸

The concurrent possibilities and shortfalls of modernity come alive in the metropolitan everyday, whether in the Parisian arcades through which Benjamin once wandered, or the mosques in London and Berlin, where I root my research. Rather than a time-centric understanding, e.g., as post-Enlightenment and temporally progressive or a distinct juncture/state, I focus on the dialectical construction of European modernity, seeking order and coherence through violently upheld hierarchies. In Eurocentrism and Modernity, Enrique Dussel argues that modernity is a European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content.¹⁹ In Dussel’s understanding, modernity is created through not only contrast but imagined superiority, suggesting hierarchy, as well as its lived repercussions, including violent projects of domination that span the globe. Zygmunt Bauman argues that it is modernity’s rationality—specifically, the problem of order in what he terms a gardening state—that creates both impetus and opportunity for violence.²⁰ Modernity’s sacrificial-mythical character, with its labyrinths and its minotaur, forges insiders and outsiders, silence, and, according to Arendt, absence of full-belonging.²¹ For my interlocutors, constituents²² of European mosques, this absence is both acute and enduring.

Within this prism of modernity, the European metropolis is not only the magnetic once-nucleus of empire, with its knotted and complex histories of power and marginality, but it is also a center of resistance against it as such.²³ And while it appears on the surface as the inner stratum of a set of nesting dolls, inside of the European state and the broader European imaginary, it remains a locus of community life and belonging in its own right. Like the sun, the city rises as a point of orientation for human organization and governance, while also a place of self-determination and defiance, again and again. Today, the city has risen again.

The mosque in the metropolis provides a window into how Muslims, cast as others inside of the geography while outside of the imaginary of Europe, find and root themselves in place—whether to the city itself or through the city to translocal polities. The idea of the translocal rather than the transnational pushes against the hegemony of a nation-state paradigm, with the nation-state largely absent from my interlocutors’ reflections on geographical and emotional ties.²⁴ This translocality causes discomfort in the societies and states at hand, a perception of transgression notably applied to many trans discourses and projects—seen as unsettling coherence, while in fact exposing long-present unsettledness.²⁵ As Jeffrey Alexander articulates in his theory of the civil sphere, states are amoral entities that provide order, not justice; they seek domination, not solidarity.²⁶ The mosque in the metropolis thus offers comfort and opportunity to these at times legal, but not cultural citizens,²⁷ as a phronetic space (in the Aristotelian sense of phronesis, meaning moral agency consisting of practical, ethical knowledge that feeds into action) concerned with solidarity and justice.²⁸ As such, it becomes a locus of crossing, making (the Aristotelian term, poiesis), and dwelling for those perceived as strangers in Europe today.²⁹

Ebrahim Moosa, a contemporary scholar of Islamic thought, sees poiesis—the craft of imagination and inventive making and creating—in and from the threshold position as imperative for critical Muslim thought. I invoke the notion of poiesis, as well as sympoiesis (making together) and autopoiesis (making apart) to analyze this craft—that of the stranger as maker—both in and from the sociospatial threshold position of the mosque.³⁰ The stranger will not be considered here in the colloquial sense of the term but instead vis-à-vis Georg Simmel’s specific conceptualization:

A stranger is not a wanderer, who may come today and leave tomorrow. He comes today—and stays. He is a potential wanderer: although he has not moved on from the society, he has not quite shed the freedom to stay or go, either. He remains within a specific place, but he has not always belonged to it, and so he carries into it qualities that do not, could not, belong there.

As Simmel asserts, the history of the European Jews offers a classic example [of the stranger].³¹ Calling forth this Simmelian concept eighty years later, Bauman writes,

The stranger’s unredeemable sin is, therefore, the incompatibility between his presence and other presences fundamental to the world order; his simultaneous assault on several crucial oppositions instrumental in the incessant effort of ordering. It is this sin which throughout modern history rebounds in the constitution of the stranger as the bearer and embodiment of incongruity . . . The stranger is, for this reason, the bane of modernity.³²

Drawing from his own sociotemporal location in the post-Holocaust era, Bauman builds on the Jewish exemplar of the Simmelian stranger through his theory of the conceptual Jew: the prototypical ethnic-religious-cultural stranger forged by modern European society.³³ This stranger, Bauman argues, is not only object, however, but active subject; the stranger rebels.³⁴ Contemporary social theorist Richard Sennett similarly turns away from subjectivity (the stranger made by Christian/European discourse) to agency (the stranger as maker). Sennett theorizes the epitome of the stranger as the culturally displaced dweller of the modern city who embraces ambiguity as a springboard for creative self-transformation and production in her urban environment.³⁵ To recognize Muslims as makers in the metropolis, more than today’s conceptual other in the European project of modernity, brings into focus how they—included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way—critique and contest marginality.³⁶

In the text that follows, I turn to how Muslims make sense of, and a place for themselves in the European metropolis in relation to, and also in spite of, what I term an undercaste status, conceptually fleshed out in the subsequent chapter. To be rooted is perhaps the most important and the least recognized need of the human soul, writes Jewish French mystic Simone Weil.³⁷ But how do you root yourself on uneven ground? Sennett portrays the modern city as an opportunity not to return to clear-cut categories and boundaries, but rather to embrace plurality in individual and social body.³⁸ Like Sennett, my interlocutors see and grasp an opportunity for the transformation of self and community in the mosque in the metropolis, questioning superimposed hierarchies of belonging. In so doing, they reflect St. Augustine’s idea that godliness can very much be experienced in the earthly city—the City of God inflected in the City of Man.³⁹

Mosque as Threshold

Thinking about mosques as dynamic threshold spaces in the European metropolis, concrete and grounded, but not stagnant architectural articulations, shows that buildings are never complete; they are, rather, continuously made and remade over time. As Benjamin asserts, "The threshold must be carefully distinguished from the boundary. A Schwelle is a zone. Transformation, passage, wave action are in the word schwellen, swell."⁴⁰ The mosque in the European metropolis is a threshold space in two regards: (1) as a dynamic entryway into Muslim life in Europe and (2) as an institution that is passageway or zone between the private and public spheres. Yet the mosque is also a temporal threshold, transcending modernity as an era resulting from linear time-as-progress, i.e., improvement over the past through the Reformation, the Enlightenment (including the so-called civilizing process), and the French Revolution.⁴¹ It is an architectural form straddling what is and what was, built to evoke not only an orientation towards the future, in the form of paradise, but also an invocation of paradise past.

The mosque as threshold thus challenges taken-for-granted understandings about space and time, and therefore becomes relegated to the social periphery. The occlusion of this ‘periphery’ . . . leads the major contemporary thinkers of the ‘center’ into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity, writes Dussel; Jürgen Habermas, for instance, conceptualizes modernity as exclusively European, ignoring Europe’s development against, and through the exploitation of, its peripheries—many the ancestral lands of Muslim populaces in Europe today.⁴² I am aware that the language of periphery and core threatens to cast this subject in light of the dominant European imaginary, and take seriously so-called geographical and/or cultural peripheries, like mosques in the European metropolis, as moral, social, and epistemological centers in their own right. I thus herein challenge and deconstruct many Eurocentric notions, from enlightenment to progress, civility, tolerance, freedom, and equality.

Betwixt and Between: Research in the Mosque

From a state of dually geographical and cultural otherness, postcolonial migrants and guest workers began the sanctioned crossing of physical boundaries to Europe in the late 1950s, cast up on the shores of strange lands, chased into the cracks and crevices of strange economies, as Arendt wrote of Jews before them.⁴³ Initial migration to Europe paralleled widespread liberationist movements in the colonies. Emergent anticolonial nationalisms emphasized an explicit or implicit core Muslim identity for the nation, mobilized against the colonizing Christian Other.⁴⁴ The majority of Muslims in the UK hail from South Asia (largely from Pakistan and Bangladesh); according to the 2011 British census, over a million ethnically Pakistani individuals and over 450,000 Bengali⁴⁵ individuals live in the UK, just over half of the latter residing in London.⁴⁶ At the same time, guest worker programs instated to address post-WWII labor shortages spanned from 1945 to the mid-1970s, reaching across the continent (e.g., to Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Sweden), with Turkey a primary sending country.⁴⁷ These individuals arrived to an uncertain future in the European metropolis. Today, the vast majority of Muslims in Germany are ethnically Turkish; according to a 2009 Pew estimate, 75 percent of the then–four million Muslims. The Muslim populace has grown to about five million since the 2015–16 refugee migration.⁴⁸

The social evolution from provisional to permanent settlement over the past half century, from the invisibility to visibility of mosques, paralleled significant changes in citizenship laws, as legal revisions across Europe expanded access to citizenship, which coincided with an exponential increase in the number of representative, purpose-built (made to look like and be utilized as) mosques.⁴⁹ The building of these mosques emerged from Muslims’ demand for dignity in the face of widely institutionalized socioeconomic disadvantage, a space in which to affirm their worth . . . a space for expressing their own identity and competence.⁵⁰

I chose to center my project in mosques as concrete instantiations of Muslims’ collective place in modern Europe, in spite of their continued cultural marginality. I build in and out from previous research on mosques. For instance, while Saba Mahmood’s formative work on the women’s piety movement in Egyptian mosques takes seriously their role as centers for the co-cultivation of piety and shifting social relations, I am interested in how piety, rooted in the Islamic epistemological tradition, is fostered at two specific institutions—the Şehitlik Mosque and the East London Mosque.⁵¹ I explore how the knowledge endowed in pious projects of the self and collective moves outwards from these mosque communities, shaping the relationships between the Muslims who constitute them and broader European civic life.⁵²

My research took place over thirty months, from 2013 to 2017 at the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin and at the East London Mosque, including the one month in Madrid with which I began this book. I chose to study these specific mosques for numerous reasons: their symbolic representation of ethnic groups (Turkish and Bengali); the size of the populations they serve; their importance for Islamic rituals and rites of passage in each metropolis; and the role that they play in society-wide conversations about Muslims/Islam in Berlin and Germany, London and the UK. In addition to the notable size of the populations they serve, and their parallel physical size (the East London Mosque accommodating seven thousand and the Şehitlik Mosque five thousand worshippers), they are hubs for Muslim life in each metropolis, providing religious education, preparation for religious rites such as the hajj pilgrimage and burials, and a space for celebrations, including high holidays and marriages. Both have also been at the center of public debates regarding Islam and Muslims in the cities and states at hand.

In Berlin, I resided largely in the Bavarian Quarter (Bayerisches Viertel), once hub of Jewish intellectual life, with the final stage of writing this book undertaken in the Barn Quarter (Scheunenviertel) of the Spandauer Vorstadt, long a Jewish area of the city. In the Bavarian Quarter, I first encountered the Stolpersteine (stumbling stones) of Jewish city-dwellers past—small commemorative brass squares laid into the ground outside of what were once their homes. Stumbling stones, in contrast to stepping stones that lead somewhere in ascendance, cause a person to pause, if not trip or fall. An undeniable insertion in an ordinary path, they are in the most concrete of forms question marks embedded in the sidewalks that city-dwellers tread. When I began my research in Berlin in 2013, I found myself both literally and figuratively stumbling upon a Jewish past. It began with the touch of a lone tile, a stone inscribed by the U-Bahn station at Viktoria-Luise-Platz.⁵³ Here lived Selma Lehmann, born Peiser 1877, it read, deported on July 17, 1941, Kowno Fort IX, murdered on November 25, 1941; I paused at this particular stone when I saw Selma, my grandmother’s name. Such awareness of a Jewish past in the metropolis colored not only my neighborhoods in Berlin but also where I later resided in London’s East End—first close to Bethnal Green (formerly a hub of Jewish life) and thereafter Victoria Park Village (on the edge of Lauriston Park Cemetery, once a Jewish burial ground).

Through this suddenly intimate past, its nearness in place if not time, I made my way to the writings of Jewish thinkers, many forced into exile during the Third Reich—Hermann Cohen, Georg Simmel, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, Zygmunt Bauman, Herbert Gans, and Richard Sennett —forming time-hopping relationships with figures from the past.⁵⁴ Reading these thinkers while researching metropolitan mosque communities became, in a way, my very own act of sympoiesis—making together with the living and the dead.⁵⁵ While the fate of Muslims in Europe in no way parallels that of Jews, these two religious minorities share a history of negative differentiation, partial inclusion and partial exclusion, as well as the collapsing of their otherness into a totalizing ethnic and racialized religio-cultural form.⁵⁶ Like their Jewish counterparts before them (and to a degree, again, beside them), Muslims in Europe assert themselves in the face of cultural subordination; they seek rootedness as Muslims in the cities at hand. To be clear, in my research I saw no inherent or essentialized similarities between Muslims and Jews but rather continuity in the European subject as marginalizing, unbrokenness in a chain of negative self-differentiation. And in facing the so-called Muslim question, I heard not only the echoes of the so-called Jewish question, but the scream of what Gil Andijar terms the European question.⁵⁷

In approaching this question of Europe, Anne Norton and Anya Topolski lucidly caution that the ways in which Europe has defined itself vis-à-vis differentiation from Jews in the centuries prior to the Holocaust and how it defines itself vis-à-vis differentiation from Muslims today should not be overlooked. Mine is thus an argument about Europe’s enduring struggles to create an identity, which, as in Norton’s and Topolski’s analyses, invoke hierarchy rather than horizontal community.⁵⁸ Benjamin writes of the glass window mirror, project[ing] the interior lives of the Parisian bourgeois into the metropolis; Muslims like Jews provide a metaphorical window mirror, seeing inside of while also reflecting the interiors of European modernity.⁵⁹

From a critical reading to a critical writing of Europe, this book was thus born out of an act of coproduction between me and my interlocutors, in person and in texts, to whom I owe an unpayable debt.⁶⁰ In any critical reading or writing of Europe, one must account for the ongoing violence perpetrated by security states, a violence cast in the language of protecting the body