In Germany, Muslims grow apart By Peter Schneider The New York Times FRIDAY, DECEMBER 2, 2005
On the night of Feb. 7, 2005, Hatun Surucu, 23, was killed on her way to a bus stop in Berlin by several shots to the head and upper body, fired at point-blank range. An investigation showed that months before, she had reported one of her brothers to the police for threatening her. Now three of her five brothers are on trial for murder. According to the prosecutor, the oldest of them, 25, acquired the weapon; the middle brother, 24, lured his sister to the scene of the crime; and the youngest, 18, shot her. The trial began on Sept. 21. Ayhan Surucu, the youngest brother, had confessed to the murder and claimed that he had done it without any help. According to Seyran Ates, a lawyer of Turkish descent, it is generally the youngest who are chosen by a family council to carry out such murders, or to claim responsibility for them. German juvenile law sets a maximum sentence of 10 years' imprisonment for murder, and the offender has the prospect of being released after serving two-thirds of the sentence. Hatun Surucu grew up in Berlin as the daughter of Turkish Kurds. When she finished eighth grade, her parents took her out of school. Shortly after that she was taken to Turkey and married to a cousin. Later she separated from her husband and returned to Berlin, pregnant. At age 17 she gave birth to a son, Can. She moved into a women's shelter and completed the work for her middle-school certificate. By 2004 she had finished a vocational-training program to become an electrician. The young mother began to enjoy herself. She put on makeup, wore her hair unbound, went dancing and adorned herself with rings, necklaces and bracelets. Then, just days before she was to receive her journeyman's diploma, she was killed. Evidently, in the eyes of her brothers, Hatun Surucu's capital crime was that, living in Germany, she had begun living like a German. In a statement to the Turkish newspaper Zaman, one brother noted that she had stopped wearing her head scarf, that she refused to go back to her family and that she had declared her intent to "seek out her own circle of friends." It is still unclear whether anyone ordered her murdered. Often in such cases it is the father of the family who decides about the punishment. But Ates has seen in her legal practice cases in which the mother has a leading role: mothers who were forced to marry pushing the same fate on their daughters. "The mothers are looking for solidarity by demanding that their daughters submit to the same hardship and suffering," said Necla Kelek, a Turkish-German author who has interviewed dozens of women about the topic. Meanwhile, Surucu's two elder brothers have papered their cell with pictures of their dead sister. There is a new wall rising in Berlin. Looking over that wall, one sees the parallel world of the Islamic suburbs. It's a world in which women, unlike some Muslim women in Europe who have risen to expansive lives, are still subject to arranged marriages and the control of their families. To cross this wall you have to go to the city's central and northern districts, to Kreuzberg, Neukölln and Wedding, and you will find yourself in a world unknown to most Berliners. Until recently, most held to the illusion that living together with some 300,000 Muslim immigrants and children of immigrants was basically working. Take Neukölln. The district is proud of the fact that it houses citizens of 165 nations. Some 40 percent of these, by far the largest group, are Turks and Kurds; the second-largest group consists of Arabs. Racially motivated attacks occur regularly in Brandenburg, the former East German state that surrounds Berlin, where foreigners are few, accounting for only about 2 percent of the population. But such attacks hardly ever happen in Neukölln. Stefanie Vogelsang, a councilwoman from Neukölln, says that residents talk about "our Turks" in an unmistakably friendly way, although they are less friendly when it comes to Arabs, who arrived after the Turks, often illegally. But tolerance of Muslim immigrants began to change in the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001. Parallel to the declarations of "unconditional solidarity" with Americans by the German majority, rallies of another sort were taking place in Neukölln and Kreuzberg. Bottle rockets were set off from building courtyards, a poor man's fireworks: two rockets here, three rockets there. Altogether, hundreds of rockets were shooting skyward in celebration, just as most Berliners were searching for words to express their horror. For many German residents in Neukölln and Kreuzberg, Vogelsang recalls, that was the first time they stopped to wonder who their neighbors really were. When a broader German public began concerning itself with the parallel Muslim world arising in its midst, it was primarily thanks to three female authors, three rebellious Muslims: Ates, the author of "The Great Journey Into the Fire"; Kelek, who wrote "The Foreign Bride"; and Serap Cileli, who penned "We're Your Daughters, Not Your Honor." About the same age, all three grew up in Germany; they speak German better than many Germans and are educated and successful. But each had to risk much for her freedom. Kelek was threatened by her father with a hatchet when she refused to greet him in a respectful manner. Ates survived a shooting attack on the women's shelter that she founded in Kreuzberg. Cileli, at 13, tried to kill herself to escape her first forced marriage. Later, she was taken to Turkey and married against her will, then she returned to Germany with two children from that marriage and took refuge in a women's shelter to escape her father's violence. Taking off from their own experiences, the three women describe the grim lives and sadness of Muslim women in Germany. Their books report almost unbelievable details that most Germans did not care to know. They describe an everyday life of oppression, isolation, imprisonment and brutal corporal punishment for Muslim women and girls in Germany. For the young Turkish women living in Germany, forced marriages are not uncommon, Ates says. In the wake of these forced marriages often come violence and rape. One side effect of forced marriage is the psychological violation of the men involved. Although they are the presumed beneficiaries of the custom, men are likewise forbidden to marry whom they want. A groom who chooses his own wife faces threats, too. In such cases, according to Ates and Cileli, the groom as well as the bride must go underground to escape families' revenge. Heavily veiled women wearing long coats even in summer are becoming an increasingly familiar sight in German Muslim neighborhoods. According to Kelek's research, they are often under-age girls who have been bought, often for a handsome payment, in the Turkish heartland villages of Anatolia by mothers whose sons in Germany are ready to marry. The girls are flown in, and "with every new imported bride," Kelek says, "the parallel society grows." Ates says, "Turkish men who wish to marry and live by Shariah can do so with far less impediment in Berlin than in Istanbul." Before the murder of Surucu, there were enough warnings to engage the Germans in a debate about the parallel society growing in their midst. There have been 49 known "honor crimes," most involving female victims, during the past nine years, including 16 in Berlin alone. Yet it is possible that the murder of Hatun Surucu never would have made the headlines at all but for three Muslim students at a high school near where she was killed in the Tempelhof district. The three openly approved of the murder. Shortly before that, the same students had bullied a fellow pupil because her clothing was "not in keeping with the religious regulations." Volker Steffens, the school's director, decided to make the matter public in a letter to students, parents and teachers. During 50 years of continuing immigration, Germans tried to tell themselves that Germany was not a country of immigrants. Suddenly, the obvious could no longer be denied. Alarmed by the honor killings, Germans have begun to investigate the parallel society: a society proud of its isolation; purist and traditional yet, in its own terms, creative, forward-looking and often contemptuous of the German host society. The recent riots in France have increased the sense of alarm. German politicians and experts lined up to point out why such riots are unlikely in Berlin, Munich, Stuttgart or Hamburg. They claimed that young Muslims in Germany - although up to 50 percent of them are unemployed - had full access to the welfare state and were not isolated in high-rise projects as in the suburbs of Paris. Yet there was an undertone of panic. At stake is German confidence that their nation can continue as it had been: integrating immigrants without an integration policy, remaining true to the traditional German identity and preserving the reassuring post-1945 chronology of advancing modernism. After 1945, Germany, in the process of reconstruction, needed great numbers of workers and initiated recruitment campaigns in the poor countries of Europe and along the Mediterranean rim. The arrival of the 100,000th immigrant worker in the 1950s was cause for celebration; the exhausted man climbed out of a train at a German station and was immediately handed a check. But from the beginning, the invitation came with a certain reservation. It was no accident that the foreign workers were called gastarbeiter, or guest workers. Guests were expected to leave after a while. It did not work out that way. Max Frisch, a Swiss author, recognized the contradiction early on. "Workers were called," he wrote, "and human beings came." These were people who wanted their families with them, people who after a long working life wanted to spend their remaining years in Germany, people who wished to provide their children with an education and a better future. Germany did not give guest workers passports or the right to vote, but it did incorporate them into the social system and gave them the opportunity to advance. A result was the rise of a Muslim middle class - relatively broad in comparison with those in France or in England - contributing around 39 billion, nearly $50 billion, to the gross national product each year and billions to the national pension funds. But as the German economic miracle came to an end, the most important condition of this precarious idyll changed. Although active recruitment was stopped as early as 1973, more and more Turks and Kurds moved to Germany, in accord with a ruling on reuniting families. These parents, wives, husbands and children took their traditional lifestyle to the German streets. During the first years of immigration, Turkish women wore Western clothing; now, they favor flowery skirts, hand-knitted jackets and tightly bound head scarves. The trunks in which they had brought sacks full of dry beans, bulgur wheat and chickpeas metamorphosed into Turkish grocery stands. Traditional celebrations in the Muslim districts gradually became more like those back home. In the back rooms of the vegetable stands and halal butchers, prayer rooms sprang up, and in time became mosques. "The guest workers turned into Turks, and the Turks turned into Muslims," Kelek writes in 'The Foreign Bride." Growing unemployment in Germany - now 4.8 million people, roughly 12 percent of the work force - hit the Muslim immigrants doubly hard, especially the youth, who frequently drop out of school before obtaining a diploma. Kelek asked a group of "import brides" who had been living in Germany for years how they had prepared for their future in Germany. Their answer: incredulous laughter. Their answer was they had everything they needed, that they did not need the Germans. Those with no work and no future were looked after by the mosques, which increasingly became the most important place of communication. Inside their apartments, women resumed their traditional ways. Amid German refrigerators, televisions and mobile phones, a rural culture was celebrating its resurrection. Life in Anatolia could be more modern and secular than in the Muslim districts of Berlin. Many sociologists attribute the growth of a Muslim parallel society to the discouraging social circumstances of the third Muslim generation of immigrants, marked by high unemployment and high dropout or failure rates in public schools. But this explanation is incomplete. The Muslim middle class has long been following the same trend. Rental agencies that procure and prepare rooms for traditional Turkish weddings and circumcisions are among the most booming businesses in Kreuzberg and Neukölln. This conservative trend is likely to guide the next generation. For more than 20 years the Islamic Federation of Berlin, an umbrella organization of Islamic associations and mosque congregations, has struggled in the Berlin courts to secure Islamic religious instruction in local schools. In 2001 the federation finally succeeded. Since then, several thousand Muslim elementary-school students have been taught by teachers hired by the Islamic Federation and paid by the city of Berlin. City officials aren't in a position to control Islamic religious instruction. Often the teaching does not correspond to the lesson plan that was submitted in German. Citing linguistic deficiencies of the students, instructors frequently hold lessons in Turkish or Arabic, often behind closed doors. Since the introduction of Islamic religious instruction, the number of girls that attend school in head scarves has jumped, and school offices are inundated with petitions to excuse girls from swimming and sports as well as class outings. There are no reliable figures showing how many Muslims living in Germany regularly attend a mosque; the estimates vary between 40 and 50 percent. Vogelsang, the councilwoman, stresses that the majority of the mosques in Neukölln are as open to the world as they ever were. But the radical religious communities are gaining ground. Vogelsang points to the Imam Reza Mosque, whose home page, until a recent revision, praised the attacks of Sept. 11, designated women as second-class human beings and referred to gays and lesbians as animals. "And that kind of thing," she says, fuming, "is still defended by the left in the name of religious freedom." The three Turkish authors are mounting a frontal assault on that kind of relativism. They are fighting on two fronts: against Islamist oppression of women and its proponents, and against the guilt-ridden tolerance of liberal multiculturalists. "Before I can get to the Islamic patriarchs, I first have to work my way through these mountains of German guilt," Ates complains. It is women who suffer most from German sensitivity toward Islam. The three authors explicitly accuse German do-gooders of having left Muslim women in Germany in the lurch and call on them not to forget the women locked behind the closed windows when they rave about the multicultural districts. German immigration policies and liberal multiculturalism are only one side of the problem. The other side is the active refusal of many in the Muslim community to integrate. "The attacks in London," Ates says, "were in the eyes of many Muslims a successful slap in the face to the Western community. The next perpetrators will be children of the third and fourth immigrant generation, who, under the eyes of well-meaning politicians, will be brought up from birth to hate Western society." Peter Schneider is a German novelist and essayist. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ADVERTISER LINKS Hurricane Katrina Article in HealthDay Read it online. 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