Background

Feminist, lawyer and women’s rights campaigner Seyran Ateş, author of The Multicultural Fallacy (Der Multikulti-Irrtum, Berlin, Ullstein Verlag, 2007) and the autobiography Große Reise ins Feuer (Berlin, Rowohlt Verlag, 2006, henceforth Ateş) has written fearlessly and eloquently about the problems of radicalisation of young Muslims, integration, the desperate isolation in which many Muslim women live, their oppression and social separatism (on both sides of the ethnic divide) in her home country, Germany, all of which are only too familiar in France and Britain as well.

From an early age, her language skills meant that she was expected to accompany adults on administrative business: "At offices and in doctors’ surgeries I noticed how awful it was if you couldn’t communicate properly.  The staff were unfriendly as a general rule and completely devoid of any willingness to help.  They sneered at the people for whom I was acting as interpreter and adopted a very curt tone.  To start off with they frightened me with their loud and overbearing voices and their self confident manner, but as time went by I grew accustomed to it.  As long as you stuck to their rules they left you more or less in peace or behaved as if you weren’t even there.  Which at any rate was more pleasant than being bellowed at" (Ateş, p57).

She vividly describes the dilemmas and strains of being caught between two cultures: "I too perceived my parental home and school as two very different worlds, but didn’t think the Germans were as bad as my parents made them out to be.  fair enough, every now and then people, especially older women, hurled abuse at us.  When we were playing with other children outside our front door they would say things as they walked by, such as ‘Out of the way, you bloody foreign brats.  There’s hardly any room on the pavement any more.  Go back home where you belong’.  Fortunately not all Germans were as frosty" (Ateş, p58).

She was always painfully conscious of the constraints placed upon her by her cultural heritage: "The topic of sexuality was, on the whole, not one that was ever talked about much in our family.  An exception to this rule was swearwords.  The terms tart or whore were bandied about frequently when I was being smacked and cursed at.  I was already familiar with these expressions before I had the slightest inkling of what whores are and what they do for a living.

Daughters embody the family’s honour and have to be protected from all sources of danger.  They must preserve their virginity until they are married.  This is why I was kept locked away.  To avoid all risks to my virtue, so that I would not stray off the path.  Sexuality was to do with honour, I was honour I was my hymen.  When I protested I was told I had to be reasonable and think and behave like a Turkish girl.  That girls and women had a very clearly defined role in our culture and that there was nothing wrong with that.  I shouldn’t think of picking up bad habits from ‘the Germans’.  they were all beyond good and evil anyway.  Allah would punish them at some stage for their wicked ways.

An acquaintance told me once that girls are as precious as gold.  The most beautiful thing was for us to be polished and placed in the display cabinet so that we could not be tarnished.  The very notion that I might have to spend the rest of my life in the display cabinet filled me with anxiety and dread" (Ateş, pp66-7).

Her parents did not ram religion down her throat during her childhood: "I was happy to lean the Lord’s Prayer off by heart and can still recite it today.  The Ten Commandments have certainly influenced me every bit as much as my Islamic upbringing at home, whereby our parents could only pass on the Islam that had become incorporated into cultural traditions.  As a child, I did not pick up much by way of the Islamic faith because my parents themselves only knew what others had told them.  They had never been properly taught.  Only now, in their old age, have they really begun to devote their attention to Islam by reading books, attending a course on the Koran and listening to radio and television programmes.  As a result, my upbringing was not particularly religious, more steeped in traditions.  hence, for example, the issue of whether or not I would wear a headscarf never really cropped up.  My Mother had, with my Father’s consent, discarded her headscarf in Berlin.  Today, having gone on a pilgrimage to Mecca, she has begun wearing one again.   My parents continue to be liberal Muslims.  They do not pester their children about this topic, they do not compel us to occupy ourselves with Islam in one way or other.  Faith is a matter between Allah and each individual.

I would have liked to have learned more about Islam in my German school, however.  I never went to a Koran school because the Islamic community in Berlin is too fundamentalist.  My parents and I were in agreement over this issue for once.  My Father stopped visiting the Mosque because it was more about pursuing politics than practicing religion.  Furthermore, downright hate speeches were propagated against the Germans, in whose country we lived, for whom we worked in order to earn a living.  Of course, many Germans were ill-disposed towards foreigners and my Father too was sceptical towards ‘the Germans’, but things must have been overly intense in the Mosque, which is why he refused to attend prayers in Berlin.  In the meantime, my Father’s opinion has been corroborated by many other Muslims, who have searched in vain for a Mosque in which they can go about practicing their religion to the exclusion of anything else" (Ateş, pp70-1).

Her depiction of being embedded in one culture whilst coming into daily contact with another is bound to strike a chord amongst those in a similar situation: "I travelled between two worlds on a daily basis, torn by my thoughts and feelings.  At home, I had to be the Turkish girl who was supposed to think and live in accordance with tradition.  In school, I was confronted with German culture, in which I was granted greater leeway.  Here I was permitted to develop my own independent personality, whilst at home rules were constantly being drawn up regulating how I had to be and behave as a Turkish girl.  Within my family, I was primarily being groomed for my future role as wife and taught how to make life pleasant for my husband and guests.  In school, by contrast, I was encouraged to learn as much as possible and undergo training in a profession to be able to live and autonomous life of my own choosing.

As they years went by, it became an ever greater source of torment that the German girls around me were allowed to do so much more than I was.  They were free, whilst I was confined, as if in a prison without locks and bars.

This experience of migrating between two worlds made it seem as if I had two faces.  Both physically and psychologically it felt as if I were two people in one.

In the course of a perfectly ordinary day I had to switch identities several times over: I woke up in the mornings as a Turkish girl and got ready to go to school.  On the way to school, everything was neutral because I was on my own for the most part and thought about what the future had in store for me.  I indulged in wonderful daydreams about how I would be able to live when I was older and enjoyed greater freedom.  At school I felt German, even though I wasn’t allowed to do everything my German classmates were allowed to.  What was more important to me was how I felt about everything I thought I wanted in life and how I imagined it would be.  It was also interesting that I always felt much better on the way to school than I did on the way back home" (Ateş, pp80-1).

On reaching adulthood, the sexual dimension was added: "I didn’t dress, speak or behave like most Turkish girls.  The greengrocer in whose shop we were regular customers soon took me to task for it as a result.  Why didn’t I live with my parents, but consorting with these hippies?  That was the other side of the coin. I switched shops and only placed my orders in German.  People didn’t realise that I understood Turkish and sometimes even made nasty comments about me.  On such occasions, I would say quite loudly in Turkish iyi günler [goodbye] on the way out.  The reactions to this varied widely.  Some people would glance at me with irritation and then look away at the floor or turn their backs on me.  Others would apologise and ask my forgiveness.  They hadn’t recognised me as Turkish.

I was and am still not identifiable as a Turk.  That annoys both sides and demonstrates how rigid the images are that most people carry around in their heads (…) A bloke who wanted to chat me up in a bar because he though I was a South American beat a hasty retreat as soon as he learned I was a Turk.  In that particular instance I was more relieved than anything else.  However, unpleasant incidents also happen, such as, for example, at a street festival on Wrangelstraße: as we were watching a folk music performance, one guy said to his friend in Turkish he should push his way forward so that he could push himself up against me.  I immediately let loose a barrage of insults in Turkish, let him so much as dare and he would soon see what would happen to him if he so much as laid a finger on me.  They apologised quite abjectly straight away, addressing me as abla (’big sister’) and asking my forgiveness.  They explained their conduct by telling me it was because they thought I was a German.

Once when I was cycling home from school a Turkish man followed me on a motorbike.  When I stopped and yelled at him he should fuck off and leave me alone he was really distraught that I had harangued him in Turkish.  He too excused himself by saying that he had mistaken me for a German.  By way of reply to my question as to what the difference was, all men after such incidents claim that chatting up German women in this manner is not so bad.

Woe betide any German who might have tried chatting up their sisters, mothers or wives like that, however.  They would have lynched the guy.  As if German women had no honour.  Of course not all Turkish men are like that.  Perhaps I was just unlucky enough to chance upon the tiny minority who behaved like that.  Then again, maybe not!  My worst experience in this respect took place at Bahnhof Zoo when I was wanting to catch the metro home with a friend after a visit to the cinema.  We were standing on the platform waiting for the metro to arrive when a Turkish man crept up to me from behind and started stroking my long hair.  I turned round instantly and gave him a dressing down in Turkish.  At first he was taken aback that I could speak Turkish and took a step backwards.  Then he recovered his composure, lunged at me and tried to attack me, saying ‘If you lie underneath German men, you can bloody well lie underneath me too!’  The mere fact that I was waiting for a metro at such an advanced hour provided sufficient grounds for him to assume I was fair game.  The next day I had my long hair cut out of sheer revulsion" (Ateş, pp139-41).

That integration is a two-way street becomes clear from many episodes from her life: "Day-to-day racism has become a part of my life.  Some experiences are so incredible that you can almost laugh at them.  One typical example from my own personal recollections: when my Mother was going through the menopause and has heavy periods that showed no inclination to stop, she had to be admitted to hospital for treatment.  When I visited her the day after she had been admitted, I wanted to find out from the ward doctor how things were looking for my Mother.  I found him in the corridor, between two nurses, went up to him and said: ‘Good afternoon.  Could I disturb you for a moment please?  I am the daughter of Mrs Hatun Ateş.  I would very much like to know what is wrong with her and what treatment she requires’.

He gave me an irritated look and didn’t respond.  After an unexpectedly protracted silence he said: ‘How am I to explain it?’ an expression of despair on his face.  ‘You understand?  Baby box.  Where babies are made’.  As he spoke, he drew a rectangular box in the air with outstretched hands.

The nurses glanced from him to me and back in obvious embarrassment at his display, giving me a look of solidarity.  Unlike him, they had understood me.  Now I was the one who was lost for words.  Having regained my composure, I asked him: ‘What do you mean?  Are you talking about the womb, the uterus?  Does my Mother have a problem with her uterus?’

He gave me a somewhat idiotic look.  I slowly grew angry and said: ‘Feel free to speak German to me.  I can understand you perfectly well.  I have just spoken to you in fluent German.  Why are you speaking to me in such a peculiar fashion?’

He apologised and claimed that he had hardly had any dealings with Turks who speak good German.  But I hadn’t addressed him in broken German.  He didn’t have any reply to that one and started explaining to me normally and sensibly, exactly the way you are supposed to when talking to a patient’s relative, what was wrong with my Mother and what treatment she would need.  my guess had been correct: he had been referring to the uterus.  The term ‘baby box’ was one he had invented specially for the benefit of Turkish patients. Apparently they would be able to grasp it.

As to what ‘the Turks’ might or might not grasp depends on what kind of an image you have of them and how you speak to them.  my parents could only pick up so-called ‘Tarzan German’ because it was the only kind of German anyone had spoken to them.  Naturally no provision had been made for the guest-workers recruited to be taught German.  All they were supposed to do was work. The most important sentence therefore was: ‘You work.  Then you get money’.  Apart from the phrase: ‘Clear off back home, why don’t you!’" (Ateş, pp211-3).

Even feminists have no grounds for self-congratulation: "In my search for feminist examples to follow, I had to leave out my Mother, aunts and other family friends.  They could be of no great help to me, no matter how earnestly I yearned for Turkish women as role models.  Most of the older women in my immediate surroundings could neither read nor write and already had to shoulder multiple burdens in their roles as mother, factory worker and foreigner and were struggling to cope with the numerous demands on them.  The last thing they wanted to do was to start thinking about how all of this was unfair and politically untenable into the bargain.

Hence only few first-generation immigrants joined the German women’s movement or allowed themselves to be caught up and swept along with it.  Immigrants were only discovered in any serious way by German feminists towards the end of the 70s.  And then it was as helpless victims of an Islamic-patriarchal society, oppressed by husband, son and all and sundry male relatives.  Of course we were – I was – oppressed.  But we are not just victims.  This was something that the German feminists were not quite so keen on hearing as, ultimately, it would have necessitated a redefinition of the respective tasks and roles and the Turkish women would not have cooked any delicious dishes or scrumptious cakes for the various events any more.  In those days, German feminists were not genuinely interested in us and our culture.  They showed as little real interest as the others with whom we had frequent dealings" (Ateş, pp241-2).

An attempt was made on Seyran Ateş’ life whilst she was working at an advice bureau for Turkish and Kurdish women.  A man in a beige trench coat and flat cap tried to push his way inside the premises, refusing to take no for an answer when Ateş and her workmates insisted that nobody of the name of Leyla was employed there.  They would be happy to give him assistance, but he was not allowed to set foot inside the office itself.  At the umpteenth reassurance that they would not ignore him provided that he left, he told them that what he was after would not take long, reached into his breast pocket, drew out a pistol and fired three shots, leaving Ateş with a severed left carotid artery and a bullet lodged between her fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae.  Miraculously, she neither bled to death nor was she left paraplegic.

The police officers carrying out the investigation refused to lend credence to her theory that the motive behind the shooting was political and that the Grey Wolves might be involved.  In spite of the death of one of her colleagues, Ateş was appalled at the lack of sympathy and support she met with from left-wing members of the Turkish and Kurdish community, her political allies.  Their attitude was based on not rocking the boat when providing social services to women.  This would have entailed taking account of "cultural values" and reaffirming deeply embedded gender roles rather than challenging them.  As far as these men were concerned, sewing classes and German courses would have been more than adequate (for the full account of the assassination attempt and its aftermath, see Ateş, pp144-165 and for details of the trial and litany of procedural errors leading to the release of the accused, see pp166-86).

I travelled to Berlin to interview Seyran Ateş when the European Cup season was at its height.  Both passionate and articulate, I was struck not only by her brilliant analytical intellect, tenacity and toughness, but also by her warmth, her refusal to succumb to bitterness after all the battles she has fought.  With her vision for a renewed feminist agenda, she is a true inspiration.

The Interview

Chameleon: Could you say a few words about yourself by way of introduction for the benefit of readers who might not be familiar with your work?

Seyran: My parents came to Germany as guest workers and, at the age of six I joined them in Berlin as the child of first-generation Turkish guest workers in 1969.  I started nursery school here in Berlin, completed my secondary school education here and went on to study law.  In other words, my entire school and university career unfolded here in Germany, more specifically in Berlin.  That summarises my educational background.  I am one of five siblings, the one in the middle, the eldest girl – I have a younger sister and three brothers, two elder and one younger.  My birth was planned.  My parents wanted another child, a third one and when it turned out to be a girl they didn’t mind in the least, I wasn’t an accident.  That was a sketch of my family background.  I grew up in a very traditional family, in other words a family whose members had not gone through the education system.  My parents do not have any academic qualifications.  They had been peasant farmers in Turkey and then simply workers and I grew up in this liminal zone poised between the traditional world of Turkey and the modern world of Germany, which I discovered at school.  My parents and people in my Turkish environment told me again and again and tried to impress upon me to be and behave like a Turkish girl, to be Turkish, although they never did explain what that implied, so I had to try to figure it out for myself as it were.  First and foremost what it boiled down to is that Turkish girls do not enjoy the same freedom of movement, they don’t have boyfriends, they don’t go out that much and certainly are never out and about unaccompanied.  These restrictions were Turkish and the German girls could move about more freely.  After a very short time indeed I really hated the fact that my brothers enjoyed greater freedom than I did.  I very quickly began to rebel, an inner rebellion set in at a very early stage and then somewhere along the line I also started reading books on women’s issues, already in my teenage years and realised that I found their message compelling, that women and men have equal rights also in the meaning of the law and at the age of 15 I decided to study law and to fight for women’s rights and the rights of minorities.  Before turning 18, I cleared off, abandoning the parental home, breaking off relations with my family to begin with, but, years later, reestablishing links with them so that now we are fully reconciled and have very close and loving relations again.  I am a lawyer, I did study law at university, just as I had planned to do and I am an author, writing and publishing books as well as producing articles for newspapers.  I have written two volumes of autobiography, the first when I left home, as a way of describing the situation of girls and set out the reasons why we want to walk out.  It was published in 1983 already.  I have a bent for writing.  I graduated in Germany in 1997 and started working as a lawyer straight away.  Something terrible had happened to me in the meantime.  When I was 20, I began working in a drop-in advice bureau for women from Turkey.  In 1984, when I was 21, I was shot in the office.  It was an assassination attempt.  I survived, but another woman died and the experience has left a profound impression on me and continues to do so because it was a politically motivated attack, an attack on the institution I was working for, against our efforts to help women to attain independence and to enable them to stand on their own two feet and that did not go down too well.  As I say, it still has a profound influence on me today and that was the reason why in 2006 when I was once again subjected to harsh attacks I closed down my chambers, saying to myself that I couldn’t stand the animosity and I was scared that something like the shooting might happen to me again.

Chameleon: So the attempt on your life was politically motivated rather than personal?

Seyran: It was politically motivated, not targeted against me personally.  I closed down my lawyer’s practice because after an appointment dealing with a divorce case, my client’s husband attacked me.  She was beaten up by this man right in front of my very eyes during a period when I was bearing the brunt of a great deal of hostility, with a steady stream of threatening e-mails and letters and I was gripped with fear that the same thing might happen to me as happened in 1984.  I had become a mother in the meantime and feared for my child.  Quite strongly.  That is why I decided to throw in the towel and gave up.  I have since obtained my licence to practice once again and have resumed my professional activity as a lawyer since 2007, although I don’t work in quite the same way as I used to in the old days.  I don’t have chambers where clients can come and go any more and I no longer deal publicly with family law related cases.  Officially I don’t have anything to do with them.  Instead I concentrate on writing and providing advice and assistance to women on an informal basis, primarily via e-mail and telephone, but also via face to face contacts.  I just don’t work in the courts any more, so I no longer legally represent clients.

Chameleon: Your experience illustrates the fact that there are at least no formal barriers impeding social mobility.

Seyran: Yes, of course girls can change and improve their social position.  I had the good fortune to attend a school class in Germany in which the majority of pupils had German as their mother tongue and that apart from me and one other Turkish girl none of the other children spoke Turkish.  We never spoke Turkish to each other, sticking to German even when it was just the two of us.  That was the making of me and I can only – as I always do – encourage others as well as their children to acquaint themselves with German culture, with the German environment and to take the step to establish contact with German society, to get to know the wider community in which they live and to obtain qualifications because you can change your social situation through education.

Chameleon: I find it interesting that you used the expression your "good fortune" in connection with being almost the only Turkish child in the class.

Seyran: I wasn’t relegated to a class full of non-native Germans.  It was indeed my good fortune.  If I had ended up in the kind of class consisting of non-German pupils that existed in those days I would never have had the good fortune to pick up German so quickly and to such a degree of fluency.

Chameleon: What happens in the majority of families?

Seyran: In the meantime most children are concentrated in so-called foreigners’ classes, which are classes for the children of immigrants.  By and large the children who attend them speak Turkish, Arabic or Kurdish to each other and don’t learn German properly because hardly anybody speaks German with them, they don’t know anyone who speaks German.

Chameleon: Is that a form of social segregation practiced by the Germans?

Seyran: It is a parallel society, practiced by both sides.

Chameleon: So it isn’t unilateral?

Seyran: Mainstream German society excludes these children by setting up classes like this in the first place and the children’s parents follow suit by failing to ensure that their children are sent to other schools, for example.  Looking at myself, I am a responsible mother and deliberately live in an area and deliberately send my daughter to a school where she comes into contact with children of many other nationalities.  Moreover, I send her to a school where speaking German is taken for granted, where German is the main language of communication and nobody speaks Turkish with her.

Chameleon: Language is a vital tool of integration.

Seyran: Absolutely.  If you don’t speak the official language of the country you live in, you don’t stand much of a chance of changing or improving your social position.

Chameleon: From that point of view these classes lumping together pupils of non-German extraction are a very bad idea.

Seyran: A very bad idea indeed.  They are counterproductive and impede integration, since integration can only work if you really live in the country fully, in the country as a whole, not just in one segment of it, if you know the country and speak the language.  If you cannot do all that, you cannot be integrated into the community.

Chameleon: But there are no formal barriers hindering the integration of Turks into mainstream German society, are there?

Seyran: Not as such.  Having said that, there is a formal barrier to the extent that if you speak Turkish, or if Kurdish or Arabic-speaking children live in a particular area then they are also obliged to attend a particular school, there are rules about catchment areas in Germany, which means that children have to attend school in the area they live in, nearby, so that they do not have a long trip to school.  Parents do not enjoy freedom of choice of school, but they can move elsewhere.  And a lot of parents do.  It would be beneficial in any case, as the children who are put in classes where almost all their fellow pupils share an immigrant background tend to live in areas with a high concentration of immigrants, in other words their children get off to a bad start in terms of opportunities.  That is why it is a good thing for them to move out anyway.  Not just for their children, but for their own sake so that they, in my opinion, can get away from this process of ethnicisation themselves, which would allow them to observe multi-cultural society first hand, to really become aware of it, to get to know other ethnic groups and cultures and not just stick to their own community.  I think it is bad for a multi-cultural society for all the Turks to live clustered together in a single ethnic group, or for all the Kurds to do the same, or all the Arabs, or all the Russians or Poles.  It is a good thing to have all these individual districts where there is a multiplicity of them, such as in New York with the Italian quarter or Chinatown, but they ought not to be hermetically sealed off from the community at large.  In spite of the preponderance of one ethnic group, they should still genuinely one part of the whole.

Chameleon: I don’t know how you could counteract ethnic pockets from becoming isolated from mainstream society.

Seyran: By creating attractions, by making it attractive to people and really explaining to them, elucidating to them that there are benefits not just for their children, but for them themselves if they move into another district.

Chameleon: I suspect this may have something to do with social class.  In general terms the working class is not quite as mobile as the middle class.  Although, beyond the occasional couscous or curry I am not convinced that the middle class are particularly keen on mixing in the interests of integration and I haven’t a clue how you can overcome this reluctance.

Seyran: What you are driving at is that education plays an important role.  You are distinguishing between the working and middle classes and suggesting that people without an education are unaware of the downside.  This is why society has a burden of responsibility to shoulder, as I maintain, to lend support, so that uneducated people can also grasp it, so that they can be opened up to the notion that they have a responsibility towards their children.  If a person doesn’t know how to sort out an education then the state has a task to carry out, as does the school, as do we as a society.  If I have the opportunity to meet parents because the situation arises for professional reasons and if these parents are in a situation like that I confront them with it, I tell them it straight.  In my view, the point is not being made clearly enough.  They are not being called upon often enough to take the initiative themselves.  I call upon every family, every father, every mother on every occasion available to me to tell them: "You have a share of the responsibility too.  For goodness’ sake move out of this part of town so that your children have a fighting chance!"

Chameleon: Presumably the parallel society comes into being as a result of this ethnic segregation.

Seyran: Precisely!  Because of the ethnic segregation you end up with a parallel society.  It is a creation of both sides.  It isn’t just a coincidence, something that spontaneously turned out that way, but was made that way by society as a whole and also by politics because the rents, for example, are so low in certain areas that only uneducated people can live there and there are landlords who don’t let out their properties to foreigners, there don’t want certain tenants.  In the 1960s and 1970s it was impossible for Turkish families to find a flat without further ado, to find landlords who were willing to accept Turks as tenants.  It wasn’t that easy.  A lot of landlords didn’t want to let Turks move in and that is how it came about that certain streets and houses were open to people from Turkey, as the landlords didn’t care who lived there.

Chameleon: It was quite similar in the UK.  In those days there were signs in the windows that read: "No blacks, no Irish, no dogs".  In London.

Seyran: Exactly.  It wasn’t any different in Germany, I know from Berlin that there were an awful lot of landlords who stated in their ads: "No foreigners".  It is discrimination, but what can you do?  You cannot force them.

Chameleon: You could prohibit it by law, couldn’t you?

Seyran: Yes, of course.  It is prohibited by law already, we have the Anti-Discrimination Law on the statute books, but you can only prosecute it if it is blatant.  Nobody dares to discriminate openly any more.  It will be the same in the UK, adverts like that will be outlawed, but certain people will continue to discriminate covertly.  If I have someone sitting in front of me whom I don’t want, I won’t tell him straight out that I don’t want him because he is a foreigner, but I will quite simply say that there are other prospective tenants.

Chameleon: Indeed.  You can’t prove it.

Seyran: That’s right.

Chameleon: Then surely the local authorities should do something about changing the rent prices.

Seyran: That would be an appropriate policy, a proper urban planning strategy.  What is needed is for rent prices to be set and building policy to be pursued in such a way that you obtain a social mix.  Housing associations building new properties are already tackling this – the attempt to achieve a better social mix is already being made.  It is also important that native-born Germans are included.  That you have German neighbours, that there is an ethnic mix, that people from different ethnic groups come into contact with one another, that ethnic minority families also get to know Germans ones because you will achieve nothing whatsoever if you move everyone from one district wholesale into another so that they all move back in together in the same house.  That would be pointless.  It would not have the desired effect.

Chameleon: Does this mean that the current state of play is that we have parallel societies within which a quite different culture operates?

Seyran: I contend that parallel societies do indeed exist.  There are some who deny their existence.  Sociologists for one, who justify their standpoint by arguing that they don’t have their own laws, they don’t have their own police force, they don’t have their own courts, but I maintain that they do.  Clan structures exist in these parallel societies whereby families say we apply our own laws, we certainly don’t share the laws of the Germans, the Belgians, the Italians or the French.  Our laws are the laws of our culture, or religious laws and then the family clan gathers, decides when someone has done something wrong and does not balk at enforcing that decision.  So what we have is a society with its own set of values and its own laws.  And it lives according to its own culture.

Chameleon: Then there is very little that a police force can do to help girls who might become the victims of an honour killing.

Seyran: The police can offer no help whatsoever in such a case because they only intervene – or for the most part are only called in – when something has already happened.  If a girl is in danger the police could help, but only if the girl reports it.  There are institutions that can offer assistance beforehand, if the threat of an honour killing becomes imminent, if a family says her behaviour transgresses the rules of our culture, we don’t want her to live that way, in such cases she can turn to an advice bureau, which can take her in, where she can find refuge and move in.

Chameleon: I suspect there are not nearly enough such shelters.

Seyran: No.  Globally, there are not enough women’s shelters.  The same is also true of Germany, although in Germany we are better off than other countries.  You have to realise that there are major differences throughout Europe.

Chameleon: How does Germany compare with other countries in Europe?

Seyran: In Austria, for example, there is no comparable institution to the one we have here in Berlin by the name of Papatya where Muslim girls can find a very special type of refuge because the concept behind Papatya is to provide help for Muslim girls in particular.  There is also an inter-cultural women’s shelter here in Berlin, which has no equivalent in other countries.

Chameleon: Back home the problem is that you are not even allowed to broach such issues.

Seyran: Yes, in Belgium [Seyran knew that I had travelled from Belgium for the purposes of the interview] I think the fear persists – a fear that also exists here – that if you ask such questions you will be branded a racist and a xenophobe.  That if you pick up the theme of violence and say that violence is particularly pronounced, if you say that youngsters are particularly violent it immediately means that violence is being ethnicised and attributed to immigrants and that you are pretending that no violence is perpetrated amongst the Belgians or the Germans, but only by the others and this is how the topic is stigmatised and also made into a taboo.  This is a highly detrimental development for our society, I feel, because multiculturalism, by which I mean the multicultural nature of our society in the positive sense, can only be preserved and extended if we take stock of society as it stands at the moment, if we observe each individual ethnic group in itself at its respective stage of development because there are quite simply time lags in the relative level of development of religions and cultures and only when we accurately differentiate them from each other will we be able to determine what work will have to be done where.  So that other issues have to be put in the foreground when dealing with Belgian families than would be the case when dealing with Muslim ones.  In order to be able to provide victim protection I have to know what kind of violence a woman has been affected by, that forced marriages simply do not happen in Belgian families any longer.  That is why I have to look at where one particular kind of violence is happening and why and to come up with explanations and responses to the many questions I also have to accept the reality that forced marriages and honour killings only occur in certain social groups.  Without this knowledge at my fingertips I cannot do anything about tackling the problems.

Chameleon: Our politicians back home are in denial.

Seyran: In Germany too there are politicians who deny the existence of parallel societies and there are some who trivialise the problems, saying that everything is a lot better than it is reputed to be, that things really are not that bad, that honour killings and forced marriages are isolated incidents, you can encounter such attitudes here too, but since 11th September 2001 at the very latest we have become aware that we have a common problem and we can no longer simply sweep it under the carpet.  Obviously we have to take the message public, that has to happen back home for you too so that the message is disseminated and the issues discussed.  To the best of my knowledge the number of women wearing headscarves in Belgium is also increasing, in schools as well.  That is tangible proof that a backwards-looking Islam is ensconcing itself.  Religious freedom is always being proffered as an argument, but the real question is whether what is being practiced is indeed freedom of religion or is something else going on?  Are we talking about an ever-widening chasm opening up between different segments of society?  It is the responsibility of politicians to address this.  Politicians must take a very close look to see whether society is drifting apart, whether certain groups are being separated and whoever is irresponsible enough to look away and mistakenly believes that he is showing tolerance by turning a blind eye is ignorant, plain and simple, ignorant because it is too complicated to look at it properly and too strenuous an effort to draw conclusions from what you see.  They also ignore it for reasons of not straying outside their comfort zone, out of convenience and because they don’t want to annoy anyone and, above all, when you speak out you are labelled a racist and so on, you open yourself up to attack and have to issue a disclaimer first, which is far more taxing than just pretending that everything is hunky dory.

Chameleon: That’s all very well, but it doesn’t exactly help those poor girls.

Seyran: It doesn’t help them, no, it doesn’t help anyone, not even society as a whole because if you look at the demographics you will have to face the question in Belgium, just like in Germany, of what your society will look like in a decade’s time?  How many children will there be?  How many children are going to school, which ethnic groups are prominently represented?  What is the degree of mixing in society?

Chameleon: What does multiculturalism mean then, in practical terms?  Anything at all, or is it merely a slogan beloved of politicians?

Seyran: I reckon that for most politicians it is merely a slogan and that multiculturalism, in common with all -isms, is an ideology that describes the existence in parallel of different cultures, it is quite closely related to cultural relativism in that everything is indeed relative, every culture is entitled to do and to be permitted to do anything that society, the community deems culture.  In essence, multiculturalism describes a society in which people live in discrete clusters, without overlap, which means that there is no meeting of cultures, but they cohabit side by side with no overlap.  The proponents of multiculturalism actually prevent the meeting of cultures and exchange between cultures and, above all, mutual criticism, the right to engage in mutual criticism.  They also impede finding common ground in the debate on values by preventing us from saying that in a multicultural society we are more than capable of agreeing on common values.  If you want to live together in a society you have to agree on a common set of values.  There is no getting round that fact.  In which case you have to hold a debate about values.  And most of the adherents of multiculturalism obstruct that because they argue that every culture has its own values, they exist side by side and any assessment of relative merits is prohibited.  Placing one culture in a position of hierarchical superiority above another and thereby creating a "dominant culture" [Leitkultur] is completely beyond the pale.  A lot of Germans have a problem with the term "dominant culture" because they don’t want to be the leaders [Führer], the ones in charge, the ones who call the shots.  I don’t have any such hang-ups because I maintain that there is a European culture, a dominant European culture, which is that of the Enlightenment, the sexual revolution, the Reformation in religious matters and that these are the three important pillars, which brought, which catapaulted Europe into modernity, and with massive, painstaking efforts, terrible labour pains and much bloodshed we have reached the stage of development we have today: that democracy has taken hold, a very important aspect.  Democracy coupled with individual freedom, the importance attached to individuality more generally.  Within the Enlightenment one significant aspect was that neither the state nor paternalism were placed in the foreground, but that the individual was strengthened.

Chameleon: Does that outlook exist in Islam?

Seyran: That is the main contradiction with Islam and the main means of resistance as well.  In Islam we have a clan-based culture, a community consciousness.  This is why the battle against the West focuses so strikingly on this particular point, because the West is rejected for being an individualised society.  The West is not only hallmarked by individualisation, but at the same time also allows for self-determined sexuality, for example.  That everything is freely determined by the individual in other words.  It is precisely this feature that is differently conceived in Islam.  There the group takes precedence, it is the community that is important.  The notion of the individual who also possesses their own rights belongs to a legal school, or is an interpretation of Islam that was suppressed in the 14th century.  There is definitely also a legal school of thought and there definitely are also supporters of reason, of autonomous initiative on the part of the individual, of İçdihat [critical hermeneutics, the process of critical reasoning, for which see Asma Barlas, "Believing Women" in Islam: Unreading Patriarchal Interpretations of the Qur'an, Austin, University of Texas Press, 2002, especially pp68-71] as it is called, the inner struggle with oneself, not the jihad with the outside world, the defence of religion, but the inner disputation and that certainly does exist in Islam, as Irschad Manji describes eloquently in her book [German edition Der Aufbruch: Plädoyer für einen aufgeklärten Islam, English edition The Trouble with Islam: A Muslim's Call for Reform in Her Faith].  It was, for example, also the foundation of Islam as it flourished in Spain in the 14th century in Andalusia which continues to be regarded as the blossoming of Islam by many today.  That was modern Islam.  Not a trace of it remains.

Chameleon: Things went badly wrong.

Seyran: Things did go badly wrong.  We can ask what went wrong, or put the question the other way round and ask what went right in Christianity?  Indeed.  Things went well because Martin Luther and the other reformers succeeded, whereas in Islam they failed and it is now high time that the reformers in Islam join forces and succeed in their undertaking, to bring Islam into the modern age.  This is a movement that can be observed right across the world and the reformers live dangerously, the human rights activists likewise live dangerously, free thinkers always live dangerously and that is why carrying through reforms in Islam will not be a simple matter.

Chameleon: But Islam can be reformed.

Seyran: It can definitely be reformed.  I am a person who thinks very logically and pragmatically and I reckon that if Catholicism could be reformed Islam can too.  Just look back over the history of the Catholic church with witches burnt at the stake and Inquisition trials.  Against that backdrop I don’t see why everything should be that much more difficult in Islam.  There is no difference.  I really can’t see any difference there, even if we bring out individualism and the ego-consciousness, which does exist in the Christian church, the individual, but I don’t think that it will founder because of that, I really don’t believe it will.

Chameleon: Do you think that individualism is the only philosophy that is good for women?

Seyran: Definitely.  I believe it is an extremely important aspect for the women’s movement and in terms of women’s rights because it is through individualism that we arrive at the concept of human dignity, which resides inalienably in each individual, which every human being possesses and by accepting human dignity in every single human being I also accept a free and self-determined life and a free and self-determined sexuality.  These are the pillars on which freedom rests and without them there is no freedom.

Chameleon: And that doesn’t exist at the present juncture.

Seyran: It definitively doesn’t exist in a great many traditional and highly orthodox families, not even in the most rudimentary form, not even for men never mind women.  It doesn’t even exist for men.  It isn’t true that men enjoy these rights to individuality and women are deprived them.  No, men too form part of this structure and because the community as a whole does not recognise them why should a man who thinks in patriarchal terms within a clan-based culture founded on a We-consciousness, and who thinks in terms of the community and who enjoys a certain status within the community, why should he suddenly turn round and give something to the female members of his community that he does not have himself, namely individual freedom?  He enjoys the freedom of the community, within this community he enjoys a putative individual freedom, only it isn’t individual.  Therefore if you look at it from the outside, even from the West, superficially, you might arrive at the conclusion that in the Muslim world the man enjoys individual freedom, but he doesn’t.  It isn’t.  Instead, it is the community once again that nevertheless determines how free he is within its boundaries.  Even if he has four wives, he is still under the constant scrutiny and surveillance of the community.

Chameleon: That is interesting because you always automatically think of the woman as being the one who enjoys no rights of self-determination.

Seyran: No, ultimately men don’t have them either.  Within the system they are a thousand times better off because a more convivial role is allotted to them.  They are better off, but if they are forced into marriage they don’t fare much better emotionally at the end of the day; they are only better off in practice.  Men too are the victims of forced marriages and they too are deprived of the right to love.  The right to decide for yourself whom you are going to marry is taken away from men as well.  Boys and men are brought up to kill their sisters if they commit a breach of honour, for example.  In such a case it is impossible to talk of freedom, of a liberal upbringing and certainly not of individualism because these young men have never lived completely alone or individually in any sense of the word, but they have been incorporated into a clan-based structure, steeped in a way of thinking that gives precedence to family honour.  They have an extremely close bond with their mother and with the family more generally.  The dependence of these young men on their mothers has to be examined and the mothers – it degenerates into a vicious circle – the mothers in this system also act as custodians of this patriarchy.  They are the ones who bring up their sons and they are also the ones who encourage their sons to behave like pashas and machos.  It is not just their fathers who are to blame.  And it is the mothers too who force their daughters into marriage, saying, well it happened to me, why should it be any different for you?  Christian women, Catholic women did exactly the same.  Human history is littered with examples of the fact that men are not the only ones we have had to fight against to break down the old structures, but women as well.  We had to push through women’s right to vote in the teeth of fierce resistance on the part of women.  The women who struggled to obtain the right to vote and stand for election for women and won through in the end had to fight against women who suddenly founded associations opposing votes for women.  You should never lose sight of that.

Chameleon: That brings us right back to the question of parallel societies.  Their existence would appear to be a key issue.

Seyran: The worst disaster that can befall multicultural societies is parallel societies, which come into being through excluding themselves from mainstream society and by setting themselves apart from, disassociating themselves from it and only by dissolving them can we hope to find a better way of living together because what emanates from these parallel societies is a quite candid, direct contempt for mainstream society because the members of the parallel society say we don’t want to live the way you do.  I am not arguing that there is anything wrong with cultural ethnic groups, or that there is anything wrong with having entire streets where only Africans, Poles, Russians or Turks live.  The problem arises when everything can be done in one language and I don’t have any need of mainstream society any more and I say at the same time that I do not agree with the overarching social system in the country concerned.  And when I start making my own laws and when my family has to live in accordance with the values I espouse, which stand in stark contradiction to the constitution and the fundamental tenets of the wider society.

Chameleon: How can you ensure that the laws of the wider society are enforced?  It sounds perhaps more repressive than I mean it to.

Seyran: Not everyone who lives in a parallel society is a criminal offender, of course they are not.  If you take a look at the cases that come before the courts you do not see masses of illegal acts being committed by people from the parallel societies.  It is more of an inner attitude and a day-to-day culture.  In order to change it you need to carry out educational work.  You mustn’t try to tackle it repressively by passing laws.  Our laws are in place.  They have legal force and they are recognised.  When you become naturalised, for example, you have to sign up to them, you have to acknowledge them.  That this recognition is absent within the family is linked to education and awareness and to my mind that in turn takes us straight back to the fact that these parallel societies exist in the first place.  What we have to put a stop to is that girls live in these enclaves, these islands.  Or we will just have to go right in there and carry out as much educational and awareness-raising work as possible, in nursery schools, in schools, to make attendance at nursery school compulsory, for example, so that the girls learn the language from the very outset and that they get to know the culture of the country they live in, that we manage to bring the country they live in closer to the children who live in families without an educated background, so that they become aware that there are other districts in the city beyond the confines of the one they live in, than the one they spend the entire day in, that they should be given the opportunity to see the main monuments of the city they live in, that they should visit the most important places that the tourists visit, for example, that they should get to know the city.  Very many children who live in these parallel societies do not even realise that there are sights in the cities they live in, that tourists are willing to fly thousands of miles to take a look at and familiarise themselves with their history.  These children might not have seen them for themselves.  You really have to ask yourself to what extent these children have been given an education if they have not even been on a school trip to the Victory Column, or the Brandenburg Gate.  Or who knows how many children from Kreuzberg know that there is such a thing as the Tegel Forest, or Grünewald, or Wannsee or Teufelsberg, all these places that go to make up this city.

Chameleon: And they have never even seen them?

Seyran: A lot of families haven’t, no.  A lot of families don’t know it themselves, hardly ever leave their home district, which means of course that their children certainly don’t and I know people from Kreuzberg who, when they travel from Kreuzberg to Mitte get the feeling they are on holiday in a foreign city, even though it is their city.  Because they never stray beyond the confines of their own district.

Chameleon: Recently there has been a debate about the acceptability of various forms of dress, for which the headscarf is emblematic.  Some maintain that wearing it is a form of oppression, whereas others argue the opposite, that it is a form of emancipation.  Where do you stand on this?

Seyran: My position on the headscarf is a quite clearly feminist one and my arguments are grounded in the philosophy of women’s rights, from the perspective of a campaigner for women’s rights.  I maintain that the primary aim the women’s movement set itself was to put an end to the sexualisation of woman, to ensure that women are not viewed as sexual objects, but as human beings vested with human dignity.  The headscarf sexualises women by saying that the woman has hair, which exudes sexual allure to the opposite sex and that these charms are to be concealed.  Women’s hair is thereby sexualised and I cannot accept that.  It is not a religious symbol as far as I am concerned, one worth continuing to exist and being preserved.  Without exception, the explanations given in the Koran only pertain to the concealment of charms, to the effect that a woman should, because she has sexually attractive features, cover herself up so that she will not be raped, assaulted and so on.  Now that really was the case in the 7th century and you can also appreciate that such an arrangement was put in place in those days to protect women.  Women fell into two categories, honourable and dishonourable, the latter comprising slaves and they were supposed to be mutually distinguishable.  I belong to the ranks of Muslim women who contend that we live in the 21st century and that form of protection has become obsolete.  We don’t require that it any longer because there are no slave women any more and because the distinction between the two categories no longer exists, or ought not to exist, there should be no distinction between honourable and dishonourable women.  Every woman is honourable.  And nobody has the right to attack her or rape her in the middle of the street because she is not wearing a headscarf.  What that means is that her hair possesses no intrinsic sexual allure and that the sexualisation of her hair has no place in the 21st century.  And that is why I combat the headscarf as a political symbol, as a political symbol for the segregation of the sexes within a society.  Everyone who advocates the headscarf in my eyes also advocates the segregation of the sexes, sexual apartheid in society and I cannot accept that.  When small children start wearing the headscarf too, a practice that has crept in in Germany in the meantime in nursery and primary school and in Belgium I know the same applies, then it represents a sexualisation of children, which has nothing to do with religion.  This is where I see it as a responsibility for the country as a whole, for politics to ban it.  Laws can be of help here, you can say we are banning the wearing of headscarves in nursery and primary schools at least because it leads to a sexualisation of children.

Chameleon: Once again, however, politicians wouldn’t have the courage to say something like that.

Seyran: The reason they do not dare to say it is that it would seem like they were encroaching on freedom of religious expression because the counter-argument put to them is always that of religious freedom.  They do not have the courage, however, to hold a debate about how it has nothing to do with religious freedom when you tie a headscarf round the hair of a five or six-year-old child.

Chameleon: On the other hand you always hear the point made that nobody is forcing women to wear the headscarf.  That it is purely a matter of choice.

Seyran: Right now we are talking about small children.  They don’t even dare talk about the issue in relation to children and then the discussion immediately veers off to women, you’re quite right.  So the whole discussion is diverted away from children, bringing you straight on to the subject of women.  But if I already start binding a headscarf around a child’s hair then by the time she becomes a grown woman she will not have had the slightest chance to develop a free will of her own.  The same debate also exists in relation to genital mutilation, whereby it is claimed that the woman allows herself to be mutilated of her own volition.  Really!  No, that is quite simply absurd.  Amongst the women who appear on television with headscarves, amongst older women and students who are dressed so fashionably, even amongst them a certain ambiguity persists.  If she is a modern woman she will grasp that she is giving her endorsement to a sexual apartheid by doing so.  Then she should be honest and say "I am in favour of a division of roles".  I don’t have anything against people saying "I am in favour of our splitting roles up into ones appropriate for men and ones appropriate for women, that I am a woman active in a given area, that it is fair enough and I have a different attitude towards gender roles accordingly", but our constitution regards both sexes as equal and in official settings that kind of behaviour is not acceptable.  I cannot force every single family to practice democracy between the sexes in the way they live their lives in the intimacy of their own homes.  I cannot do that, but what I can do is to say that the state espouses democracy between the sexes and for that reason I can ban the wearing of the headscarf in official surroundings.  If a woman turns round and says "I am wearing it of my own free will and I don’t have a problem with it" then let her feel free to do so in her private life.

Chameleon: There was a major dispute over a teacher, whose name escapes me.

Seyran: A teacher, indeed, which is why I was alluding to formal, official settings.  Mrs [Fereshta] Ludin, a supply teacher who wanted to wear a headscarf whilst giving lessons.  She was not permitted to do so and the Constitutional Court subsequently issued a ruling [see Dominic McGoldrick, Human Rights and Religion: The Islamic Headscarf Debate in Europe, Oxford and Portland, Oregon, Hart Publishing, 2006, pp111-8] stating that as no law banning the wearing of headscarves exists here in Germany it is up to each federal state to draw up such legislation in the first instance to settle the issue of wearing the headscarf.  Now there is a patchwork of different rules in different federal states.  Baden-Württemberg banned it and now the woman is teaching here in Berlin in an Islamic school with a headscarf because Berlin also banned teachers from wearing the headscarf.  The ban also applies to civil servants.  Because it is the state that presents itself in public in schools and must preserve its neutrality, hence religious symbols are not allowed to be put on display in such a blatant manifestation.  This is the main line of argument adopted by the federal states that have instituted a ban.

Chameleon: However, within the parallel societies themselves if these young women do not wear the headscarf then they run the risk of being bullied by the young men of their community, of having abuse hurled at them that they are whores.

Seyran: What you can observe in the parallel societies is an extreme social pressure to conform.  Hard evidence has been produced to corroborate this pressure.  So it is something that can actually be observed and sociologically proven on the basis of research.  Turkey also provides a good example of how social pressure outdoors in the streets has increased exponentially and the same is true of pressure in the wider neighbourhood and in school classes.  Here too in Germany, where Muslim school pupils, boys and girls alike ostracise other Muslim pupils of both sexes, hurl abuse at them when they don’t wear the headscarf.  Yes, quite clearly social pressure does exist and that includes pressure to wear the headscarf.

Chameleon: Under such circumstances is it meaningful to say with any honesty that a woman is wearing it of her own free will?

Seyran: Under these conditions who can speak of it being voluntary?  Nobody.  And if the congregation of a mosque says they won’t allow a woman to go without a headscarf, or if an imam says "I demand that your daughters wear the headscarf" where is the voluntary aspect of that?  If an imam preaches a conservative version of Islam – and 100% of all imams here in Germany do – then I cannot maintain that it is voluntary within the congregation of this particular mosque and if women who do not attend the mosque, who are not integrated into a given congregation wear it too then they are once again being influenced by an interpretation of the Koran that is also conservative.  And if these women wear it in an allegedly modern style, the Iranian way of tying the headscarf counts as modern – when you look at a headscarf you also have to look at how it is tied – and then from the neck downwards they are swathed in tight clothes, are wearing very erotic clothes and are veritably plastered with make-up, in other words, the whole of the rest of their bodies is sexualised, whilst the main charm, their hair, is covered, then they are projecting a sexuality to the outside world that stands in flagrant contradiction to their religion.  Then too I cannot accept it when she claims to be wearing it as a matter of personal choice because it represents a religious contradiction of such magnitude that it is insincere, hypocritical, so I quite simply refuse to believe her when she tells me she is wearing it for religious reasons.  She is actually wearing it for political reasons because she has to dissociate herself from the West, as, if she were wearing it for religious reasons she would conceal her charms and not offer a man any incentive to attack her, but if she dresses erotically, emphasising her breasts and her backside, wears high heels – and here in Kreuzberg you can already observe women with bare midriffs, belly button piercings and headscarves – then you realise how mendacious this debate is.  We are dealing with a political movement when examining women wearing headscarves.

Chameleon: What is the aim of this movement?

Seyran: The aim of this movement is to foster acceptance of gender apartheid, that in hospitals, for example, women treat women and men treat men, so that all of society is separated into the domain of women and the domain of men.  Encounters between the sexes are placed under supervision, sexuality is not practiced before marriage and the family, yes, in the final analysis the vision of society is identical to that of the National Socialists, which envisaged exactly the same structures, the more children the better, the woman is relegated to the domestic sphere, the man to the public sphere, the absolutely classical old division of roles.  Children, kitchen, church.  Yes, it is absolutely identical.  That is why I become really morose, to put it very mildly, when I am labelled a critic of Islam.  I am not a critic of Islam.  When I contemplate this division, and then look at how things were in other religions, I am a campaigner for women’s rights, a feminist, I look at this phenomenon within society and know only too well that things are no better in other religions and endeavour, precisely because I look at the whole from an international perspective and from a genuinely multicultural vantage point, I am aware that what we are dealing with in the Muslim community is a time lag, and that is why it is incorrect to call me a critic of Islam because if I am a critic of anything I am a critic of religion, at least in part, because I take a very close look at exactly where a woman is put at a particular disadvantage due to her gender within society and it is religion that is at fault.

Chameleon: Then my question would be is any religion – and I am not singling out Islam or Christianity – is any religion compatible with women’s rights?

Seyran: Equality between the sexes is probably most likely amongst Buddhists, but not amongst any of the rest.  Basically, there is no genuine equality of opportunity unless religion is interpreted and lived contemporaneously, in accordance with the times we live in.  It is perfectly possible for a Catholic, a Muslim, a Jew, a Christian to practice genuine equality in his marriage and thereby in conflict with his religion, along similar lines to the Pope, who says I reject homosexuality, but at the same time I reject discrimination against homosexuals.  In other words, he inhabits this contradiction.  And a great many people live in this conflict, they practice their religion, which actually promulgates discrimination against women as women are represented again and again as inferior, but in their daily lives they can quite happily treat their wives as equals.  It does exist, but if we return to religion per se, I suspect that the most likely candidate for espousing what we can summarise in the phrase "all human beings are equal" irrespective of sex, would be Buddhism.

Chameleon: In Islam, or so I have read at any rate, in the Hadith it says that women are worth only half as much as men.

Seyran: Yes, exactly.  Similar examples can be found for all religions, the Old Testament is chockablock with quotes like that as is the Koran.  "Man is the head of woman".  The same applies to literature as well.  "When you go to a woman, don’t forget the whip!"  And Mohammed is alleged to have said "I have looked into hell and more than half of its inhabitants are women".  All of this is well known.  My appeal, for example, also to politicians is that if they are afraid of being depicted as critics or enemies of Islam that they should take the wider view, they should admit that in Europe, including in Belgium amongst the Catholics, amongst the Christians and the Jews these battles had to be fought.  If they devote any thought to the matter, it will dawn on them too that they have a duty to call for reforms within Islam because they, as politicians, occupy a position that enables them to support the cause of democracy between the sexes and obviously to live in the context of such democracy between the sexes, whilst in another religion in the midst of their society the concept is not even accepted.  They have to confront this contradiction and they have a responsibility, a duty to intervene.

Chameleon: Since we are on the subject of religion, religion passes laws.  In Britain the Archbishop of Canterbury stated that the introduction of sharia law in the UK was unavoidable.  How do you respond to such a declaration?

Seyran: It is appalling!  making concessions is precisely the wrong course of action to follow.  I reckon that the Archbishop of Canterbury called for that because his church enjoys a panoply of rights and he is afraid for his own church that his conservatism might at some stage be open to attack and so he wants these backward-looking and conservative Muslims to be given a great deal more rights in order to safeguard his own.  All religions converge in conservatism and show solidarity towards each other.  That is the only way to interpret his statement.  If he were to sit down and study the implication of what such a step would mean, in the final analysis, for women he would not issue such a demand.

Chameleon: He is wrong.  It is by no means unavoidable.  Why should religious law be deemed acceptable for one section of the community?  Doesn’t that constitute a form of racism?

Seyran: It does.  Of course what he is claiming is not unavoidable.  The only way to describe it is bullshit, my apologies.  Really, that is the only appropriate term that comes to mind and you really do have to be careful in Britain of all places if you look at what is going on with the spread of the Muslim community there not to make further concessions, but set the limits instead and ask the question what kind of a society do we want to live in?  If the majority of the Pakistani Muslims in Britain were to turn round and declare that they didn’t want to live in this social order any longer that would have an impact on political life, on democracy, on the fundamental structure of society.  In that case you would be forced to create a different country, a different constitution, a new constitution – everything.  If we are talking about a people, a unified people taking such a step then there is no getting round it, there would be a revolution and you would have a new Britain.

Chameleon: What would it mean in practical terms in the lives of Muslim women if sharia law were introduced here?

Seyran: If we take a look at the Islamic countries then we have a shrewd idea of what it would and could mean in Europe.  Look, there are already swimming baths in Germany at present, which have set aside certain days when only Muslim women are allowed to go swimming.  That is pure separatism in society and discrimination against German women who are not allowed to go to the swimming baths because Muslim women are there.  What this means is that even superficial contact between Muslim and Christian women is not wanted, is deemed undesirable.  That is apartheid.  There were times when blacks were not allowed on board buses, were prohibited from sitting in the same bus as whites in America.  For a long, long time.  It reminds me of that.  It is reverse discrimination.  Discrimination on the part of Muslims, the racism, which Muslims are guilty of as well, the anti-Semitism that Muslims certainly preach as well are phenomena which people are happy to play down.  If Muslim women refuse to go bathing in the presence of Christian women it is to my mind an insult to Christian and Jewish women.  It is a kind of separatism, which cannot be healthy for society.  And I do not want to bring up my child in such a way, I don’t want children in general to be brought up to say "We are not going to the swimming baths with Christians".  We have gone beyond that.  At least I sincerely hope we have moved on beyond that.

Chameleon: I do too.  Hopefully it will never get that far, but supposing sharia law were to be introduced then women would have to live in our midst as if they were stuck in the Middle Ages.

Seyran: In the Middle Ages, indeed.  They already do live in our midst in part as if they were in the Middle Ages.  And if sharia law were to be introduced it would pertain primarily to family law where it would quite unequivocally be to the detriment of women.  Beyond dispute.  The sharia, Islamic law, not only contains legal prescriptions, but also governs the daily life of the Muslim, how he is supposed to pray and how he is supposed to wash, but if we concentrate on the legal side of sharia it lays down provision in family law in particular, that is its main focus, and it regulates family law in accordance with the relationship between the sexes with the woman put at a disadvantage.  It would clash with the family law provisions currently in force.

Chameleon: Wasn’t there a woman judge who passed a really idiotic ruling?

Seyran: In Frankfurt, yes.  A prime example of saying, "Well yes, that’s the way it is amongst the Muslims, so I won’t apply German law, but will apply the yardsticks of Islamic law instead".  It’s not on!  It is perverting the course of justice, yes, in essence that’s precisely what it is, perverting the course of justice to fail to apply the law at hand, but instead discriminating against people who are allegedly subject to a different set of laws.

Chameleon: Do you think there is some kind of movement at work here?  For example, there was the case in France with the annulment of a marriage because the bride turned out not to be a virgin.  What do you think of that?

Seyran: It is both terrible and dreadful.  It is proof of what we have been talking about.  In the near future we will hear about an increasing number of such cases and if you look back over recent years, at the trend for more and more little girls to wear the headscarf, such decisions will no longer be isolated.  More and more gang rapes are being committed by young Muslim men on the pretext that their Muslim girl victims were behaving indecently.  Right here in Europe.  You can read about it in a book, for which I wrote the foreword, by Ni putes ni soumises, a movement in France, which means Neither Whores nor Doormats [German edition, Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi and an introduction by Seyran Ateş, Weder Huren noch Unterworfene, Berlin, Orlanda Frauenverlag, 2005; English-language edition, Fadela Amara with Sylvia Zappi, translated with an introduction by Helen Harden Chenut, Breaking the Silence: French Women's Voices from the Ghetto, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006.  On gang rapes, I recommend Samira Bellil's harrowing To Hell and Back, translated by Lucy R. McNair, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2008].  It deals in particular with these gang rapes where young Muslim men target Muslim girls who, according to their notions, are behaving immorally, living in keeping with the Western model and rape them as a punishment or because they consider them fair game.

Chameleon: As you have said, new cases are cropping up all the time, with judges trying to prove their impeccable credentials.

Seyran: How culturally sensitive they are.

Chameleon: Yes, they are trying to prove their intercultural competence, or whatever.  Where is this coming from?  Does it come from them themselves or is there some kind of coordinated movement behind all of this?

Seyran: It isn’t a political movement perhaps in the sense that there is a party with a programme, but it does constitute a political attitude, a political stance, which permeates society as a whole and you can find it in every political party.  It is a variety of ostensible liberalism, whereby people feel they live in a liberal country, that they are liberal and liberalism means you also have to be very liberal towards other cultures.  A mix-up occurs, as the people you are showing tolerance towards and/or to whom you wish to be liberal are people who fight against liberalism and another confusion is that liberalism does not mean accepting every breach of our constitution and that liberalism does not mean neglecting to demand that other cultures adapt to our constitution.  Yes, there is a great deal of muddle-headedness amongst people whom you would designate as decent people, and who consider themselves especially liberal.  There is a particular way of thinking that prevails amongst many Westerners, who are particularly individualistic.  They cannot get their heads round the fact that they might be comparing chalk and cheese and they would say, "Fair enough, if she is wearing a headscarf as a matter of personal choice, then why not?  What objection could you have against it?" because this person takes free will for granted, he knows what personal choice is, he knows that he enjoys the greatest of latitude when it comes to taking decisions and assumes that the person opposite him has grown up in exactly the same context and is as familiar with the concept of free will as he is himself.  Whereas in reality he is confronted with a person who has never acquired free will in the form he learned it.  Obviously you can hold a philosophical debate about whether people in the West have acquired free will, of course they haven’t either, and I am perfectly willing to take part in such a philosophical discussion and would be happy to admit that I am no exception, that I am not free in my choice of clothes, but the nub of the question is what degree of latitude I have and how much latitude does the person opposite me have when they come from a Muslim clan-based extended family.  There are nuances in other words and these superficially liberal-minded people do not work their way through them.

Chameleon: So no deliberate erosion of the law is taking place?

Seyran: No, there is no deliberate erosion taking place.  Definitely not.  It is taking place through naivety.  By adopting a naive and superficial approach to the subject, yes, but there is no clear, inexorable or cold and calculated conscious undermining taking place.  The judges even believe that what they are doing is fundamentally good, even in terms of the law.

Chameleon: It cannot be good, however.

Seyran: No, it most certainly isn’t.  It most certainly isn’t because the signal they pass on is deeply flawed.

Chameleon: In this context I have heard of the so-called "cultural bonus" [whereby cultural background is factored in as a mitigating factor during sentencing]

Seyran: The cultural bonus when dealing with honour killings, precisely.  Unfortunately, it continues to exist in the lower courts here in Germany, but in the Supreme Court, the Bundesgerichtshof, previous rulings are regularly quashed and there is no culture bonus for these murders in Germany.  Provided that the case gets as far as the Supreme Court.

Chameleon: What should we be doing as feminists?

Seyran: As feminists we should at long last resurrect a true women’s movement, put an end to its Sleeping Beauty-like slumber, we have to awaken all our women with a kiss, we have to set ourselves an aim again, to fight together for equality between the sexes, the war of attrition is not over yet, we act as though we had sorted everything out and although a lot has been achieved it simply isn’t true that our work is finished.  Women continue to be driven back into the domestic sphere and they do not enjoy equal representation on the labour market.  The women’s movement can boast a great many achievements, but we have not attained our ultimate objective yet, we still have a long way to go and it is up to the women’s movement in particular to show solidarity with Muslim women because our sisters have not even set off along the road whilst we have reached the first staging post.  If I draw an analogy with the world of golf, we have got as far as the first hole whilst the others have not teed off yet.  So what we have to do is help them catch up, we have to galvanise our movement into action.  What I want is a new women’s movement, or rather, the revival and continuation of the old one.  Somewhere along the line, the women’s movement fell into a deep slumber and it needs to be stirred awake and go back to its roots, to re-read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex.  The introduction alone would be more than enough if you don’t necessarily want to read the entire volume.  Then, equipped with these benchmarks, evaluate the situation of Muslim women.

Chameleon: Sometimes I have the impression that – unfortunately – the women’s movement in the West has lost its way, that it prefers to address issues such as Internet pornography, that feminists have divided themselves into opposing factions, the sex-positive and the rest and then become embroiled in bitter in-fighting whilst all the time Muslim women are being murdered across the length and breadth of Europe.

Seyran: They are being forced into marriage and murdered.  It is pretty absurd that we currently see these Alpha-females and laddish girls who say "Of course I like sex and watch porno films now and then".  For goodness sake this is not what feminism is all about.  It is definitively not what feminism is all about.  What is primarily being insinuated is that feminism means not feeling like having sex, that feminism is conflated with hostility towards sex.  Which it definitively is not, quite simply because feminism is all about self-determined, freely self-determined sexuality.  Yes, and this means not only that these women have not understood feminism, but also that the feminists from way back when have gone into retirement prematurely.  And have unfortunately left the field open to others, who perhaps convey these false impressions.  What we need is for older and younger women to join forces once again, who would explain what feminism is all about, who would define it, agree on objectives for it, put forward demands, to be an alliance that is worthy of the name of a movement, but at the same time that would put women’s individuality in the foreground once again, stressing that a woman as an individual possesses human dignity, her own rights, everything that the women’s movement argued from its very beginnings, and which continue to be relevant themes today.  As you say, it is absurd in the extreme that whilst women are being genitally mutilated, right in our midst in Europe, whilst they are being forced into marriage, whilst they are being forced to flee from honour killings, are compelled to live on the run, that we have to occupy ourselves with literature in which women explain how fabulous they find pornography, how freely they live out their sexuality because they have sex in the most perverse of positions with ease, and as to how free and liberated that really is, as to whether that really constitutes freedom is a big question mark in my mind.  And how wonderful they find it to chat online.  Yesterday I watched Sex and the City for the second time.  I believe it shows us – it is an important series for our times – it demonstrates to us quite clearly how little has changed in terms of the roles assigned to women and men.  The four single women are on a quest, searching for the man, the handsome Prince who will come to their rescue, who will make them happy, in sex and in love.  It is the age-old archetypal model for women that continues to exist.  You encounter the same thing when you go out shopping, if you want to purchase underwear or clothes for children, they are split into pink and blue, which means the war of attrition is far from over, who is going to tell me it’s all over and done with, consigned to the past?  No, it most certainly isn’t over and done with, far from it!

Chameleon: If you challenge them, they will claim it is meant ironically, in the spirit of postmodernism…

Seyran: It is neither postmodern nor ironic if in Tchibo or Eduscho I can only choose between pink and blue.  It is an insult to my free will.  I can’t buy green or orange garments for my child, or yellow ones.  I have to choose between pink and light blue.  No, we haven’t carried the day yet.  That women go out to work, that we have a few women in leading positions, that we have a Chancellor who is a woman, these are all mere drops in the ocean.  That we have a lot of female politicians – how many do we have ultimately?   Right across Germany women earn 20% less than men.  This trench warfare, this war of attrition is far from won and our Muslim women – many of them, not all of them, but many of them – are still living in the Middle Ages whilst we have at least secured some of the advances mentioned.  That is what I want to draw attention to.  Please look at what is going on!  You have fought for and obtained all these achievements and come out the other side – you fought for the right to wear trousers and today there are Muslim women who are not allowed to wear trousers.  It is not a self-evidence.  That you are allowed to smoke in public.  There are women who continue to huddle in the toilets at weddings for a puff on the sly because women do not smoke in the presence of men or older people, the simplest of things that sound so natural, are not nearly so simple after all.  Choosing your own partner, getting a divorce if you want one, not to be despised by society, all of these things are being denied many – not all, of course not all – Muslim women right under our noses.  We have to help them progress as far as we have and march forward together.

 

 

[Interview, portrait of Seyran Ateş and all translations © Chameleon, 2008.  No portion of this interview may be reproduced without prior written authorisation, which may be obtained via the e-mail address listed on this blog's Profile Page]

Seyran Ateş’ Der Multikulti-Irrtum [The Multicultural Fallacy], Berlin, Ullstein Verlag, 2007, hardback, 282 pages.

Susan Moller Okin’s prescient Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? (reproduced in the volume of the same name, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1999) asks a question that has become ever more prominent on the political agenda: “(…) what should be done when the claims of minority cultures or religions clash with the norm of gender equality that is at least formally endorsed by liberal states (however much they continue to violate it in their practices)?” (p9).

Before addressing the issues at stake, she first defines the terms in which her argument will be presented: “By feminism, I mean the belief that women should not be disadvantaged by their sex, that they should be recognised as having human dignity equal to that of men, and that they should have the opportunity to live as fulfilling and as freely chosen lives as men can.  Multiculturalism is harder to pin down, but the particular aspect that concerns me here is the claim, made in the context of basically liberal democracies, that minority cultures or ways of life are not sufficiently protected by the practice of ensuring the individual rights of their members, and as a consequence these should be protected through special group rights or privileges (…) In other cases, groups have claimed rights to govern themselves, to have guaranteed political representation, or to be exempt from certain generally applicable laws” (pp10-11, emphasis in original).

Individual and group rights may be discordant: “Suppose, the, that a culture endorses and facilitates the control of men over women in various ways (even if informally, in the private sphere of domestic life).  Suppose, too, that there are fairly clear disparities in power between the sexes, such that the more powerful, male members are those who are generally in a position to determine and articulate the group’s beliefs, practices, and interests.  Under such conditions, group rights are potentially, and in many cases actually, antifeminist.  They substantially limit the capacities of women and girls of that culture to live with human dignity equal to that of men and boys, and to live as freely chosen lives as they can.

Advocates of group rights for minorities within liberal states have not adequately addressed this simple critique of group rights, for at least two reasons.  First, they tend to treat cultural groups as monoliths – to pay more attention to differences between and among groups than to differences within them.  Specifically, they accord little or no recognition to the fact that minority cultural groups, like the societies in which they exist (though to a greater or lesser extent), are themselves gendered, with substantial differences in power and advantage between men and women.  Second, advocates of group rights pay little or no attention to the private sphere.  Some of the most persuasive liberal defences of group rights urge that individuals need ‘a culture of their own’ and that only within such a culture can people develop a sense of self-esteem or self-respect, as well as the capacity to decide what kind of life is good for them.  But such arguments typically neglect both the different roles that cultural groups impose on their members and the context in which persons’ sense of themselves and their capacities are first formed and in which culture is first transmitted – the realm of domestic or family life” (p12, emphasis in original).

The potentially adverse impact of setting aside a space within which group rights take precedence will be disproportionately greater for women: “First, the sphere of personal, sexual, and reproductive life functions as a central focus of most cultures, a dominant theme in cultural practices and rules.  Religious or cultural groups often are particularly concerned with ‘personal law’ – the laws of marriage, divorce, child custody, division and control of family property, and inheritance.  As a rule, then, the defence of ‘cultural practices’ is likely to have a much greater impact on the lives of women and girls than on those of men and boys, since far more of women’s time and energy goes into preserving and maintaining the personal, familial, and reproductive side of life.  Obviously, culture is not only about domestic arrangements, but they do provide a major focus of most contemporary cultures.  Home is, after all, where much of culture is practices, preserved, and transmitted to the young.  On the other hand, the distribution of responsibilities and power at home has a major impact on who can participate in and influence the more public parts of the cultural life, where rules and regulations about both public and private life are made.  The more a culture requires or expects of women in the domestic sphere, the less opportunity they have of achieving equality with men in either sphere” (pp12-13).

Although they are by no means perfect, Western liberal democracies have their merits nevertheless: “While virtually all of the world’s cultures have distinctly patriarchal pasts, some – mostly, though by no means exclusively, Western liberal cultures – have departed far further from them than others.  Western cultures, of course, still practice many forms of sex discrimination.  They place far more importance on beauty, thinness, and youth in females and on intellectual accomplishment, skill, and strength in males.  They expect women to perform for no economic reward far more than half of the unpaid work related to home and family, whether or not they also work for wages; partly as a consequence of this and partly because of workplace discrimination, women are far more likely than men to become poor.  Girls and women are also subjected to a great deal of (illegal) violence, including sexual violence.  But women in more liberal cultures are, at the same time, legally guaranteed many of the same freedoms and opportunities as men.  In addition, most families in such cultures, with the exception of some religious fundamentalists, do not communicate to their daughters that they are of less value than boys, that their lives are to be confined to domesticity and service to men and children, and that their sexuality is of value only in marriage, in the service of men, and for reproductive ends” (pp16-17).

We should therefore proceed with caution in assessing the merits of claims: “It is by no means clear, then, from a feminist point of view, that minority group rights are ‘part of the solution’.  They may well exacerbate the problem.  In the case of a more patriarchal minority culture in the context of a less patriarchal majority culture, no argument can be made on the basis of self-respect or freedom that the female members of the culture have a clear interest in its preservation.  Indeed, they might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct (so that its members would become integrated into the less sexist surrounding culture) or, preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women – at least to the degree to which this value is upheld in the majority culture.  Other considerations would, of course, need to be taken into account, such as whether the minority group speaks a language that requires protection, and whether the group suffers from prejudices such as racial discrimination.  But it would take significant factors weighing in the other direction to counterbalance evidence that a culture severely constrains women’s choices or otherwise undermines their well-being” (pp 22-3, emphasis in original).

We should also ensure that the group spokespersons with whom we engage in dialogue are genuinely representative of the community as a whole: “Moreover, policies designed to respond to the needs and claims of cultural minority groups must take seriously the urgency of adequately representing less powerful members of such groups.  Because attention to the rights of minority cultural groups, if it is to be consistent with the fundamentals of liberalism, must ultimately be aimed at furthering the well-being of the members of these groups, there can be no justification for assuming that the groups’ self-proclaimed leaders – invariably composed mainly of their older and their male members – represent the interests of all of the groups’ members.  Unless women – and, more specifically, young women (since older women often are co-opted into reinforcing gender inequality) – are fully represented in negotiations about group rights, their interests may be harmed rather than promoted by the granting of such rights” (pp23-4).

Against this backdrop, Seyran Ateş’ brutally honest and courageous warning about the deficits of multiculturalism could hardly have been better timed.  Living in Berlin since the age of six (in 1969), Ateş made the trip back to Turkey on holiday almost every year with her Kurdish father and Turkish mother, both of  whom were convinced that they would one day return for good, a sentiment that has been passed on to the third generation.  They never felt that their period of residence would be anything other than transitory, regardless of how many years went by.  Germany was always perceived by them as resolutely foreign and Turkey remained the focal point of their emotional attachment.

Like many Turkish immigrants before and after them, her parents never really felt at home in Germany and acquiring such a sense of belonging was not exactly made easy for them.  For today’s young people, gloomy job prospects exacerbate such underlying tensions.  Under these circumstances, many members of the third generation now cling tenaciously to the culture of a distant homeland they were not born in and its religion as the only things of value they possess.  They do not so much confidently straddle cultures, as feel exiled from both.

Ateş formerly practiced as a lawyer, but closed down her practice in the summer of 2006 after being assaulted by a defendant.  Because of her uncompromising stance on the plight of Muslim women and girls in contemporary Germany, she has been forced to remove her name from both doorbell and post box and has no official address.  As she pointedly writes, she lives in a country where freedom of expression enshrined in the Constitution, yet she has no choice but to live in hiding, punished for speaking her mind with overt hostility and even death threats.  Intimidation is thus the penalty for truthfulness and honesty, accusations of being a traitor to her community, undermining its image and contributing to animosity against immigrants have not deterred her from speaking out.

When honour killings and forced marriages are discussed in media, community representatives immediately go on the defensive.  However, little by way of effort is made to wean them off antiquated traditions, help them find their place in modern world and thereby set a process of change in motion in the Turkish-Muslim world.  Without this, justified criticisms make no impact whatsoever.

Ateş describes her book as an appeal for genuine tolerance, which she defines as the opposite of indifference and ignorance.  Instead, it involves becoming familiar with and accepting the other, their social milieu and culture: “Many Germans, particularly those of the Left, still continue to believe that the dream of a multicultural society will at some stage become a reality if things are simply left to run their course.  This is a mistake, however.  Multiculturalism, as it has been practiced thus far, is organised irresponsibility” (p9).

One of her primary endeavours is to demonstrate to the cultural relativists that they are committing a grave error of judgement with serious implications, when they trivialise the atrocities perpetrated in the name of Islam or even blame the West for them (p10).

Her aim is that all women, with or without the help of Islam, should have the opportunity to live the lives they want to, in dignity and freedom, but she is aware that in issuing this plea in public, she is fighting against people who do not want to engage in discussion, but prefer to silence their opponents by murdering them (p9).

In spite of the hardships she has encountered, she remains firmly convinced that cultures, languages and religions can live peacefully side by side, but that the precondition for this to happen is a genuine exchange.  Integration will only be possible if its objective is to establish a stable identity, when the majority culture does not demand that the immigrant community abandon wholesale the culture it has brought with it from its country of origin and when parallel societies that seek to subvert the way of life of the majority have ceased to exist.

Ateş concentrates primarily on the Turkish and Kurdish communities, partly because she has the greatest personal experience of them, and partly because they constitute the biggest contingent of “foreigners” residing in Germany.  Her focus is on Islam because religion represents a further problem.

She begins by tracing the origins of the multiculturalism debate in Germany.  Valid concerns blighting the lives of women have been deliberately pushed into the background.  I wholeheartedly agree with her condemnation of the abdication of the Left in the debate, which combines haughty dismissiveness with culpable neglect.  This almost total capitulation is not confined to Germany alone, and smacks of a cowardice, which serves only to perpetuate the sufferings of the most vulnerable in our society.  By ostracising anyone who voices reservations about the wisdom of prevailing orthodoxy, the Left has permitted racists to monopolise the debate, contenting itself with regurgitating truisms rather than examining the less savoury aspects of a more complex reality.  An impeccable example of just how difficult it has become for the Left to speak up in defence of the Western liberal democratic model is afforded by Balibar’s essay Is There a ‘Neo-Racism?’, (in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, London, Verso, 1991, pp17-28), which employs P.A. Taguieff’s concept of differentialist racism: “It is a racism whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others, but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of lifestyles and traditions” (p21).

This form of racism insidiously swathes itself in the language of its opposite: “It is granted from the outset that races do not constitute isolable biological units and that in reality there are no ‘human races’.  It may also be admitted that the behaviour of individuals and their ‘aptitudes’ cannot be explained in terms of their blood or even their genes, but are the result of their belonging to historical ‘cultures’.  Now anthropological culturalism, which is entirely orientated towards the recognition of the diversity and equality of cultures – with only the polyphonic ensemble constituting human civilisation – and also their transhistorical permanence, had provided the humanist and cosmopolitan anti-racism of the post-war period with most of its arguments” (p21, emphasis in original).

Balibar debunks its propositions: “(…) if insurmountable cultural difference is our true ‘natural milieu’, the atmosphere indispensable to us if we are to breathe the air of history, then the abolition of that difference will necessarily give rise to defensive reactions, ‘interethnic’ conflicts and a general rise in aggressiveness.  Such reactions, we are told, are ‘natural’, but they are also dangerous.  By an astonishing volte-face, we here see the differentialist doctrines themselves proposing to explain racism (and to ward it of)” (p22, emphasis in original).

What we witness is a displacement of the problematic (p22): “Prophylactic action against racial mixing in fact occurs in places where the established culture is that of the state, the dominant classes and, at least officially, the ‘national’ masses, whose style of life and thinking is legitimated by the system of institutions; it therefore functions as a unidirectional block on expression and social advancement.  No theoretical discourse on the dignity of all cultures will really compensate for the fact that, for a ‘Black’ in Britain or a ‘Beur’ in France, the assimilation demanded of them before they can become ‘integrated’ into the society in which they already live (and which will always be suspected of being superficial, imperfect or simulated) is presented as progress, as an emancipation, a conceding of rights.  And behind this situation lie barely reworked variants of the idea that the historical cultures of humanity can be divided into two main groups, the one assumed to be universalistic and progressive, the other supposed irremediably particularistic and primitive” (pp24-5).

Hence Balibar is reluctant to concede that Western democracy might exhibit any virtues whatsoever: “The difference between cultures, considered as separate entities or separate symbolic structures (that is, ‘culture’ in the sense of Kultur), refers on to cultural inequality within the ‘European’ space itself or, more precisely, to ‘culture’ (in the sense of Bildung, with its distinction between the academic and the popular, technical knowledge and folklore and so on) as a structure of inequalities tendentially reproduced in an industrialised, formally educated society that is increasingly internationalised and open to the world.  The ‘different’ cultures are those which constitute obstacles, or which are established as obstacles (by schools or the norms of international communication) to the acquisition of culture.  And, conversely, the ‘cultural handicaps’ of the dominated classes are presented as practical equivalents of alien status, or as ways of life particularly exposed to the destructive effects of mixing (that is, to the effects of the material conditions in which this ‘mixing’ occurs).  This latent presence of the hierarchic theme today finds its chief expression in the priority accorded to the individualistic model (just as, in the previous period, openly inegalitarian racism, in order to postulate an essential fixity of racial types, had to presuppose a differentialist anthropology, whether based on genetics or on Völkerpsychologie): the cultures supposed implicitly superior are those which appreciate and promote ‘individual’ enterprise, social and political individualism, as against those which inhibit these things.  These are said to be the cultures whose ‘spirit of community’ is constituted by individualism.

In this way, we see how the return of the biological theme is permitted and with it the elaboration of new variants of the biological ‘myth’ within the framework of cultural racism” (pp25-6, emphasis in original).

I fully accept Balibar’s call to vigilance against a racism in disguise, yet am deeply concerned about how such ideas have been translated into the vulgate of public opinion where any questioning of difference is automatically deplored as racism.  Is defending the achievements of the West, one of the most important of which is the recognition that there is no justification for treating women as the inferiors of men nothing more than cultural imperialism?  Is it racism to believe that minimum standards of decency and justice should apply to all ethnic groups within our society?  Shrugging our shoulders and invoking cultural difference is not going to stop women from having their clitoris and labia hacked off as a pre-emptive remedy to promiscuity.  The Berührungsängste [aversion to tackling the issue] of the Left is one of a series of disappointments and downright betrayals of its emancipatory origins.  The insufferable air of self-righteousness the Left adopts when at its most doctrinaire is in this instance directly harmful, stifling debate with an intellectual laziness matched only by its moral bankruptcy.  Small wonder that hardly anyone dares to speak up in a context where ceding ground has lent force to the charge that only racists harp on about cultural difference.

Timothy Garton-Ash, in What does a free society require of believers and non-believers alike? (The Guardian, 29^th November 2007), resists the creeping censorship spawned by the aversion to a serious engagement with the issue of where tolerance should end: “Among the essentials is freedom of expression, which has been eroded to an alarming degree, both by death threats from extremists and by misconceived pre-emptive appeasement on the part of the state and private bodies.  Freedom of expression necessarily includes the right to offend; not the duty, but the right.  We must, in particular, be free to say what we like about historical figures, be they Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Churchill, Hitler or Gandhi (and then let our claims be tested against the evidence).  We may not agree with what controversialists say about these figures but we must defend to the death their right to say it.  There should, for obvious reasons, be limits to what we are free to say about living people, but these limits must be very tightly drawn.

Among the liberal essentials is equality before the law, including equal rights for men and women.  Among the essentials is also freedom of religion.  Since a core liberal notion is that we must be free not just to pursue our own version of the good life but also to question and revise it, it follows that we must be free to propagate, question, change or abandon our religion.  In a free society, proselytisation, heresy and apostasy are not crimes.  This – and apostasy in particular – is not accepted in many versions of Islam, but it is a liberal essential on which there can be no compromise.

In order to secure these freedoms, we need a secular public sphere.  But what exactly do we mean by that?  To say “Enlightenment values” begs the question, “which Enlightenment”?  The Enlightenment of John Locke, which claimed freedom for religion, or that of Voltaire, which aspired rather to freedom from religion?  (I deliberately simplify a complex history.)  A liberal order in which the devotees of all Gods are free to try their hand in the public square, on an equal footing with those who insist – correctly, in my view – that there is no God?  Or a liberal order in which all gods are kept as far as possible out of the public square?  (The French republican understanding of laïcité is closer to the latter, the United States‘ first amendment tradition to the former.)  I’m more of a Lockean myself, but I don’t think this debate is best pursued at the abstract, theoretical level of “which Enlightenment”?  Better to tackle specific issues: faith schools, new mosques, the teaching of evolution, the hijab, Muhammad cartoons and so on.

We do, however, need to be clearer about the difference between secularism and atheism.  Secularism, in my view, should be an argument about arrangements for a shared public and social life; atheism is an argument about scientific truth, individual liberation and the nature of the good life.  Today’s debate around Islam is bedevilled by a confusion between the two.  Atheists must be free to say to Muslims, Christians or Jews: ‘Your mind would be much more free if you gave up your ridiculous belief in God’.  Believers must be free to argue back: ‘You would have a more profound sense of personal freedom if you did believe’.  But neither is entitled to demand that of the other as a condition for participating as a citizen in a free society.  The public policy argument about freedom for religion and the private conviction argument about freedom from or in religion should operate on different levels.

That distinction would, of course, no longer hold if being a devout Muslim were in fact incompatible with being a full citizen of a free society.  I feel this is what quite a few participants in the current debate, both atheist and Christian, really believe, while seldom spelling it out so clearly.  Yet the thought keeps peeping through, for example in the formula ‘Islam is incompatible with democracy’.  But as a non-Muslim I can only agree with the author Edward Mortimer who, in his book Faith and Power, concluded that there is no single, unchanging Islam, ‘there is only what I hear Muslims say, and see them do’.  What Muslims say and do in the name of Islam has varied enormously through history, and varies enormously today.  Yes, of course, there is the Qur’an and the Hadith, just as there is the Bible. But, as in all great religions, these are complex texts, subject to diverse interpretations”.

Joan Smith, likewise taking inspiration from the Gillian Gibbons teddy bear case in Islam and the modern world don’t mix (The Independent, 28^th November 2007), more clearly stresses the gender dimension: “The stark fact is that the notion of “honour” and the violence linked to it cannot co-exist with the modern idea of universal human rights.  It encourages men to create oppressive laws which do not recognise individual liberties, and to break the law in states where those liberties have been acknowledged.

I have never claimed that Islam is the only religion that does this, and there are anomalies in British law – the archaic offence of blasphemy is an example – which reminds us of a time when Christians reacted just as violently to what they perceived as “insults”.  In the past, Catholics and Protestants took turns to slaughter each other as Sunni and Shia are doing now, but Christianity has to a large extent been secularised. Not as much as I’d like – there’s still a way to go on homosexuality and abortion – but there is no doubt that the influence of Christian churches has dramatically declined.

At the heart of this process is an alteration in the status of religious texts.  The Old Testament is full of hair-raising injunctions and barbaric punishments but I don’t know anyone, apart from a few extremists on the Christian right, who takes it seriously.  The idea that a single book written centuries ago has unique authority – in effect, a veto over all other ideas – makes no sense in societies where intellectual curiosity is valued and encouraged”.

She elaborates further: “No book or person has a monopoly on truth, and I certainly don’t regard Muhammad, Jesus or Marx as beyond criticism.  But while Muslim scholars are prepared to argue about interpretation, they have this in common: they all agree on the primacy of the Qu’ran and the hadith.

Even the suggestion that the text needs to be reformed, which she has denied making, was sufficient to force Taslima Nasreen to flee her home country, Bangladesh, and seek refuge in Sweden.  She recently moved to India, hoping to find more tolerant attitudes among Indian Muslims, and is now being hounded from one city to another by angry mobs.

It is not enough in these circumstances to claim that Islam is a religion of peace, and dismiss all the things non-Muslims don’t like – honour killings, relentless assaults on free speech, and now an accusation of blasphemy related to a teddy bear – as aberrations.  The mores of the seventh century have no relevance in modern life, especially in the arena of sex where decisions about who to sleep with are widely regarded as a personal matter.

The damage that is being inflicted daily on the image of Islam doesn’t come from people like me, who are constantly accused of Islamophobia, but practices such as forced marriage, honour killings and heated denunciations of ‘Western’ values.  I can’t think of any secular country where a rape victim or a well-meaning British teacher would find themselves threatened with flogging”.

Ateş unflinchingly confronts the Left and Liberals with their share of the blame for the coming into being of parallel societies by elevating multiculturalism to the status of an unchallengeable ideology.  The result is that people of different ethnic origins lead hermetically sealed lives with virtually no contact or crossover.  At the same time the unwitting instigators of this segregation are astonished that such separate spheres have come into existence, as if they had been conjured up from nowhere.  They are, quite simply, oblivious to their own share of the responsibility: “I mean the variety of Leftists and Liberals who appear to be of the opinion that they enjoy a monopoly on being good, the so-called multiculturalists [Multikultis].  I would even go so far as to designate some of them as multicultural fanatics because they are downright obsessed with their vision of a multicultural society.  They propagate it with missionary zeal, are blind to reality and respond to doubt and divergent opinion with abrupt intolerance” (p14).

Ateş convincingly argues that leaving as much room as possible for cultural peculiarities and avoiding arrogance in dealings with other cultures is one of the cornerstones of the rule of law.  There are limits to tolerance, however, and these are set out in the Constitution.  Neither a fundamental nor a human right to culture is recognised.  Culture ends where racism begins.  This cuts both ways, though, applying to majority and to the disparate minority cultures alike.  Ateş does not object to the idealism of the multiculturalists, but to their lack of realism.  When they feast on other cultures, they fail to appreciate that they are projecting on to them all that is positive, embracing them with boundless admiration, reserving their ire/disdain for their own, impoverished, degenerate, led-astray culture (the complaints are familiar: materialism run riot, absence of spiritual values, lack of respect for the elderly).  In short, the multiculturalists glorify the foreign at the expense of their own culture, which they devalue (perhaps from a guilty conscience).  They are, however, looking at the minority culture from the outside, with the inevitable bias such a vantage point entails: “The reason why I call the multiculturalists irresponsible is that they are indulging in a non-binding tolerance of other cultures.  As long as they are not influenced by other ways of life, ‘the others’ can do what they like.  Since the true multiculturalist is in essence an opponent and in some instances an outright enemy of the state, it is very difficult to convince him if at all that the welfare state can no longer sustain a putative integration policy in the form in which it has existed hitherto” (p15).

The multiculturalists are not consciously aware of their hypocrisy: “The tolerance of classical ‘multiculturalists’ towards foreigners has clear limits, however.  As soon as offspring are on the way, he very soon seeks out another area to live in with fewer ‘foreigners’.  Because his progeny are supposed to have decent chances in life.  The multicultural fanatic on the other hand, you have to give him credit where it is due, even manages to remain faithful to his multicultural part of town.  When his children do not settle down in school because proper teaching is impossible when the majority of pupils in the class barely speak German you start hearing slogans, such as ‘I sacrificed my child on the altar of multiculturalism’” (pp15-16).

With her straight talking, Ateş breaks through the obfuscations and hand-wringing anxieties that hamper debate: “This does not mean treating minorities with kid gloves in a spirit of cultural relativism due to the all-pervasive fear of offending them.  Such behaviour is every bit as racist as the opposite, in other words, perceiving minorities as barbarous and acting as if they had a monopoly on all the nastiness that exists in dealings between human beings.  Irrespective of whether a deplorable state of affairs is played down or projected onto the culture of ‘the other’, both prevent equal treatment.  And equal treatment is precisely what I am after (…)

For that to happen, however, we first have to ascertain how much the majority society composed of native-born Germans actually knows about ‘other cultures’ in Germany and about what their circumstances and living conditions actually look like within this society because only once I am familiar with the particular features of the communities can I provide effective victim protection.  At the same time, agreement needs to be reached about being allowed to criticise, condemn and combat as contemptible traditions everything that contradicts universal human rights” (p107).

This presents many feminists with the dilemma of where to seek allies.  Multiculturalists and Islamic fundamentalists make strange bedfellows, their coalition as unlikely as one between feminists and the Right.  Nevertheless: “When dealing with topics such as integration, Germany as a country of immigration and Islam, the old dividing lines between Left and Right don’t operate any more.  All of a sudden as a left-wing feminist I find myself allied with Conservatives.  I feel that they understand my positions and concerns and take them seriously.  Whereas many Leftists are ideologically blinkered and unaware of the questionable alliances they occasionally enter into” (p249).

Immigration began in earnest over 40 years ago in Germany, but the response of politicians until very recently was to ignore it, Sleeping Beauty-style, as Ateş puts it.  Being in denial can have pernicious consequences, which she charts.  The ethnic composition of certain districts within German cities changed rapidly, a process accelerated by reunification, leaving some blocks of rented flats with no “native Germans” [I am painfully aware of the limitations of this translation of Urdeutsche, since the main objection to the conceptual and linguistic inadequacy of the terms hitherto used to describe the Turkish population in Germany is that they bracket out, or overtly deny the fact that many of them were born in Germany] and certain school classes almost exclusively (80-100%) made up of the children of immigrants.  Thus parallel societies have gradually come into being: “By this I do not mean the many subcultures, which have emerged within an increasingly differentiated society, such as the gay scene in Berlin for example, or the community of football fans or carnival enthusiasts, ballroom dancers, singletons, single mothers, etc.  What I actually mean is an alternative society, which delineates itself in contradistinction to and as a rival of our majority society and which pursues the declared aim of altering structures within majority society that are incompatible with its own culture.  Majority society is supposed to adapt or even subordinate itself to the traditions and customs of the minority.  We are dealing with a very strong, self-confident and in part extremely arrogant Muslim (regardless of whether they actively practice their religion) community, who have created a world independent of that of the majority with its own legislative, executive and judiciary powers.  Contact with native Germans is no longer necessary in this separate world and often not even deemed desirable” (pp16-17).

Within these communities you can find a Turkish greengrocers on every street corner, halal meat is easily obtainable, any Turkish speciality, no matter how exotic can be found with minimal effort, services are provided in Turkish, problems are resolved in Turkish and according to Turkish tradition.  Marital disputes often never make it as far as court because the family takes care of them instead.  The multiculturalist might welcome Turkish bakeries as a colourful addition relieving the monotony of the street landscape, but Ateş is acutely aware of the unhealthy isolationism in the Turkish neighbourhoods: “Very many Turks and Kurds live today in Germany without any kind of contact with native Germans even though they live in the same building or street.  Majority society has long ignored the existence of such parallel societies.  The multiculturalist bought his vegetables at the ‘Turk’s’, his kebab at the Döner shop and was fiercely proud of his first-hand multicultural credentials and anti-Germanness.  In the meantime he did not demonstrate the slightest interest in the culture of the greengrocer or the owner of the kebab shop who might well have been a patriarch filled with contempt for the native German and his way of life.  The blinkered multiculturalist didn’t even notice.  He was convinced that the ‘Turk’ must adore him because he was, after all, ‘foreigner-friendly’.

Ultimately this meant that the multiculturalist had formed a bond of solidarity with the Turkish or Kurdish patriarch, although he would never have dreamed of doing the same with his uneducated, rough and ready German fellow citizen who beat his wife and drank away the housekeeping money down the local or squandered it in fruit machines” (pp17-18).

She distinguishes between three groups: the advocates of the notion of a multicultural society, multiculturalists and multicultural fanatics.  The first lack the power and the majority backing to set the agenda politically and are slowly moving towards a concept of transculturalism.  The latter two have accumulated a burden of culpability, which they ought to face up to and modify their views accordingly.  For Ateş, multiculturalism is outdated.  In its place, she promulgates transculturalism, which we have been drifting towards unawares as it is.  In her opinion, the fatal shortcoming of multiculturalism is to be found in its assumption that in a single country different cultures would be able to live together peacefully side by side, all acknowledging and submitting to the authority of the same state.  Each one of these cultures would remain fairly distinct and self-contained.  Indeed, this very separateness and exclusion were allegedly the hallmark of multiculturalism as cultures that insisted on their uniqueness/individual distinctiveness excluded difference whether intentionally or not.  Today, however, we inhabit a globalised world in which people constantly shift or migrate between the most disparate cultural domains and are therefore exposed to the most diverse cultural influences.  From this arises a blending of cultures and a new set of identities far more complex than those produced in sealed off, monocultural environments.

These processes are far from unique to Germany alone and Ateş provides an objective and illuminating survey of the evolution leading up to the situation that prevails today.  Germany has long been a favoured destination for immigrants, without ever having put in place the legislation to merit such status.  Immigration has almost exclusively taken place through family reunification or asylum-seeking and has always been tightly regulated for employment purposes.  Her historical overview of the vocabulary used to describe immigrants exposes the underlying lack of acceptance on the part of the majority as well as the presumed transitory nature of sojourn, not seen as a permanent putting down of roots.  The drearily literal designations constitute a clear and succinct illustration of everything that has gone wrong.  In the1950s a labour shortage in Germany attracted 700,000 or so foreigners from Portugal, Italy, Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey who were lumped together under the term Gastarbeiter [literally guest workers], the implication of that word being that they would, sooner or later, pack their bags and go home, even though their willingness to take on the menial tasks the Germans turned their noses up at meant they were greeted with open arms.  This was a particularly strong assumption concerning the Turks and Kurds: Muslims would harbour no desire to stay in a Christian country longer than absolutely necessary.  In fairness, the Turks and Kurds thought in identical terms.  If asked, representatives of the first generation would proclaim that they would spend a year in Germany tops earning a good living.  Thus twenty years were allowed to elapse with no integration policy worth the name.

The oil crisis in the 70s put an end to the recruitment drive abroad, but this did not mean that the flow of immigrants dried up.  Many of the Gastarbeiter availed themselves of the right to bring their families to join them once it dawned on them that the likelihood of their returning home in the near future was slender.  By the 80s, the number of Gastarbeiter had reached some 4.7 million.  The demand for their labour had diminished and the climate towards them became increasingly hostile.  Why did they not just go back home?  Ateş quite rightly retaliates with the question of why, if Germany was only interested in workers, did its politicians not opt for fixed term contracts for the incomers without making provision for their spouses and children to join them?

In the meantime, the workers had moved out of the hostels and into flats of their own, if they were fortunate enough to have found a landlord willing to rent out rooms to “foreigners”.  They moved into areas dominated by the working class and formed mini communities of their own, mirror images of the villages or towns they had left behind.  The number of foreign-born occupants of such streets swiftly rose.  By this stage they were referred to, starkly, as Ausländer [foreigners].  Earlier predictions about the Muslims proved erroneous.  How to get rid of them became the main preoccupation of the majority.  They couldn’t simply be deported as most of them were in possession of a residence permit of unlimited duration or an entitlement to stay and carry on independent activity (self-employed).  Some were even holders of a German passport.  At this juncture, some bright spark reasoned that since they had come to Germany in the first place to make money in order to establish themselves comfortably in Turkey later on they could be given an incentive to leave Germany.  On 1^st December 1983 the law on encouraging foreigners to return entered into force.  Financial assistance to the tune of approximately 5,300 Euros was to be put on offer to those willing to go back.  In addition, their pension contributions were to be paid out.  In 1988 Ateş’ parents availed themselves of the measure, but not as many as had been hoped by the initiators of the legislation followed them.

By the end of the 80s it was no longer politically correct to call the resident immigrant population “foreigners”, and so the unwieldy substitute ausländische Mitbürger [foreign co-citizens], which coincided with the discovery of ethnic diversity and a debate on the merits of multiculturalism, was coined to replace it.  This new term soon fell out of favour, because it emphasised the alien, the coming-in-from-the-outside-aspect.  “Migrant” and “immigrant” did not appear fitting either, as the Chancellor was at pains to stress that Germany was not an immigrant country.  In the mid-90s the latest effort to express difference came in the shape of türkeistammig [originating from Turkey], türkischstamming [of Turkish origin] and Deutsche türkischer Herkunft [Germans of Turkish extraction].  As Ateş remarks, the plethora of linguistic innovations did nothing to alter the fact that neither side had a clear image of how to relate to each other.  She draws the comparison with an open relationship in which the partners are wary of entering into a full commitment, yet neither do they wish to split up altogether.

Following reunification, tensions erupted and houses occupied primarily by immigrants were burned down, people were hunted down and executed.  Although shunned by the politically correct, the designation “foreigner” was used liberally by the media (little has changed in that respect according to Ateş), particularly when reporting on riots by right-wing extremists.  The September 11^th attacks have instigated a further terminological modification: Arabs, Turks and Kurds are now subsumed under the heading “Muslims” and have been placed under blanket suspicion of terrorist sympathies.

Her conclusion: “The 40-year history of migration from Turkey into Germany is the history of an absence of social acceptance.  This lack of social acceptance, the social devaluation and exclusion of people from Turkey – for the most part people of other nationalities do not fare much better if they do not happen to belong to the European community – is reflected in the difficulty of finding an appropriate term for them.  As long as these people are not accepted as an integral part of this society they will continue to be perceived, denoted and excluded as foreigners.

In my opinion it is of the utmost significance to find a term that can be used to describe those of us who are not of native German extraction with which we can identify and which will enable us to feel as if we are part of German society.  The kind of term I am looking for is one that does not in itself contain implicit discrimination, such as “foreigner”, “foreign co-national” etc.  All of the terms used up to now suggest that the people they refer to are different, foreign and not native to Germany.

“Deutschländer” [as opposed to Deutsche, which would translate as “Germans”; an approximation might be “Englanders” for English.  I propose to leave it in the original rather than render it as German-Turks analogous to, for example, British-Asians] is what (…) the Turks living in Germany are called in Turkey.  The term bore a primarily negative connotation, but I find it very fitting for people whose lives are centred in Germany without being able to look back on a long family history in that country.  You can always start filling it with positive meaning.  At any rate I prefer “Deutschländer” to any of the alternatives.  Personally speaking, I can identify with it quite well, even if there is a type of sausage of the same name.  The term “Deutschländer” includes the country in which we live and emphasises the sense of belonging to it and its society” (pp26-7).

Ateş then sketches out attitudes and the genesis of present day integration problems.  First generation immigrants arrived with the expectation that they would not stay permanently.  They felt and behaved like guests.  They wanted to earn money, which they would set aside and take back to Turkey with them.  Initially they did not bring their families with them either because they only envisaged a short spell in Germany.  Children were left behind with relatives, brought up within the extended family.  When the immigrant workers were recruited nobody took the trouble to point out to them that their belief that they would only remain for a year or so before returning with a large amount of savings was unrealistic and that the likelihood of their spending many years or even the rest of their lives in Germany was far greater.  Ateş characterises this as the crucial difference between Germany and a genuine immigrant country, such as the US.  Nor were her parents enamoured of the idea that Germany might be their new home.  They had neither the will nor the inclination to integrate.  However, as Ateş makes clear, it would be grossly unfair to blame the first generation for failing to do so.  Irrespective of the fact that the country was not geared towards integration, no efforts were made by society at large to teach the immigrants anything other how to perform their jobs correctly.  They were patronisingly addressed in “Tarzan German”, in keeping with the lowly status accorded them.  Most were unskilled workers filling in vacancies that Germans did not deign to accept.  Their physical constitution was of greater concern than their level of schooling.

The second generation was far more heterogeneous.  The extent to which they integrated depended to a large degree on the timing of their arrival.  The older they were, the lesser the chances of completing their education successfully.  Again this should not be taken as an indicator of a lack of desire to adapt on their part, but rather as a serious charge against a system that foresaw no dedicated support for them (thankfully this has been remedied in the meantime, although the opportunities that now exist for those who failed to leave school with any qualifications smack of palliative activity, an “alibi function”, as Ateş puts it, as most do not have any real prospect of employment).

For those who settled in Germany in the 70s their future hinged on whether they were placed in classes reserved for immigrants or in classes where the majority of pupils were Germans.  The prevailing policy of the time was to gather together Turkish children in segregated classes, although in those days mixed classes would have been perfectly possible.  Those who were incorporated into ordinary classes quickly made friends and secured better results.  Ateş attributes the stubbornness displayed by the school system in separating off children of different ethnic extraction to simple lack of interest based on the misguided assumption that they would soon be going back home anyway.  Her verdict: the second generation was shut out of the education system.  A complicating (and still highly relevant) factor was that certain Muslim families did everything in their power to keep their daughters out of school to avoid their being “led astray”.  In addition, many second-generation children were sent to remedial schools because of learning difficulties arising from their imperfect command of German.  The result was that huge numbers left school with nothing to show for it and this severely restricted their employment prospects.

The fortunate few as a rule outperformed their German classmates in the knowledge that they had to do better as immigrants if they wanted to carve out a decent living for themselves in later life.  Girls were under even greater pressure to achieve because they had to prove that their ethnic origin did not mean they were less intelligent.  Upward social mobility was their prize, but even the most successful members of the second generation felt torn between their own vision of how to live a good life and that of their parents, leaving them unable to pass on any clear guidelines to their own children.  On the one hand, they sought to distance themselves from the first generation whilst on the other they were only too aware of being excluded within their adopted homeland.  Fluent in two languages and equally comfortable in both cultures these few are feted as examples of successful integration and their identity is transcultural.

This group does not accurately reflect the situation of the majority of second-generation immigrants whose mastery of German and qualifications are not comparable, who were the first to lose their jobs in the recession following reunification and who had little option but to fall back on the social security safety net.  Their fate had a direct impact on the third generation who have lost out in every respect, having grown up to believe that they are neither wanted nor needed in Germany and that regardless of how much energy they devote to improving their lot their exertions will remain futile as far as their labour market opportunities are concerned.  At the same time they learn that it is possible at least to get by on benefits.  Ateş classifies them as the lost generation, living proof of the disastrous consequences of the chronic aversion to confronting the real need for integration.  Most are unable to speak either German or Turkish properly, in the throes of a permanent identity crisis.  The combination of feeling as if they do not belong, lack of recognition and paucity of life chances leads them back to the culture of their forebears and they reject mainstream German lifestyles.  Against this backdrop, violence is rife with large numbers of young men convicted for it (every third persistent offender, defined as having committed more than ten crimes a year, comes from an immigrant background, with Turks, Vietnamese, Poles and Lebanese topping the list).

These young people are positioned between cultures with all the tensions thus implied.  Their parents are often anxious that the old traditions not be lost (although very few observe them strictly), but their children lose sight of their positive elements, absorbing instead those related to power and violence.  The nihilism of hopelessness gnaws at them, their emotional poverty coupled with material deprivation.  As if this were not bad enough, they also experience the narrowing of horizons and poverty of ambition of the chronically disadvantaged: of school leavers without qualifications, 9.2% are “native Germans” compared with 20.5 of Deutschländer (figures from 2003-4).

That integration would take place by osmosis or immersion within the wider mainstream without the need for any outside agency or support has been shown up as a myth.  Ateş dismisses the idea that the extent of integration depends on social class, since approximately 80% of Deutschländer do not feel they form part of German society.  Integration is not a one-way street: both sides have to meet half way.  If majority society is unwilling to adapt, German nationality, speaking the language and living in German surroundings will still be considered inadequate.  In spite of above average fluency and impressive educational backgrounds, fully assimilated immigrants will go on being looked upon as non-German on the basis of their looks and foreign sounding name.  As it is, they are treated like walking miracles even though what they have done is exactly what the majority demands of them.  More German than the clichéd German they are performance-oriented and highly disciplined.  What more are they supposed to do to gain acceptance?  Even the complete assimilation entailed by Germanising their names (Ayşe to Anja and Mustafa to Manfred) cannot eradicate the mark of exclusion constituted by their appearance.

In the rhetoric of politicians, “integration” should not be taken at face value, but read as “assimilation”.  Ayşe might not want to become Anja, however, as her identity and personality derive sustenance from both cultures.  She possesses an intercultural competence, which can only be of benefit to society.  This is precisely why there are no reasonable grounds for her to turn her back on her Turkish culture.  Only once politicians wake up to the vast potential that is being squandered in parallel societies, that there are young people who speak two, three or more languages will an important step towards a feasible integration policy have been taken.  The worst possible message to transmit would be to urge the Deutschländer to preserve their original culture completely intact with no concessions to the German environment, that they can expect no help in becoming German because the native population is ashamed of its own culture.

The burden of responsibility for peaceful co-existence rests on the shoulders of the second generation, as the attitudes of the third will be moulded by them and their long-term input will continue as grandparents to the fourth generation.  It is from their ranks that the “cultural chauvinists in the Islamic Associations and the hate preachers in the mosques” are drawn (p40).  These are the parents who refuse to send their children to nursery school, ask permission for their daughters to be excused from lessons and marry them off forcibly, who instil in their sons an image of humanity and of women in particular that shows contempt for rights and law alike, transforming them into violent guardians of “honour” and even into murderers.

Having thus clarified the context, Ateş moves on to the substance of her analysis: the situation of Muslim women and girls in Germany.  Her position is unequivocal.  In the same way as no democracy worth the name can function whilst women are oppressed, integration is doomed to failure as long as women are denied equality, the opportunity to lead a fully autonomous life on their own terms.  As a result, integration policy across the globe must have the emancipation of women as its first priority.

Discrimination against women in the Turkish and Kurdish communities begins before birth.  Prior to conception, both men and women hope for a boy, as the birth of a daughter is not so much a cause for celebration as regret.  Bringing a boy into the world is viewed as a proof of the husband’s manhood and enhances the status of the wife.  Ateş herself was spared the trauma of being grudgingly tolerated as two older brothers had preceded her.  Pre-natal diagnostics allow the gender of the foetus to be established and female embryos are aborted with monotonous regularity, a practice which has spread to Germany (compare this with a recent article by Paul Bracchi, Britain’s missing babies, Daily Mail, 3^rd December 2007, which publicises research revealing that between 1990 and 2005, about 1,500 fewer girls were born to Indian mothers living in England and Wales than would have been statistically probable for this group.  The expert who collated the information insists that the discrepancy in birth ratios is too “sudden and pronounced to have a likely biological or environmental cause… the most probable explanation is sex-selective abortion”).

Girls bear the brunt of an authoritarian tradition of rearing children that does not balk at corporal punishment as they are the repositories of the family honour.  The onset of puberty is fraught with conflict, with every male relative interfering in a girl’s upbringing and asserting their claim to power by force if necessary.  Bringing pressure to bear is not the exclusive preserve of men, however, as female relations and friends can also help uphold “virtue” (As Phyllis Chesler remarks in The Death of Feminism (Houndmills, Palgrave Macmillan, 2005: “Arab and Muslim women are not exempt from universal women’s ‘ways of being’.  This includes female-female aggression, competition, conformism, sexist policing, gossip, envy and hate – as well as female-female kindness, compassion, support for resistance and rescue from violence”, p124).  The girl must not suffer damage to her “reputation”.  This is often the juncture at which even daughters of “modern” Turkish families start wearing headscarves, rebelling against their more progressive parents by adopting this potent symbol.

The one socially acceptable role for a Muslim woman is that of being a good wife and mother.  The more suitors a girl can boast of, the greater her standing.  She might show off about the number of proposals she has received without fully grasping what is at stake.  The resulting “marriages” cannot be deemed voluntary in any genuine sense.  The brides are mostly between 12 and 18 years of age and are “joined in wedlock” by Muslim clerics, the couple living together until they have reached legal adulthood and can be officially married at a registrar’s.

Amongst the Deutschländer, marriages are quite literally family affairs as opposed to a commitment entered into by two individuals.  Entire clans have to get along with each other and frictions are often rife.  Daily life can be soured by gossip and wrangling, the older generations convinced that they know best and advising the husband on how to extract obedience from his spouse.  Even when the marriage has the potential to work, it often founders because the newly weds are not permitted uninterrupted time together, under a continual obligation to prove their loyalty to their respective extended families.  Daughters-in-law have a particularly hard time of it, as they are required to submit to the authority not only of their husbands, but also of all the other male relatives.  They have no choice but to run both their own households and those of their parents-in-law.  Until they have children of their own they are in many instances put in charge of caring for their nieces and nephews.  None of these duties is a matter of choice, but taken for granted and the women concerned are never consulted as to their opinion.

Ateş makes no bones about her stance: “[The situation of Muslim girls and women] is an excellent yardstick against which to measure integration policy.  If one really had existed, there would be no need to lament such deplorable circumstances in the lives of many Muslim women and girls today.  The integration of all Deutschländer would have progressed a long way further.  The manner in which a society treats its women and children also demonstrates the level of civilisation and democracy it has attained.

State and society have allowed Muslim women and girls to fall victim to antiquated traditions and patriarchal structures which show contempt for humanity.  Even now thousands of them are locked up in their dwellings and beaten.  They can barely string two words together in German and have no contacts with anyone outside their family.  Many of these women live in the so-called [ethnically segregated] neighbourhoods where they virtually never encounter any native-born Germans.

The situation of Muslim girls and women is being played down in order to justify decades of omissions in integration policy” (p44).

Counselling services and courses are on offer to introduce Muslim immigrants to German society (though many initiatives tailored specifically for women have been abandoned due to a chronic lack of funding).  It has become increasingly apparent, however, that for them to stand any chance of success the entire family has to be involved.  The taboo against any meddling in the private lives of people from a different cultural background long hindered such realisation.  Since the amended immigration law entered into force in 2005 it has been compulsory for all newcomers to attend an integration course to enhance their language skills as well as improve their knowledge of social, cultural and economic life in Germany (and overcoming the ingrained recalcitrance of the Left has been an uphill struggle: “We have spent decades convincing the multicultural dreamers that it is not racist to demand of immigrants that they learn German.  It was a hard slog.  But we are far from having won everyone over yet.  Integration is not contingent upon language knowledge some continue to maintain in all seriousness”, pp236-7).  Following reforms (applicable as of July 2007), the length of these courses has been increased from 600 to 900 hours.  The possibility of penalties for non-attendance has also been opened up.

The laudable intention behind the courses is that women should be given a helping hand in becoming more independent and thereby empowered to take charge of their own destinies.  Ateş regrets the fact that the courses have not yet attained the conceptual maturity to be able to reach women who have been conditioned by traditional thought patterns.  The most serious problem is that participation is only mandatory for new arrivals.  Women who have been resident in Germany for a longer period are unfortunately not entitled to take part in them.  Not that the women themselves would necessarily want to take part if left to their own devices.  Ateş recounts an incident whereby a Turkish woman had been given a placement under a job creation scheme, not an integration course proper, but a similar initiative.  She complained to the teacher that she could not even work half days because of having to look after the children.  Later on, she confided in one of the other Turkish participants: “‘These Germans simply can’t get their heads around it: I can’t go out to work because it is a question of honour!’”.

Ateş shows little sympathy towards such attitudes, asking why the state should foot the bill for such misogynistic traditions, as what it boils down to is these women claiming benefits because in the eyes of their husbands remunerated employment outside the home is incompatible with his sense of “honour”.  For which read anxiety that their wives might be corrupted by coming into contact with strange men and developing sexual desires of their own.  One of her clients had been severely battered by her husband for having the temerity to express a wish to supplement the housekeeping money from social security by helping out in a shop.  He snarled at her that what she really wanted was to be ogled at and felt up by other men.

Ateş dismisses the notion that this represents an extreme manifestation of simple jealousy, classifying it instead as the will to regulate and control every aspect of female sexuality on the part of Muslim men.  For her, this insatiable appetite for power and domination is the single key issue determining the position of Muslim women in Europe, the unpalatable truth which underlies the wearing of the headscarf, forced marriages, honour killings and domestic violence.

The majority of women Muslim immigrants in Germany (and here she draws on her vast experience as a lawyer) are largely confined to less privileged social milieus and are not particularly well-educated.  They are highly dependent on the family network and would be at a total loss without it.  Everything revolves around the family group, individuality is downgraded.  Many immigrant women have never learned how to take decisions of their own let alone take charge of their lives.  For some of those who succeeded in breaking out of forced marriages being freed from the constant threat of violence and always being told what to do by others was entirely new.  Even something as self-evidently banal as doing the shopping when they wanted and for what they wanted imparted a heady sense of freedom.

Not that Ateş idealises the realities of life in Western Europe for non-immigrant women, acknowledging that we have not yet achieved full equality regardless of what the statute books stipulate.  Most immigrant women have not yet taken the first faltering steps towards catching up, however, and precisely because of their lack of education and social vulnerability require assistance to pluck up the courage to set off down the road to emancipation.  What we witness instead are clear trends towards a new religious conservatism, turning back the clock to the 7th century.  Ateş regards the headscarf as the visible indicator of this tendency.  Whereas most Turkish and Kurdish women of the first generation deliberately and demonstratively cast their headscarves aside when they came to Germany, more and more women of the second and third generation are covering themselves up.

Ateş goes on to address the myriad flagrant abuses of human and women’s rights committed in the name of culture in great and harrowing depth, meticulously tracing the cultural history of forced marriages (“Silence is a very widespread reaction on the part of Muslim women when asked whether they would like to marry this man or another one.  Silence, because they have never learned to give a genuine answer to enquiries because they are ashamed.  In certain families fathers no longer speak to their daughters once they have reached a certain age.  At most they issue the occasional instructions, but no real conversations take place – and a chat about such an intimate matter as marriages is certainly off limits” (p55); “One motive for forced marriage which is only seldom mentioned is the homosexuality of the children, particularly of the sons.  Marriage is expected because it offers the possibility of a ‘cure’ for this sexual orientation, which is viewed as an illness by many Muslims and is fought against with the utmost vehemence.  The wife frequently only discovers that her partner is gay late on.  Sometimes the spouses come to an arrangement.  The man says: ‘OK, I will fulfil my duty to father two or three children, but then I will leave you in peace.  In return please let me go about living my own life’.  Here too the men are at an advantage.  A lesbian who is paired off in a forced marriage has barely no chance of leading a double life, certainly not on the basis of making an arrangement with her husband” (p56); “Some of my clients were beaten on a regular basis for years on end by their mothers-in-law for refusing to have children.  In part, these women stated quite clearly that they did not want to start a family yet, or they did everything in their power to prevent a pregnancy from happening.  All but the tiniest number of these women had no access to contraception.  Only very few had friends or neighbours who acted as their accomplices and obtained the pill for them in secret.  This is why many women have recourse to subterfuge to prevent unwanted pregnancies.  It is not a rarity for them to fake migraines or other physical ailments over such a long period that real somatic illnesses or depression ensue.  For other women by contrast children represent the only source of solace, the only positive feature in their lives” (p57)), and the range of practices flanking it, such as the pathological obsession with virginity as the mark of honour, the unrelenting supervision and chaperoning of young people and the plight of imported brides (according to the prevailing legislation they only acquire an independent right of residence once two years have elapsed and have to endure their husband’s brutality in the meantime as they can be deported for trying to escape the marriage except in circumstances of demonstrable hardship, p59).

Ateş proposes a series of remedies, the first of which is to make forced marriage a criminal offence in its own right.  This would not only allow it to be punished more effectively than hitherto, but also serve to raise awareness of the wrongfulness of the practice, not only amongst perpetrators and victims, but also within the judicial system itself.  Most of the former do not realise that it is already prohibited by law as a particularly serious form of coercion (not that its victims are generally of an age or possess the requisite education or specialist legal knowledge to be able to invoke the protection it affords), and making its illegality explicit would chip off the veneer of tradition that renders it acceptable.  The penalties meted out thus far have not sufficed to convince families of the injustice of selling their daughters and calmly sitting in the room next door whilst she is raped.  Although it would be possible to convict those responsible for forced marriage of rape, coercion, grievous bodily harm and deprivation of personal liberty simultaneously, most judges have shied away from doing so because alleged cultural peculiarities are involved.

Furthermore, the one-year period which must elapse before a marriage can be annulled should be scrapped and the rules governing the right of residence of victims revised to make it possible for girls carried off to Turkey to be married to a partner they barely know to return to Germany even in cases where they have spent over six months abroad in the interim.

Finally, girls who have not yet reached legal adulthood should be given the opportunity to flee to refuges without their parents’ consent being required as this puts them at greater risk: most do not want a complete break with their families, but neither do they wish to be married off against their will and the law as it stands confronts them with a dilemma many cannot cope with.

Reformed legislation must be accompanied by preventive measures, such as lessons incorporated into the official curriculum at nursery and primary schools and letting girls know about where to turn to for help.  From her legal practice, Ateş can corroborate that many women only find out about their rights and the support mechanisms in place when they start attending the aforementioned integration courses.  Passing on this vital information should therefore become a mandatory part of the courses.  Since the entire family is usually implicated in arranging a forced marriage, cooperation with immigrant associations is likewise indispensable given that they play such a key part in relaying the laws, values and standards of majority society.  As Ateş points out, many of these associations have been accepting subsidies to carry out integration work for decades without, to the best of her knowledge, fulfilling their side of the bargain in an active and satisfactory fashion.  On too many occasions they have simply denied the existence of the problem or are guilty of trivialising it.

Honour killings are not condoned by Islam, but, originate from much further back in history, and are deeply entrenched in the tribal societies of the Near and Middle East.  However, passages in the Koran and traditional Islamic texts pertaining to the appropriate conduct of women are often cited by way of justification.  Mosques and Islamic associations therefore ought to be the first to correct misapprehensions amongst their brethren.

Her resounding indictment: “It is deeply shocking that even in a country such as Germany many women had to die before the debate reached its current stage.  The bogus tolerance of so-called cultural peculiarities has led to the toleration of violations of the most fundamental human rights.  For this reason I also accuse the multicultural fanatics of a share of the responsibility for what has gone wrong in Germany.  Honour killings were already being committed in the 1970s and 80s, just as they are today.  But neither the media, mainstream politicians or the diehard Leftists, who were part of the squatter movement and caught up in their autonomous struggle against the ‘filthy state’ bothered their heads about human rights abuses that were taking place right under their noses.  It was the hard-line Left that learned about the immigrant community, including its darker side, from us Turkish and Kurdish women who worked together with them in the widest possible variety of projects.  Many such Leftists did not want to shake the foundations of a world view that cast the foreigners as the good guys and the Germans as the bad”, p62).

Women are regarded as property, not merely of the husband, but of the entire community.  Article 1, paragraph 1 of the German Constitution states that the dignity of the human being is inviolable and that the state is called upon to both respect and protect it.  Unfortunately, large segments of the Turkish and Kurdish communities in Germany do not feel bound by the strictures of the Constitution, which to their minds only applies to native Germans.  Once again, therefore, Ateş suggests that honour killing be included as a separate offence.  Turning a blind eye to this appalling negation of women’s worth would be obscene and cannot be treated more leniently as the product of a different cultural tradition (the so-called “culture bonus”).  We have a moral obligation towards those who cannot defend themselves against social pressure (increasingly, women are being driven to suicide by their relatives in preference to overt slaughter) and to condemn harmful and archaic traditions.

We should not lose sight of the fact that honour killings are not an exclusively male crime.  Because the honour of the entire family is believed to have been besmirched or compromised, female relations are also complicit, though their participation is usually restricted to the planning phase (or furnishing alibis), leaving the actual “execution” (in both senses of the word) to the men.  Mothers in particular might be motivated by envy or resentment to remove the “taint of disgrace” (Chesler agrees: “Many women know that at any moment they might be ‘honour’ murdered by a male family member with the approval of their female relatives.  Like men, many women also internalise their society’s hatred of women and suffer from low self-esteem and feelings of unworthiness.  Like men, women are sometimes exceptionally cruel toward other women”, op. cit., p132).

One of the central messages of the book is made explicit in connection with domestic violence: “It also has to be clear that German laws apply to all the nationalities that live here.  It might seem self-evident, but it is not.  The patriarchs from the parallel societies have laws of their own.  As long as it is not impressed upon them, with all possible rigour, that they are subject to German laws every bit as much as their native-born neighbours, nothing will change.

Again and again I hear certain Turkish and Kurdish men say ‘I couldn’t care less about German laws’.  It is not a matter of coincidence that some Islamists contend that Germany is the most Islamic country in the world because democracy and freedom of religion prevail here.  For which read: ‘Here I can do whatever I want with my wife.  All I have to do is invoke my religion’.  And the not especially religious men say: ‘I am not in the least bit interested in what the German laws state.  I am a Turk and I have a different culture’.  Unlike the German ‘namby-pambies’ these men know how to treat women.  Of course this does not apply to them right across the board.  There definitely are also Turkish and Kurdish men who are labelled ‘namby-pambies’ by their compatriots and fellow males when they treat their women lovingly, with respect, humanely and as equals and neither hit them nor insult them with swearwords” (pp114-5).

 Once again, Chesler concurs: “While some Western men are also domestically violent, woman-battering is no longer culturally acceptable.  Indeed, thanks to Second Wave feminism, it is increasingly prosecuted.  Also, Western woman-battering does not spring from a culturally induced source of shame and honour.  Because of this, preventing, tracking, and abolishing woman-battering among Muslims and non-westerners may need to evolve in different ways” (op. cit., p13, emphasis in original).

No mere scrap of cloth the headscarf is indeed more than a religious symbol, condensing a whole vision of society and how it should be ordered, which advocates the segregation of the sexes in a kind of gender apartheid.  Ateş is not surprised that the most ardent champions of covering up are men since what is really at stake is their ability to assert their supremacy and enforce their view of female sexuality.  On the question of whether women adopt the headscarf voluntarily, Ateş recounts the experience of an acquaintance of hers, a very devout man who never misses Friday prayers when on holiday in Turkey, but who shuns most of the mosques in Berlin because he objects to the imams demanding of the men that they ensure their wives take the veil.  For the thirty years since she first arrived in Berlin, his wife has not worn a headscarf and he could not imagine attempting to compel her to put one on again.  He often feels that he is being accused of not being a proper Muslim and that the mosques are driving through a political agenda.

To quote Chesler again: “Of course, women may wear the hijab for reasons of modesty and to express their respect for both God and the family.  They may do so, just as Catholic nuns or Orthodox Jewish women do, in order to set themselves apart from secular standards of behaviour.  Perhaps some women also feel that such garb might protect them from male sexual violence.  Still, Muslim women bear a greater symbolic burden than their Muslim male counterparts and are more closely scrutinised, no matter what they do” (p155).

For Ateş, regardless of whether the wearing of the headscarf is a religious duty, it stands in flagrant contradiction to Article 3, paragraph 2 of the Constitution, which talks about the equality of everyone before the law.  Men and women enjoy equal rights and the state must ensure that this equality is implemented as well as working to remove disadvantages.  Nobody may be discriminated against or given preferential treatment on grounds of their gender.  When the wearing of headscarves is aimed at influencing others or is abused politically in public life to undermine the principle of equality it becomes an issue of crucial social significance.  It has no place where the state is being represented in any capacity, since the state, unlike the individual, has an obligation to obey the provisions of the Constitution in its entirety and must prevent everything that creates the impression that the sexes do not possess equal rights.  In the context of schools in particular the state’s duty is to impart these rights and put them into practice.  It damages its own credibility if it applies double standards, absolving one group, in this instance Muslims, of the responsibility of observing the principle of equality.

Following an examination of controversies over veiling within Islam, Ateş concludes: “When a religion calls for the complete subordination of the woman to the authority of the man, or cites such religious precepts in order to justify such subordination, limits have to be placed on the freedom of religion and belief.  I am of the view that the headscarf is not a religious, but a political symbol of the subordinate position of women.  The headscarf is a gender-specific outward mark of differentiation between men and women, which emphatically postulates such a difference.  It does not demonstrate the religious subordination of women in their relationship with God, but the social subordination of women under the dominion of men.  For this reason it should not – as repeatedly occurs – be treated as the equivalent of the cross or the kippah, which are exclusively religious symbols and do not in any respect define gender roles.  The headscarf signals the sexual value of the woman, which would arouse men if it were not concealed.  It is a symbol of the reduction of women to a sex object” (p126).

The German Constitutional Court’s so-called headscarf ruling from 24^th September 2003 was a landmark victory for cultural relativism and a complete cop-out.  Prospective Muslim teacher Fereshta Ludin was instructed by the Baden-Wurttemberg Ministry of Culture not to wear a headscarf whilst giving lessons.  When presented with the opportunity to introduce uniform legislation by instituting a complete ban, the Court left the decision to the discretion of each federal state.  The minority opinion from the dissenting judges found fault with the ruling because it neglected to consider the implications of the headscarf in terms of the role accorded to women, the view that veiling guarantees the woman’s subordination to the man being very widespread amongst Muslims and therefore clashing with the Constitution’s stipulation of equality.  As Ateş remarks, it was, ironically, the conservative judges who adopted this firm stance in favour of equal rights.

Fitting in with the crowd can be a reason for adopting the headscarf for schoolgirls, but the real unifying factor is the wish to dissociate themselves from their Christian and Jewish peers and display their Muslim identity for all to see.  Ateş expresses irritation at young girls and women who wear a headscarf, yet at the same time plaster themselves with make-up and wear figure-hugging, erotic clothes.  Some of them even combine the headscarf with bare midriffs that show off their belly piercings.  Whereas for Ateş this approach is riddled with contradictions the standard retort from the women themselves when challenged about why they wear sexy apparel when a headscarf is supposed to stop them being looked upon as sex objects is that just because they wear one it does not mean they have to walk around looking ugly.  As long as their hair is covered, putting on make-up and being pretty is no sin.

Ateş: “These women are of course, however, making themselves into sex objects since they are also playing up to men’s fantasies of what might be concealed beneath the covering.  I can see no genuine difference between a woman draped half naked for advertising purposes over a car bonnet and one hidden under a veil.  In both cases she is a sex object and is reduced to that alone” (p131).

We should be under no illusions about the seriousness of the threat to equality for girls.  For example, in its judgement on excusing a Muslim girl from mixed gym classes dated 24^th March 1992 the Supreme Administrative Court of Bremen stated that in deciding whether the pupil could be exempted it did not matter whether her religion discriminated against her as a woman.  Such scruples as whether Muslim girls were as a result of religious commandments (such as wearing the headscarf) being treated as full equals according to Western standards or whether such practices impinged on their equality as women within Western society were likewise deemed irrelevant.  In other words, in the Court’s learned estimation the equal rights to which Western girls and women are entitled cannot be demanded for Muslim women because their religion obstructs it.

Ateş is dumbfounded by the mind-boggling hypocrisy that informs such a verdict, which completely overlooks the fact that we live in a secular, pluralist society in which even Muslim schoolgirls can hardly escape noticing the “nudity” of others given that we are all bombarded with highly sexualised advertising images of naked women on the TV and in magazines.  The Court’s pronouncement smacks of ignorance and indifference, an easier way out than subjecting the (massive) social implications to careful scrutiny.  More perniciously, such reactions from the authorities make it possible for girls to be confined in an Islamic parallel society against their will.  Parents who want to keep their daughters away from all Western influences feel vindicated in their strivings by such a response.  Letting the girls off gym lessons is entirely at odds with the school’s educational brief, and it is incompatible with the right of the child to equal opportunities and to develop her full potential within mainstream society.  Efforts to promote religious and cultural diversity are taking place at the expense of women and girls when traditions that show contempt for human beings in general and women in particular are endorsed out of a misconceived notion of a multicultural society and when their irreconcilability with inalienable rights is ignored.

Turning to the Sharia (the primary sources of which are the Koran and the Sunna, as set out in the Hadith), Ateş is careful to dispel any misconceptions by reminding us that the “path to the watering hole” is not a coherent, monolithic, clearly delineated set of rules, containing as it does both legal and moral components.  The Sharia is not a conventional legal text in the sense that it has been codified, could be purchased in book form and used as a reference work.  Nor is there one single Sharia, with identical rules applicable throughout the Islamic world.  Instead there are five major legal schools, four Sunni and one Shiite and even within the schools themselves no general consensus exists amongst scholars as to how it should be interpreted beyond the fundamental matters of religious observance, which takes up its bulk.

The Sharia does provide regulations governing every aspect of life, encompassing civil and social law, which includes family and marital relations, criminal law, ethics and precise edicts on religious practice, such as praying five times a day and fasting during Ramadan.  No area of human activity is omitted, which is why many of Islam’s critics feel that secularisation attempts are doomed to failure by definition.

Crucially, the Sharia does institutionalise inequality between men and women (equal worth in the sight of God not being quite the same thing, as evidenced by the Cairo Declaration of 5^th August 1990, which already in Article 1 diverges from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.  It avers that all human beings form part of a single family, whose members are linked through subjugation to God and as descendants of Adam.  They are all equal in the sense of fundamental human dignity, rights and duties.  “True faith is the guarantee for the enjoyment of such dignity on the path towards human perfection”.  Article 24 leaves no doubt as to the source of authority, specifying that all of the rights and freedoms mentioned in the Declaration are subject to the Sharia.  In Article 6 women are accorded equal human dignity with men and we are told that they too have rights and duties.  They come under autonomous civil law and are financially independent as well as entitled to retain their own name and descent.  The husband must provide for his family and its welfare).  Family, inheritance and criminal law are the best sources for gauging the legal situation of women according to the Sharia.  Ateş believes that we are living through an Islamic Reformation of equal historical significance (and every bit as traumatic) to its Christian counterpart, the most striking difference being that so many of its leading figures and thinkers are women, both in Muslim countries and the West.

Many of the rules in the Sharia are misogynistic and for Ateş the real question is whether or not they can be changed.  Many of them appear so backward that they cannot be salvaged for use in a modern, liberal democracy, such as the lesser value attached to a woman’s testimony, the smaller portion of an inheritance granted her by virtue of her sex and the right of a man to physically chastise her, or polygamy.  Ateş is baffled as to how women’s rights campaigners in certain Muslim countries can sincerely believe that if only Islam were interpreted correctly the disadvantages accruing to women would vanish.

Equality can only be arrived at through a root and branch reform of Islam, which would require agreement being reached amongst Muslims that certain parts of the Koran have to be consigned to the past.  That the sacred texts are held to be direct revelations of the timeless and eternally valid will of God acts as a barrier to jettisoning practices which have been overtaken by social evolution.  In spite of ongoing exertions to bring laws up to date in countries such as Turkey, the tacit assumption is that women are inferior and subordinate to men.  One of the principles of Islamic law is that like must be treated as like and unlike as unlike.  When He created them, Allah gave men and women equal worth, but because of their differing natures assigned different tasks to them, from which follows that their rights and duties are not identical.  Furthermore, the fact that women possess fewer rights than men should not be seen as unjust as men are the breadwinners and protectors of their families and as such have a heavy burden incumbent on them.  Some Islamic scholars go so far as to contend that women are thereby given preferential treatment.

In the meantime, Europe can no longer avoid interrogating the issue of whether the Sharia and the rights it sanctions for men (and denies for women) is compatible with secular, enlightened principles of the rule of law and what the limits to religious freedom are.  Within German society (and the same is true elsewhere in Europe) there is a group of people who want to withdraw from the prevailing legal order altogether.  This would mean introducing the Sharia in matters pertaining to family and inheritance law for the Muslim community: “I am of the view that the Sharia, even in its most liberal interpretation, is not in harmony with our Constitution.  Because it represents a religious system of laws, which lays claim to regulating every area of the individual’s life and only recognises Allah as lawmaker.  Such a system of laws shuts itself off from any secularisation.  It should not become established in Germany and Europe through certain parts of it being permitted to apply to Muslim citizens.  For Islam too the line of secularisation must run through religion and politics.

If the Sharia were – even in part – to be introduced into Germany Muslims would obviously assess it as a sign of acceptance.  They would thereby be given official permission to bid farewell to the generally applicable system of laws and set up an Islamic parallel society with laws of its own.  This is in my opinion quite clearly the objective of those Muslims who are clamouring for the application of the Sharia in Germany and other democratic societies.

Given that in Islamic law Allah is understood to be the sole legislator, a principle is articulated that is incompatible with the central proposition of the rule of law, namely that laws are devised by human beings and may therefore be changed.  This is precisely the aspect stressed by many opponents and critics of Islam, who believe that Islam cannot be reformed.  If the people or its representatives cannot convince the legislator to the need for better and more appropriate laws that take account of contemporary realities because Allah as legislator is not available to mankind then the laws are inalterable and irrevocably fixed” (p159).

Ateş opens her chapter on sexuality in Islam with characteristic frankness: this is the area where women’s relative lack of privilege is most blatant.  Provided that women follow the rules drawn up exclusively by men they are accorded a right to exist, but this is a far cry from a life lived to the full since participation in social life is reserved for men.

In the Muslim world an extreme hostility to sexuality holds sway alongside a high degree of sexualisation with all the tensions this implies.  Double standards are rife.  All matters sexual are hedged about with shame and taboo and sexuality is repressed, combated and subject to controls whilst at the same time men satisfy desires that are not always compatible with religious commandments.  In this context, Ateş draws attention to the use of prostitutes as a proof of male potency and the hypocrisy of married men who lock their wives up at home allegedly to protect their decency and shield them from the predatory gaze of other males before heading off to the brothel.  Amongst orthodox Muslims men have the freedom to do whatever they like, they are entitled to take pleasure from sexual congress, whereas a woman’s role is to be available, arouse her husband and supply the clan with male heirs, enduring her reproductive burden without any cravings or enjoyment of her own.  That intercourse leaves the believer somehow dirty and impure is revealed by the injunction to wash immediately after the act (when the man is considered ritually unclean).  For Ateş, sexuality needs to be liberated from the influence of religion, which would benefit both men and women alike.

She goes on to tackle the obsession with virginity bordering on the manic that ruins the lives of young women (touching upon sensitive issues such as the frequency of recourse to anal sex in order to preserve chastity and the rising demand for hymen reconstruction operations prior to marriage), segregation of the sexes, male sexuality as portrayed by the sacred texts, polygamy, “temporary marriages” (outlawed in certain Muslim countries as a form of prostitution, the duration of which can vary from an hour to several years, and which can offer a means of gaining sexual experience before marriage and an opportunity for single and divorced women to engage in legitimate sexual contact), attitudes towards homosexuality, sexual abuse of children and the image of women as potential whores and seductresses.  On that latter question, Ateş does not gloss over the fact that inculcated sexism spills over the community divide: “German [woman] teachers and many German women in general are confronted again and again with the sexist image of women harboured by Muslim youths and men.  And this sexism differs from that of native German men in that it is accompanied by a certain racism.  When challenged about their brusque treatment of native German women most of these youths and men reply: ‘They are only Germans, after all.  They are all whores in any case’.

I get the impression that the causes of the contempt evinced towards Western women by Muslim youths and men in the form of sexual insults and terms of abuse have not yet been given an appropriate airing within the integration debate.  We do talk about the insults experienced by women in part, but we do not speak openly about the origin of the contempt of the free Western way of life.

Offence given to Muslims, such as in the caricature dispute, for example, and the insults meted out to Muslim women who are looked at with suspicion and disapproved of because of their headscarves are dealt with frequently, however.  The insults and offence given to German women, secularists and atheists by contrast are discreetly passed over and we speak even less about the religious and cultural-specific dimensions of this contempt.  I am even repeatedly accused of going so far as to ethnicise sexism.  You do have to ask yourself, however, why you hear phrases in Turkish or German such as ‘I’ll fuck your mother’s cunt’ spoken on the Metro or in the playgrounds by Turkish boys who are often not older than about six, whereas you at most overhear the like from German children when they have become integrated in their neighbourhoods into the community of Turkish, Kurdish or Arab children.  I believe that quite a few people make life easier for themselves in the course of the integration debate when they put the blame exclusively on the social problems of these children and youths and fail to take account of their religious and cultural character.  Only an open and honest discussion unimpeded by false taboos and mental blocks can lead to a dialogue from which solutions can emerge” (pp188-9).

The freedom to practice one’s religion is a fundamental right in Europe and guaranteed by the German Constitution.  What is understood by such freedom, however, is one thing in the Western, Judaeo-Christian and Enlightenment tradition and quite another in the Islamic world.  Whereas for the former, tolerance, sensitivity and respect for other faiths take centre stage, in Muslim societies pushing for absolute precedence to be given to one’s own religion is the norm.  Ateş describes this as absolutism and sees in it a defining trait of Islam rather than simply the reflex of a minority subsumed, but not integrated, within a wider society.  She roundly rejects accusations from certain Islamic associations of growing Islamophobia in Germany.  On the contrary, Islam is benefiting from uncritical preferential treatment compared with other religions, with the state responding to the problems of parallel societies and lack of integration by enhancing the faith’s institutional status (although, as she immediately comments, it is surely well nigh impossible to institutionalise a religion that itself knows no institutions).  Political parties and churches have created posts for Islamic affairs specialists, lessons on Islam are in the process of being built into the school curriculum, the German public service broadcaster ZDF has created an Internet portal that showcases a different Muslim every Friday and there have been calls to set aside one or more important dates in the Muslim calendar as public holidays nationally.  Ateş asks the pertinent question as to why the idea of Jewish public holidays has never been mooted, or even a day on which the nation could contemplate the immense sufferings visited upon the Jews by the Nazi regime, discerning in the special treatment granted to Islam a capitulation to the fundamentalists, an appeasement in the face of terror threats.

Worryingly, this preferential treatment is being carried over to the realm of jurisprudence where even the most abstruse interpretations of the Koran are accepted.  Ateş makes reference to a case which gained notoriety in spring of last year when a plaintiff of North African origin petitioned for an early divorce on grounds that she was being battered by her husband.  She had already been given sole right of occupancy of the marital home and a restraining order had been issued against her abusive spouse.  Her application for an accelerated divorce was turned down by the woman judge, however, who quoted the husband’s right of physical chastisement according to the Koran and added that any woman who entered into matrimony with a Muslim man must be aware of what she was letting herself in for.  Identical rights and laws should appertain to all, irrespective of religious affiliation: “I can discern a dangerous development in Germany whereby, under the guise of freedom of religion and worship, Islamic law and, with it, an authoritarian, archaic-patriarchal parallel society is being established with the seal of approval as it were of the courts, which is diametrically opposed to the modern, enlightened principles of the rule of law and will erode the latter step by step.

State neutrality towards religions should not be allowed to go so far as to accept breaches of fundamental and human rights in the name of freedom of religion and worship.  Every religion should be subject to an audit to determine the extent to which it upholds the Constitution.  Clear limits should be placed on the freedom to practice and spread one’s faith where they impinge on fundamental rights.

Native Germans cannot simply turn round and say that forced marriages, honour killings, violence against women and girls, exemption from lessons at school or even the slaughter of animals are just Islamic customs and traditions, which are none of their business.  Because these traditions and customs are being practiced in German society and the people who practice them and those who suffer from them are for the most part German citizens.  The in many ways misconceived tolerance of German society promotes and bolsters in an extreme manner the parallel societies that already exist as well as encouraging the stream of adherents into fundamentalist faith communities” (pp202-3).

We feminists have precious little to congratulate ourselves on: “It may well be the case that native German men do not necessarily have to develop a great interest in the sexual liberation of Muslim women.  What about the native German feminists, who, for example, see in the headscarf a symbol of emancipation, regard most forced marriages as arranged marriages and are every bit as reluctant as their fellow male multiculturalists to take note of the oppressed sexuality of women in Islam?  What kind of barrier exists in the minds of these women, who are able to criticise the Catholic church again and again for its inimical attitude towards sexuality and women only to defend Islam in the same breath?  What about sexual self-determination, which they fought for so bitterly?  Does it really only apply to sexually liberated Christian women?  Is it not misogynistic to the umpteenth degree to put up with the oppression of women on the pretext of freedom of religion?” (pp189-90).

Phyllis Chesler also exhorts us to reexamine our attitudes: “In the name of multicultural correctness (all cultures are equal, but formerly colonised cultures are more equal), the feminist academy and media appear to have all but abandoned vulnerable people: Muslims, as well as Christians, Jews, and Hindus, to the forces of reactionary Islamism.

Because feminist academies are now so heavily influenced by left ways of thinking, many now believe that speaking out against headscarves, face veils, the chador, arranged and child marriages, polygamy, forced pregnancies, or female genital mutilation is either ‘imperialist’ or ‘crusade-ist’” (op. cit., p2).

And: “I did not foresee the extent to which feminists – who, philosophically, are universalists and therefore interventionists – would, paradoxically, become both multiculturalists and isolationists.  Such cultural relativism (in the presumed service of antiracism) is perhaps the greatest failing of the feminist establishment” (op. cit., pp2-3).

Apathy does not become us: “Islamic terrorism is threatening to destroy what feminists and other forces for democracy have accomplished thus far.  But even as Western feminists decry sexist oppression everywhere (and they do, they do), their own doctrine of multicultural relativism allows them to have one standard for western women and another, much lower, standard for women who live under Islam.  In my view, such multicultural relativism is an ingeniously disguised form of racism and sexism.  The presumed compassion involved in viewing the veil as a free choice or polygamy as a colourful cultural custom is, I believe, tragically misguided and a betrayal of feminist principles” (Chesler, op. cit., p36).

Ateş’ invaluable contribution to the debate should function as both clarion call and admonition.  No longer should we turn a blind eye to the injustices being committed in our midst.

All translations copyright © The Chameleon, 2007

The day had been chill but bright, the trees in nearby Sanssouci Park in full autumn splendour, we had explored the streets of small shops not yet ravaged by competition from sprawling commercial palaces and sampled the local Kaffee und Kuchen. As the evening drew near, our sense of anticipation mounted. We had made the journey in honour of Serap Cileli, indefatigable campaigner for the rights of Muslim women in Germany, whom I am proud to call a friend. Her courage and fortitude, her uncompromising criticism of injustice and oppression were about to be given official recognition in the form of the Bul le mérite, awarded annually by the Association of German Criminal Investigation Officers (AGCIO, in the original BDK) for outstanding contributions to promoting internal security and social consensus concerning issues of vital importance.

Encomium by Minister Beate Blechinger, Minister of Justice of the Federal State of Potsdam:

“‘Do you repent of your sins?’ was the question with which Hatun Sürücü’s younger brother dispatched his sister to her death. Five shots hit the 23-year-old mother of a young son directly in the head. Berlin police later described the killing as an outright execution. The great sense of horror over this terrible deed was not confined to Berlin alone, but was felt throughout the entire country. It was not the first crime of its type in Germany. Never before, however, had the sufferings of Muslim women and the threat to them emanating from traditions such as being forced to wear the veil, forced marriages right through to so-called “honour” killings – even the term itself is unspeakable – been brought to public attention in such shocking fashion.

The cold-bloodedness displayed by the Sürücü brothers, the emotional detachment shown by her parents all the way through to the comments of approval made by certain school pupils of Turkish extraction generated a sense of complete bewilderment, all the more so since these reactions were obviously fully in keeping with the moral concepts of a few Muslim families living in Germany. Public opinion also took clear note of the condemnations issued by Turkish and Islamic associations. In both the media and politics the incident triggered weeks of debate on the subject of integration policy.

The five shots fired on a February night in 2005 at a bus-stop in Berlin-Tempelhof and which ended the life of Hatun Sürücü gave rise to a plethora of questions of the kind which Serap Cileli, who has in the meantime been honoured on numerous occasions for her achievements in campaigning for legal equality for Turkish and Muslim women, had already been asking repeatedly for quite some time:

How should majority society in Germany deal with the existence of Turkish-Muslim parallel societies?

How can a stop be put to the state of complete deprivation of rights faced by thousands of women and girls of Turkish origin?

What is the state of play of integration efforts in Germany?

How tough an approach should be adopted vis-à-vis values and moral concepts, which are incompatible with the constitution?

Politics too has become aware of its responsibility and begun addressing these issues. At national and European level numerous initiatives have been launched and programmes drawn up with a view to improving the situation of women with an immigrant background. The Portuguese Presidency [of the European Union], for example, intends to put immigration and trafficking of women on the agenda. Before the year is out an international day against trafficking in women is supposed to draw attention to this problem. In addition to these efforts, the European Parliament is preparing a Year against Violence against Women. Above and beyond these actions, many organisations, centres and refuges across the world are engaged in informing women at risk about the dangers they face, but also about the rights they enjoy. My impression is that the topic has been firmly placed on the political agenda, a great deal of valuable work is being done, but in order to bring about a change in the mindset of Turkish-Muslim families our efforts must be redoubled.

Against this backdrop, appeals, personal testimonies and offers of help from women directly affected by these issues assume even greater importance; from women, whose accounts carry weight within the Turkish-Muslim community because they share the same cultural background and because they have first-hand experience of the situation. It is precisely this correlation that Serap Cileli has recognised. Her first book, We Are Your Daughters, Not Your Honour, caused quite a stir accordingly. In this volume, the author sets out a frank description of the hardships she encountered during her childhood and adolescence in a strict Muslim family and in so doing made a valuable contribution to a long overdue debate. In so doing, Serap Cileli has assumed her place in the tradition of the great campaigners for women’s rights, putting her in such august company as Lea Ackermann, who rendered outstanding services by fighting for help to be given to women who had been forced into prostitution and who was awarded the “Bul-le-mérite” by the AGCIO. In this context I am also thinking of Waris Dirie from Somalia, whose commitment to the cause of banning the circumcision of women in Africa also brought a wave of solidarity into being. The incalculable worth of all these publications lies in the fact that they provide authentic proof of perpetrated injustices and thereby create the pressure necessary for sustained action.

That latter point is particularly true of Serap Cileli’s book, which leaves a deep and lasting impression on the reader, not least because of the realisation that the extent of the problems set out therein has been seriously underestimated. The reader becomes aware that Serap Cileli only narrowly escaped the same sad fate as Hatun Sürücü and that the story of both women’s sufferings is emblematic of those of thousands of others.

Serap Cileli too was as a 12-year-old girl engaged to a future husband during a holiday in Turkey and only escaped the forced marriage through attempting suicide. Three years later she was made to marry against her will a man ten years older than herself who was a complete stranger to her before being left behind in Turkey. A period full of despair and fear ensued. During this time, however, the seeds of the will to take control of her own life and the firm resolve to flee the existence she so despised germinated within. After seven years of forced matrimony and the birth of two children she was able to obtain a divorce. Later on, Serap Cileli was finally able to find the love and intimacy she had longed for and had been made to do without in a relationship with a new partner. Her parents’ reaction was one of rejection: they regarded their daughter’s new relationship as an affair that brought dishonour and threatened to punish her for it. The bitter feud with her parents culminated in the abduction of her children by their grandmother, who took them off to Germany. The unshakeable bonds of solidarity and closeness between Serap Cileli and her second husband Ali were what gave her in the end the strength needed to flee to Germany, take back her children and start a new life.

Serap Cileli’s life story demonstrates that what is termed as “forced marriage” only provides the faintest of hints about the suffering experienced by the women who are trapped in it. For year after year serious crimes were committed against both her and her children, crimes, which have never been atoned for. Whether we are talking about the brutal physical injuries inflicted by her Father, the abduction of the children by her Mother or the oppression and state of incapacitation induced by the family as a whole over a prolonged period of time – all of these took place as a result of an archaic concept of honour.

The fact that the Association of German Criminal Investigation Officers is honouring Mrs. Cileli with the Bul le mérite represents an important signal. Investigating and prosecuting acts of violence is the task of CID officers. From their day-to-day work they are familiar with the prevailing conditions in society at large. Unfortunately in the negative sense for the most part. To an increasing extent, the CID has to tackle the reality that in our society new motives for committing violent crimes exist. Officers are being confronted with the phenomena that Serap Cileli sets out. This constitutes new and to a great degree unknown territory, which the officers have to negotiate. For this reason, becoming familiar with and understanding the background to such crimes is useful.

I welcome the fact that the CID is both ready and willing to take on this task. The two central concerns of standing up for human rights and combating violence unite the recipient of today’s award and the officers of the CID. Agreement on both objectives lays the foundation for tackling the problems of integration together and without prejudice. Today’s award ceremony makes an important contribution to this undertaking.

The CID is confronted with the integration issue on a day by day basis, not only in densely populated urbanised regions or major cities such as Berlin. It is true that Germany, in spite of all the efforts that have been made, is still at the beginning of a long process when it comes to the integration of migrants. Moreover, it is also beyond dispute that ignorance and a misunderstood notion of tolerance has meant that many opportunities have been missed for years on end.

In your first life – which is what it ought to be called – you demonstrated great courage on many occasions. Your strength has saved your own life as well as the lives of your children. In spite of your terrible experiences you decided against withdrawing into privacy once you had rescued them. You dared to go public, a step, which transformed you into a “nest-fouler” in the eyes of many of your Turkish compatriots. The resulting risk of threats and of being confronted with violence did not deter you.

You stood firm and in so doing helped demolish the wall of silence, thereby encouraging women who have endured sufferings similar to yours to rebel. You have shown unflagging persistence in fighting for the right of oppressed women to take charge of their own lives and have denounced the human rights abuses that have taken place right in front of all our eyes.

Today you, together with your new family, are living the life you hardly dared to even dream of as a young woman. Perhaps it was this very dream of happiness, from which you have drawn and continue to draw the sustenance and strength that enable you to carry out your important task.

For the commitment coupled with unwavering inner sympathy you have shown, I would like to offer you my warmest personal gratitude, as well as that of the government of the Federal State of Brandenburg. The courage to stand up for what you believe in that you have demonstrated is exemplary and will hopefully serve as a model for many others to emulate.

Dear Mrs. Cileli, it is a particular pleasure and honour for me to present you with the “Bul le mérite” award of the Association of German Criminal Investigation Officers in recognition of your achievements.

Many congratulations and all the very best for the future!”

Serap’s acceptance speech: “‘Fifty years of immigration into Germany’, the integration of Muslims and internal security in Germany is and will continue to be one of the most important policy tasks and duties at home over the years to come. Everyone is aware of the opportunities that were missed and of what has happened in the past, so let us talk about what will happen tomorrow and what will have to be done in the future.

It is a fact that Germany has been a destination for immigrants in the past and remains a destination for immigrants today. It is likewise a fact that the vast majority of Muslims in Germany, particularly those of Turkish origin, are caught up in their misogynistic ways of life, customs and traditions, in their Islamic faith and culture. It is also a fact that Islam in Germany ‘as a religion between God and man’ has not only lost its face, but has shown its original face as ‘archaic and violent’.

And for quite some time now, Islam in Germany has not merely been the religion of immigrants, but of at least 18,000 German converts. Their precise numbers are not known because there are no registers of converts. But there can be no doubt that there has been an ‘upward trend’ and that more and more Germans are converting to Islam, which from my point of view reveals an alarming development. We should keep a vigilant eye on converts. They are the offspring of solid middle-class German families, are susceptible to radicalisation and often, as the Prime Minister Designate of Bavaria Günther Beckstein (CSU) stated in Handelsblatt (on 6^th September 2007) ‘have a clear tendency towards particular fanaticism to prove themselves worthy of the[ir] new religion’.

The so-called home-grown Islamic suicide bombers ‘on the way to paradise’ did not just have names like Adem Y. or Mohammed Atta, but were also called Fritz Martin and Daniel Martin [the reference is to Adem Y., a 28-year-old German-Turk, Fritz Martin G. (also 28) and Daniel Martin S. (21), the latter two Germans who had converted to Islam, were suspected of being members of the terrorist organisation Islamic Jihad Union and of having planned bomb attacks on Us facilities. All three of the accused were arrested on suspicion of terrorism in Sauerland shortly before the 6^th anniversary of the September 11^th atrocities. Mohammed Atta was a student in Hamburg before piloting one of the planes used on September 11^th]

Since the majority of the converts of German origin are women, I would like to mention the 38-year-old Belgian [Muriel Degauque] who blew herself up in Baghdad on 9^th November 2005 as well as 40-year-old Sonja B. from Berlin suspected of pursuing jihad with her young child ‘on Allah’s path’. We ought to pay very close attention to this new movement of religious warriors.

I would therefore like to call upon each and every one of us to show greater courage and speak out clearly.

Because it has become common knowledge that not only religious fundamentalism and political Islam have long since become a striking reality in Germany, but also the so-called ‘Grey Wolves’ [Bozkurtlar], who are known to be a rallying point for ‘Turkish’ neo-fascists. This movement of ethnic (racist) nationalists mixed with fundamentalist elements with its propensity to violence and totalitarian system based on the leader principle [Führerprinzip] constitutes a breeding ground for Islamic and extremist organisations on German soil. Quite frequently behind the representative mosque buildings – which appear as a symbol of the strength and superiority of Islam – lurk the obscure groups of Grey Wolves.

Every person has the right to practice his religion, the right to freedom, equality and safety, the right to individual difference. Nonetheless, difference can only be accepted as long as it does not endanger the peaceful cohabitation of people in this country. Because it is indisputable that any society can only cope with a certain amount of difference. The limits of difference must be contained in the constitution, which applies equally to all citizens of this country.

Human dignity and human rights as well as freedom and individuality are the preconditions as well as the fruits of democracy, which are indivisible.

The values enshrined in our constitution are the highest and binding goods for all members of the Federal Government and ought not to be restricted in favour of other values such as the traditional norms and values of the sharia (the Islamic legal system).

The judicial scandal in a set of divorce proceedings before a woman family court judge in March of this year furnishes depressing proof of how the German legal system is being undermined in the name of the sharia. Because a 26-year-old Muslim – a German of Moroccan extraction – was being subjected to severe maltreatment by her Moroccan husband she wanted to speed up her divorce. Her application for the proceedings to be accelerated due to aggravating circumstances was rejected by the Frankfurt judge with reference to the Koran. She cited the right of physical chastisement enjoyed by the Muslim man in marriage.

A further example of how the German courts are capitulating to the sharia and archaic traditions was something we witnessed in the Sürücü trial in Berlin. The orthodox Islamic family of the murdered victim, Hatun Sürücü, was accompanied by their own ‘kadi’, or ‘sharia judge’ throughout the trial. As a close acquaintance of the Sürücü family he took his place in the courtroom with the consent of the German judge.

I see red when I see with my own eyes how the Imam of Izmir recognised today’s reality years ago now. He turned to the Christian participants at a dialogue meeting and warned the Western Europeans: ‘Thanks to your democratic laws we will overpower you; thanks to your religious laws we will rule over you’ [The reference is to the European Synod in 1999 when the Turkish Bishop Bernardini reported about the openness with which the Imam of Izmir had addressed the Christian participants in a dialogue meeting shortly beforehand. The quotation was drawn from an article by Gernot Facius in Die Welt, 6^th October 2001 edition and by Hans-Peter Raddatz in From God to Allah, Munich, Herbig Publishers, 2001, p349] And I must admit that he is right, because the ‘reign’ has already begun. You have no choice but to wonder whether the Christian-Islamic dialogue is not based on a series of deceptions.

What chance does the Christian-Islamic dialogue have when the Muslim brothers and sisters confront us with unassailable dogmas, such as: ‘We have the answer to your questions! You cannot teach us anything and we do not need to learn anything because Islam is the only true faith, the first human was a Muslim. It is the original faith of Abraham. We invite you all to show our Prophet, Islam, the sharia, the hadith and the Koran reverence and respect’.

How much longer are we supposed to stand to attention before Muslims who make statements similar to that of the former Lord Mayor of Istanbul and current Prime Minister Erdogan, who, at an electoral campaign meeting in South-East Anatolia, quoted the following in his speech: ‘Democracy is merely the train we will board until we reach the destination. The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets, the domes our helmets and the faithful our soldiers’ [In 1998 Erdogan was arrested for incitement to religious hatred for quoting a religious poem by Ziya Gökalp at an electoral meeting in South-East Anatolia and sentenced to 10 months’ imprisonment, of which he served four. See Die Welt online, The Islamist as Moderniser, 6^th May 2007 and Dietrich Alexander, Reformer or Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing? likewise in Die Welt, 22^nd September 2004] It would appear to be true that we are dealing with a dialogue of the deaf.

Because it is a fact that terms such as ‘a dialogue between equal partners’, ‘mutual respect, fairness and equality’, or terms such as ‘human rights’, ‘women’s rights’, ‘freedom to practice religion’, ‘democracy’ and values such as ‘freedom of opinion’, ‘freedom of information’ and ‘artistic freedom’ possess a completely different meaning for the Muslim population than they do for Western Europeans.

I would like to stress quite unequivocally: the freedom to practice religion cannot be granted to a community that combats our country’s constitution.

It would make it far easier for many Muslim girls and women to perform the balancing act between traditions at home and the modern Western world in the foreseeable future if the Koran and the sharia were henceforth not given precedence over applicable German law.

When I as a woman from a Turkish immigrant background put up a fight against male domination sanctioned by Islam, against turning back the clock, I call upon Germans too to muster the courage to call a spade a spade and to defend the values of civilisation instead of handing out culture and Islam bonuses, like the German cultural relativists, who never miss an opportunity to issue reminders of the dark legacy of the German past and who understand the second-class position of women in Islamic societies as a form of promotion of culture.

If the Germans wish to free themselves of feelings of guilt, if they do not wish to become the victims of self-censorship they ought to show courage and defy the creeping Islamicisation of our country because a consistent political response is long overdue.

And last but not least they should support us in our rebellion against patriarchal authority and Islamic tradition. All of this is true, but it is only part of the truth.

What we all know, but are not permitted to utter out loud.

Has structural integration of immigrants in the education system, the labour market and professional life and cultural assimilation with the local majority been a success? Or has the concept of integration foundered?

The answer to those questions was the best-kept open secret in the country until the 11^th September 2001. After the murder ‘in the name of Allah’ of the film-maker Theo van Gogh who was critical of Islam, anger and consternation prevailed not only in the Netherlands, but throughout Western Europe.

On 2^nd November 2004 Van Gogh was not only executed in broad daylight in the street, but subsequently slaughtered like a sheep in accordance with Islamic ritual. For several days afterwards shoot-outs took place between police, army and Islamic fundamentalists in The Hague as if war had broken out.

Islam expert Bassam Tibi explained to the press why the concept of dominant culture he devised is of such crucial importance and he issued a warning: ‘In its current state of mind Europe cannot ward off Islamicisation’ [The reference is to an article in Die Tagespost, 4^th December 2004, What is Really at Stake]

Nevertheless the multicultural dreamers with their romantic vision of society ignored the critical voices as they have done for the last 50 years. The critics were greeted with vehement disapproval and confronted with accusations of jeopardising the internal peace of the country. Extremists, Islamists and sleepers, forced marriages and imported brides dominated the media headlines and parallel societies cropped up again and again. Nonetheless attempts were made to silence the critics and the valid points they made derided by means of exaggeration. Only in the wake of Hatun Sürücü’s murder in Berlin-Tempelhof on 7^th February 2005 did the taboo begin to crumble. At the same time the political intellectuals here in Germany admonished us to be on our guard against trading in generalisations as tarring everyone with the same brush and indulging in cheap propaganda would make us guilty of endangering the climate of integration.

This paralysing ignorance of the unasked question: ‘What is the state of play of the integration of Muslims in Germany?’ was put to an end by headmaster Volker Steffens. In Grade 8 of the Thomas Morus Secondary School in Berlin-Neukölln, three male Muslim pupils expressed their approval of Hatun Sürücü’s murder in the following words: ‘She only had herself to blame. The whore was running around like a German’. Whereupon the headmaster of Thomas Morus Secondary School in Neukölln, Volker Steffens, published an open letter to the parents: ‘These pupils are upsetting the peaceful life of the school by approving of the murder.

We will not tolerate rabble-rousing propaganda against freedom’.

In the public eye Hatun Sürücü’s murder was immediately linked to six other killings in Berlin that had taken place since October 2004 where the suspected motive was that of a so-called ‘honour killing’.

At the same time, on 19^th May 2006, the Federal Criminal Police Office in Wiesbaden published an analysis of so-called ‘honour killings’ that had been recorded by the police. According to the study, there had been a total of 55 such cases in Germany between 1^st January 1996 and 18^th July 2005.

Since mid-2005 Germany has – at long last – been debating the integration of immigrants, as well as women in the Muslim world and in the diaspora. We finally admitted to ourselves that in many German cities some Turkish districts had in the meantime been established and therefore cultural areas where Turkish was the language of communication.

Slap bang in the middle of Germany and Western Europe an Islamic parallel society had come into being.

In these parallel societies a segment of our Muslim fellow citizens had retained their tribal culture, their traditional values, language as well as patriarchal norms, which are incompatible with our constitution and fundamental values.

To put it plainly: our Muslim fellow citizens have failed to make the leap from the old to the new homeland.

And today so many experts and politicians are suddenly unsure of themselves and are asking: ‘What has gone wrong in Germany?’

For years they were too dewy-eyed and optimistic, taking it for granted that the second generation at the latest would integrate automatically. They would be transformed from Gastarbeiter [literally ‘guest workers’, betraying the expectation that their residence would not be permanent] to citizens. They simply assumed that the differences between them and the native society would diminish as one generation succeeded another. The next generation – the children of the Gastarbeiter – would automatically become ‘Berliners born and bred’. And now they have ascertained that even the third generation – to an increasing extent – is moving in a quite different direction. All I have to say to this is: ’50 lost years’, the consequences of an absent integration policy.

Many of the integration problems, which we in the past as well as the present, have endeavoured to solve on the basis of integration measures, are linked to a fundamental error. The attempt to explain that every ‘Muslim’ who has immigrated to Germany and who has attended language and integration courses will automatically embrace the values of the free democratic constitutional structure and recognise women’s rights, religious pluralism as well as the secular principle.

A further false promise is integration through language. The truth is that language acquisition does not equal integration, but represents a key to integration. A lack of or poor language knowledge ought not, therefore, to be made solely responsible for integration problems.

Linguistic, professional and social integration work starts with a person’s upbringing in the parental home and is bolstered in particular through cooperation in day nurseries and schools.

It is up to parents to pass on democratic values through the upbringing they provide. Muslim and Turkish parents should be obliged to take this task on board, if necessary with the help of professional social workers and early start programmes (such as the Hippy Programme). Without the cooperation of parents or a constructive will on their part to engage in integration our expectations of either the new integration measures funded through taxpayers’ money or the amended immigration law that entered into force on 28^th August [2007] ought not to be too great.

If we really want to integrate the Turkish population we ought not to leave them with the Turkish press and media as their sole source of information.

The vast majority of all Turkish programmes watched in Germany are produced in Turkey and beamed to Germany via satellite. Most of these programmes are hardly conducive to integration, but are instead more suitable for keeping Turkish migrants anchored in the culture and mentality of their country of origin. The dissemination of radical Islamic and right-wing extremist ideas via the Turkish media in Germany has barely registered on the political radar up to now.

Press coverage in Turkish language newspapers has been repeatedly criticised. Accusations have been levelled of a distorted image of Germany and aggressively nationalistic reporting, which obstructs integration efforts and contributes to the creation of ‘parallel media worlds’. Its influence on the integration process in Germany exceeds that of much of the German media.

It is high time that we call multiculturalism – mainly on the political scene – into question and break the taboo. But – I fear – until we have arrived at that stage, the gulf between the cultures will yawn ever wider. Under the headline Merkel is Hitler Number Two, the Islamicist daily VAKIT [Anadolu’ da Vakit] in its Sunday edition of 2^nd September [2007] equated the German Federal Chancellor Angela Merkel with the Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. In addition, Mrs. Merkel was humiliated in a caricature which portrayed her with a swastika on her arm and along with her the entire German people.

The cause of this wrath was the new law on immigration, which was allegedly directed primarily against Turks. Several Turkish immigrant organisations and German-Turkish politicians inter alia were of a similar opinion and boycotted the integration summit on 12^th July [2007] by way of protest.

When our President Horst Köhler signed it on 21^st August [2007], other sections of the Turkish media likewise seized upon the new immigration law to voice hostile criticisms of Merkel and the Federal Republic. Had it been the other way round, many Turks would have felt that their national pride had been injured.

One or other might recall. A few days after Pope Benedict’s speech in Regensburg the Vatican, ‘for fear of attacks’, had to ask forgiveness of the Muslim faithful. The same scenes were played out in Denmark and Sweden over the caricature dispute.

And to today’s date I have likewise been waiting in vain for the Turkish side to say: ‘We would like to apologise to Chancellor Angela Merkel and the German people for having offended them’.

And to today’s date I have equally been waiting in vain for Muslim ‘sisters and brothers’ to make a clear declaration ‘against fundamentalism’ and ‘in favour of integration’, whether it manifest itself in the form of large-scale demonstrations, advertising campaigns, vigils or a kilometre of lit candles.

I would like to see some clear indication at long last that honest efforts are being made by Muslims to integrate into our society and culture. Whether it be through flags, posters or banners hung in front of mosques or car stickers with slogans such as ‘Against fundamentalism’, ‘Against political Islam’ and ‘Equal rights for Muslim women’ or ‘Against forced marriages and honour killings’. I don’t believe in the lip service they pay any more. I want to see action!

It is, for example, customary for Muslims in the Ramadan month of fasting to make donations and pay or transfer their zakat-contribution [compulsory alms contribution].

What I expect of Islamic organisations and initiatives or of the zakat-administrations that the payment of zakat-contributions not just be spent on projects ‘by Muslims for Muslims’, such as, for example, in Palestine, the Lebanon, Sri Lanka or Pakistan or to use zakat alms to fund the building of mosques in Germany or to make provisions for the poorest countries of the world under the pretext of ‘Muslims Helping People in Need’, but also to support ‘Aid projects for destitute Christians’ or to organise projects to promote integration outside the mosque.

It would be a welcome move if they were to give up building a single mosque a year in Germany and spend the money instead on setting up a ‘refuge for Muslim girls’.

Instead of merely paying lip service in condemnations of Islamic terrorism, they should provide financial support in the form of donations to foundations or assistance programmes for the victims and bereaved families of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington [11^th September 2001] or in Madrid [11^th March 2004] or in Israel, or use zakat alms to launch campaigns against the persecution of and discrimination against Christians by Muslim fanatics.

Integration can only hope to succeed if we set in motion a change in mentality in Muslim society, particularly amongst the so-called Turkish elite (businessmen, politicians, journalists and academics). Above all we need a change of mentality of German society, which immediately suspects that xenophobia lurks behind every critical statement, in which even the native elite and its own citizens adopts a schizophrenic, distanced and even downright hostile relationship with the home country. Whereas it is not a rarity for the children of Turkish immigrants into Germany to be given a Turkish fascist name such as Bozkurt or Asena and for them to have a chauvinistic national pride drummed into them, every positive feeling of patriotism is mercilessly nipped in the bud amongst German children. It is the self-appointed ‘pillars of the community’ who feel that every decent German should hang his head in shame over his past for all eternity and when young people say ‘I don’t feel personally responsible for a crime committed by my grandparents!’ they have insults and abuse hurled at them.

Of course the crime of the Holocaust is a crime against humanity of incomparable magnitude, which should never be forgotten. But all other states have to face up to their share of the responsibility too. The task for the future for the young people of Germany will be to set aside the involuntary and difficult title of ‘criminals of the Holocaust’ and with due vigilance and care to fight for peace right across the world, to combat racism, fascism, anti-Semitism and other forms of intolerance.

If Germans are calling for integration, they have to ask themselves the question of integration into what precisely?

Where is a sense of pride in the new home or a willingness to embrace this country amongst immigrants supposed to come from, if even the native is afraid to be ‘German’? Is afraid that if he waves a flag even once he will be condemned as a nationalist? It didn’t escape our notice that many of the people who were waving the German flag at the World Cup in 2006 came from an immigrant background. The big stage provided by the World Cup showed us positive chances for integration and cohabitation. Consciousness of one’s own cultural values and espousing them is not a hindrance to, but the precondition of an intercultural dialogue.

These values – which are founded on an unshakeable belief in democracy, the fundamental rights of men and women and the inherent dignity of the individual – continue to define our common interests in the 21^st century. If the Germans themselves have no clear identity they will fail in their undertaking to integrate foreigners.

Not only as a woman from a Turkish background, but above all as a German citizen, I feel obliged to fight constraints on liberty. It is precisely because of my constitutional patriotism that I have a duty to fight against all forms of discrimination and intolerance. Remain critical in the interests of peaceful cohabitation!”

In connection with the award and in response to Serap’s call for action, the Association of German Criminal Investigation Officers published a set of proposals on how best to combat violence against women, including:

• training to be provided for police to raise awareness concerning the specific features of the situation of Muslim, and in particular, Turkish women in Germany and the types of crime they are most likely to fall victim to;
• similar further training about typical patterns of behaviour and manifestations of physical and psychological abuse of women;
• providing information to Turkish/Muslim men that certain actions legitimated by tradition in the country of origin are against the law and, as such, subject to criminal prosecution in Germany;
• including the topic of the role of women in Islamic societies on the school curriculum;
• providing detailed and comprehensive information to Turkish girls so that if they become victims they will turn to the German police for assistance;
• to foster trust amongst young people affected and their families concerning the objectivity of the work done by the German police;
• cooperation between the police and women’s shelters, especially those that deal primarily with Muslim women;
• where individuals are under threat a change of name and new identity documents along the lines of the witness protection programme should be authorised and facilitated;
• in cases of massive psychological intimidation or physical violence committed by the family, the victim should be afforded the same assistance as in witness protection programmes, including change of place of residence and employment, severing contacts and providing the opportunity for a fresh start away from the family;
• guarantees of financial and practical assistance to enable the victim to start a new life;
• a consistent judicial response to crimes committed, for example, prison sentences without early release on probation;
• examining the possibility of tougher sentences in cases where physical and psychological violence against women has taken place on religious grounds;
• deportation of male foreign nationals in order to remove the source of danger when the threat to the Muslim woman has been substantiated and where the immigration status of the man concerned allows.

Serap’s website on the awards ceremony

Interview with Serap Cileli

Serap Cileli at the Round Table in Brussels

 

 

 

Translations © Chameleon 2007

Welcome to the 22nd Carnival of the Feminists!

Without further preliminaries, let me proceed immediately to the first topic:

Feminism and Fat.

Jax, of Making it up tackles the fraught relationship we are encouraged to have with our bodies, which affects both fat and thin alike, in Size, fashion and discrimination. She worries that “somehow it’s not feminist to be happy about being thin” and goes on to recount a recent experience on a skirt-buying expedition with her daughter, which proved to be an eye-opener (and will no doubt strike a chord with many parents): “How do we expect women to grow up valuing all the sizes that we can be, accepting each other for what we are, when it would appear we expect all six-year-olds to be the same size? So we are already telling many of our children that they are too big, too small, too thin or too tall”.

Molly, of Molly Saves the Day in Fat shamers take note rightly draws attention to a phenomenon that is sadly inescapable in the lives of those of us who exceed a culturally-prescribed size norm, that of being showered with unsolicited advice and comments, often from random passers-by: “To me, the worst thing about this ‘I’m just trying to be nice’ fat shaming is that it does seem, generally, to be filled with good intentions. The people engaging in it don’t seem to think about the fact that they wouldn’t be so nosy, or so quick to judge, about almost any other trait – physical, behavioural, or mental. Fat-shaming is so much a part of our culture that even the person being made to feel ashamed or condescended to is supposed to feel grateful, not offended”.

Finally, from Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon, we have Chew on this, Ms Hewitt, which disputes the lazy assumption on the part of sanctimonious politicians that fat is a personal problem (which conveniently absolves them of responsibility for getting to grips with such thorny issues as poverty). On her transition to a healthier diet than the one she was brought up on, she writes: “But what has changed is not fundamentally me, but aspects of my environment. I got the right messages; I was provided with the chance to exercise; I was given the right food supplies that I could afford. None of those things are individual; none of them are broadly available to the British public”.

Before moving on to the second topic, I would like to include three posts on the more general issue of appearance. Margaret Ervin, of Basket of Eggs, recalls her reaction to a remark made by a man on her red hair being set off to perfection by her blue dress in Owning Beauty. Again, she tells of an unwanted appraisal, not from what Bartky refers to (drawing on Foucault) as the “panoptical male connoisseur” who “resides within the consciousness of most women”, but a flesh and blood one, who happened to be walking by: “I told the story of walking down the street and being told to smile, commanded in fact to ‘Smile!’ I talked about how that often happened to me. ‘Smile!’ Why did these men think they had the right to tell me to smile? I had plenty of reasons not to smile. Did they want me to look more decorative? Why were they telling me, a perfect stranger, to please them?”

Ann Bartow, of Feminist Law Professors provides us with a salutary (and tongue-in-cheek) reminder of the pettiness of the fashion industry’s imperative to shift more products off the shelves by fostering a perpetual sense of insecurity in consumers in Your Eyebrows Were Too Thick! Now They Are Too Thin!: “But what if you don’t have the patience to grow out your eyebrows, or they are naturally on the thin side? Must you leave the house in a hat that falls mid-retina to hide this appalling facial deformity? Not necessarily, because luckily, there are plenty of NYT advisers ready to help you solve your horrible eyebrow deficiencies if you have adequate time, motivation and expendable cash”. The ludicrousness of it all reminds me of the charming György Pál (1960) version of The Time Machine, in which the protagonist, George, watches the hems on the shop window mannequin’s dresses rise and fall at incredible speed as the seasons fly by.

Holly, of Self-Portrait as…, deals with the subject of breast implants and male mammary fixation (and the range of women’s responses, from pride in corresponding to the ideal, to shame at not and the cleavage between them – sorry, I couldn’t resist, please forgive me) in Just as God made ME: “One day I listened to Muriel and Jane, a couple of my well-endowed friends, decry a survey they’d just read in some women’s magazine, in which the majority of men questioned said that any woman with a B-cup or smaller should get breast implants – these men felt that way even after being told that implants can harden to the point that they feel like baseballs, making certain kinds of physical contact painful if not impossible”.

Topic Two: Feminism and Faith

Since I issued a personal request for the following submission, it seems only appropriate to mention it first. Hugo Schwyzer of the eponymous blog eloquently and passionately advances his arguments on the compatibility of adherence to religious belief and feminism in Faith and Feminism, whilst urging us to move beyond the cardboard cut-out, cliché-ridden language of suspicion and antagonism: “In a way, evangelical Christians and feminists are both largely defined – at least in the public imagination – by their enemies. It’s very easy to caricature either group. The secular left tends to see all evangelical Christians as intolerant, homophobic, jingoistic Republicans; many on the right tend to see active feminists as shrill, angry, humourless, godless liberals. The public pronouncements of leading figures in both movements are regularly quoted out of context in order to reinforce an image of extremism. And of course, both ‘feminists’ and the ‘religious right’ are regularly invoked as dangerous spectres in fund-raising by both conservatives and progressives” [emphasis in original].

Eteraz in Why Muslim Honour Killings Why writes powerfully, uncompromisingly and poignantly about a phenomenon, which feminists surely must engage with: “Having said all that, it should be absolutely clear that I think the ‘honour’ that undergirds the murder of women like Ghazala Khan is a bastardisation of honour. In a properly exercised act of honour, the only person who could judge Ghazala’s honour was Ghazala herself. Yet, instead, all around the Muslim world (and parts of India and China), we find others (usually men) judging the honour of everyone around them, ascribing what they think is an inadequacy in another, to a loss of their own honour, and then, instead of exacting corrective behaviour upon themselves (as a truly honourable person would do), they exact vengeance from those they find inadequate. It becomes a Darwinian pain cycle with the strongest (men) punishing others (women)”.

I would now like to turn to two honest and contemplative posts by Sage of Persephone’s Box. In Those Pagans Were On To Something she meditates on the appeal and relevance of the church (she describes herself as a “recovering Catholic) in spite of some rather obvious deficiencies: “I say I’m recovering from the church because I think it’s poisonous. Christianity is a brilliant philosophy, but I haven’t seen many of Jesus’ ideas implemented at this church. The hierarchical power structure, archaic rules over birth control and divorce, intolerance, and inequitable behaviour towards women are just a few toxins Catholicism leeches out into its prey”. Amen to that, sister!

In the companion piece, Hate the Religion, Not the Religious, she broaches the subject of the relationship between faith and morality (in a manner reminiscent of Richard Dawkins in his documentary The Root of All Evil?): “I actually think that rejecting God can allow for a more sincere morality. We can be good without threat of punishment or loss of rewards. In fact, can we really call someone ‘good’ who only acts kindly in hopes of eternal salvation? I’m much more inspired by those who do what’s right for the sake of what’s right without expectation of fame, fortune, or spiritual longevity” [emphasis in original]

Another superlative post written by a former Catholic appears on Mind the Gap!. In Thoughts on Catholicism and Resistance, Winter acknowledges the role of organised religion in forming her personality and nudging her in the direction of feminist politics. After a careful examination of the ideology (the epitome of the virgin-whore dichotomy), she shows how its messages can be used for practical (and positive) ends in keeping with the believer’s life goals: “Some feminists are not going to like me for saying this, but I am grateful to the church for giving me a much-needed reason to resist when my peers were telling me that I must have sex by the time I was 14. The reason to resist should have come from feminism, but the only feminism that was available to me was the sort that says young women will have sex, therefore the best thing to do is provide plenty of contraception and show them how to get abortions. I wasn’t happy about that either. This is why I think many feminist responses to the Christian abstinence movement are over-simplistic, insofar as they fail to see any attractions within that ideology and view the young women who sign up to it as passive victims of patriarchy” [emphasis in original]

Demonstrating that women are mobilising an active resistance to the Catholic hierarchy, challenging the dead weight of male authority, the Reverend Astrid Joy Storm interviews Jean Marie Marchant, secretly ordained as a priest under a pseudonym. The opening couple of paragraphs certainly grab you by the (metaphorical) short and curlies!

At Culture Kitchen, Lorraine treats us to an incisive, witty and irreverent critique of the church’s impulse to regulate human sexuality, seeking to stifle desires of which it does not approve in Crushing on the King of Kings, inspired by a radio broadcast: “I live out in the country, so ‘Christian stations’ are as frequently encountered as roadkill woodchucks, and usually, I pay them about as much notice. But some woman was talking about her sexual purity, and I couldn’t help it. It just about made me cry. I did not hear the preceding discussion, so I wasn’t sure about what exactly the nature of this woman’s sexual ‘sin’ had been, but I listened in rapt fascination and a sick feeling in my stomach as she recounted how she carried around her ‘brokenness’ for ten years, until the night, in darkness because she didn’t want him to see her face, she confessed her sin to her husband” (I break off the quote here with a suitable cliff-hanger, paragon of wickedness that I am).

Concluding on this theme, breaking ranks at My Left Wing fires a devastating broadside against spiritual authority in The Stained Glass Ceiling: “Spiritual authority is one (man’s) vision imposed on all others, winning pre-eminence through guile, mass mobilisation, and acts of verbal violence. The spiritual authority dictates reality, recording their vision on the world as if people were blank tapes”.

Rainbow

This final section comprises submissions not explicitly related to the announced topics in all their colourful splendour.

Taking marriage as a starting point, Bitch Lab, in Spinster cat ladies aren’t black, provides us with a brilliant illustration of how we are all (and the privileged sociologist is far from immune to the influence of ideology) caught up in a web of social relations where various forms of oppression intersect. For any study to retain credibility, race, class and poverty with all their attendant nuances should never be dwarfed by gender in critical analysis to the extent that they drop out of view: “This isn’t to say that women who aren’t white and middle class don’t think about marriage and weddings, just that the pressure isn’t there in the same ways. And, it’s to say that there are other kinds of pressures which shape the way people decide to live their lives, what opportunities are open and which are closed, what tools of resistance they have at their disposal, what cultures and languages they speak, and even what languages of individualism are encouraged and even available to them”.

At Vee Levene’s Insipid Missives, Vee expertly dissects two articles, exposing their respective subtexts in Porn chic for women and girls. Denouncing the way ruthless marketers sink their claws into tender young (female) flesh, Vee adeptly steers us back into the territory of objectification and sexualisation of pre-pubescent bodies. Taking issue with a glib comment in an interview that, by emulating models through the fashions that they wear, girls are actively articulating “views”, Vee questions what these might consist of: “The ‘view’ of the knowledge that the best a woman can do is be appearance-based and as unnatural as possible, for the purposes of competing with other women and pleasing men? Since when does fashion (especially mainstream fashion) even begin to encompass the range of ‘views’ and opinions any individual – no matter what age – has? And in a case like this, with marketers insidiously targeting the most impressionable of the population; how can these ‘views’ be considered anything other than societal influence?”

Verbify at Signifying Nothing gets to grips with a discussion of courtship by Cassandra de Benedetto at Modestly Yours in oh fer christ’s sake. The quoted passages make for depressing reading indeed, furnishing proof (if any were needed) that many women prefer submission to male authority (to the extent that they accept the male claim of ownership over their bodies) to the autonomy that feminism offers: “In Cassandra’s view (…) a woman is not capable of going through life, of surviving, much less thriving, without a man looking out for her, wiping her nose, holding her hand as she crosses the street, cosigning car loans, calling her boss when he threatens her. To Cassandra, a woman without a man is, well, nonexistent” [emphasis in original]

Melissa, at Mobwhorelog condemns the self-serving nature (especially on the part of parasitical whore-prospectors) and class-based myopia that permeates much of the writing on the sex industry even amongst feminists in What’s empowering about whoring (question mark), a challenging, provocative and intelligent piece that challenges complacent assumptions. In Melissa’s words: “It is not for our supposed slavery but for our freedom that I am fearful that sex workers will never find the stigma we’re stuck with lessening. What the most outspoken of sex workers represent, the very few who can risk being open, is not fucking, but freedom. Not ‘freedom of choice’, or some abstract ‘freedom to come’, but freedom to live honourably alongside society. No, not outside society, but right in it – and by contrary rules”.

Marcella, at abyss2hope, summarily dismisses the fatuous conclusions drawn from the results of a survey in her succinct, but excellent Feminist Rape Crisis Over?, providing us with a salutary reminder that we cannot repeat the message about male violence often enough. Her own verdict, steeped in irony: “If it weren’t for victim-blaming and feminist-bashing, you might not know some people realize that anyone but small children and dead women are raped and that rapists are anybody except gays, illegal aliens, minorities and Muslims”.

Antiprincess, at I shame the matriarchy, in a harrowing piece of personal testimony, succeeds admirably in her undertaking to re-connect the often belligerent and impassioned torrent of words that is living feminist debate to the “human experience” of dreadful spousal abuse: “Feminism did not shield me, because the Patriarchy wasn’t beating me. A human being was beating me. He was, his fists were, both true and real. He was not a figment of the collective imagination. He was not a concept, a generalized sort of shorthand to symbolize centuries of suffering. He was a fellow human being”.

Concentrating on another aspect of women’s right to control their own bodies, Roni, at Goddess Musings, judiciously laments the exclusion of teenage girls from prescription-free access to the morning-after pill in Not good news at all, a stirring battle-cry: “So I ask you all to remember the young women who have been left out of this revolution. I know, even getting one condom out of this administration would be a victory, but we cannot give up. We cannot let this partial victory be also a partial victory for all the anti’s who want all young women to grow up without access or knowledge to reproductive health services”.

Amanda, at Ballastexistenz in Wow. Stuff about the anti-political nature of therapy confirms something I have always suspected (although my own experience of psychologists are utterly trivial in comparison to hers), namely, that in most instances therapy is all about taming and squeezing the recalcitrant client into a pre-determined mould, about forcing you to conform to social definitions of normality, reconciling you to the circumstances, which are causing you acute pain and distress in order to improve your “functionality” as opposed to tackling the root causes (the aforementioned circumstances) themselves. All that therapists teach us is to bottle up/suppress our anger rather than release it more fruitfully. Thus, as Amanda so perceptively explains, therapy is directly inimical to political action, narrowing the focus to the individual, “repairing” a “defect” instead of interrogating the iniquities of an unjust situation. A dazzling assault on the tyranny of experts, the literature cited also makes it a treasure trove for anyone interested in the dangers of avoiding confrontation as well as the corrosive effect therapist-dependence has on genuine human interaction. One brief excerpt ought to suffice to whet the reader’s appetite: “Therapism makes it so that friends don’t actually have to do things for each other, there are professionals for that. It makes it so that if one person is assisting another person more at any given particular amount of time, this can be considered ‘co-dependent’ rather than a part of the natural ebb and flow of a relationship. Aside from encouraging selfishness, therapy seems to encourage an incredibly superficial kind of friendship wherein if any problems arise for your friends, you aren’t expected to help in dealing with them, you’re expected to tell them to go to a professional”.

On the literary front, Nina, at Queer Cents, skilfully interviews author Amy Guth about finances, feminism and her debut novel Three Fallen Women in Ten Money Questions for Amy Guth: “I wrote Three Fallen Women at a time when I was seeing a few people around me unable or unwilling to enforce their personal boundaries in various ways. I think most of us learn this lesson through trial and error, sure, but suddenly I was noticing a lot of people who didn’t seem to have a grasp in that direction at all. The more I saw this, the more I started noticing things people were enslaved to. Food, pain, drama, clutter, money, misery, people, rotten partners – it was everywhere! So, I ended up writing a lot about the freedom that comes from setting boundaries and practicing self-reliance and ended up doing it through the mouthpiece of these characters”.

Sandy, at the imponderabilia of actual life, treats us to a detailed, balanced and thoughtful review of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World by Linda R. Hirshman. The following passage will hopefully give you a flavour of the critique: “Personally, I think that restructuring both the family (dividing household and childcare tasks more evenly) and the workplace (to be more ‘family-friendly’ is much more radical than Hirschman’s suggestions, which leave the corporate underpinnings that devalue the private sphere totally unchanged. In fact, encouraging upper-class parents to employ lower-class women to care for their children and clean their houses strikes me as downright conservative” [emphasis in original]

A tangible and thought-provoking illustration of how women’s participation in remunerated employment at the top end is given at the Workplace Prof Blog in New study Stresses Importance of Women in Senior Management Positions to Reduce Gender Gap in Income.

Nursepam, at 21st Century Lesbian Trailer Trash, ponders the implications of Louann Brizendine’s book in A Woman’s Brain: “There still remains within our culture the dichotomy of The Other. Us and Them. And it is alive and well in the idea of the superiority of the masculine.
This is where the causes of feminism, racism and homophobia converge. As long as we insist on putting our energies into deciding which is better, and then subjugating the group(s) who are Other than ourselves, we take our energies away from saving the planet and the human race as a whole”. A resounding endorsement to those sentiments!

Jpfbookworm, at Official Shrub.com, ventures into the realm of etiquette and dining in Sexism on a Plate (Classism, too), assessing a phenomenon I have (thankfully) not yet encountered (it is annoying enough when I eat out with my partner, whom I support financially, and the waiter always brings back the credit card I have deposited on the saucer alongside the cash tip for him to sign the slip before cringing with embarrassment when the Hungarian smiles and passes the pen to me) of menus with a blank space where the prices should be: “Quite obviously the practice of assuming that a man will pay for a woman’s meal is a sexist one, whether that assumption takes the form of handing the check to a man, or giving a woman a menu without prices”.

In drawing to a close, I would like to strike a more light-hearted note – we have, after all, cogitated on life, the universe and everything to borrow Douglas Adams’s phrase. Firstly, from Audrey at Talking Pony we have Sex for Money, which admittedly examines the very serious issue of the options open to “a twentysomething woman with a top-notch degree”.

Finally, Madeleine at Mad Kane allows us to take our leave of this edition with a smile on our faces, with her superb and hilarious parody of those quizzes we like to while away an idle minute or two with in Those Unspeakable Meetings.

The next Carnival will be hosted by Lingual X at Lingual Tremors on 20th September.

[The panel discussion on the theme of "Integration of Women of Turkish Descent in the European Union Member States" took place on 7th March at the Representation of the Free State of Bavaria to the European Union in Brussels]

Introductory statement: The integration of women of Turkish origin in the European Union in general or in specific Member States in particular is a more topical and serious issue than ever. It has various dimensions, being a women’s political issue in the sense that an emotional, capricious, aggressive and anti-constitutional bias in favour of men persists, leaving vast resources of human capital untapped and also being a matter of human rights. According to a Commission report (dating from 24th February of this year) the gender pay gap continues to yawn wide across Europe with women earning on average 15% less than male colleagues. In some sex-specific sectors, wage differentials have actually increased over the last five years in a number of countries, including Germany and Belgium. Ongoing support must be given to countries imminently about to join the EU as well as to potential candidates for fully-fledged membership to enable them to implement the acquis communautaire. Before a debate can be launched on the subject of a new wave of immigration into the EU, integration has to be highlighted and an adequate solution to the problems encountered by Turkish women found. In this context, the prospect of Turkish accession has to feature prominently, irrespective of the political stance adopted on the question (Bavaria giving preference to a form of privileged partnership as opposed to full membership as it has existed thus far). All candidates must comply with the Copenhagen criteria, one of the classic preconditions of membership being adoption and implementation of the acquis. These common rules include equal treatment of men and women in society and at work.

[The relevant passage in the Commission's report to which the opening address referred makes for sobering reading, even in the arid, bland, dispassionate and bureaucratic language in which such a document must, of necessity, be drafted: "The favourable trend in female employment has led to a narrowing of the gender gaps in employment and unemployment. Nevertheless, major imbalances persist while the high pay gap shows no significant signs of narrowing.
[…] Against this favourable backdrop [of a drop in unemployment amongst women], it must be acknowledged that the main areas of growth for female employment continued to be concentrated in activities and occupations already predominantly feminine. This has reinforced segregation in the labour market. Indeed, both sectoral and occupational segregation continue to rise in the EU, respectively to 25.4% and 18.1%. More than four in ten women work in public administration, education, health or social services, compared to less than two in ten men. In the private sector, however, business services remain an important source of job creation both for women and men, with an increase of employed persons in excess of 5% between 2000 and 2004.
A further source of concern is the persistence of the gender gap in part-time work, which is done by 32.6% of women in employment against only 7.4% of men. Although recourse to part-time work may reflect personal preferences and may help people to (re-)enter and stay in the labour market, the high gender gap is also evidence of differences of time use patterns between women and men and of the role of carer predominantly assumed by women and the greater difficulties they face in trying to reconcile work and private life. Participation in employment and the amount of time worked by women is closely linked to the number and age of children; this is less the case for men. For women aged between 20 and 49, having a child pushes the employment rate down by as much as 14.3 points, while it drives up men’s employment rate by 5.6 points. Similarly, the recourse to part-time work by women increases with the number of children, which is not the case for men. One-third of women with one child and half of women with three or more children work on a part-time basis, while the number of children has little effect on the proportion of men working part-time.
Work-life balance tensions combined with stereotypes and gender-biased remuneration and evaluation systems continue to affect the women’s career and perpetuate the vertical segregation of the labour market. Within enterprises, women account for only 32% of managers. Only 10% of members of boards and 3% of CEOs of the larger EU enterprises are women. In education and research, women outnumber men as graduates (59%), yet their presence decreases consistently as they progress on the career ladder, from 43% of PhDs down to only 15% of full professors.
The pay gap between women and men remains at unacceptably high levels and shows no significant signs of being closed. On average, women earn 15% less than men for every hour worked. This results from both non respect of equal pay legislation and from a number of structural inequalities such as labour market segregation, differences in work patterns, access to education and training, biased evaluation and pay systems and stereotypes” (emphasis in original)]

Cornelia Bolesch (Brussels correspondent of Süddeutsche Zeitung, chairing the panel): Women living in Europe have rights on paper, but do not enjoy them fully in practice, as was mentioned a moment ago in conjunction with the gender pay gap. This discrimination is “light” compared with the kind of discrimination practiced and suffered elsewhere in the world where patriarchy is more heavy-handed. Today in Europe women such as Serap Cileli and Ayaan Hirsi Ali have mustered the courage to stand up and talk about their experiences and transform problems that have previously been hidden from public view into problems of relevance to us all. Alongside Serap the other members of the panel are Dr. Vladimír Špidla, Commissioner for Employment, Social Affairs and Equal Opportunities, who has just returned from a three-day visit to Turkey, and Christa Stewens, Bavarian State Minister for Labour and Social Welfare, Family Affairs and Women. The discussion will focus on three main areas: What are the current realities? What laws are called for to bring about improvements? And what practical measures can be introduced to remedy the problems? The most authentic information comes from an individual who has experienced the difficulties first-hand, Serap Cileli.

Serap Cileli: I am an author and women’s rights activist. At the age of fifteen my own family forced me into marriage in Turkey (I had been forcibly engaged in Germany when I was twelve). I stuck out the marriage for seven years and the best way to find out more is to consult my home page. When I was 23 I returned to Germany with my children and I took refuge in a women’s shelter. My current husband is the man of my own choice. In 1993 I started writing about the sufferings I had endured, initially as a kind of therapeutic exercise. I published my book cataloguing my experiences as a case study, the story of an individual fate, but the more I probed, the more I investigated the issue, the more apparent the degree of violence became. Somebody had to speak up, so I went public. Between 1994 and 1999, however, the journalists and television channels I approached turned down my offers of interviews, claiming that I would only stir up xenophobia with my views, but since 2005 I have been able to speak openly about the problems that continue to beset Muslim women immigrants although such communities have been living in Europe for over 50 years. Through my home page I have been able to help over 200 young women and 20 men affected by forced marriage. It is not a problem restricted to any particular age group: the youngest girl I have helped was only 12, the oldest victim 52. German women who have converted to Islam have also been affected. They have lived in polygamous arrangements and been subjected to abuse in the form of domestic violence. The youngest girl I helped was Turkish and had been living in a traditional marriage for one year already without anyone at her school noticing. Another Turkish girl of just 13 became the second wife of a man who already had eight daughters. Yet another girl refused to enter into a forced marriage and paid an appalling price for her disobedience: her own father decided to kill her, tying her to her bed at five in the morning, pouring spirits all over her and setting her alight. She lay on fire for 45 minutes leaving 60% of her body burned. It is of the utmost importance to speak out publicly about such cases in Turkey as well as in Europe and it is important to keep goings on in Turkey under close scrutiny, not just to keep tabs on Turkish immigrants.

Cornelia Bolesch: Can you tell us a little about how you came into contact with such problems minister?

Christa Stewens: The first time I was confronted by such problems was when an aunt of mine married an Egyptian. Hers was not the only marriage between a German and an Egyptian in which difficulties ensued. When things went wrong between the spouses, the women discovered that they had no rights to custody of their children, which meant that even before I entered political life I was aware of what could happen. Once I entered the political arena living near Munich, women got in touch with me, told me their life stories, how they wanted to be given the opportunity to learn the local language, take part in sporting activities and in reading groups, but whose husbands refused permission to do so. I started thinking about how we could reach such families. Only low-level intervention held out any prospect of success. Two programmes in particular proved useful. As Minister of Social Affairs, I am interested in women’s shelters. In Bavaria, 50% of those who have recourse to their services are of foreign extraction, mostly Muslims. Then there are the women’s emergency help lines, right there in the thick of things. The whole issue is extremely sensitive within German society. Muslim families have a very pronounced patriarchal structure and women attach a great deal of importance to it. They do not want their family structures to be undermined or destroyed. We need to promote language learning and help the women to get out of the home. Of the third generation immigrants, 30% speak Turkish at home, in other words the German language represents the most important bridge in improving the situation.

Cornelia Bolesch: Commissioner Špidla, can you say a few words concerning your visit to Turkey? What were your impressions and were the problems encountered by Muslim women in Europe crop up in debate?

Vladimír Špidla: I was still in Ankara this very morning. It was exactly a year ago that a demonstration by Turkish women in Istanbul was brutally suppressed and my official visit was intended in part as a signal that women’s rights are not a peripheral issue of little relevance to enlargement, but have played and will continue to play an important role. I stated this point very clearly when I took the floor at public events and when I met representatives of women’s NGOs. There is a divide in Turkey between the small, but prominent elite of highly educated women willing to fight for rights through the NGOs and the rest. Women do occupy management positions, in fact, at the very highest level there are twice as many women in Turkey than in the EU holding their own [The Commission's report on equality between women and men for 2006 mentions the following figures: "In the economic field, it appears that, in 2004, women represented 32% of managers in Europe. However, women's share of top management positions in firms (i.e. membership of the daily executive bodies of top companies) was 10%]. This is one layer, but there is another world where quite different conditions hold sway, in which honour killings and forced marriages are quite normal. I also met members of the Commission against Honour Killings in the Turkish Parliament. Approximately 40% of women in Turkey are in favour of domestic violence, whilst 98% accept the right of husbands to mete out physical chastisement to family members. Only 24% of women in Turkey are in remunerated employment, compared to the European average of 56% and many of these work in the informal sector without decent conditions or any social security benefits. There is a great deal of catching up to do. I am convinced that there is – to an extent – an awareness of the problems, certainly of honour killings, but not so much of forced marriages. The very fact that a Commission to tackle honour killings has been set up in the Turkish Parliament stands as proof that it is being taken seriously by the leading lights in politics. What goes on at a high level is one thing, however, whereas day-to-day life is another kettle of fish. A great deal remains to be done.

Cornelia Bolesch: In Germany a major debate has been launched as to whether the testimony of women like Serap is relevant or whether it simply reflects the problem of a minority within the Turkish community. Do you as a Commissioner perceive a problem of information? Is what we are confronted with dramatic enough to warrant your taking action or do you want better statistics? It is all very well for Eurostat to compile information about the number of dairy cattle in the EU, but should it not also be gathering data about the educational situation? About how well Muslim women speak the languages of the countries in which they live?

Vladimír Špidla: It is definitely a problem. It is difficult to know exactly how many Muslims are living in Europe at present, 15 million being the approximate figure. What we do know is that by 2030 we will have 20 million too few workers, even including today’s immigrants in our calculations, so there will continue to be an influx of new migrants in the future. You are correct to suggest that we require more detailed statistics, but you must also bear in mind that when dealing with statistics the method applied determines the results. We certainly need to study the problem, but I don’t think that statistics alone can provide the answers. What we really need are targeted studies. It is extremely delicate and sensitive. Perhaps the European Gender Institute can be charged with the task of carrying out research of this type.

Cornelia Bolesch: It is due to start work next year and will address issues of women’s rights across Europe.

Vladimír Špidla: We do lack proper data, so there is no doubt that studies are needed and meticulous work has to be done.

Christa Stewens: Whenever you attempt to gather information you are still left with a certain unknown quantity in the sense that you cannot encompass everything. The advantage of the Internet is that it allows for a certain degree of anonymity. Women who pluck up courage to raise their voices in public and complain about being denied equal opportunities are often stigmatised within their families. The Turkish community is about 1.8 million strong, comprising many thousands of families. That integration has not yet been achieved is demonstrated by indicators such as the number of Turkish women fleeing to women’s shelters. More and more women are making a public stand, however, which raises awareness at a political level, enabling us to start getting to grips with the problems politically. At the various language and integration courses 60% of the participants are women. Funding from the European Social Fund allowed publication of a brochure entitled “Mummy speaks German”. Mothers bring up their children, which means they play a key role in the education of the upcoming generation in their formative years. Given the current demographic trends it is important for us to take action to avoid the creation of parallel societies before we allow more immigrants in. Women’s role in integration terms is absolutely critical.

Cornelia Bolesch then gave the audience an opportunity to ask questions. The first contributor was interested in obtaining a response on the wearing of headscarves. A letter had been addressed to all of the German Federal States calling upon them to explain how a ban on the wearing of headscarves could be deemed as compatible with the prescription concerning neutrality of world view. Some Federal States had no specific provisions and the speaker was curious to learn what the Bavarian reaction had been and whether, if penalties were applied, more far-reaching ones than was the case with Baden-Württemberg would be envisaged.

Vladimír Špidla: As a result of the introduction of new anti-discrimination legislation, the Commission has to monitor implementation. Headscarves are a highly sensitive matter in terms of human rights. I broached this issue with the Turkish government and by way of response was informed that the headscarf ban in universities in Turkey did not constitute a breach of human rights. More letters will follow, but I have not made a statement implying that discrimination has indeed occurred. Currently, the Commission is ascertaining how the new laws are being put into effect.

Serap Cileli: Headscarves are a red rag to me. Let me be very specific: they go beyond the limit of my tolerance. If they are nothing more than a piece of clothing then it should be possible to ban them at public institutions. Wearing them in private is the choice of each individual. My grandmother wore a headscarf. If you support the right to wear it then you are supporting a violation of human rights. In the Koran, the wearing of the headscarf is not a duty, but a commandment. Liberal and democratic Muslims differ in their views on the subject compared to orthodox Muslims. If we favour wearing it, we are supporting the orthodox camp. In certain families in Germany young girls are shaved bald before they are allowed to go on school trips because of the fear that if the headscarf slips someone might catch a glimpse of their hair. Girls as young as six, seven and eight undergo this in an effort to conceal their charms from men. This is what women’s sexuality boils down to: it has to be protected against men. In Turkey girls are not permitted to wear headscarves to school. The same should apply here if we want to defend human rights.

Christa Stewens: Bavaria is a liberal state and my firm conviction is that the headscarf is a religious symbol, which means that teachers should not wear it. The decision to ban wearing it is therefore correct. It represents a form of discrimination against women. Let me reiterate. It is my firm conviction that teachers should not be allowed to wear it at school, whereas pupils may do so. Baden-Württemberg takes things a step further than Bavaria. The argument is that if wearing the headscarf is tolerated at school this has nothing to do with equal rights for women, since many girls do not wear it voluntarily.

The next speaker from the audience pointed out that it was all very well for Bavarian politicians to harp on about secularism and the separation of state and religion, but that crosses hang on classroom walls in Bavarian schools. Religious symbols have no place in schools, regardless of whether they are Catholic, Protestant, Jewish or Muslim. Conservative politicians stress that we live in a Western culture and call for integration into that culture, but what does integration mean? Does it always mean that minorities should adapt without any leeway for innovation? Twelve per cent of the German population consisted of immigrants, leaving the arguments put forward in tatters. In Berlin, in the block of flats where the young woman lived, fellow residents painted their nails with bright red varnish, teetered on high heels, yet wore the headscarf and when challenged would reply that they didn’t give a shit, they wanted to mix and match symbols as the mood took them. The headscarf really is merely a piece of clothing and should be de-ideologised accordingly.

Serap Cileli: There is a new trend emerging, exactly as described, with young women dressing in white, see-through dresses and headscarves by way of being deliberately provocative whilst representing Islamism. It is a paradox. Eyes with eye shadow appeared more erotic combined with the headscarf. I have talked to some of these girls in Berlin, telling them they looked very oriental. They replied that it makes them feel good. Wearing the headscarf in schools is quite a different matter from wearing it in private or on the streets. At schools it is part and parcel of the oppression of women.

Christa Stewens: There is a huge difference between displaying a crucifix and the wearing of the Muslim headscarf. Displaying a crucifix on the wall of a classroom in Bavaria is linked to the Bavarian constitution and to fundamental values. If the crucifix bothers anyone they are entitled to ask for it to be taken down. Children living in the Christian West know what their values are and these values do not include the oppression of women.

Cornelia Bolesch: What laws do you think are needed at EU, national or Federal State level to help women overcome the dual discrimination they face? Do you think, Serap Cileli, that if an appropriate law had been on the statute books it might have helped you?

Serap Cileli: It is extremely important that we give a clear and strong signal that in a democracy where the rule of law prevails we will not tolerate certain behaviours. With the young girls I help, these victims are let down by the law. They are too frightened to press charges against their families. I can find a temporary refuge for them, I can also report their families to the police for unlawful duress, but the girls themselves are terrified when it comes to reporting crimes. Very often they are not even aware that a crime has been committed. They say that their families only wanted what was best for them. Eight out of ten of the girls I help return to their families. We need to be able to get into the families when the children are of nursery school age onwards. When I help a girl escape she will often lapse into a state of distress, of absolute helplessness and powerlessness because the family bonds exert a very strong pull. The girls’ outlook is very traditional and family-oriented. Sometimes when I intervene and explain how the girl feels to the families the experience is positive. Awareness-raising and education are the be all and end all. We have to reach the women who bring up their daughters.

Cornelia Bolesch: Should forced marriage be recognised in law as an official offence? If a forced marriage takes place should it be possible to press charges without the victim’s consent, going over their heads?

Serap Cileli: Both. One of the demands I have put forward along with women’s organisations is that forced marriage should be considered a criminal offence. Girls are placed in extreme situations, yet in spite of it cannot summon the courage to press charges against their families. We need to be able to report the families to the police. On innumerable occasions I have been forced to move the girl from location to location because the families have resorted to various ploys to uncover her whereabouts, all of which could be avoided.

Vladimír Špidla: The Commission has adopted an action plan covering the period up to 2010, which has come under fire from the European Parliament [the Roadmap identifies six priority areas: equal economic independence for women and men; reconciliation of private and professional life; equal representation in decision-making; eradication of all forms of gender-based violence; elimination of gender stereotypes and promotion of gender equality in external and development policies. Point 1.6 pertains to "Combating multiple discrimination, in particular against immigrant and ethnic minority women" and reads as follows: "The EU is committed to the elimination of all discrimination and the creation of an inclusive society for all. Women members of disadvantaged groups are often worse off than their male counterparts. The situation of ethnic minority and immigrant women is emblematic. They often suffer from double discrimination. This requires the promotion of gender equality in migration and integration policies in order to ensure women's rights and civic participation, to fully use their employment potential and to improve their access to education and lifelong learning". Point 4 relates to "Eradicating gender-based violence and trafficking" and states: "The EU is committed to combating all forms of violence. This is a breach of the fundamental right to life, safety, freedom, dignity and physical and emotional integrity. Violation of these rights cannot be tolerated or excused on any ground. Prevention is essential and requires education and knowledge, the development of networking and partnership, and the exchange of good practices. Urgent action is needed to eliminate customary or traditional harmful attitudes and practices, including female genital mutilation, early and forced marriages, and honour crimes". The Commission undertakes to "issue a Communication on the establishment of a system for comparable statistics on crime, victims and criminal justice in 2006 and monitor progress at EU level", which would at least clarify the extent of the blight of forced marriages and honour killings and to "support Member States and NGOs in their efforts to eradicate gender-based violence, including customary or traditional harmful practices, by promoting awareness-raising campaigns, supporting networking, exchange of good practices and research, and by implementing programmes for victims as well as perpetrators, encouraging Member States to establish national action plans"].

Hiltrud Breyer (MEP, Greens/European Free Alliance Group): Its wording is very vague and it does not contain any proposals for legal initiatives. Moreover it is also extremely vague on migrants and Muslim women. Wouldn’t it be a good idea to try to remedy the problems with legislation?

Vladimír Špidla: That is a very clear and a very good question. There are different levels of legislation. European legislation is very general in nature. More detailed legislation can be adopted in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, at Member State level in other words. New anti-discrimination law has just entered into force and has to be implemented rigorously. Germany has not yet done so, nor has the Czech Republic. Other countries have with varying degrees of success and failure. Our task is to ascertain the level of implementation. Europe cannot be like a leopard skin with certain spots where there is no equality of opportunity. We have to make sure that implementation is effective and open up new opportunities for legislation to come into being, drawing up new directives. I want to see a good analysis carried out. Checking up on implementation takes time, but is necessary. As far as forced marriages are concerned, the terms of the debate have not been precise. Laws already exist in the Member States that can be used to combat and prevent forced marriages from taking place. Laws possess a symbolic dimension. Let me be clear: condemning crime is more than trotting out tired old clichés. I do not shy away from drafting laws, but I have to be certain that there is a point to them. Unnecessary laws are worse than no laws at all.

Cornelia Bolesch: If we take the example of domestic violence, which can involve everything from physical violence through to manslaughter. It is committed in private, where there are flowing boundaries, but in the interests of giving off the kind of signal you alluded to would it not be good to make clear once and for all that it is unacceptable by passing a European directive outlawing it?

Vladimír Špidla: Let me sketch out the contours of the process. Tonight’s debate is very important and it can open the doors to a debate at European level, but ultimately the decisions have to be taken by the Member States. One good legal system setting out the parameters of offences was the Code of Hammurabi. It listed the crimes without legal abstractions. In some cases it is good to have definitions, but what we need here is a debate at EU level and the open method of coordination. It is feasible to tackle the phenomenon in this manner, but impractical to pursue the course of setting out a specific offence. That would not be the correct approach and it would also prove difficult to enforce.

Cornelia Bolesch: What about increasing the age at which family members are allowed to join their relatives in the EU as a means of preventing forced marriages? Mr. Schäuble has expressed sympathy for the Dutch law increasing the age to 21. Do you think that Germany should follow suit in an effort to erect a barrier against forced marriages?

Christa Stewens: Yes, I am in favour of it. In Bavaria the directive on family reunification provides for this. It is intended as a barrier to forced marriages. We must avail ourselves of the room for manoeuvre that exists in law from provisions prohibiting unlawful duress through to prosecuting criminal acts. So I agree with Mr. Schäuble.

Cornelia Bolesch: Should it be possible for women sent to Turkey by their families for the purposes of forcing them into marriage to have restrictions on their return to Germany eased?

Serap Cileli: Yes. The right to return should not be subject to restrictions. At the moment, the residence permit expires after six months. When they arrive in Turkey the women’s passports and ID cards are taken away. We have to adjust the right to return as this constitutes a very important means of improving the situation. On the other hand, however, we must also support more women’s shelters being opened in Turkey. For the whole country there are 14 or 15 and scarcely a refuge for girls. Many women might have wanted to escape, but not had anywhere to escape too. We need to engage in talks with the Turkish government about this. The German consulate could help these girls, but they do not have German citizenship, so the consulate has its hands tied. Raising the age to 21 is good, but we must not forget that the children born in polygamous marriages are not registered. A 14-year-old girl can officially come to Germany by claiming that she is 18 and there is no way that her real age can be verified.

A further speaker from the audience reminded listeners that rape and domestic violence did not feature on the political agenda in the past and that political change had to come from self-confident women. One problem was that insufficient room for manoeuvre was available to those affected. The example chosen was headscarves. The women had to choose between wearing it and keeping their jobs. Neither option was particularly emancipatory. In Denmark it was no longer possible to start up a family freely, which is a fundamental human right. How can we avoid exacerbating the situation further? By prescribing emancipation from above? The next audience contributor commented on Mr Špidla’s reserved attitude. It had slowly become apparent that law prohibiting violence was an indispensable complement to liberalised divorce laws. Education was called for and the state should offer assistance rather than focusing exclusively on sanctions.

Mary McPhail (Secretary-General of the European Women’s Lobby): There is very little information I can add to the debate, but as far as the issue of data is concerned, the European Women’s Lobby has been putting pressure on Member States government’s to compile comparable data for over a decade. In 1999 we published our own research in Unveiling the Hidden Data. It encompassed police records, public health records and the testimony of women in shelters. One in five women in Europe experiences violence from her intimate male partner. These results were backed up by a WHO study, which concluded that for women between the ages of 15 and 49 the biggest cause of death and injury was precisely partner violence. These problems are compounded where harmful traditional practices affect migrant women. We need an EU-wide directive on violence against women, since such violence is a major barrier to women achieving their full rights. A law which protects the victim and penalises the perpetrator is required, as well as support and services. The evidence is compelling and it behoves the EU and the Member States to take more direct action and accelerate the pace of change. National action plans mean better monitoring as part of the road map.

Vladimír Špidla: On the question of the road map, I am not afraid of drawing up legislation, but improved implementation of existing laws could deliver results. Current laws are being shoddily enforced. My most important task is to work for consistent implementation.

Hiltrud Breyer (MEP, Greens/European Free Alliance Group): How can you deal adequately with female genital mutilation, forced marriages, headscarves and pupils being banned from taking part in swimming lessons on the basis of anti-discrimination legislation? The European Parliament is calling for a directive. We need tough measures to bring about genuine change. You need to make recommendations and put the issue on the agenda rather than hide away and claim you have a clear conscience. It is precisely this kind of attitude that creates the leopard skin you were talking about earlier. This is misunderstood tolerance and we expected more of you. Last year we asked for a report on Turkey in the wake of the demonstration. We also want initiatives on the registration of girls’ real ages so we can tell how old they really are when they come to Europe. The fact that this has been overlooked is proof of bankruptcy.

Vladimír Špidla: Let’s put it on the political agenda. We cannot maintain anti-discrimination law is being properly implemented. Female genital mutilation is a clear breach of bodily integrity, guarantees of which are clearly set out in European legislation. Honour killings are simply murder. You cannot insist that a Member State has to tackle murder. Conventions and directives have to be implemented and made a reality. We can draw up a directive on forced marriages, but what good would it do? It would be up to the Member States to enforce it. As things stand not a single Member State believes that forced marriages are good or that honour killings are anything other than murder. What you need is courage and a heart, not simply rules. I have done a great deal, even if my heart is not quite pure.

Cornelia Bolesch: This brings us neatly on to the final topic, that of practical policies. Traditions, culture, religion and private constraints have an influence. The European Women’s Lobby statistics show that one in five women is a victim of domestic violence. The perpetrators are men. We can only move forward, if we want to change the situation of Muslim women if we work together with the local Turkish communities.

Serap Cileli: Recently a postcard campaign was launched by two Turkish boys and two Turkish girls with the slogan “My honour is to fight for the freedom of my sister”. It is an encouraging sign that at least two Turkish boys are standing up and being counted, fighting in public for their sisters’ freedom. It would be good if more were to lend it their support. I don’t know how many Turkish migrants are in the audience tonight. Very few Turkish migrants attend my lectures, but we need to broach the issue of forced marriages and persuade leading Turkish community figures who can influence opinions to air it in public and to discuss how it can be prevented in our own community. I often receive calls from teachers who don’t know what to do about their girl pupils. This helplessness is similar to that felt by social workers in shelters when they encounter problems. Turkish associations and organisations have a role to play. How can we help these women? In Berlin the Central Council of Muslims says it is responsible, that it will go into families and if the husband attacks and beats his wife it will intercede and act as a mediator, that Muslim law does not condone violence. We don’t need to call in an imam if we have law and the police, however. The girls are too frightened to call the police or to press charges. If imams are used as go-betweens it can lead to a positive outcome.

Cornelia Bolesch: How much by way of compromise is possible or acceptable for a state? Schools are confronted with practical difficulties if pupils are not allowed to take part in sex education classes or swimming lessons, or they are only allowed to attend the sex education classes if boys and girls are taught separately. Is it reasonable to accept such an approach?

Christa Stewens: We have a victim protection law. In Bavaria counselling facilities need to be attached to shelters to help women. We need networked assistance, involving social workers, doctors, schools and the police. In order to eliminate domestic violence we have to develop a manual, put help on offer and rope in all relevant actors as well as making it clear that this is a task for society as a whole. I am opposed to compromises in a state where the rule of law holds sway. Such a state cannot turn a blind eye, cannot look the other way. We have to stick to the letter of the law, including in schools. Turkish girls must take part in swimming lessons. Integration has to be the order of the day from nursery school age onwards. We also have to make sure there is a proper mix between German, foreign and Turkish children, as there are some nursery school classes where 70% of the children are of foreign extraction. We will have to introduce weighting to guarantee a proper spread in nursery school groups, which is to be welcomed from the point of view that when the children make friends with each other, the foreign children will be invited to play with the German children, will communicate in German and have a different grasp of the values and the language. This will lead to considerably less recourse to violence. These are important paths to integration.

Vladimír Špidla: The most important word in this context is integration. At EU level our opportunities are restricted. The Treaty only allows for certain options. We need a “triad” of integration in language, education and employment, as difficulties have beset all three. I agree that we need a good mix in nursery school so that the children enter primary school properly equipped, which will assist in labour market integration later on. 30% of Turkish women are in remunerated employment, the rest stay at home. Integration and having a job create independence. Earning money provides an income, which in turn opens up new opportunities, and boosts independence and self-confidence.

Cornelia Bolesch: What about the role of men? Why are men not seen as victims? They do enjoy privileges, but they too can be victims of forced marriages, suffer from occupying a low place in the hierarchy and being forced to live lives in confinement. We should also encourage men to see themselves as victims of the system.

Serap Cileli: How many men out there freely admit to having weaknesses? A man has to be a real man, at least according to the macho culture prevalent in the Turkish community. In the course of one of my school visits I met a 15-year-old boy who, shortly before the summer holidays, admitted that he had been forced into an engagement. He showed great bravery in doing so. In a school in Düsseldorf, I spoke to a group of pupils aged between 16 and 17. Hartun Sürücü cropped up in conversation. She had refused to wear a headscarf and was murdered. One of the boys said “If my sister behaves like a whore, I’d kill her too”. I tried to talk to him afterwards. He thought it was perfectly acceptable for his father to hit him or his mother if they stepped out of line or refused to obey the rules. This attitude was deeply ingrained in him. Outwardly, many Turkish girls might seem to be very emancipated, yet they zealously defend their traditions, so before we start reaching out to men, we have to sort this out first.

One final audience participant pointed out that men would not emancipate themselves alone, but only along with the rest of society. Such a project only stood a chance of success if an integrated approach were adopted. In other words, public awareness would have to be raised and certain trendsetters would have to show the way to the rest.

Cornelia Bolesch: Tonight’s debate has concentrated primarily on the double burden of discrimination on immigrant women, but all women are adversely affected by it. We need to continue to draw attention to the problems and launch a debate. The spat between the Member of the European Parliament and the Commissioner shows that we are not just dealing with anaemic directives, but issues of the utmost relevance to making social progress.

[Chameleon's disclaimer: The above does not pretend to be a complete transcript, but a reconstruction based on notes jotted down. Any inaccuracies or lacunae are neither deliberate nor malicious, but due to deficiencies in my note-taking technique]

Serap Cileli is an indefatigable champion of the rights of Muslim women in Germany as well as being that country’s foremost expert on forced marriages and honour killings. I had the immense privilege of visiting her at home for an in-depth interview. I was deeply impressed by the depth of her warmth and compassion and by her courage in braving hecklers and the disapproval of those who disagree with her views. For many years hers was a voice crying in the wilderness, the uncomfortable truths she was determined to bring to light welcomed neither by intellectuals nor by politicians. With a visible (and justified) sense of pride, she smiled at the recent phrase in the extended pieces in the International Herald Tribune and the New York Times describing the activities of her and her sisters elsewhere in Europe as “the rebellion of the Muslim women”. The story that she has to tell is one of culpable squandering of human potential and shocking political listlessness.

Chameleon: Can you tell us a little about your life and why you began campaigning against forced marriages and honour killings?

Serap: When I was fifteen I was forced into marriage against my will by my family here in Germany. I was born in Turkey and had come to Germany to join my parents at the age of eight and when I turned twelve I was forcibly engaged to a potential marriage candidate from Nuremberg. This engagement was against my will, but my Father had already made up his mind about the marriage. He was convinced that the man in question was the right man for me and wanted to marry me off to him. I did not want to be married to him, so I attempted suicide at the age of thirteen because I felt so helpless at the time. There was nobody for me to turn to, I couldn’t involve third parties, as my Father’s honour, his reputation would have been damaged if I had talked to my classmates or my teacher about it, that I was going to be forced into marriage and that the whole thing was against my will. As a thirteen-year-old child I felt completely helpless, I just wanted to die and because of the suicide attempt my prospective parents-in-law visited my parents to complain that their daughter had not been brought up according to the precepts of our religion, according to our customs and traditions, if she had been, she would not be opposing her Father’s decision and that it dishonoured our family. They didn’t want to have anything to do with this dishonour nor did they want such a rebellious daughter-in-law, so they broke off the engagement. Of course I was initially delighted at the news, but my Father told me not to rejoice too soon, that I was now entirely in his hands and that he would decide on my future whether I liked it or not. A year later, when I was fourteen, we were in Turkey where we spent six weeks on holiday every year. Shortly before we were due to leave – I was still only fourteen – my Father once again had me forcibly engaged to another man in Turkey, ten years my senior, which meant that I travelled back to Germany as a fiancée. It goes without saying that I was extremely unhappy and tried to explain to my Father that I didn’t want this marriage, to which he replied that he had given his word, that he had already warned me that a daughter who disobeyed him, who disputed his authority would soon know about it. So when I was fifteen I was married in Turkey during the summer holidays and left behind there. I stuck that marriage out for seven years, seven whole years and every time my parents came to Turkey on holiday I always pleaded with them, insisting that I didn’t want to stay in the marriage, that I couldn’t stand it any more, that I wanted a divorce, I wanted them to give me their consent to go ahead with a divorce, but my Father turned round and told me it was my fate. All of a sudden it was deemed to be my fate, because they had seen for themselves that this man was not fulfilling his marital duties. My family had been supporting us financially. If my parents had not sent me money every month I would have starved in Turkey together with my two children. They were aware of what was going on, but they kept on saying it was my fate, there was still a chance he might change and that they would continue to support us. I should stick at the marriage. After seven years I told my Father that if he didn’t agree to the divorce there and then he wouldn’t see me and the children the following year when he came back to Turkey. I was issuing a threat, letting him know that I would kill myself and the two children. Then he said (although it wasn’t quite as easy as that, there were still huge difficulties) he gave me his word that if I stayed in the marriage for another four to six months, he would give me the time, if I gave it another try, but that if after that period had elapsed I still wanted out, he would consent to the divorce. So he finally faced up to the fact that it hadn’t worked out and all of a sudden I found myself a single mother of two in Turkey. When I was still separated I fell in love with one of the neighbour’s young sons. Such a relationship was off limits firstly because although we were living apart I was not divorced yet and secondly because we were Alevites and he was a Sunni, in other words, we belonged to different religious communities, although we were both Muslims. He was the man of my choice and I had an affair with him. My parents did not accept him as a son-in-law so that my Mother, when she found out about the affair, abducted my children to Germany. She issued me an ultimatum. I had to choose between my children and the man I loved. I had to leave and join my children, which is how I ended up back in Germany in 1991. Here my Father and my Mother made another attempt at forcing me into a marriage, for the second time, in order to cleanse the “stain” on our honour caused by the affair. That was in 1992 and I fled to a Women’s Shelter with the two elder children. I lived there for 16 months and then in 1994 I began writing about my past experiences, in order to come to terms with them. It was really very difficult for me to do so; it caused me a great deal of anguish. My family no longer accepted me, they disowned me. I was left with so many questions for which I had no answers, which is when I started writing. It was through this writing that I embarked upon my present activity. My activities give me a sense of purpose and fulfilment. I regard what I do as a mission. For me it is a duty, a task, a mission to fight on behalf of the thousands of Turkish Muslim women in Europe, to fight for their rights. Because I have found happiness. I was able to get married to the neighbour’s son in 1993. He came to Germany through family reunification. I have found happiness. I have also known freedom and I want to share the freedom I enjoy today, for which I fought so long and bitterly, with as many women who have undergone similar sufferings as possible. I do not want Muslim women to be confined to their homes and tacitly kept as slaves, with everyone turning a blind eye. I have made it my objective to shake Europe, society, the politicians out of their torpor, to tell them there is a minority here in Europe, Muslim women, who, in spite of the provisions of our constitution, are unable to avail themselves of their rights, women who live in slavery in the midst of our free states. This is why I have undertaken this mission as a duty, as a responsibility.

Chameleon: How do you react to the talk of multiculturalism? Do you see it as an excuse to treat women as second-class citizens? What is your opinion of it?

Serap: This multicultural idyll, as it were, is a mere pretext for violating human as well as women’s rights, an excuse for looking away, for not wanting to face up to the realities for reasons of convenience. I always contend that those who stand up for this multicultural idyll and then frantically defend it in public debate are accomplices when human rights are violated next door. That’s what it boils down to. For almost 50 years now, there has been immigration into Germany and Europe. For almost 50 years we have never had such an intensive debate about the suffering of Muslim women, about forced marriages, domestic violence, honour killings, child marriages, incest and abuse in the family as we are having now, in 2005. These topics were all taboo and it is precisely these hypocritical advocates of the multicultural idyll who are to blame for it. It was a breeding ground for Islamists. Europe, democracy provided fertile soil for Islamists, fundamentalists and also for patriarchs. Why did Germany react in this way? I asked myself for a long time why this should be the case. I was only able to come up with a single answer, namely, the past, Germany’s Nazi history. German society was racked with guilt for years because of the crimes of their forebears. It was an appalling business. Obviously we have to stand up and say nothing like it must ever be allowed to happen again, but you cannot always carry this burden of guilt, you cannot pass on these feelings of guilt from generation to generation forever. It is precisely this feeling, precisely this manner of upbringing here in Germany that has made the suffering of these women possible because people didn’t want to confront what was going on, it was ascribed to such and such a tradition, to their culture. The reaction was a desperate effort to accept the alien elements of other cultures, of other traditions just as they were, without questioning them and without criticising them. It was out of bounds, taboo. For years on end it was taboo. What incenses me most is that the politicians kept quiet about it. Integration officials, the immigration authorities and first and foremost the members of Parliament of Turkish extraction maintained for years that the majority of the Turkish population in Germany are integrated – I am talking about the Turkish community because the Turks constitute the biggest minority group here in Germany. This is why in Germany we can talk about the problem of the failed integration of Turkish Muslims. Because I raise these issues in public I am considered a traitor to my country, a denigrator of my homeland and I take abuse at public meetings. I face insinuations that I am fanning the flames of xenophobia and I don’t just hear it from my own compatriots, but from some Germans too, good people, who very naïvely cling to their misunderstood tolerance to the extent that they almost become accomplices when women are murdered in the name of honour. That is quite bluntly how I see it from my point of view. That people just want to draw a veil of silence over it. On the other hand, of course, it costs money to carry out educational work nationwide as well as on a political level to change the laws. Thankfully, thanks to an initiative taken by the federal state of Baden-Württemberg, forced marriages have been classified as serious coercion since February 2005 carrying a sentence of between six months and five years and it goes without saying that I am really very happy about this indeed, as are my fellow campaigners. I, for example, have been engaged in my public relations work since 1994. If you think about it for a moment, my voice wasn’t heard until 2005, it took a long time. Over a period of five years I wrote to many journalists, to editors, to television producers to draw attention to the topic and in 90 per cent of cases I was turned away, 90 per cent of the time I was told, Mrs. Cileli, we cannot broach this issue or film a piece on the subject or even carry out an interview because it could stir up xenophobia. I listened to this kind of thing for years and obviously it infuriates me, it really made me fume with rage, but on the other hand I say better late than never. But, I also ask myself, did it really have to take the murder of six women one after the other in the name of honour in the space of five months before German public opinion, German politicians stood up, showed the courage of their convictions and decided to do something about tackling the problem, to say these people live here, they are not just guests any more and each and every one of us, hand in hand, has to help these people and we also have to tell these people, in a spirit of frankness, that we have equal rights here, sharia laws do not apply and we cannot allow them in Germany, nor can we allow parallel worlds, parallel societies, parallel ways of thinking to be created here in Germany or here in Europe for that matter. Anyone who approves of suchlike or even promotes them has no business being here in this Western civilisation. These people have to be deported. In other words, if people such as these fundamentalists, these Islamists in mosques at the weekends, for example, foment hatred amongst young people who were born here in Germany and grew up here we should not tolerate it. We cannot tolerate it because these young people are our future. If we say that the birth rate in Germany is declining, then it is automatically the case that the future of Germany depends on these young people of foreign parentage. We have to invest in these young people now. We have to reach out to them, integrate them. We have been looking the other way for years. We didn’t want to admit that Germany was a country of immigration. That was one point. The other is, as I mentioned earlier, Germany’s Nazi past.

Chameleon: In the British press we read about young girls ostensibly going on holiday who are then forced into marriage abroad without having suspected that this fate would befall them. Do you have any figures about the dimensions of this phenomenon?

Serap: First of all in Germany, as in Europe as a whole, we don’t have any representative figures. In France the figure of 70,000 a year has been mentioned. In Germany, the corresponding figure is 30,000. We need a representative study to determine the true extent of the phenomenon. That is extremely important. There are Turkish women, the so-called “educated” Turkish women here in Germany, for example, including some members of Parliament, who take a confrontational stance towards us and claim that we are making generalisations, that I and my fellow campaigners are exaggerating, that it only affects a certain small group who live in a highly traditional, patriarchal fashion and who place their daughters in forced marriages. However, it is not only girls who are affected by it, but boys as well. Young boys of 15, 16, 17 and 18 are forcibly betrothed. I look after persons affected who turn to me for help. Of the approximately 200 individuals to whom I have offered help since 1994 20 were boys. The youngest was 16, the oldest 48 (he was being forced into an engagement for the second time). It all comes down to upbringing. The core problem lies in the upbringing of these young people. The children, the girls, know what’s in store for them. From their infancy they are brought up to believe that their greatest responsibility is to enter into marriage as virgins. Marriage is the be all and end all for them. From their earliest childhood they are squeezed into this housewife role, they are already brought up to know what to expect later on. Their mother serves as an example. At the end of the day it is the mother that brings them up in this manner. The brothers and the fathers are those who keep tabs on their virginity, on their sexuality and monitor it. What happens is that the girls have been brought up in such a way that they know that after they reach puberty they could be forced into marriage at any time or enter into an arranged marriage. They are both the same to me, I do not draw a distinction between arranged and forced marriages because the core problem, as I pointed out, lies in the upbringing of these girls. At some stage these girls will be confronted with a forced marriage, but they already know that this will be the case. Marrying for love is synonymous with prostitution. They are like whores, in other words, they are castigated as whores if they are in love with someone whom they would like to marry or if they are glimpsed on the street with a boy. These are the rules, this is what is demanded of women in this tradition, this patriarchy and they must respect them stringently. The girls know this. They know it, but they don’t know when it might happen. There are girls, thank God, who, thanks to our public relations work, are daring more and more to rebel and say, “It’s happening to me too and I don’t want it”. By publicising the problems we are giving these girls the courage to express themselves. This is why it is so important for us to maintain a constant presence in the press, on television as well as on the internet, for example. A lot of people get in touch with me via my home page. They go online, and surf when their friends are affected by forced marriages, for example. The girl cannot get out of the house, she is locked in and another friend tries to get hold of help from outside the family, from elsewhere. Then they come across my home page and contact me and we both try to help the girl. The work that we do is essential, so that the girls do not feel that they are on their own. The majority of the girls remain silent. The majority are scared of putting up a fight, they are afraid of acts of revenge, afraid of rebelling against the family, but also afraid of losing the family. They have a huge emotional investment in the family because they are not brought up as individuals in their own right. They are part of the extended family. This is how they are taught to see themselves, they are constantly reminded: “You are only a woman. You are just a girl. You are stupid, you are not good at anything, what do you need an education for? You don’t need to go to school either. Your husband will go out to work. That’s his job. You have to be the housewife. You have to learn how to clean, you have to be able to look after the children, you have to be a good cook, you have to be able to do the laundry, those are your tasks. Domestic chores. What goes on in the outside world is your husband’s business”. This is how Turkish girls are prevented from getting a proper education. Then people here in Germany are astonished that almost 40 per cent of the children of Turkish immigrants don’t have any qualifications. It’s the same in the Netherlands. According to a recent study in Austria, published in Vienna, 40 per cent of Turkish children have neither vocational training nor school leaving certificates.

Chameleon: Does that 40 per cent only comprise girls?

Serap: 40 per cent in total, girls and boys. The figures are the same for Germany. Exactly the same. We are talking about the third generation here. The third generation. In other words if even the third generation is unable to obtain these qualifications, if the third generation is illiterate in two languages, if they cannot speak either German or Turkish and have no prospects for the future then we shouldn’t be surprised if in 10 or 15 years’ time we see the same conditions here as exist in France. This time round it will be the children of Turkish immigrants. In France it was the young people from Morocco or the Mahgreb. We shouldn’t be surprised if we end up in the same situation in Germany. Here in Germany we have barely 23-24,000 Turkish students at our universities. That is too few. Too few by far.

Chameleon: Could you remind me of the size of the Turkish community in Germany?

Serap: There are between 2.7 and 3 million Turks living in Germany. According to some official figures there are 3.5, others say 2.7. Estimates vary. Officially it is stated that 2.7 million Turks live in Germany. The figure pertains to those who have not been naturalised, only to those who have a Turkish passport. There are approximately 700,000 naturalised Turks. If you consider for a moment that people have been living in Germany for 50 years, that we have nearly three million Turkish fellow citizens and that only some 700,000 have German citizenship you will realise that you are looking at a core problem if these people do not feel a sense of belonging. This has various causes, on both sides. On the German side there has been a failure in putting forward integration measures, to include these people, to put activities on offer to young people born here either during school hours or in their free time. On the Turkish side, the German-Turkish community has not set up any lobbies here in Germany. There are around 1,600 clubs and organisations in Germany, of which about 800 are Turkish religious associations. The Turkish citizens in Germany have preferred to set up religious associations instead of founding clubs and the like for the next generation. They have not created a body to represent the interests of their own young people. What I have observed is that the lack of integration measures, be it on the German or the Turkish side, has led to Islamists stepping in and taking over these tasks. The fundamentalists have stepped into the breach and the mosques are now offering German courses. German courses for Muslims. Youth centres are being set up in mosques, taking these young people off the streets. They have taken over this function, filled the gap. It really ought to have been up to the state to take them off the streets. A young person who can’t speak either language properly is not given any support from the family – it happens quite frequently, in fact it affects the majority of Turkish youth that nobody shows an interest in the child’s school or later the vocational qualifications. The parents simply do not take an interest in their children, nor are they particularly bothered with them. They don’t go to parents’ night, nor do they even know which school the child attends, which year the child is in or the name of the form teacher. This is the kind of problem the children have to cope with at home, so of course they don’t take an interest any more. If nobody asks how they are getting on at school, if nobody asks them what they have been doing at school, what homework they have today, if they don’t ask “Can we help you?” it is small wonder they lose interest. The parents, the second generation, can’t actually speak German. For the last decade the problem has been exacerbated by imported brides, a trend that is on the increase. These are women who don’t know anything about German culture or German society, nor do they speak German and, of course, they can’t be of any help to their children either. These frustrated young people are out on the streets. They roam around in small cliques, create their own ghettoes. They say in the mosques that we must look after our own. It might perhaps be well-meant, but the people who lead the prayers, or the imams brainwash these children. The brainwashing includes stirring up animosity against majority society, against Western values, against Christians, against infidels and they point a finger of blame at Western values for the young people’s accumulated frustration. And the young people believe it. I have spoken to various young people and I always hear the same story from children and adolescents alike. They tell me: “I have experienced racism at school. My teacher couldn’t care less about me, my teacher unfairly gave me these marks, they are Germans, after all, they don’t care about us, they don’t want us here in the first place”. These are children who were born here, third generation children, some of whom have German citizenship. They are practically being armed against majority society. The children are, in a nutshell, being taught to hate German society. In our midst, in mosques and we are just standing by and letting them get on with it. And if, as I said, in a couple of years’ time see the same circumstances as in France we will ask ourselves, where did we go wrong? What did we do wrong? I personally believe, and I raise this issue every time I appear in public, that there are many people here in Germany who share my views. All we need is the political will to have a rethink and counteract it. To engage in prevention. Because the children belong here, they don’t feel accepted in Turkey either where they are considered Germans, they don’t feel at home there either, even the first generation doesn’t want to go back. That means it is up to us, to German society in general and the politicians to take action.

Chameleon: And Western values presumably also include women’s rights?

Serap: Equal rights? Between men and women.

Chameleon: Exactly.

Serap: In Turkey women have enjoyed equal rights, on paper, since 1923. Since the Republic was founded we have been able to vote and be elected. Turkey is a democratic republic, a secular state and those who commit murder in the name of honour are not given lighter sentences any more. On paper.

Chameleon: And in practice?

Serap: Here the EU directives have had an impact, the criteria that Turkey has to fulfil [to gain full EU membership]. On paper Turkish women in Turkey enjoy equal rights. The same applies to Germany. Here in Germany we espouse Western values with men and women officially given equal rights. However, as I said, we don’t know the figures. From my point of view, on the basis of my observations, the majority of Turkish women here in Germany don’t even know the letters E R of equal rights. The women do not know about the rights they have. They don’t know who they can and are supposed to turn to get help or how to go about getting help. This is why educational work – I cannot stress it often enough – in schools, in families is indispensable. We have to go directly into Turkish families with Turkish social workers. We can elaborate various projects and concepts to enable us to do so. We have to sit round a table and discuss how we can best achieve our aims, how we can engage in prevention, we have to examine what possibilities we have to go into Turkish families, to see how we can reach and inform these coming generations about our values, how we can get the message across about universal human rights and tell them that we live in a democracy not under sharia. I have to point out, though, that there are also Turkish women who reject this, who reject Western values. There are also German women who have converted to Islam and who reject both equal rights and Western values. They are the worst.

Chameleon: Don’t worry about me, I’m an atheist!

Serap: I am not afraid of these women because they deliberately turn up at every event devoted to the head scarf. The German converts always appear with their blue eyes and blonde hair as impassioned advocates of Islam.

Chameleon: Having listened to what you are telling me it seems as if this parallel society already exists.

Serap: It certainly does. There are various reasons behind it. Of course, the main reason, I have to say, is financial. People with no professional qualifications are forced to live in these areas, renting accommodation there. They can’t afford better. Unemployment is rife amongst the Turkish immigrant population in Germany. They don’t have any professional qualifications, the vast majority of the women are housewives and if their social and financial level is not sufficient they are forced to move into this council housing. Given that the majority, by which I mean the Turkish immigrants, have been affected by this, this is how the ghettoes came into being. I hear from a lot of Turkish people who live in these parallel worlds, these ghettoes, that they want to move out because they too want to offer their children a future, they want their children to get out, but it is simply beyond their financial wherewithal, they cannot afford to rent expensive flats. The Germans who live in these houses also move out, saying that they have become a minority in their own country in these ghettoes. School classes are full to overflowing, and most of the children, 80 or 90 and in some places even 100 per cent, come from immigrant families, so that there might be one single German boy in the entire class, which parents don’t want either. We have to get rid of these ghettoes. We have to give these people jobs, we have to launch social initiatives, provide them with social facilities, and we have to help them to get out by means of social projects. It is Germany’s responsibility for the future to dissolve these parallel societies. It cannot be achieved overnight. We can, however, attain our aim if we, as I mentioned, set up centres in these ghettoes, in which women who have been living as housewives, for example, can train for a profession. We have to begin with the second generation. Everyone has some special talent or another, I am quite sure of it. Maybe one woman is really good at painting, whilst another can perhaps produce beautiful ceramics, we simply don’t know because we have never bothered to find out. Another might be a skilled needle worker. We have to discover these people’s hidden qualities and talents and we can do so by setting up centres where they can acquire vocational qualifications, where they are given opportunities depending on their family circumstances. Women or indeed men could attend for half days, or women for full days, it really must be feasible and then we have to offer them jobs. We have to invite firms, even force them, to employ these people and once we have provided these people with both social and financial support and helped to build them up the entire conflict will resolve itself. This was the root cause of what happened in France. Slums, ghettoes formed and the French government left these people to get on with it. People who went hungry, people with no work, people with no future, young people with no jobs, no prospects and so it shouldn’t come as a surprise when they suddenly go on the rampage. It doesn’t just suddenly come out of the blue. We carry our share of responsibility for it as a society and as a state and we have to prevent it. We can if we want to and we mustn’t turn around in ten years’ time and say we had no idea. We said the same thing 50 years ago. It is only now, in the last two years or so, that a large number of politicians here in Germany have been saying, “Yes, we thought that the integration of the second and third generation of foreigners, of guest workers, the so-called guest workers, would be inevitable, it ought to have been automatic because the children are born here, grow up here and go to school here”. In my eyes these are mere excuses. If I welcome a foster child into my home, I have to make some plans for that child in advance, don’t I? If I want to have children of my own, as a reasonable human being I have to look after that child, take care of its future because I am responsible for its welfare. If we brought these people into Germany we ought to have known, by 1970 at the very latest, since that was when we stopped the recruitment drive and then family reunification started, it really ought to have dawned on us that, yes, the Turkish so-called guest workers were becoming permanent residents. By then at the latest we ought to have noticed whom we had fetched in, they were, after all, coming into our home, it is not as if we could simply close up a room in our own homes and say, alright, they want to get on with their lives in that room on their own. We cannot and should not respond in that way. It beggars belief that that we had no idea that integration in Germany would fail after 50 years. No politician can convince me of that. I simply don’t believe it. Because it is up to the politicians to programme and plan the future of this country, that is why they were elected. That is also why we have experts. This is why we have ethnologists who can then deal with this group. We should have known. On the other hand, we have witnessed a very pronounced trend towards reislamicisation in Turkey since 1980, something we have been feeling the effects of here in Germany too for twenty years. Home Secretaries cannot maintain that they didn’t know about this reislamicisation trend here. Only now has Otto Schilly acted in a very radical fashion and quite rightly so. We should have known about it years ago. We should never have allowed more and more Islamicists to gain a foothold here in Germany because it has an impact on women’s rights. In these families women’s rights are being trampled underfoot. These families apply their own laws, sharia laws and we are letting this happen, in our own home, in the neighbour’s flat, other laws hold sway to the laws that govern us. I can only decipher one thing from this. We were not so naïve in Germany, we knew what direction we were moving in, so it all comes down to politics. There is a Turkish proverb that “Politics are darker than the darkest night”. I do cherish hopes. What I am interested in is women’s rights, the next generation of young men, that they should think and live in a different way to their forebears, that they grant their wives and their daughters and their mothers these rights, that they acknowledge and regard them as individuals with equal rights, that they then put this into practice in everyday life, not just on paper, but in everyday life. There is a long way to go before we achieve that here in Germany or in Europe for that matter.

Chameleon: What you are telling me is that the root of the problem is political apathy.

Serap: Yes.

Chameleon: Or indifference, though it sounds as if something is finally being done on a political level…

Serap: Here in Germany as well as in the EU topics such as forced marriages and honour killings in Muslim parallel societies in Europe are being discussed and debated, as is also the case in Islamic countries. That we are now holding this debate in Europe is something I consider to be the first step. It is a step in the right direction. We have to draft legislation in which we make it clear to those who murder in the name of honour that murder is murder, the perpetrators must not receive more lenient sentences, which has actually happened on a couple of occasions quite recently in Germany, whereby German judges have given the honour murderer a “cultural bonus” because the Anatolian didn’t know any better. We should not allow it because if we do we are strengthening, encouraging them in their barbaric traditions as it were. It is extremely important. We need laws, we have to be able to protect women with laws, but that is not enough, of course. Right across Europe we have to set up facilities, such as for example crisis centres for Muslim girls. We do not have such facilities at the moment. We have to start off by creating crisis centres specifically for Muslim girls with culturally specific advice, counselling and care in the mother tongue, in their second language, as it were. That is very important. In schools, we have to put these issues on the curriculum, these breaches of human rights, such as forced marriages and honour killings must feature in lessons and teaching materials, we have to teach universal human rights. I go to schools personally, to ethics classes. The ethics teachers raise the issues as a topic for pupils before I attend the class, they talk about the questions for a week beforehand, the teachers prepare the pupils and then I come along to give my lecture and debate with these young people and a week later they write an essay on the subject. I attach a great deal of importance to it. There are many possible solutions, such as German courses. Since 2001 I have been organising German courses open only to Turkish women at local level. The course lasts two years for each woman, during which time they have half an hour’s worth of German lessons twice a week. The first year is for beginners, the second year for advanced students. We provide child care and it is free of charge for the women. And at this German course, these women subliminally absorb the message about their rights. They are informed about their rights. The anti-forced marriages poster developed by the women’s rights organisation Terre des Femmes is pinned up on the wall in the room where the lessons take place. About a month ago we had a visit from a careers advisor from the AWO (Arbeiterwohlfahrt, Workers’ Welfare Association) who gave the women information about vocational qualifications. She told them about what opportunities existed locally, what they can learn, what they can do. I am involved in various projects with these women. We go on day trips, for example. Many of them are not aware that there is a museum near where they live or where they can go for a picnic, they don’t know that we have a dam nearby that they only need to travel five or six kilometres, quite apart from the fact that they do not know that there is a bookshop in the town centre. I also show them round places. For example we went on a visit to the Red Cross, to the Fire Brigade. Last year we also attended a First Aid course for mothers arranged by the Red Cross, where I acted as interpreter. What can I do, what should I do if my child is injured? What First Aid can I administer? How can women who can neither read nor write call for help, for instance? Some of the participants on the course are illiterate. How can they call for help? How can they alert the police? How can they call in the fire brigade? We talked about this during the lessons and we also paid a visit to the local police station where the women had a chance to ask questions. These are not trivial matters, they are of vital importance to these women. Introducing these women into society in practical terms. What I do is to bring these women out of their Anatolian villages into our midst. In the confines of their homes they really are living in Anatolia. Some of them want it to stay that way, but they are in the minority. Most of them by far want out, so they need someone who will reach out to them, who will tell them, “I will get you out, I will support you”. That is what these women need and the German course enables me to do precisely that. We have a Housewives’ Association consisting only of German women. We have an afternoon session of cooking together with the Turkish women. We put on a flea market together and the women really enjoy it because it gives them the chance to practice the German they have acquired through the course. Next year I have planned practical training placements for the women. We are going to sit down and write the applications together. I don’t know how it will work out, but it is an idea of mine. Many of the women have never had a job, at most they might have been cleaning ladies, you know? They don’t communicate with the Germans in such situations, they don’t get a chance to exchange a few words, so what we have to do is let them put their knowledge into practice and they can only do so by coming into contact with majority society. We have to do things together. We’ve had day rambles, where we spend a day walking with German women and the participants in the German course. There are various associations and clubs, so we take a look at them and ask them if they feel like spending a day with us, doing something together. They are quite happy about it. Friendships are also formed this way. One woman, for example, has been living in Germany for thirty years, but had never had a German friend. She couldn’t speak German and had wanted to obtain German citizenship, had applied for it, but had been turned down due to her lack of knowledge of the language. I was full of admiration for her for taking part – she has been awarded German citizenship in the meantime, by the way – I asked her, „What was the best thing about the German course for you? Was it having the opportunity to learn the language?” She replied: “For me, the best thing about the German course was that now, for the first time in 30 years, answer the phone. I could never go to the phone whenever it rang at home. Now I can pick up the receiver and say, ‘Hello, who is it?’” I thought that was splendid. Not just that she had finally been given German citizenship, but imagine, this woman couldn’t even go to the telephone in her own home. She told me that if her husband or children were not at home she would panic if the phone rang. Can you even begin to imagine what that must have been like? She also told me that if something had happened to her, she would not have known who to call, how to communicate, how to get the police to come. They are afraid of the police somehow when they can’t speak the language. These are the small, but extremely important aspects of these women’s lives. There were also women who were battered by their parents-in-law and their husbands, who were not permitted to attend the course. They were told, “You don’t need to be able to speak German, why do suddenly want to learn German?” There are such individuals. I have experience of them and every time I have tried to get in touch with them to talk to them my efforts have been futile. Such a pity. The most frequent victims are the imported brides, the young women, the young children imported to Germany fro Turkey who are then confined within the walls of their homes.

Chameleon: There is nothing you can do about it, or am I assuming wrongly?

Serap: There is nothing we can do about it. We live in a democracy and what would it make us, where would it get us if we were to remove these young women by force? At this juncture political will comes into play. If we were to say German courses are mandatory, people who wanted to come to Germany ought to furnish proof of knowledge of the German language beforehand. So that we can clear that up in advance. We could also prevent forced marriages on that basis. For family reunification purposes, if partners are being brought from Turkey to Germany, although the rules would apply equally to all foreign nationals, they would not be allowed in until they had reached 21 years of age. By so doing we could also prevent child marriages. We could also prevent illiterate people from coming into the country, as we have very high illiteracy rates amongst the Turkish immigrant population, particularly amongst the imported brides and other women. So, as you can see, just by talking about it at sufficient length a variety of possible solutions emerge. I can’t take the decisions alone. It’s not enough for me to come up with ideas. It’s not enough for me to debate such possible solutions again and again. They have to be put into practice, which is why we need, firstly the politicians on board and secondly money to implement the proposals. We don’t have either at the moment, unfortunately. At the moment, anyway.

Chameleon: I couldn’t agree more. The ideas are there, but the funding isn’t.

Serap: Both the government and financial experts have to be called in. We need the funding. How are we supposed to organise German courses otherwise? Thankfully, the new immigration law has made German courses mandatory, but we have to check up on them and we have to be able to impose penalties on those who fail to comply. If need be, perhaps their social security payments could be cut, their unemployment benefit or child benefit, depending. These people have to complete a 600 hour course and in order to pass they have to turn up at classes. They are not just taught the language, but also ethnology and German history. Having said that, I have to point out that I have never been on such a course myself. Perhaps inspections should also be carried out to check on how the people are being taught. I have heard about such courses from people without vocational qualifications who have been sent to the training centres directly from the employment agency, allegedly to undergo further training so that they can be reintegrated into the labour market. Some of the courses last one month, others three, six or even eight months and quite a lot of money goes into them. They cost really quite a lot, I have to say, something between five and six thousand Euros. I also know that in these further training courses everything but German or computer skills or suchlike are being taught. Someone has to be charged with the task of inspecting these German courses, of looking at how they are being taught. Do these people really need what we are asking for? It should not be mere window-dressing, a cosmetic exercise, so that we can say we have put these courses on offer, they are compulsory and now it’s up to you to determine how to organise them. We don’t monitor the courses and we badly need to. I heard from a person who had to take part in such a course who had been sent by the employment exchange. He was depressed. He wanted to learn something, he had all sorts of hopes, he was really delighted and had major expectations about really acquiring new skills there. The teachers were not qualified, indeed the teachers behaved very coarsely towards their students who were of differing nationalities and who, moreover, possessed quite diverse qualifications. As I said, the teachers had no appropriate qualifications to teach, yet they were supposed to stand up in front of the heterogeneous group and get on with it. All of the students in the class knew how to use a computer, yet the teacher in charge of the computer skills course, just to quote one example, endeavoured to teach them how to open a file and save it. These “students” included computer experts.

Chameleon: Ludicrous.

Serap: Indeed. Now I don’t know how things are shaping up with the German language courses, but we need to have inspections.

Chameleon: Turning back to honour killings, you talked about the six women who tragically lost their lives. Perhaps we should kick off by exploring the concept, which is quite alien to those of us who come from a different cultural background.

Serap: The concept of “honour” is a key concept in Muslim families, it is not specific to Turkish families in particular. The Koran stipulates that the woman must preserve her chastity, she must be virtuous and not commit adultery. The same applies to men, of course, officially, in the Koran, the avoidance of adultery and entering into marriage as a virgin also applies to men, not just to women. Islamic and patriarchal tradition turns a blind eye in the case of men. Adultery on the part of men is not punished in the same way as it is when committed by women. It is more important for women, in actual practice it is important only for women that they enter into marriage as virgins, do not commit adultery, are demure, virtuous, obedient, that they practically have their sexuality under control. These are the rules and responsibilities the women have to fulfil. Women are the guardians of reputation and honour; they are the repositories of the man’s honour. This is how they are perceived. Of course there are certain suras in the Koran where women are deemed subordinate, where they are regarded as inferior beings, but I am not able to delve into that now because the interpretation of the Koran is ambiguous, depending on who interprets it and how they do so. For me it is important to look at the traditional and patriarchal perspective, that, for whatever reasons, whether because of Islam, Islamic tradition, the sunna and the hadis, or from a patriarchal point of view, women are being murdered in the name of honour. What concerns me in these violations of human rights is simply that these women have been married against their will, are chased away, have acid poured over them, are decapitated, that women have to flee from their families for the rest of their lives, are forced to live in anonymity, that there are women who are kept as slaves, all these varieties and manifestations of violence. What concerns me is that human rights are being violated, regardless of the reasons behind the acts; I am not interested in the latter. I maintain that there is no justification for violence against women. That is my work and that is what I talk about. Something is going on here, women are being murdered in the name of honour by members of their own families, like the six young Turkish and Kurdish women who were killed one after the other. It is going on all the time, it is not an isolated incident. Nor are the forced marriages isolated cases. This kind of thing has been going on in Europe all along, people just didn’t want to know about it. They didn’t want to become aware of it. People always thought it is their tradition and their culture, they can sort it out amongst themselves. The prevailing view in Germany was that we had to accept how the neighbours wanted to live their lives. The same is true of Europe. Of course honour killings occur in various religions and in various countries, but the majority are committed in Islamic countries, such as Turkey. Unfortunately this is not just happening a long way away from us, in Islamic countries, but also in our immediate vicinity, in the middle of Europe, in the middle of our civilisation, of which we are so proud. Naturally, we puff ourselves up and boast that we guarantee human rights in our part of the world, and we compare the Islamic countries unfavourably as backward, although the same kind of thing happens here in our midst. For years on end we have ignored this femicide, as it were, this butchering of women. We are partly to blame because we looked away, we are implicated in the deaths of all those women who were murdered in the name of honour here in Europe. Those who failed to raise their voices in protest, unfortunately the majority of people in Europe, also bear part of the blame for every woman whose life was cut short in her tender youth, who was violently dispatched from the ranks of the living, for allowing her own father to become her enemy, her own brother, her own husband. Women are living in fear of their lives, even have to move abroad from one European country to another because the families cannot forgive the alleged “dishonour” incurred by their daughters. They can only cleanse it with blood, it is their attitude that only the blood of the female sinner can restore the honour of the man who lost it. This is an extremely radical mindset, which people in Germany are afraid of. People are also afraid of being confronted with a father like this. Even the police are sometimes afraid when all of a sudden a father appears at the station and asks for the daughter to be reported missing, even though he knows full well that the daughter has run away from home. The police have to do their job by entering her in the register of missing persons. I have had experiences where the police have supported us in protecting the girl, but I have also had experiences where the police have handed the girl, who was still a minor, back to the family and the child welfare authorities also failed to step in to give support. My experience has varied and I cannot generalise, but I have to admit that in the past I have had negative experiences with both the police and the child welfare authorities. They could neither assess the danger, nor could they guarantee the protection the girl needed. As I said, however, this whole public debate has meant that the police, the child welfare authorities and the social workers have been shaken up a little concerning the extent of the problem and they are also trying to take a slightly different approach, so that now when I go to the police and tell them “I have a girl here who has been affected by this and I want her to receive police protection” they don’t think twice before making the protection available to the child. However, having said that, the majority of the staff of the relevant services have not got the message yet and that is something we have to tackle.

Chameleon: Would it be useful to send the police on training courses?

Serap: On dedicated further training courses? Absolutely. That is something we are calling for. We would like the staff of all the relevant support services to complete such training courses, in which they would be taught about this mentality, this culture, well, actually I don’t think I can call it by the name of culture, that this tradition, this bloodthirsty tradition, be brought home to them, that we should discuss with them what the dangers are, give them guidelines as to how they should respond. There was one case, for example, when I was looking after a girl who had been registered as unemployed before she fled from home. She had been put up in a refuge and the family left no stone unturned in trying to ascertain her whereabouts. Sometimes I feel like the author of crime novels, because in situations like that I always have to put myself in the family’s shoes and figure out what subterfuges they might resort to. Sometimes they have the equipment to intercept the calls, so that when the daughter rings them up they can trace where the call came from, which means that they can be lying in wait for the daughter within a couple of hours and try to catch her. The families have all sorts of ruses up their sleeves to get back their “dishonoured” daughters and restore their honour. You can barely imagine the kind of things that go on. Just to give you a topical example, the brother went to the employment exchange and said, “My mother is ill and believes that my sister has committed suicide”. The civil servant behind the counter was naïve enough to blurt out: “No, no, your sister isn’t dead, she’s alive and well and lives in such and such”. By pure coincidence the girl phoned up her friend and confidante who was also acting as our spy so that we could be kept informed about what was going on at home to determine whether the family had caught wind of anything and she warned us that the brother had found out where she lived, that he had gotten hold of her address and in the space of half an hour we had to whisk her away from one federal state to another. It can happen at the drop of a hat.

Chameleon: What are your feelings about headscarves? Perhaps you could also say a few words about the recent attempt in Canada to introduce sharia law.

Serap: There has of course been a major debate about the headscarf. From my point of view the headscarf is a form of oppression of women. As far as I can see, women wear the headscarf in all likelihood because of the Koran, although, as I pointed out earlier, the Koran is interpreted ambiguously. People who represent the liberal form of Islam and are of a secular bent, feel that the Koran does not state that women must wear a headscarf, that it is only a commandment, not a duty, as to whether women cover themselves or not. I agree with this way of looking at it, in other words, the Koran does not rigidly prescribe that women must cover up their charms. Now who can explain it to me when teachers at our state schools wear headscarves whilst they teach, that they have to cover up their charms in front of six, seven or eight-year-old Turkish or Muslim boys so that they do not sexually excite them? Who can explain this to me? Many women who wear the headscarf, for example, feel that they are only doing so for religious reasons. Now, if they are wearing it for religious reasons it means that they have to protect their feminine charms from men. That is the rationale. However, if we turn the argument on its head, this means that on the one hand men are being discriminated against, and on the other, that men do not have their sexual urges under control. I mean, if we are living in the 21st century it is a humiliation, a form of discrimination against the male sex, isn’t it? This is why I call upon enlightened men to stand up and be counted and speak out against the women who are in favour of the headscarf. What we don’t have is men standing up and rebelling against it. More’s the pity. In Canada an attempt was made recently to introduce the sharia as law in the parallel societies. That would mean that if someone had stolen something he could have his hand lopped off. If someone committed adultery, like in Iran, for example, the woman, or both parties involved, could be stoned to death. It is absurd that in a democracy people wanted to accept a law as backward as sharia. To the best of my knowledge it didn’t get through, the debate was fired up and thanks to many feminists and members of women’s movements, the Canadian government could be prevented from committing a very grave error. We have to fight against it instead of approving it, let alone giving it our express support or even introducing it into our democracy. Sharia laws here, in a civilised society, are quite clearly unacceptable.

Chameleon: It would certainly constitute discrimination against Muslim women as it would only apply to them.

Serap: If we, with our values, with our enlightened values, here in our midst were to turn the clock back almost 2,400 years and say “You are Muslims, you have to continue to live in the times of Mohammed, as it were, in the Middle Ages” that would not simply represent discrimination, but also exploitation and stripping Muslim women of rights. We would be practically sitting back and letting half of society be murdered, be deprived of rights, be exploited. I can’t interpret it in any other way. That anyone went so far as to contemplate it, that it crossed anyone’s mind to debate it in the first place, you know? It is not merely an absurdity, but a crime, to my mind, a crime against the rights of Muslim women.

Chameleon: I agree.

Serap: When, for example, the rights of Muslim women here in Germany are breached, the German politicians point the finger at the Islamic countries and at Turkey in conjunction with the latter’s EU-accession. It was said that in Turkey, more lenient sentences for the perpetrators of honour killings have to be scrapped, women have to be given equal rights, not just on paper, but also in practice. In all of Turkey there are only 14 women’s shelters, so clearly we need far more refuges. So attempts are being made to improve women’s rights whilst in our own country, in Germany, the rights of Muslims, of Turkish women are being violated. To my mind this constitutes a paradox. We have to clean up our own act first and then we can bring pressure to bear on Muslim countries, telling them that they have to do such and such to guarantee women’s, children’s and more generally human rights. Of course those rights are not guaranteed in the countries in question, but if we want to serve as an example we have to get our own act together first. If I have a sick person at home, I have to nurse that person first before I go next door to start taking care of the neighbour’s children or family. We have to tackle poverty at home first, we have to guarantee human rights at home first before we go across to the neighbour’s and offer support and start making demands of them, such as asking for guarantees of women’s and children’s rights or that torture should not be allowed to take place in prisons any more, or that the rape of Kurdish women in prisons should stop, for example, it is standard practice there, another taboo topic. If you talk about it, you are branded a traitor.

Chameleon: Do you think Turkish accession to the EU will help improve women’s rights in Turkey?

Serap: It already has. There has been an EU-wide debate about Turkish accession and the EU has helped in that the current government, and here we have to give him [Mr Erdogan] credit where it is due, although from my point of view he is a wolf in sheep’s clothing and has considerable conservative Islamic leanings, everyone is aware of his past, where he grew up, where he comes from, as it were, everyone knows about it, but you are not allowed to talk about it openly. Nevertheless, although he has his own interests and is pursuing them, I have to say I think what he is doing is greatly to his credit. This is why he amended the relevant legislation within a very short space of time and was able to get them adopted. The prospect of EU accession has had a positive influence on Turkey, but I believe that at least another two or three generations will still need to go by before we have the same conditions in society in Turkey as we have here in Europe, because a change in mentality has to occur. A society that approves of child marriages, a society that approves of honour killings, a society that approves of forced marriages – Turkey has undergone a reversal in its development since the 1980s after the military putsch; it has been backsliding as a result of reislamicisation. The present government would now like to repeal the ban on wearing headscarves in schools, for example. Religious secondary schools, the so-called Imam Hatip schools have been opened, they have been positively mushrooming in number. The youngsters who graduate from them do so as preachers. There is a great deal of unemployment in Turkey and the entire social welfare system simply does not function. There is a chronic lack of vocational qualifications amongst women far in excess of the average. Only around 21 or 24 per cent of women in Turkey go out to work. That figure includes women in the agricultural sector, in their own families, their own villages whose work is not even remunerated. The 24 per cent includes them. This is the kind of problem we still have to contend with in Turkey. This represents an enormous task for Turkey, which it will not be able to resolve within ten or fifteen years. It is an illusion to believe otherwise. Of course I always point out and it is very important to bear in mind that Turkey should not be carrying out all these reforms under orders from the outside, as it were, due to pressure from the EU, but out of its own conviction. Turkey has to take these steps for its own sake, for the sake of its own country, for the sake of its own people; it has to fulfil the criteria for its own benefit, not just because the EU says so. As far as I can determine it is merely a cosmetic exercise. There is no other way I can describe it. That is what Turkey is doing at present with the various amendments to the statute books, engaging in window-dressing, going through the motions. Now we have to wait and see how things shape up in Turkey over the next few years. We will have to wait and see and monitor developments very rigorously. Not just keep tabs on economic development or defend purely economic interests, but keep a close eye on how human rights, women’s rights and children’s rights evolve in Turkey. The Bozkurt [Member of the European Parliament] Report on the status of women in Turkey is very welcome. Of course, it has certain defects, but it at least represents an initial step. I think the rest will fall into place if we really do take it seriously. A report of this type should be drawn up once every six months, so that we can take stock of what is going on in Turkey, what is still missing, what ought to have been done, what Turkey has failed to do and we really have to be strict, really tough on the Turkish government and really demand action on what has not yet been guaranteed. As far as the EU criteria are concerned Turkey has to reckon with sanctions, we have to show that we mean business with the criteria if Turkey wants into the EU. It is of the utmost importance that we have Europe-wide draft legislation prohibiting forced marriages, prohibiting honour killings. The Member States of the EU have to be instructed to press ahead with information campaigns and educational initiatives and make resources available because we need it. As I say, it is absolutely vital that legislation be drawn up and to the best of my knowledge the Council of Europe has broached the subject of such a draft on forced marriages and honour killings. I know that women’s movements have been active in lobbying the European Council, so hopefully we will see these efforts come to fruition.

Chameleon: I would like to come back to a question that slipped my mind earlier. Are there statistics covering the whole of Germany on how many honour killings are committed each year?

Serap: In Germany we do not know exactly how many honour killings occur each year. The only official figure is based on a single study carried out by Terre des Femmes and Papataya, according to which between 1996 and 2004 49 women were murdered. All I can tell you is that the list is very long, as I too am carrying out research into the phenomenon of honour killings. The first murder that I was able to uncover dates back to 1984 and I will talk about it in my new book, so we will have to wait and see. I don’t want to bandy about any figures right now.

Chameleon: No problem. Could you perhaps say a few words about your memorial initiative?

Serap: Yes, it is quite unique. The memorial is very important to us. When I began drawing the public’s attention to the issues of forced marriages and honour killings in 1984, these being the main subjects on which I focus, although they are only the tip of the iceberg and domestic violence, abuse and incest also form part and parcel of what I deal with in the course of my activities, it struck me that we have read about the murders in the newspapers, simply skimmed through the articles about the murdered women in the Turkish newspapers, said to ourselves, “My God, how terrible!” before moving on and thinking no more about it. We have simply gone back to getting on with our everyday lives. It struck me that we react in this way and I started to take a closer look at it and noticed that in the German press, the German media neither the nationality nor the name of the victim is printed if they were of foreign extraction. It was only deemed to be worthy of a small footnote. Research into the topic was very painstaking, time-consuming and difficult. I carefully sifted through all the newspaper articles and tried to uncover all the murders and manslaughter cases, which bore as close a resemblance as possible to honour killings. I put question marks next to a lot of them and then stepped up my research efforts and discovered that Turkish families were involved, that it was a Turkish woman or a Turkish girl who had been murdered by her brother or husband depending. Then I also gradually noticed that it was the names of the perpetrators that stuck in the mind, that the names of the victims were being consigned to oblivion and it became a matter of personal importance to me to give the victims back their names. They have a name and a face and a story and these were very important to me. This is why I created this memorial. I wanted to give the debate on forced marriage greater public prominence and get the message across that a forced marriage can also end in an honour killing, if girls oppose a forced marriage or if a woman asks for a divorce. Of course it doesn’t always end in an honour killing, they are confined to the most extreme cases, but we have to recognise that the two are linked; both conflicts have to be dealt with and put on the agenda together. I did not want the victims to be forgotten, I wanted their memory to live on, I wanted us to see their faces, so that every time I see the face of one of these women it should remind me, but also other women, of what we have neglected to do. We know that they were murdered, but what did they have to endure up to that day? What did they have to live through and what did we do wrong? How did we support these families? We didn’t lift a finger. If we take Hatun Sürücü, for example, or Gönül Karabey, how many times did they seek help before they were murdered? They might have gone looking for help x number of times, they might have visited friends, they might have talked about how scared they were, they might have sought protection and nobody really noticed quite how real their fears were, nobody protected them, nobody took them under their wing, nobody was looking out for them, they never felt secure. I want to raise this issue in my book, to say they are dead now, but what did they actually go through prior to their deaths? We have to open our eyes so that no more Hatuns or Gönüls are murdered. Not just set up a memorial or organise a demonstration. We have to take action so that we can move on to a time where we don’t need that kind of thing any more, so that we can prevent these deaths, so that no more Hatuns, Meleks, Meryems or Gönüls are murdered. This is why I created the memorial, so that the women are not forgotten. On the one hand, I was saying to my husband today that a friend of my daughter was lost in a car accident. The family is devastated with grief, weeping and mourning their lost child. On the other hand, there are families who murder their own flesh and blood. It makes no sense to me, it is beyond my comprehension how a girl such as Hatun or Gönül, for example, can be murdered simply because they were in love with a German, simply because they dared to love. The love that these patriarchal families feel for their children is not the same as what we understand by love. In my opinion it is just ignorance, dictatorship, power play. The children are regarded as mere commodities. If the life of a child is worth less than honour, if honour takes precedence over the life of a child it is not love any more in my opinion. We cannot reach these people on the basis of educational initiatives alone, but we can endeavour to get the message across to their children. That is my only hope. That we can reach the fifth and sixth generation of immigrant children, but we cannot prevaricate, have to act now, otherwise we won’t succeed, otherwise we are kidding ourselves, otherwise hundreds and thousands of Gönüls and Hatuns will have to die. Then it is not only the families or the murderers who have blood on their hands, but us as well.

Photograph by Ida Henschel
© Serap Cileli
This image has been reproduced by kind permission of Serap Cileli, and may not be copied or reproduced in any form without the express written authorisation of the copyright holder.

Serap’s home page
A revised and extended edition of Serap Cileli’s book is due to be published in June.

This interview will also appear in Subtext Magazine.

Interview © Chameleon, 2005. No part of this interview may be reproduced without written authorisation, which may be obtained via e-mail (see profile page).

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