The Muslim-makers: how Germany 'Islamizes' Turkish Immigrants

Analysing the political and media debate on immigration during the 2000s in Germany, this contribution focuses on a significant shift in the public perception of the large Turkish-origin community in Germany. In this period the image of Turkish immigrants was increasingly ‘Islamized’, thereby taking up and reshaping older discourses which focused on their ethnic and cultural ‘otherness’ as foreigners or on the vision of a second generation ‘caught between two cultures’. The public ‘Islamization’ of immigrants has thus become a key element of a re-evaluated German integrationism that conceptualizes a democratic and secular German identity against a vision of Islam untouched by the Enlightenment and liberal emancipation.