Necla Kelek was born in 1957 in Istanbul, where her parents had moved to from central Anatolia.1, Reference Kelek2 For the child, the metropolis was to become a lost paradise, for when she was eight, her father decided to move to Germany, the land of promise and hope. Her parents went ahead by themselves, the children were looked after for a year by their paternal grandmother in Anatolia, later joining their parents in an unnamed German town. There the family attempted to maintain its urban lifestyle, socialising with middle-class Germans. Yet with the arrival of an ever-growing number of Turkish immigrants, they imperceptibly disappeared into the Gastarbeiter (guest worker) community. Social osmosis made them more religious than they had ever been previously. The authority structure of the family tightened. They had hoped to escape the Anatolian village for good, yet it had followed them into Germany and now closed in on them from all sides. Necla had been an energetic, outgoing child, now she became morose. She retreated into a private world of books and dreams, nevertheless performing well at school. She became especially good at German and often acted as an interpreter for other Turkish speakers. Thus, German life became ever more alluring to her, in contrast to the life in her unhappy, disintegrating family. Her elder sister, with very little resistance on her part, was married back in Anatolia. Necla began to rebel. In a showdown with her father he half-heartedly and ineffectually attempted to kill her. Having lost face, he left the family and returned to Anatolia, never to be seen again.Reference Kelek2
Necla Kelek was supported in her struggle for freedom by sympathetic Germans. With their help, she became first a technical sketch artist and then finished her secondary education. She had scholarships and jobs and also helped out in her family, who had stayed on in Germany. All this led to a sort of conversion to the German way of life. Her assent to its democratic, liberal, secular values proved serious and lasting. Life in two cultures had predisposed her for sociology, which she ultimately went on to read at university.
This difficult life course made her a late starter. She was already 45 when her thesis was published. Islam in Everyday Life (Islam im Alltag) deals with the cultural dimension of being a Muslim in Germany and is based on qualitative interviews with adolescents.Reference Kelek3 These youths had obvious difficulties adapting to the school system and to German life in general. Were their problems due to socio-economic or to cultural factors? For Kelek it was their Muslim ‘stamp’, which resisted modern secular society. Nonetheless, she ventured an optimistic prognosis: in the end, Islamic culture would prove amenable to modern life. At the same time, more sceptical scholars such as Wilhelm Heitmeyer were warning that integration would not happen automatically and, should it fail, that failure could lead to radicalisation.Reference Heitmeyer4 Kelek did not take this warning seriously enough. She had noticed the spread of Islamism in the second and third generations of migrants yet preferred to regard it with what Werner SchiffauerReference Schiffauer5 described as a ‘last protest’ against the inevitability of modernisation.Reference Kelek3 Just one thing continued to trouble her; the aggressive image of the migrant boys, which she deferred to a later study.Reference Kelek3
The difference between Kelek’s first book and her second one could hardly be more pronounced, The Foreign Bride (Die Fremde Braut) (2005) addresses the controversial and oft-avoided subject of the forced marriage of underage girls.Reference Kelek2 It describes the sufferings and humiliations of these child brides, as well as accompanying abuses of familial authority, including honour killings. And we, the decent Germans, Kelek reminds us, condone these horrors by looking away in the name of cultural relativism. In our striving for moral perfection we wish our Turkish-Islamic fellow citizens well, even if this marriage strategy expresses and solidifies the distance they keep from us. The Foreign Bride dramatically breaks the optimistic consensus of mainstream German migration research. It is partly an autobiography, partly telling the stories of these unfortunate girls. The book hit a nerve. Its success catapulted Kelek to the status of an expert on all things Turkish and Islamic and gave her the status of public intellectual.
Her third book, The Lost Sons (Die verlorenen Söhne) (2008)Reference Kelek6 belatedly unveiled her opinion of the aggressive image of the German-Turkish male. The parable of the lost son had already been used by Schiffauer for the migrant offspring who would become lost – or so he believed – to their parents by adapting to modernity.Reference Schiffauer7 Kelek contradicts him now: they are in danger of getting lost to modernity itself. Her book is based on interviews with Turkish prisoners in German jails. Their stories follow the same tragic trajectory: boys have to compensate for their privileged position in the family by watching over its honour, especially the honour of their women. This is no easy task in the permissive German society. It may entail violence and infringements of the law. In such matters boys have to act on behalf of their fathers, younger brothers on behalf of the elder ones. There is a strict hierarchy in the family and boys belong to the family, not to themselves. This prevents their full integration into German society. They stay at its bottom and their frustration breeds aggression. Boisterous and violent as they are, the migrant’s sons are victims like their sisters. Through their family loyalty they reconstruct the Anatolian village in the heart of Germany. The entity, which is thereby a constructed entity, is called by some researchers a ‘parallel society’.Reference Tibi8 More successful migrants keep their distance from it in the interest of their children’s education. Kelek here expressly revokes her previously optimistic prognosis.Reference Kelek6 Far from being a last protest on the road to modernity, the Islamism of the disadvantaged renders its adherents increasingly hostile to German society.
These three books on the Turkish migrant community thus show an internal development, mirroring the evolution of Kelek’s own thought. As a doctoral candidate she had still been unsure of herself and eager to please. Although clearly perceiving the fault lines between the migrant’s children and modern German society, she had persuaded herself to come in line with the prevailing optimism. Yet her knowledge of, and empathy with, the migrant’s children told her a bleaker story. Its basic facts were not unknown to migration researchers, yet Kelek was the first sociologist to tell them systematically, together with their implications and their sometimes revolting details and to face the consequences of this indelicacy. Writing The Foreign Bride she must have known that she was in for trouble.
Decent Germans are so ashamed of the Nazi past that they never want to become authoritarian and intolerant again. Yet this commendable attitude may be exaggerated. By elevating tolerance into an axiom which no longer may be discussed, the repenting Germans have manoeuvred themselves into an untenable position. They are now forced to put up with attitudes and practices that contradict everything else they believe in or approve of, and they dislike being reminded of this contradiction. German public opinion can stomach a lot of inconsistency. Yet when its peace of mind becomes endangered, it gets nasty. This kind of attitude has been called by Karl Kraus ‘persecuting innocence’ (‘verfolgende Unschuld’).Reference Djassemy9 It takes a lot of courage to confront it.
Kelek mustered the required courage because she was emotionally concerned. One protagonist in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov collects stories on the abuse of children. He cannot forgive God the suffering of these little ones. He therefore refuses to see the harmony in His creation and returns his ‘entrance ticket’ to Him.10 This passage in Dostoyevsky’s writing is the archetype of Kelek’s drama: she could forgive neither the parallel society nor its well-wishers for the fate of the child brides. To the one she returned her entrance ticket, the others she confronted for their self-congratulatory callousness. She no longer trusted that social forces would automatically establish a kind of harmony in the future. Her books on the migrant’s daughters and sons are more than sociological studies. They are intended to rouse the consciences of migrants and well-wishers alike.
The migrant’s trilogy remains the core of Kelek’s oeuvre. It was followed by a travel report on Turkey,Reference Kelek11 a book on the fault lines between Islam and modernity in general,Reference Kelek12 a travel report on the ‘Arab Spring’ and its meagre fruits for Muslim women,Reference Kelek13 and a collection of essays and polemics.Reference Kelek14 She writes in a vivid and clear German. She knows how to tell a story. She makes the comparison with Scheherazade herself;Reference Kelek2 it is apt because her books are interconnected to form one vast web of stories, descriptions and reflections. She can be a brilliant polemicist if provoked. Yet she is not without limitation. Making her life as a controversial writer and public intellectual, she has to ride the wave of her success. Having once exchanged the role of the impartial sociologist for that of the emotionally involved critic, she has chosen sides. Now she remains the prisoner of her decision. Her success went with a price.
Told in this way, Kelek’s story no longer sounds like a fairy tale. It rather sounds like a ‘Whig interpretation’ of her biography. Her episodic style facilitates omissions and arrangements. I mention just one: the status of her family. She is not simply the daughter of guest workers. Her father was a businessman, albeit an unsuccessful and ultimately a failed one. Her brothers sought to make up for paternal failure by becoming an industrialist and a manager. Her sister married a primary school teacher. Relatives on her father and mother’s sides were in qualified professions. There is even talk of ancient money in the family, which she once described as ‘old Turkish upper and middle class’.Reference Kelek11 Thus, when her mother worked as a Gastarbeiter in Germany, the Kelek’s fortunes must have been at their lowest ebb. Her career has no doubt been influenced by these ups and downs. It could be seen as the struggle of a déclassée to regain her lost status: Scheherazade telling stories to save her life. This insecurity and this ambition were not lost on her enemies.
After the success of The Foreign Bride, an open letter against its author appeared in the liberal weekly Die Zeit. It bore the title ‘Justice for Muslims!’ (‘Gerechtigkeit für die Muslime!’)15 and was signed by 60 migration researchers. Among them was the supervisor of Kelek’s thesis, Ursula Neumann, and this must have been hurtful. The letter denounced her for generalising singular cases, which it argued were badly documented. Even if forced marriages happened occasionally, they were not to be blamed on the Muslims, but on the German policy of exclusion against them. The letter implied that Kelek had twisted her data with an eye to generating sales. It thus insinuated that ambition had seduced her to betray her faith and her people. This set the tone for subsequent criticism of Kelek.
Her critique of the migrant community had no doubt been so well received because she was Turkish and a Muslima herself. This allowed decent Germans to concur with her opinions, which they would not have dared to express by themselves. Insiders are seen to be in intimate communion with their group and thus know it best. They may therefore speak with natural authority about it, whereas outsiders are supposed to be prejudiced against it. This advantage turns to a disadvantage for the insider, however, when he starts to criticise his group. The group regards him now as a troublemaker and, if his criticism reaches the outside, as a traitor. Does he not disclose information that only the group itself should possess? Does he thereby not help its potential enemies? Critique from the inside is after all especially valuable to the outside.
This was also Kelek’s case. It became aggravated by the interference of the well-wishers. Some people chose a foreign group as a reference group, in the same way as the snob chooses the aristocracy or the inverted snob the proletariat.Reference Emge16 Such outsiders tend to over-identify with ‘their’ group and to know what is good for it. So the well-wishers stirred up distrust about Kelek. A Muslim preacher of German birth, Pierre Vogel, publicly prayed for her destruction (may Allah ‘guide her correctly or destroy her’).17 After having described her as ‘the most listened-to expert on Islam in Germany’ the star journalist Patrick Bahners portrayed her as a cynic pandering to German Islamophobia. Like many of the well-wishers he charges her with a ‘wounding harshness’ towards the migrant community.Reference Bahners18
On the other hand, Kelek has admirers and supporters amongst the migrants, as well as among the native Germans. There are born Turks who want to escape the parallel society, critical Muslims and especially Muslimas, and last but not least Germans who refuse to give in to Islamism. The boundary drawn between inside and outside is less clearly defined than cultural relativists tend to assume. Yet Kelek’s success in Germany led her into another kind of ambiguity: that of applause from the wrong quarter. Not only level-headed Germans refer to her, but also xenophobes and Islamophobes. This makes it easy to accuse Kelek of having a tacit understanding with these undesirable elements. Bahners, maintaining that a clique of scaremongers in Germany is agitating against Islam, singles her out as ‘the witness of the prosecution’.Reference Bahners19 Personally, I cannot find that she deliberately courts the attention or approval of the right wing. She belongs after all to the left of the political spectrum. Yet had she wished to avoid this applause altogether, she would have had to remain silent. Given her point of departure, that would have been neither courageous nor honest. Applause from the wrong quarter is the price to be paid for the expression of unwelcome truths. Having dared to speak up, Kelek now has to live with this kind of approval being used against her.
There is still a third kind of ambiguity haunting Kelek. It follows from her narrative method. In her foreword to the paperback edition of The Foreign Bride she writes: ‘A Turkish reporter started searching for these women, whose fate I have told in this book. I had changed their identity for good reasons. Yet in mosque circles it got around which congregations I had been to and met and spoken to women. “These women had no fear of the public afterwards, but of their husbands,” the hodja of the mosque that most of these women had visited told me.’Reference Kelek20 She goes on to tell that this hodja had been transferred, together with his wife who has worked with the women, and that this mosque has been closed down. What she does not tell, and I think for good reasons too, is what has been done to these women by their husbands and their community after they had become indirectly prominent by the success of The Foreign Bride.
This was why the reporter had traced them. When these women had spoken to Kelek, she had been an unknown sociologist. Now she was a public intellectual, and forced marriages had suddenly become a public issue. For those she interviewed, the situation had changed now too: had they not helped Kelek in passing on confidential information to the outside? Yet these women were more vulnerable than Kelek, as was the hodja and his wife. I think that Kelek had not originally foreseen that particular consequence of her narrative method. What was the true agenda behind these incompletely known events? Were these women put under pressure to take their stories back?
The narrative method is by necessity subjected to this dilemma if it deals with identifiable persons. Two approaches are open to the researcher. They might anonymise people by changing their names and significant attributes, yet the more their real identity is tampered with, the more fictitious the narration becomes and the easier the accusation of invention gets. Or, in staying close to their real-life world, the narration maintains its truthfulness, but also runs the risk of exposing its informants. I fear that Kelek committed the mistake of wanting to have it both ways. The consequence of exposing the informants may be accepted if the matter of the research is not a delicate one. Yet if it is delicate, responsible researchers will do their utmost to protect them, even if it means diminishing the weight of their narration. This dilemma may be called the uncertainty principle of social research. Now one can see why it had been so easy to accuse Kelek of having badly documented her cases (a quandary wilfully overlooked by those migration researchers who pride themselves on their scientific rigour). Deviant behaviour within a closed community is an extremely delicate matter, and informants on it are in real danger. The researcher must then decide what to do, and no textbook can take that responsibility from them.
Three types of ambiguity are involved here: being accused of being a traitor, being suspected of attracting attention and approval from the undesirable elements, and being suspected of callousness towards the very people whose interests she defends: this is the high price she must pay for being in the right. Kelek has paid for her method, for her research matter and for the prominence she had thereby achieved. Whatever she now says or does will be tainted by these ambiguities.
Acknowledgements
The author thanks Kitty Ferguson and Jennifer Carvill Schellenbacher for their assistance in improving the English of this article.
Justin Stagl is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Salzburg in Austria. He served as Visiting Professor of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Notre Dame, USA; Directeur d´études associé, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris, France; Fellow, Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Social and Cultural Sciences (NIAS) in Wassenaar, the Netherlands; and is a Member of the Institut für historische Anthropologie, Freiburg im Breisgau; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie; Görres-Gesellschaft; European Academy; Life Member, Clare Hall, Cambridge; and Corresponding Member of the Verein für Volkskunde, Vienna.
