At the turn of the twenty-first century two countries—one at the center of Europe and the other at its periphery—officially declared converts to minority religions to be threats to national security. The first is Germany, where since early 2006 Minister of Interior Affairs Wolfgang Schäuble has repeatedly warned against the danger posed by German converts to Islam (e.g., Schmid Reference Schmid2007). Recently, after two German Muslims were caught collecting chemicals used to make explosives, the Christian Democrat Union (CDU) faction's leader Wolfgang Bosbach and its Bavarian Interior Minister Günther Beckstein suggested the government register and follow all who have converted to Islam (Küchen Reference Küchen2007). Bosbach said, “A convert registry only makes sense given that we know some of them may be radicalized after converting” (Ringel Reference Ringel2007).

The second country is Turkey. In 2001 the National Security Council of Turkey prepared a report that listed Protestant missionaries from abroad as the third largest threat to Turkey, following the separatist Kurdish PKK and Islamic fundamentalism. The report asked for preparation against well-planned divisive and destructive efforts of Christian missionaries against Turkey. In 2004 the Turkish armed forces prepared another report, entitled “Missionary Activities in Our Country and in the World,” to warn the religiously oriented Justice and Development Party government about the Protestant activities and to encourage it to implement new laws to curb their missionizing (Akıner Reference Akıner2007; Zaman Online 2004). The report declared that the missionaries are especially dangerous because they are trying to divide the nation by converting ethnic and religious minorities such as Kurds and AlevisFootnote ¹ to Christianity and are thereby weakening citizens' ties to the Turkish state.

In both countries the fear of converts and minority religions is great, and officials and politicians continually offer alarmist reports about religious converts. In early 2007 the German Interior Ministry sponsored research by the Islam Archive that claimed 4,000 Germans converted to Islam between July 2004 and June 2005, more than ten times the annual number a decade before. The study indicated that people with higher education and income levels were now converting. The alarming report was soon withdrawn after it became apparent that the Archive did not have access to information regarding who was converting, but it was nonetheless heavily quoted in the media.Footnote ² In 2005, the Turkish armed forces declared that missionaries aimed to convert 10 percent of the Turkish population, which would result in close to ten million Christians (Akıner Reference Akıner2007).

In reality, the number of religious converts in both of these countries is very small. In Germany the number of converts to Islam is unknown, but is estimated at somewhere between twenty and one hundred thousand, about 1–2 percent of the country's Muslims. In Turkey, Turkish-speaking Protestant churches have only three thousand members, of whom only half are converts from Islam; the other half being Armenian and Syriac Christians.Footnote ³ In 2007, Interior Minister Abdulkadir Aksu declared that over the previous seven years only 344 Muslims had changed their religion. Of these, 338 had converted to Christianity and 6 to Judaism (Işık and Saymaz 2007).

The recent fear of converts becomes even more surprising when one considers that with two exceptions converts almost never caused problems in either country. The Turkish exception was one convert to Christianity who attempted to hijack to the Vatican an Istanbul to Tirana flight in order to complain to the pope about the difficult conditions under which Christians live in Turkey and to ask the pope to secure him an exemption from mandatory military service (CNNTürk 2006). The German exception is more significant: In September 2007, after being followed by the police for six months, two German converts to Islam were caught as they gathered hydrogen peroxide. Before catching them, the police had already diluted the substance (Lander Reference Lander2007). Other than these two failed attempts, in neither country have converts to minority religions taken part in sizable political opposition or social unrest. Contrary to accusations, in both countries converts have pledged their allegiance to their nation and national identity and have even become outspoken nationalists.

In her discussion of religious conversion in the context of colonial India and Britain, Gauri Viswanathan argues, “conversion is arguably one of the most unsettling political events in the life of a society” (Reference Viswanathan1998: xi), whether individuals convert for spiritual or political reasons. She explains that conversion not only creates anxiety by altering demographic patterns, but also challenges the notion of religion as a communally sanctioned agreement (xvi). Viswanathan's argument explains a major reason converts are mistrusted in both Germany and Turkey, at any given moment in history. But how are we to understand the historicity of the heightened anxiety about converts in Germany and Turkey, the most established center, and official margin, respectively, of the new Europe? What is behind the unprecedented fear of religious converts that makes them a major source of national insecurity at the turn of the twenty-first century?

I attempt to answer these questions by looking at the synchronic “convert alerts” in Germany and in Turkey. My purpose is not to compare and contrast Turkey and Germany, but rather to allow these two cases to reflect and refract aspects of the early-twenty-first-century public fear of converts as it relates to questions regarding religion, culture, nation, and security in the new Europe and at its margins. The research is based on my analysis of public discourse and policies regarding converts to the most significant religious minority of each country. I also draw on insights gained through ethnographic research with Turkish and Kurdish converts to Christianity in both Turkey and Germany (summers of 2005, 2006, and 2007) and with German converts to Islam in Germany (2006–2007).

CONVERT ALERTS AT THE CENTURY'S TURN

The politicized fear of religious converts at the turn of the twenty-first century is shaped by several post-Berlin Wall developments. The foremost factor is what John Borneman calls “anxiety of Europeanization” (Reference Borneman1997: 488). After the Wall's fall, in 1991 European leaders met at Maastricht and decided to shift the economic basis of the European Union from an economic alliance of the European Economic Community to a political and cultural federation. In the new and enlarged Europe, the leaders defined culture as a central issue of social cohesion that would join the original members with the twelve new socialist bloc countries (Özyürek Reference Özyürek2005).

An anxiety over post-Cold War Europeanization has been coupled with a shift in the hegemonic language or theory of racism: from that of biology at the turn of the twentieth century to that of culture at the turn of the twenty-first. Scholars of racism have argued that whereas so-called scientific or hereditarian explanations were favored in the exclusionary and oppressive practices of the colonial period, the post-colonial period has brought an upsurge in theories that legitimize similar practices toward immigrants with cultural differences said to be irreconcilable (Balibar and Wallerstein Reference Balibar and Wallerstein1991; Stolcke Reference Stolcke1995; Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka, Goldberg and Solomos2002). A newer twist to what scholars have called “new racism” (Balibar Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1991), “cultural fundamentalism” (Stolcke Reference Stolcke1995), or even “racism without race” (Rex Reference Rex1973), is a change in emphasis in the post-9/11 world from culture to the narrower category of an essentialized religion. According to Mahmood Mamdani (Reference Mamdani2004), this new emphasis on religion reconfigures politics as religion and hides an array of power relations manifested in interconnected encounters within and outside of Europe. As he demonstrates, these encounters have been simultaneously constitutive and transformative of what we conceptualize as “European” and “Islamic” today.

Verena Stolcke argues that what is different about the new discourse on culture—or, for our purposes, religion—is that, because it is not based on a theory of race, this new discursive framework of exclusion opens up space for assimilation of minorities. She is correct on one level. Conservative German leaders assert that immigrants should accept the leading culture, even though many immigrants find it impossible in practice to be considered a part of this culture. Regardless, at least in its invitation to assimilation, this anti-Muslim attitude is different from its predecessor in Europe, anti-Semitism. As Matti Bunzl argues, “Whereas anti-Semitism was designed to protect the purity of the ethnic nation-state, Islamophobia is marshaled to safeguard the future of European civilization” (Reference Bunzl2005: 506). That is why, while German Jews who converted to Christianity could not escape the Holocaust (Hertz Reference Hertz2007), Muslims today—such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands, or Necla Kelek or Seyran Ateş in Germany—who declare full allegiance to Western civilization and publicly bash Islam are celebrated. Yet they are still not fully accepted as European because the biological argument never fully disappears but carries on in the background.

The culturally and religiously defined Islamophobia of the twenty-first century differs from hereditary anti-Semitism in another important way: it opens up space for the fear that minority culture and religion might take over the minds of individuals in majority society. In Fear of Small Numbers, Arjun Appadurai (Reference Appadurai2006) argues that it is the “systematic compromise of national economic sovereignty that is built into the logic of globalization” which turns minorities into “the major site for displacing the anxieties of many states about their own minority or marginality (real or imagined) in a world of megastates, of unruly economic flows, and compromised sovereignties.” He adds, “Minorities, in a word, are metaphors and reminders of the betrayal of the classical national project” (2006: 43). A significant factor would add another layer to Appadurai's analysis of the minority situation: at the turn of the twenty-first century converts to minority religions have become one of the main sites of stately anxiety. Unlike ethnic minorities, religious minorities have the potential to convert the members of the majority and thus threaten the assumed religious and cultural purity of the political unit. Whereas in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries mixed-race unions were the great threat to the biological purity of the superior race (Stoler Reference Stoler1992; Reference Stoler2002; McClintock Reference McClintock1995), in the twenty-first century religious converts are the dangerous hybrids, polluting and challenging the cultural superiority and purity of the dominant group.

Anxiety over Europeanization, as most acutely expressed in fears of Islam and Muslims within Europe, finds its refracted counterparts in places excluded from what gets to be defined as Europe. Just as essentialist Europeans define Europe as fundamentally Christian or humanist, nationalist Turks who oppose Turkey's integration into the European Union define Turkey as fundamentally Muslim or at least non-Christian. Furthermore, they express parallel fears that Christians or Western powers will take over the Turkish culture and state from within by converting individual citizens to Christianity.

Along with fears of the minority religion corrupting the majority culture, convert alerts create new categories of threat and mobilize new memories of the past, reconnecting them to the present in novel ways. If the language of culture and religion is one of the most significant elements of the convert alert, memory plays the second role in this process. The convert alert triggers memories of the—by definition—unfinished job of national, religious, and cultural homogenization in nation-states and supra-national entities of the post-Cold War period. Essential to the establishment of both modern Turkey and modern Germany is the elimination of their most significant ethnic and religious minorities, namely Jews and Armenians, who were central elements of each society. Hence, in the current nationalist narratives dominant in both countries religious identity and especially that of the marked religious minority represents the past. Religious converts become contemporary reminders of multi-faith pasts and also that their countries are still neither religiously nor ethnically homogenous. Even though one country embraces public responsibility and atonement and the other the denial of the ethnic/religious cleansing as official policies for dealing with past traumas, in both the act of annihilation of the most significant ethnic and religious minorities codes, as an issue of history, a multi-faith and multi-ethnic existence, inconveniently resurrected by converts from the ethnic majority whose integrity to the nation is hard to doubt.

CONVERT ALERT IN GERMANY

Christian Democrats, since their election to power in 2005 as the major party in a grand coalition with the Social Democrats, have introduced a significant transformation in how the government relates to Muslims. The place of Muslims in German society has been determined by the fact that a great majority of them were invited to rebuild the post-World War II economy.Footnote ⁴ Following their arrival in the 1960s, consecutive German governments tried to keep immigrants separate from the rest of the society, since they were to be sent back eventually. Only in 2000 did the Socialist and Green Party coalition change the immigration law and make it possible for immigrants to apply for citizenship. Though fewer applied than expected, the new law did lead to creation of a sizable population of Muslim citizens.Footnote ⁵

In reaction to the new immigration law, Christian Democrats promoted the argument that immigrants threatened Germany's Leitkultur (leading culture) (Pautz Reference Pautz2005). This concept was first formulated by the Arab-German sociologist Bassam Tibi, who argued that the unified Germany should base itself on the European values of democracy, modernity, secularism, enlightenment, human rights, and civil society (Reference Tibi1998). Following the new 2000 law, the concept was taken up by Christian Democrat leaders such as Friedrich Merz and Jörg Schönbohm, who argued against multiculturalism and for the assimilation of existing immigrants (Bernstein Reference Bernstein2004). At the base of Leitkultur discourse is the assumption that different cultures should stay separate and that otherwise they will come into conflict (Pautz Reference Pautz2005). The promoters of the Leitkultur concept shied away from defining the leading culture in nationalist terms, but instead embraced an essentialized definition of the European culture. Hence, they argued, immigrants—the majority of whom have Muslim backgrounds—do not fit within German society, not because of their nationality but because of their religious and non-European cultural backgrounds.

This pro-European emphasis is not new or unique to Germany. Since the end of World War II, both Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have promoted the view that Germany should adopt a European identity and have enthusiastically supported European unification (Risse and Egelmann-Martin Reference Risse, Engelmann-Martin and Pagden2002). The first chancellor of Federal Germany, Konrad Adenauer, emphasized that Germany should embrace the European values of Christianity, democracy, and a free-market economy (ibid.: 296). Contextualizing German identity within a European one was seen as a way to curtail the rise of another nationalist movement. What is unique at the turn of the twenty-first century is the shift in the meaning of being pro-European. While through the second half of the twentieth century being pro-European meant being anti-Nazi, the revival of the same discourse at the turn of the twenty-first century increasingly meant being anti-multicultural, anti-immigrant, and most specifically anti-Muslim.

Ironically, the anti-Muslim and assimilationist discourses promoted by CDU politicians went hand in hand with identifying and recognizing Muslims as Muslims for the first time. Though Islam is widely practiced in Germany, until now it has never been officially accepted as a religion, a status given only to Catholics, Protestants, and Jews (Jonker Reference Jonker2000; Fetzer and Soper Reference Fetzer and Soper2005). On 28 September 2006, the Chancellor's office initiated a new project by inviting Muslim representatives to meet in an Islam Conference. The Interior Ministry website defines the aim of the conference as “[Germany recognizing] cultural and religious differences while requiring [from people from different cultures] the complete acceptance of Germany's liberal democracy” (German Ministry of Interior Affairs 2006). This conference was a significant moment in German history, not because it brought any concrete change for everyday Muslim experience, but because it signaled government recognition of Muslim leaders, even if only through their “differences.” Probably the most important thing that happened during the meeting was that Minister Schäuble went around the room shaking hands with every representative, an act that deeply moved the Muslim representatives I spoke with.

The CDU officials who were willing to shake hands with Muslims also wanted to know and define who were Muslims in Germany, and the Interior Ministry declared that there were 3.4 million of them. This number was reached by calculating the people who came to Germany from Muslim majority countries and their offspring. The same groups of people referred to as guest workers in the 1960 and 1970s, and as Turks, Arabs, or Iranians in the 1980s and 1990s, began in the 2000s to be called Muslims. Neither atheist nor Christian Middle Easterners were excluded from this number, nor were German Muslims included. In such an ethnicized definition of Islam, ethnically German Muslims who blurred boundaries between Germans and Muslims became a serious matter of concern for Christian Democrats. As the Islam Conference was being held on 4 February 2007, Wolfgang Schäuble gave an interview to the conservative daily Die Welt in which he warned the nation against the threat German converts to Islam might pose (Schmid Reference Schmid2007).

Soon after this warning, newspapers were peppered with news referring to converts as potential terrorists. German converts to Islam first appeared in the headlines that year when an Islamist group distributed a video on the Internet threatening Germany and Austria with terror attacks unless they withdrew their troops from Afghanistan. The video marked German government officials as targets and had German-language statements and subtitles. The threat caused surprise and fear among the public because the newspaper articles indicated that such videos had previously targeted only the United States and Britain, never Germany. More importantly, many articles commented that the German language used in the video was perfect, indicating that converted Germans or Austrians must be helping the Islamist group, and the dangerous alliances ethnic German converts were making against German national interests (Der Tagesspiegel 2007). Editorials made the implicit assumption that only German converts to Islam could have written faultless German subtitles, and that only ethnic Germans can write and speak in perfect German.Footnote ⁶

The biggest convert alert took place in September 2007 when two ethnic German Muslims, Daniel Martin Schneider and Fritz Gelowicz, along with Adem Yılmaz, a Turkish citizen and resident of Germany, were caught accumulating large amounts of hydrogen peroxide, used in making explosives. When the police officials reported that six hundred officers had been following this group for six months, it became clear that Schäuble had been aware of these individuals and was probably referring to them when he had declared converts a threat to Germany's security. Even though one of the three arrested was a Turkish immigrant, the public did not focus its attentions on the potential dangers immigrants might pose in organizing terrorist attacks.

Weeks after the incident, anti-convert sentiment was very high. One newspaper article after another asserted that converts are very dangerous because no one can tell who they are by their names, they can easily hide in society, they have German passports, and they can easily obtain visas to travel abroad. Such statements and accusations against converts, coming both from government officials and the mainstream media, make it clear that Muslims are not expected to mix in society, be a seamless part of it, speak flawless German, or have German passports.

The heightened anti-convert spirit had serious consequences for ethnic German converts who had no political affiliation. During my field research with ethnic German Muslims in Berlin during 2006–2007, I noted that many converts, especially women, have been subjected to acts of hate and violence. They told me about being spit on and yelled at, and regularly receiving shaming looks. Many converts lost their jobs after they made their conversion known or chose to wear Islamic dress. The most extreme case I heard about happened to a German Muslim woman who lived in an East Berlin neighborhood where immigrants do not live and neo-Nazis make their presence felt. After she started wearing the Islamic headscarf, her car was torched, though she never found out who did it or why. But she told me that she had never seen another car reduced to ash in her peaceful neighborhood.

I conducted all of these interviews before the police caught the two German Muslims, after which life became even more difficult for German Muslims. One telling case involves the hardship suffered by an ethnic German Muslim woman and her Kuwaiti husband during their honeymoon. A day after Kathrin Klausing and Omar Abo-Namous checked in to the little cottage in the two-hundred-resident village of Hamwiede, close to Hannover, the neighbors called the police.Footnote ⁷ They told the officials that they were suspicious of the man who looked Middle Eastern and the woman who spoke perfect German who had come by taxi the night before and were staying at the cottage. Villagers were especially distrustful because the curtains remained closed throughout the day.Footnote ⁸ Following the warning, eight armed policemen without a search warrant stormed into the cottage where the newlyweds were staying (Geisler Reference Geisler2008).Footnote ⁹

CONVERT ALERT IN TURKEY

Even though Turkish converts to Protestant Christianity form a much smaller community, the convert alert in Turkey has been even greater than Germany's. The alert also has had more serious, even deadly consequences for the Turkish converts.

The Turkish army has taken an active role in preparing reports and encouraging governments to curb the missionary movement. Throughout modern Turkish history the army has been an active political actor and the Turkish generals have oppressed many political movements, whether through full-fledged military interventions (such as the 1960, 1971, and 1980 coups) or threats of a military coup (as in 1997).Footnote ¹⁰ In addition to investing much of its energies since the 1990s in suppressing and controlling Islamist and Kurdish groups, the Turkish Army has also turned its attention to the new Christian groups bourgeoning in the country. Soon after the National Security Council prepared the above-mentioned report about missionary activities, a series of arrests began of Turkish protestant leaders across the country. In my interviews with the leaders of the movement in Turkey and in exile in Europe, I was told that even though all leaders were released after a few days, they were imprisoned and faced differing levels of mistreatment.

Arrests of protestant leaders were coupled with a public campaign against foreign missionaries, and many were told to leave the country and never come back. The anti-missionary campaign was part of the nationalist anti-European Union campaign and many nationalists promoted the idea that missionaries in Turkey are sent by the European Union to undermine and divide the country. The right and left ends of the nationalist spectrum formed a coalition promoting their anti-globalization position and calling for an “absolutely independent Turkey” (tam bağımsız Türkiye).Footnote ¹¹ Nationalists criticized the religiously oriented Justice and Development Party in government for opening the country to the interests of the European Union and the United States. To support this isolationist outlook, extensive conspiracy theories were developed which attributed a key role to missionaries in prophecies of a Western colonization of Turkey. Interestingly, the loudest voices of this campaign were not the most radical Islamists, who tend to have a more internationalist outlook that pays respect to the community of believers beyond Turkey. Rather, it was radical nationalists, some of whom were practicing Muslims and others not. Regardless of their religious affiliations, nationalists accused the government of turning a blind eye toward missionaries and of therefore being anti-nationalist.

One of the key figures of the anti-missionary movement was Rahşan Ecevit, the wife and closest political advisor of the former left-wing nationalist Prime Minister Bülent Ecevit (d. 2006). In the 1970s he had moved Turkey away from being a member of the European Economic Community on the grounds that this would challenge Turkey's independence. The underlying message of Rahşan Ecevit's campaign was a claim that the Turkish nation and the Turkish Republic was about to be lost to the European Union through the work of Christian missionaries, who had started a second organized Crusade against Turkey. At the beginning of 2005 she distributed a press release to newspapers:

As this statement makes clear, Rahşan Ecevit and other secular nationalists are often opposed in equal measure to Christian missionaries and Islamists. They perceive turning to either Islam or Christianity as irrational and anachronistic engagements. More importantly, they see both as external impositions on the otherwise rational and sensible Turkish people by foreign powers hoping to undermine the strength and sovereignty of the Turkish state. According to Ecevit, any slippage away from the state-approved Turkish Islam can only be a colonial plot, organized jointly by the United States and the European Union. That is why in the same press release she easily shifted from the European Union to the United States as the parties responsible for manipulating Turkish people's religious affiliations: “The United States is the primary state which hopes that the Christian population increases in Turkey. They think that once there are more Christians in Turkey they can divide it up more easily” (Ecevit Reference Ecevit2005). It is noteworthy that in other statements she and other secular nationalists accused the United States of supporting a U.S.-controlled moderate Islamic government in Turkey so that it can have a better control over the entire Middle East and its Muslim populations.

Rahşan Ecevit's declarations were applauded in both right- and left-wing nationalist circles and taken as proof of how widespread missionaries are in the country. Since then, dozens of books have been written and conferences organized on the topic. An organization calling itself Social Association (Toplumsal Dernek) was established to fight against the missionaries. The infamously nationalist soap opera “The Valley of Wolves” (Kurtlar Vadisi) even started a campaign against missionaries who were depicted as trying to take over Turkey. A young man who stabbed a Catholic priest in Izmir on 16 December 2007 said that he had been inspired by the soap opera and wanted to be a national hero.

As seen in this stabbing, anger and hatred towards Christians in general and converts to Christianity in particular were far from limited to political-discursive contexts and had serious consequences for Turkish Christians. In November 2006, shortly after Pope Benedict XVI visited Turkey, two fulltime Turkish missionaries, Hakan Taştan and Turan Topal, whom I met during my research in Istanbul, were arrested for their missionary activities, and they now face a lawsuit. As they explained to me, Hakan and Turan were responsible for contacting people who had responded to newspaper advertisements to learn more about Christianity and had exchanged letters and received distance-learning materials for over six months to a year. When they were arrested they were holding meetings in Silivri, a resort town outside Istanbul, in which they explained the basic teachings of evangelical Christianity. Currently they are charged with “insulting Turkishness” under the infamous article 301 of the Turkish penal code, and also with inciting hatred against Islam, negating the Turkish army, encouraging sexual misconduct, and bribing Muslims to convert to Christianity. In their statements both Hakan Taştan and Turan Topal denied all charges and said they were proud to be Turkish and to be Christian (Blake Reference Blake2006). Their court case is currently under postponement until 4 November 2008.

The saddest event for Turkish Christians happened on 18 April 2007 when in the eastern Anatolian town of Malatya two converted Turkish Christians and a German missionary were tortured for three hours by five Turkish Muslim young men and then murdered. They tied the hands and feet of Necati Aydın, Uğur Yüksel, and Tilman Ekkehart Geske like sacrificial animals, stabbed them hundreds of times, and in the end slit their throats. The murderers had come to the Bible study reading group at 10 a.m. ready with ropes to tie their victims down, bread knives to stab them, towels to mop up the blood, and cell phones to film the massacre. During the initial interrogation one of the perpetrators said, “We took bread knives with us but we didn't discuss who would stab them. We were all ready to kill. We did this not for ourselves but for our religion. We are about to lose our nation right in front of our eyes. Hopefully this will be a lesson for the enemies of religion” (Urfa Haber 2007).Footnote ¹²

It would be no exaggeration to say that there is a national campaign against Christian missionaries and Turkish Christians in Turkey, despite the fact that missionary activities were legalized by recent legal adjustments to harmonize the system with the European Union. Those who sued Hakan Taştan and Turan Topal, the murderers of the Turkish Christians in Malatya and those who supported them, and other anti-missionaries in Turkey promote the view that when Turks abandoned their Islamic religion, they pose not only a challenge to religion but more importantly to the integrity of the Turkish nation. Thus it would be a mistake to conclude that this represents an exclusively Islamic reaction. In fact, more religiously inclined leaders, such as Prime Minister Tayyip Erdoğan, have given more statements in support of missionary activities than have their more nationalist and secularist counterparts. When Rahşan Ecevit complained about the missionaries in 2005, Erdoğan responded, “If the German government allows opening thousands of mosques in Germany, we need to respond in kind to this stance. No one should be afraid of religious freedom” (Işık and Saymaz Reference Işık and Saymaz2007).

CONVERTS AS A CHALLENGE TO SOCIO-SPATIAL ORDERING OF THE SELF AND THE OTHER

In her Schmittian discussion of mass sovereignty, Susan Buck-Morss argues there are two kinds of enemies (Reference Buck-Morss2002). One is the “normal, safe enemy” which acts like an enemy is defined and expected to act. The “absolute enemy,” on the other hand, is far more challenging because “it challenges the very notion by which the identity of the collective has been formed” (2000: 34). Converts to the religion of the normal enemy become absolute enemies in the sense that, in the present case, they challenge the divide between Euro-Christians and the Turkish-Muslims by merging the two categories. Much of the hatred towards converts is to be found in this mixing of categories that are fundamental to the making of the post-Cold War political order and identities.

Over the past few years, sensational reports about Muslims taking over Europe have repeatedly appeared in popular magazines in Europe. An older alarmist strategy highlighted the high birth rates of immigrants; the new alarmism is different, and emphasizes the spread of Islamic ways of thinking and living among non-Muslim Europeans. The idea behind this new anxiety is that Muslim values have already started to dominate the European public culture, because liberal Europeans are too permissive to stand up for their values and protect them. This understanding is best represented by a 2006 issue of Der Spiegel entitled “Mecca Germany: The Silent Islamization” (Mekka Deutschland: die stille Islamiseerung). The cover of the issue dramatically displays a crescent shining over the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, the symbol of the city. The lead article starts by discussing Christa Datz-Winter, a German judge on Frankfurt's family court, who cited the Quran during a divorce case. She claimed that a German woman of Moroccan heritage should have known that wife beating is acceptable in Islamic culture when she married a Moroccan man. Hence the woman could not ask for an accelerated divorce, which is usually granted when there is domestic violence (Bartsch et al. Reference Bartsch, Andrea, Simone, Gunther, Cordula, Caroline and Sultan2007).

The case attracted much attention in the German media. Anti-Muslim political observers, among them German feminists such as Alice Schwarzer, took it as evidence that the German legal system is already weakening, making space for Muslim demands at the expense of the German legal order. In a previous interview Schwarzer had argued that German liberals give unnecessary compromises to Muslims because they are embarrassed by the country's Nazi past. She said such practices are signs of “self-hatred as well as the German desire for beliefs. After the Nazis condemned everything foreign, the children want to love everything foreign, with their eyes wide shut” (Schiessl and Schmidt Reference Michaele and Schmidt2004).

The harsh Muslim critic Henryk M. Broder has been prominent in promoting a similar anti-Muslim sentiment in Germany, especially in his best-selling book Hurray! We're Capitulating (Reference Broder2006). As a son of two Jewish Polish holocaust survivors, and a sharp-tongued critic of German society, Broder has a critical position in German public discourse. Most of his writings focus on anti-Semitism and the liberal tolerance of Islam in Germany. In his book he writes: “The prevailing feeling among Muslims is that they are being abused by the West. What should we do about it? We might as well surrender. After all, we're already on our way” (Broder Reference Broder2007). Believing that Europe has almost turned Muslim already, he once even suggested that young Europeans who love their freedom should emigrate to Australia or New Zealand. He commented that because he is sixty years old he would stay in Berlin (in Belien Reference Belien2006). Broder and his conservative European supporters, such as Paul Belien in Belgium, suggest that since Islam literally means submission, liberal secular Europeans who submit to Islam's upsurge in Europe have already submitted. “Many Europeans have already become Muslims, though they do not realize it or do not want to admit it” (Belien Reference Belien2006).

In such a context dominated by fears of Islamic religion and culture taking over Europe, worries about individual converts to Islam come to the surface. Ethnically European or more specifically German Muslims become the most visible manifestations of Islam taking over the European mind, lifestyle, and culture, which do not have an agreed on, positive self-definition. Critics of Islam often accuse converts of embracing politically wrong positions that they associate with Islamic culture. For example in its July/August 2002 issue, Emma, the most popular and mainstream feminist journal in Germany, published an article entitled “The Converts … and who is hiding behind them?” (Filter Reference Filter2002). The article discusses numerous well-known German Muslims and argues that they are anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, Nazis, supporters of Islamic terrorism, and deniers of women's rights. The author essentialized an “Islamic” political position and claimed converts ascribe to it. What makes these positions non-German in the twenty-first century is that now they fall outside the fold of contemporary European universalism, even though many of them were fundamentally German positions less than a century ago. In that sense, Muslim converts are so indistinguishably German, both in their ethnicity and their beliefs, that they challenge the new united German identity in the making all the more.

Turkish nationalist circles express similar fears of Christianity taking over their culture and hence the national identity. Since the end of the Ottoman Empire, the idea has been voiced frequently that Western powers will try to take over and dominate Turkey through any means possible.Footnote ¹³ What is different today is that, whereas before nationalist Turks focused on the idea of a political and military power struggle between their weak state and the strong imperial powers, today nationalists are sensitive to a new kind of struggle in which Western powers try to destroy Turkey from within by imposing their own culture and religion. Many nationalist Turks have repeatedly argued that Christian missionaries in Turkey are part of a crusade organized by the European Union and the United States intended to diminish the feeling of Turkishness among citizens and then divide and rule the country.

At the end of 2001 two political debate programs were broadcast on television, devoted to Christian missionaries in Turkey and the views of some Turkish nationalists. Both were very popular. The programs were organized by the secular nationalist programmer Hulki Cevizoğlu, and were titled Missionaries and Political Christianity, and The Vatican: The Danger that Comes from the West.Footnote ¹⁴ Cevizoğlu began the first program by saying that until now he had prepared many programs criticizing political Islam and he had now decided that it was essential to devote a program to discussion of political Christianity. He further justified his topic of choice by saying: “People who follow our TV programs and books will remember. As we explored the scenarios plotted against Turkey, we always reminded our viewers that global colonizers under different names (such as European Union project or [America's] Greater Middle East Project) will first demolish our beliefs and then they will present us with a ‘new religion.’ We need to underline this once more—missionary activities carry a special importance for issues regarding national security” (Cevizoğlu Reference Cevizoğlu2005a: xiii).

Participants in this program consisted of on one side, Turgut Üçal, one of the earliest Turkish converts to Christianity and the representative of the Presbyterian Church in Turkey, and Atillio Constantino Cedolini, a born-Christian member of the Catholic Church in Istanbul, and on the other side Zekeriya Beyaz, dean of the divinity school at Marmara University in Istanbul, and Hulki Cevizoğlu. Beyaz and Cevizoğlu first attacked the two Christians regarding the nature of their beliefs, declaring them irrational and unfit for true human nature. They then criticized them for their efforts to spread Christianity among Muslims in Turkey.

In the program, Zekeriya Beyaz repeatedly emphasized that he was against Christian missionaries because they were trying not only to teach people a different religion, but also to take over Turkey through conversion:

According to Zekeriya Beyaz, like the men who massacred the converts in Malatya, connections between one's religion, culture, nationality, and state are very straightforward. One can simply not be a Turk and a Christian at the same time. Furthermore, only a Turk can appreciate Turkish literature and history. Once people step outside of their national culture and religion, they can no longer remain loyal to their country and their state. When one of the Christian representatives challenged Zekeriya Beyaz's imperialist conspiracy theory by pointing out that many missionaries in Turkey are not Westerners but South Koreans, Beyaz did not seem to change his views:

CONVERTS AS A CHALLENGE TO THE TEMPORAL ORDERING OF THE SELF AND THE OTHER

In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson (Reference Anderson1993) points out that religious and national identities base their sense of being in different senses of time shared with other members of the community. He suggests that while religious communities share a flattened sense of the past, present, and the future as tightly connected, national communities share a homogenous empty present that connects contemporary members of the nation to each other. These alternate senses of the temporality may be one reason why there is resistance to members of the national community who embrace a different sense of time by converting to a different religion and hence personally and publicly highlight their new sense of communal identity. Gauri Viswanathan suggests a more straightforward reason to why religious conversion challenges the national temporality. She suggests that nationalist narratives locate religious identities in a time period before the establishment of national identities. In this framework, national identities appear as a more advanced moment in history, where emphasizing religious identity becomes an unnecessary return to the past (1998: xii). Although this logic may seem to make religious identity less significant than national identity, it actually establishes the former as a crucial building block for the latter. That is why the idea of choosing a new religion, especially a minority religion, may appear simply wrong and especially anachronistic to nationalists.

Hence, both Turkish and German nationalist leaders accuse converts of engaging in anachronistic and irrational activity. In Germany it is commonly accepted that Christianity, and especially Protestantism, is the most appropriate religion for modern life because it was modernized through the Reformation and the Enlightenment.Footnote ¹⁵ Many in Germany suggest that Islam belongs to medieval times because it was never reformed. It is common to read statements that name Islamic demands in German society as “the rules of a camel drivers' society in the modern age” (Bartsch et al. 2007). In Turkey, on the other hand, students as a part of their national education learn that Islam is the best religion because it succeeded other monotheistic religions. In that sense, it is the most recent, progressive, scientific, and rational religious practice, which has invalidated previous ones in a linear, progressive fashion.

In addition to this generalized, anachronistic approach to religion in the nationalist framework, German and Turkish converts to minority religions have a special way of reminding their respective nations of their pasts. Although different in many respects, the roots of modern Turkey and modern Germany share a common feature: both eliminated their most significant religious minorities. Ethnic cleansing is not of course unique to these two countries, and it has been a common feature of twentieth-century transitions from multi-ethnic empires to nation-states. But Turkey and Germany can be seen as radical expressions of the association between nation and religion, and then of attempts to eliminate religious minorities in order to establish national unification. It is noteworthy that in post-World War II Germany the Jewish Holocaust became a crucial building block of national identity formation, whereas in Turkey, which emerged victorious from World War I, denial of the Armenian massacres and of the Armenian presence in Anatolia were central to the nationalist narrative (Akçam Reference Akçam2004; Göçek and Bloxham Reference Göçek, Bloxham and Stone2008). These contrasting choices made in relation to the public memory of a collective trauma, coupled with the distinct political contexts that followed each ethnic/religious cleansing, led subsequently to different treatments of the religious minorities in the two countries.

German national unification started before the Jewish Holocaust, yet, the Holocaust was an effort to complete the homogenization of Germany. After the war, however, Germany quickly sought to amend its wrongs, and in post-Cold War Germany remaining Jews have legal rights to be different and equal (Peck Reference Peck2006). Yet, the more numerous and stigmatized religious minority of Muslims, most of whom immigrated after World War II, do not have this right; they are not recognized as full members of German society and their religion is not granted official status of a corporation under public law (Fetzer and Soper Reference Fetzer and Soper2005). In addition, Muslims overall have lower incomes and education levels, live in worse housing conditions, and are marginalized in most aspects of life (Mühe Reference Mühe2007).

The Turkish Republic was founded in 1923 after the Christian Armenian population was eliminated through massacre and deportation, and the Greek population was forced to migrate to Greece that year, where they were exchanged with the smaller Muslim population living in Greece. The new Turkish nationalism aimed to put an end to Ottoman social organization that categorized people according to their religious affiliation and to create a nationally homogenous society, but being Turkish was nevertheless still based on religion (Baer Reference Baer2004). The 1923 population exchange encompassed Turkish-speaking Christians living in Turkey and Greek-speaking Muslims living in Greece (Hirschon Reference Hirschon2003). The new secular Turkish nationalism attempted to create a nation of Turks from Muslim speakers of Turkish, Kurdish, Arabic, and Circassian, who were then defined as a “Turkish race” that excluded Jews and Christians (Baer Reference Baer2004). The Greek and Armenian Christians and Jews who remained in Turkey were given some special rights, such as the right to private education and to keep their houses of prayer. Yet, because of these rights, they were left outside the national contract that constituted Muslims as the primary members of the new nation. To this day, non-Muslim Turkish citizens cannot serve in positions directly related to national security or serve as officers in the army.

In other words, the foundations of secular Germany and secular Turkey are religiously homogenous. This condition of homogeneity creates a specific kind of secularism where the religious majority is equated with the national majority and keeps the religious minority outside the national imagination, no matter how well integrated or assimilated the members of the minority are. For over a century being a Turk has implicitly meant being a Muslim, and being a German has meant being a Christian.

One reason recent converts to minority religions pose a difficulty for the national narratives is that they evoke the multi-faith, multi-ethnic pasts of both Turkey and Germany. This claim is easier to support in Turkey. All Turkish and foreign missionaries I spoke with told me that they faced most resistance in areas where Christians had resided before the Turkish Republic. These are also areas where most Armenians and Greeks converted to Islam in order to escape the deportations and massacres and the population exchange. Thus many residents of those towns were themselves Christian a few generations ago. Or, in some cases, it was their grandparents who killed their Christian neighbors and took over their property. Underscoring this point is that all recent violent acts against Christian priests, missionaries, and converts have occurred in what were previously important Christian centers. These include the killing of Italian Catholic priest Andrea Santoro in Trabzon on 5 February 2006; the stabbing of French Catholic priest Pierre Brunisen in Samsun on 3 July 2006; the stabbing of Italian Catholic Priest Adriano Franchini in Izmir 16 December 2007; and, most dramatic, the killing of the German Protestant missionary and two Turkish converts in Malatya on 18 April 2007.

Malatya, where the two converts were killed like sacrificial animals, was one of the most important Armenian centers in Anatolia. Several months before the murders, on 19 January 2007, Hrant Dink of Malatya was assassinated. He had been the most important Armenian journalist in Turkey, and had openly talked about the World War I massacres of Armenians as genocide.Footnote ¹⁶ His assassination caused a major uproar among liberals, but among many nationalist groups it was supported and celebrated (Arsu Reference Arsu2007). An unexpected consequence of the event was embarrassment for Turkish nationalists in Malatya who felt uncomfortable with their town's association with an Armenian journalist. When the soccer team of Malatya played that of Elazığ on 29 January 2007, in Malatya, spectators from Elazığ belittled Malatyans by calling them Armenians, and unfurled a banner reading, “We are neither Armenians nor Malatyans. We are from Elazığ, we are lovers of Turkey.” This associated Malatyans with Armenians and implied that neither could be true Turkish nationalists. Elazığ itself hosts a large Kurdish population, and Malatya fans retaliated by yelling back at Elazığ supporters: “PKK [Kurdish guerillas] out!” In a fight between fans of the two teams most of the stadium seats were broken and burned, and ten people were seriously injured, including three policemen (Dündar Reference Dündar2007).

Shortly after the event, fans of the Malatya Sport, associated with the ultra-nationalist Nationalist Action Party (MHP), made a documentary about their town entitled “Malatya, the citadel of Turkey” (Türkiye'nin Kalesi Malatya) and in March 2007, shortly after Dink's assassination, they uploaded it to YouTube.Footnote ¹⁷ Clearly the video was planned as a reaction to accusations that Malatya was an Armenian city. The video consists of slides depicting the Ottoman and Turkish armies, with an emphasis on scenes from the Greco-Turkish war of 1919–1923, and from the battle of Gallipoli during World War I. The insinuation was that Malatyans would fight the foreign (i.e., Christian) forces now as they had before. The slides were interspersed with ultra-nationalist and religious slogans such as “In my homeland the call to prayer does not end and the (Turkish) flag does not come down” (Benim vatanımda ezan susmaz, bayrak inmez). Though there is nothing notably spectacular about the video, in just eight months it was viewed 10,553 times and received hundreds of supportive comments.

Following the April 2007 killings, a Christian group prepared another video entitled “Malatya Massacre” and placed it on YouTube. It showed pictures of the massacred Christians accompanied with a song praising Jesus. It was viewed by 14,409 people, and many Malatyans engaged in a virtual battle with the Christian group. A great majority of the commentators supported the killings, accused missionaries of trying to trick innocent people into changing their religion, and cursed them. They also accused Christians of engaging in worse massacres during the Crusades, in Bosnia, and in contemporary Iraq, and most importantly of massacring Turks in 1915, and thereby justified the recent killings of the Christians. For many commentators, including one going by the name Skemo, the recent murder of Turkish Christians was a clear message directed toward Armenians. After cursing them, Skemo says Armenians “want to come and take our land. We took this land by irrigating it with the blood of the Turkish nation, our ancestors. We will not give it to dogs. The spirit that took this soil over is still alive.”

When I spoke to Armenian and Turkish friends in the Turkish-speaking evangelical movement, they agreed with my interpretation that the Malatya massacre had been an effort to ritually cleanse Malatya's alleged (and at the same time very real) Armenian roots. Recent converts to Christianity made this memory painfully alive. The highly ritualized killing of the converts in a way that mimics the way Muslims slaughter animals during the Sacrifice Feast suggests the assassins longed to offer the victims to a larger power, hoping for forgiveness and cleanliness. Just as Muslims offer sheep to God as sacrifice, the killers offered these converts to higher nationalist and religious powers with the hope that their mixed past would be forgotten and forgiven.

Clearly the German case is different from the Turkish case because Muslims have replaced the space left by Jews as the most significant religious minority. Through his survey of literary texts Gil Anidjar (Reference Anidjar2003) demonstrates that from very early on “the Arab” and “the Jew” and hence the “the Muslim” and “the Jew” were conceptualized together as the same enemy in the European imagination, but this point is not so easy to make in sociological terms. In his recent book Sander Gilman warns against considering Islam as “a surrogate for speaking about the Jews in today's Europe because of superficial similarities to Judaism” (Reference Gilman2006: 5). Nevertheless, scholars of contemporary German society point out the similarities between the pre-Holocaust conceptions of Jews and present-day conceptions of Muslims (Linke Reference Linke1999; Peck Reference Peck2006; Yurdakul and Bodemann Reference Yurdakul and Bodemann2006). Soon after German unification, the Duisburg group found that some of the same racist stereotypes once used against Jews were now being used against Turks (Wodak and Reisigl Reference Wodak and Reisigl1999). Furthermore, rules and rituals central to Jewish and Islamic faiths that regulate many details of the life-cycle and daily life—male circumcision, dress codes, kosher/halal slaughter of animals—are seen to contradict the Christian understanding of belief. The Christian narrative offers a unilinear understanding in which God makes a second contract with his people and tells them that after Jesus' arrival, rules and regulations are unnecessary. In this Christian narrative, practices in both religions seem anachronistic and unnecessary.

What is more significant than theological parallelisms of ritual and belief between Jews and Muslims is that in contemporary Germany cultural and historical references about both groups are related. In a study of literary narratives, Leslie Adelson calls such intermingling between the two groups “touching tales” (Reference Adelson2005: 20). According to her, in German literature tales about figural Turks and Jews “touch,” especially in reference to victimization and genocide. “Because” she argues, “they evoke a culturally residual, referentially non-specific sense of guilt, blame, shame, and danger” (ibid.: 86). Despite historical and sociological differences between the two groups, references to Jews and Muslims also trigger each other outside the realm of literature. As anthropologist Ruth Mandel puts it, both Jews and Muslims “are seen simultaneously as wrongful insiders and unintegrable outsiders” (Mandel Reference Mandel2008, 131). In a controversial newspaper op-ed piece, Michal Bodemann (Reference Bodemann2004) provokes the reader to think about this very same point by replacing the word “Muslim” with “Jew” in mainstream media narratives where Muslims are accused of having a parallel society, or being dishonest or patriarchal. He thereby points out that many characteristics attributed to Muslims are reworkings of those told about Jews less than a century ago. Today, as more Muslims become German by taking German citizenship and as more Germans become Muslim by converting, these mixings prompt older anxieties and tropes of the enemy within. Just as the well-integrated turn-of-the-twentieth-century German Jews generated anxieties about mixing (Bauman Reference Bauman1989), so too, converted German Muslims—as well as German citizens born Muslims—who have perfect accents, German passports, and German names, evoke anxieties about not being able to tell who is, and is not, a true German.