CAM Cambridge Alumni Magazine
Why do Germans convert to Islam? How do Muslims become German? And, what are the recent directions of Holocaust education programmes in Germany? In 'Becoming Muslim', an interview for the Lent Term issue of CAM, the Cambridge Alumni Magazine, Professor Esra Özyürek reflects on her ethnographic research of religion, culture and the politics of identity in contemporary Europe.
"I also found tension between Islam as it is practised by those with a Muslim background, and converts’ ideas about how it should be practised. To many of the converts I spoke to, Islam is the religion most compatible with the values of the traditional German Enlightenment. Back in the 1920s, some in Weimar Germany argued that the country needed spirituality rather than modernity to get out of its crisis. And some believe, today, that Islam is that answer. They see it as a purer religion: you are closer to God; there are no intermediaries; and they contrasted this with what they perceived to be the complex structure of other faiths such as Catholicism."