Muslims are often stereotyped as oppressors of women. The stereotype is powerful enough to have produced targeted education for Muslim boys in Germany. In a new joint article for the journal Men and Masculinities, Esra Özyürek and Jacob Lypp document contradictions in the masculine ideal represented in such education.
Lypp and Özyürek begin their account with a specific flashpoint:
New Year accusations
At New Years’ Eve 2015–16, Muslim men were accused of assaulting women outside Cologne cathedral. The accusations drew significant media coverage.
Policy shifts followed. One outcome was a growth in educational projects aimed at preventing sexualized violence and teaching values. These projects have state funding. However, they are generally delivered by non-state actors. This means informal education programmes for Muslims are part of a social work sector often led by Christian organisations.
Rhineland Heroes?
Lypp and Özyürek both undertook independent fieldwork in the region around Cologne (North Rhine-Westphalia). Özyürek spent time with a secular organisation. Lypp studied a Protestant organisation. Both programmes rely on a negative portrayal of so-called “honour culture” as typically Muslim and a barrier to mature adulthood.
German father problems
There is a specific context here too.
After World War 2, one psychological explanation given for the Nazi rise to power was that Germans had a troubled relationship with fatherly authority. If this risky psychology could be fixed among native Germans, the fear that migrants might reintroduce it remains.
Özyürek has documented this set of cultural arguments to show how Germany has pathologized Muslims. Some related analysis features in chapter 1 of her 2023 monograph, Subcontractors of Guilt.
What good looks like
Other scholars have documented gender politics and nationalist ideals and their impact on queer and feminine identities. Such studies refer to a negative vision of heterosexual, cisgender Muslim males. The question of what the alternative is meant to be had escaped attention.
Together Lypp & Özyürek now interrogate the opposite side of the coin: What does “good” masculinity look like?
In the two settings they report on, they observed several common issues: despite wishing to get rid of authoritarian father-figures, educators sometimes employed these same figures to reinforce their own authority. While claiming that the attempt to control women’s sexuality was a core issue for Muslims, a Christian educator casually implied he had responsibility for governing his own children’s sexual conduct.
Lypp and Özyürek situate these specific instances as part of a wider pattern. Fatherhood models maintain racial hierarchies. To become a good man seems to mean rejecting Muslim culture. The transformation needed to be a (good) German looks a lot like conversion to Christianity.
Working together
The co-authors explain how their own identities shaped their fieldwork:
“Esra Özyürek is a Turkish- and Muslim-background researcher who found it easy to establish a rapport with Middle East-/Muslim-background youth, who referred to her as ‘older sister’ and introduced her to their families. Conversely, as a native white German with a Protestant background, Jacob Lypp was seamlessly incorporated into the world of the Christian educators... who were eager to use his (presumed) academic expertise to foster their youth club’s educational and spiritual mission.”
Jacob is a Cambridge alumnus and a PhD candidate at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is also an active participant in the Entangled Otherings network funded by the Cambridge–DAAD Hub for German Studies. He has retained Esra as a supervisor and mentor following her relocation to Cambridge in 2020 to take up the Sultan Qaboos Professorship in Abrahamic Faiths and Shared Values.
Together they make a clear case for further collaboration:
“...coauthored ethnographies bringing together two authors working at different fieldwork sites remain rare. Yet... Co-authorship also makes use of our differential positionalities in the field. [In this case, it] allowed us to bridge the split between Christian and nonreligious organizations characteristic of the dualized German welfare state.”
They are careful to show that this work has implications for other Europeans too. The stereotyping of Muslims is not unique to Germany.
Further reading
The article has been published online and will also appear in a print issue of the journal Men and Masculinities later this year. Read the full article, Taming Muslim Masculinity: Patriarchy and Christianity in German Immigrant Integration on the Sage Publications website (sagepub.com).
From the archive
An early version of the work documented here was presented as part of a workshop at the Centre for Faith in Public Life (Wesley House, Cambridge). Read a profile of that event: The future of European religion-state regimes (‘CIP on Religion and the State, November 2022’).
The feature image (man in prayer) was taken in Yogyakarta, Indonesia and sourced from unsplash.com.