Muslim Women in Austria and Germany Doing and Undoing Gender Making Gender Differences and Hierarchies Relevant or Irrelevant Constanze Volkmann

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Constanze Volkmann
Muslim Women in Austria

and Germany Doing and
Undoing Gender
Making Gender Differences and
Hierarchies Relevant or Irrelevant
Muslim Women in Austria and Germany
Doing and Undoing Gender
Constanze Volkmann
Muslim Women in Austria

and Germany Doing and
Undoing Gender
Making Gender Differences and
Hierarchies Relevant or Irrelevant
Constanze Volkmann
Competence Center for Empirical
Research Methods
Vienna University of Economics
and Business
Vienna, Austria
Doctoral dissertation at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences

at University Bremen and Jacobs University, Germany.
Dissertation defence on November 3rd, 2017

Reviewers: Prof. Dr. Margrit Schreier, Prof. Dr. Özen Odağ, Prof. Dr. Manfred Lueger
ISBN 978-3-658-23951-0 ISBN 978-3-658-23952-7 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-23952-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958469
Springer VS
© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019
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Acknowledgement
In some way the present study represents the outcome of a rewarding intellectual
and emotional journey that provided numerous new perspectives and insights. I
wish to thank the many persons who accompanied and supported me on this
journey.
I am deeply grateful to Margrit Schreier for having supported me over the
past years both in academic terms and on a personal level in an incredibly gener-
ous, encouraging, and open-minded manner.
I thank Manfred Lueger very much for numerous extensive discussions that
greatly helped me broaden my theoretical and methodological perspective on the
subject matter.
I also thank Özen Odağ for very constructive feedback at various stages of
the research process as well as for her openness when volunteering for a trial
interview. This experience was very valuable to me.
I am deeply grateful to all the women who participated as interviewees in
this study for opening up and sharing their stories.
Also, I am very grateful to my student assistants Rumeysa Dür and Merisa
Karadjuz for conducting, transcribing, and translating the Turkish respectively
Bosnian interviews as well as for extensively discussing them with me. And I
thank you so much for your friendship.
Also, I thank the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences
(BIGSSS) very much for providing a three-year-stipend as well as for funding
for the field research. Besides, I also thank the German Academic Exchange
Service (DAAD) for funding a research stay in Vienna. Moreover, I would like
to thank fellows and faculty at BIGSSS for critical and engaged discussions in
the context of the doctoral colloquium, which helped refining the study in many
ways.
Moreover, I am very grateful to colleagues and friends at Vienna University
of Economics and Business, especially Karin Sardadvar, Sylvia Mandl, and Barba-
ra Glinsner for methodological advice and for supporting the data analysis in the
context of various interpretation groups as well as for sharing the experience of
writing a dissertation on a personal level. I would also like to thank Agnes
Raschauer and Katharina Hametner for further support regarding the data analysis.
I also thank Christa Baumann and Rita Bernd for dedicated discussions on
the topic and for putting me in touch with interview partners.
VI Acknowledgement
I am deeply grateful to my wonderful family and friends for their support

over the years on so many levels. Particularly, I thank my sister Ariane very
much for her intense participation in the data analysis and for backing me up
emotionally during hard times.
Also, I thank Marion Noack-Brammer very much for her invaluable help
with the editing.
Moreover, I am very grateful to so many friends for their interest in and en-
gaged discussions on my work, for believing in me, for empathetically sharing
all the ups and downs during the process as well as for instilling both endurance
and kindness in me in the face of adversity. Thank you Viki, Judith, Renate,
Marion, Isabella, Birte, Anne, Katja, Caro, Sylvia, Matea, Barbara, Roman, and
many more.
I am also most deeply grateful to my parents, Anne and Rainer, for their un-
conditional support and belief in me as well as for their enthusiasm about my
work that sustained me during all these years. Thank you so much!
Last but certainly not least, I thank you, Hannes, for always being there for
me. Thank you so much for the enormous support in intellectual, emotional, and
practical terms – the listening and discussing, the cooking and shopping, your
confidence as well as your kind, positive outlook on everything… thank you for
all the good energy! Ich liebe Dich.
Constanze Volkmann
Table of content
List of figures ..................................................................................................... XI

List of tables ................................................................................................... XIII
1 Introduction ................................................................................................ 1
2 Muslim population in Austria and Germany: Its origins, current

contexts and definitional challenges ......................................................... 7
2.1 Ascription vs. identification in defining “Muslim”:
The mingling of nationality, ethnicity and religious affiliation ..... 7
2.2 Historical, demographic and religious background ..................... 13
2.3 Institutional and legal context ...................................................... 18
2.4 The current political and societal context .................................... 23
3 Theoretical approaches to gender ........................................................... 29

3.1 Positivist approaches: Gender as a feature of individuals............ 30
3.1.1 Divergent conceptualizations of gender: Systematizing the
approaches that investigate differences........................................ 31
3.1.2 Theories for explaining gender differences ................................. 43
3.1.3 Discussion .................................................................................... 54
3.2 Constructivist theories: Conceptualizing gender as a product
of social processes ........................................................................ 59
3.2.1 The ethnomethodological approach of ‘doing gender’ in
interactions ................................................................................... 59
3.2.2 Discourse-theoretical approaches: Butler and Bourdieu .............. 68
3.2.3 Intersectionality ............................................................................ 73
3.2.4 Discussion .................................................................................... 78
4 Integrating the theoretical perspectives: A comprehensive

approach to gender .................................................................................. 81
4.1 Concepts of femininity/masculinity: The contents of
accountability and actions in (un-) doing gender ......................... 82
4.1.1 The heterogeneity of possible contents for gender assessment
and acting ..................................................................................... 83
VIII Table of content
4.1.2 Gender equality vs. gender equity: The case of difference and
hierarchy....................................................................................... 84
4.1.3 Instances of un-doing gender conceptually .................................. 87
4.2 The (un-)doing of gender as a process: Interaction as the site
of acquisition, expression and change of gender concepts .......... 88
4.2.1 The ‘me’: Individuals adopting others’ gender concepts in the
interactional process of doing gender .......................................... 89
4.2.2 The ‘I’: Individuals changing others’ gender concepts in the
interactional process of doing gender .......................................... 90
4.2.3 Self-assessment: Doing gender in interaction with oneself ......... 93
4.2.4 The subjective relevance of gender assessments and their
impact on individuals’ responses in interactions ......................... 94
4.3 Discussion .................................................................................... 96
5 Review of the literature on the role of gender among Muslim

women in ‘Western’ societies .................................................................. 99
5.1 Positivist approaches to the role of gender among Muslim
women in ‘Western’ societies .................................................... 100
5.2 Constructivist approaches to the role of gender among
Muslim women in ‘Western’ societies ....................................... 105
5.3 Discussion .................................................................................. 109
6 Research question and methodological approach:

their development throughout the research process ........................... 113
6.1 Research question ...................................................................... 113
6.1.1 From gender roles to (un-) doing gender: The theoretical
concepts included in the research question ................................ 114
6.1.2 Taking a pass on the ‘migration background’ ............................ 116
6.1.3 Focusing on three domains of (un-) doing gender: income
generation, motherhood, and abstract affiliations ...................... 116
6.2 Methods ...................................................................................... 117
6.2.1 Design ........................................................................................ 117
6.2.2 Sampling .................................................................................... 118
6.2.3 Data collection ........................................................................... 126
6.2.4 Transcription (and translation) of the interviews ....................... 128
6.2.5 Data analysis .............................................................................. 129
6.3 Reflecting on my own position as a researcher.......................... 137
Table of content IX
7 How Muslim women in Austria and Germany construct and

practice gender ....................................................................................... 143
7.1 Sensegenetic type formation on income-generating work ......... 143
7.1.1 Fighting for economic survival occasionally (Type 1) .............. 144
7.1.2 The light of the house: fortifying a gendered division of
labor (Type 2)............................................................................. 147
7.1.3 Gender mimicry as a practical tool to individually
circumnavigate gender differences and hierarchies (Type 3) .... 151
7.1.4 Gender-equity feminism based on immaterial values
(Type 4) ...................................................................................... 155
7.1.5 Fighting for gender equality in light of income-generating
work being self-evident for women (Type 5) ............................ 159
7.1.6 Correspondence analytical and sociogenetic outlook:
Attempting to explain the genesis of these types of implicit
knowledge .................................................................................. 163
7.2 Sensegenetic type formation on motherhood ............................. 169
7.2.1 Being a mother as a matter of course in a woman’s life
(Type 1) ...................................................................................... 171
7.2.2 Idealizing motherhood as a means for purpose and status in
life (Type 2) ................................................................................ 174
7.2.3 Strategic mothers: wanting it all and knowing how to get it
(Type 3) ...................................................................................... 180
7.2.4 Avoiding motherhood as a threat to one’s independence
(Type 4) ...................................................................................... 185
7.2.5 Correspondence analytical and sociogenetic outlook:
Attempting to explain the genesis of these types of implicit
knowledge .................................................................................. 190
7.3 Positioning oneself vs. being positioned by others at the
intersection of various reference points for potential
affiliations: gender, religion, cultural traditions, and the
‘mainstream society’ .................................................................. 194
7.3.1 Defending gender equality in every domain of belonging
(Type 1) ...................................................................................... 194
7.3.2 Orienting toward the mainstream society as a safe haven
for women (Type 2) ................................................................... 200
7.3.3 Religious compensation: Islam as a means to counterbalance
cultural disadvantages for woman (Type 3) ............................... 205
7.3.4 Secular strategists: Overcoming cultural disadvantages for
women through work and education (Type 4) ........................... 210
X Table of content
7.3.5 Living gender equity: Islam as a tool to integrate different

affiliations (Type 5) ................................................................... 215
7.4 Conclusions: What we’ve learnt from the study ........................ 223
7.4.1 Conclusions regarding income generation ................................. 224
7.4.2 Conclusions regarding motherhood ........................................... 227
7.4.3 Conclusions regarding abstract affiliations ................................ 230
8 Discussion ................................................................................................ 233

8.1 Theoretical implications ............................................................. 233
8.1.1 Implications for how we conceptualize gender.......................... 234
8.1.2 Implications with regard to previous research on the role of
gender among Muslim women ................................................... 240
8.2 Strengths and weaknesses .......................................................... 246
8.3 Practical and political implications ............................................ 251
8.4 Perspectives for future research: Integrating men and the
‘mainstream’ society in the analysis .......................................... 252
References ......................................................................................................... 255

Appendix ........................................................................................................... 281
List of figures
Figure 1: Gender in context model .............................................................. 49

Figure 2: Social role theory ......................................................................... 53
List of tables
Table 1: The intervieweesʼ background characteristics –

overall sample ............................................................................ 122
Table 2: The interviewees‘ background characteristics –
final sample included in the analysis ......................................... 135
1 Introduction
Which role does being a woman play in the lives of those, who, living in pre-
dominantly non-Muslim countries, identify as Muslim or to whom this affiliation
is ascribed to? The relevance of this question is highlighted by both the public
discourses in predominantly non-Muslim countries, and the most recent political
developments in these countries as well as predominantly Muslim countries such
as the Middle East.
The public discourse on Muslims – and especially on Muslim women – in
European countries since the late 1990s has been marked by an emphasis on
negatively connoted topics such as terrorism and religious fundamentalism (Ha-
fez & Richter, 2007) and representations of women as repressed victims of their
‘culture’. Islam in general and Muslim women in particular, are constructed as
the ‘other’ as opposed to a Christian-occidental ‘us’ (e.g. Karis, 2013; Zick,
Küpper, & Hövermann, 2011) in various ways. The multiple meanings of the
veil, for instance, are erased in ‘Western’ discourses and instead it is exclusively
viewed as a symbol of gender inequality (Chakraborti & Zempi, 2012) . In terms
of topics, the public discourse’s focus on negatively connoted issues such as
forced marriage and honor killing (Dustin & Phillips, 2008) further contributes
to this ‘othering’ of Muslim women. Although such images of Muslim women as
suppressed have meanwhile also been criticized as caricatures (Akhtar, 2015),
they have created stereotypes, which misrepresent Muslim parts of the popula-
tion as monolithic entities (Dustin & Phillips, 2008) and disregard the diversity
among them (Hellgren & Hobson, 2008) .
In addition, gender equality has been “employed opportunistically in order
to demonize Muslim migrants and ‘prove’ their backwardness” (Rostock &
Berghan, 2008, p. 354) in these discourses, i.e. the degree of assent to women’s
rights is used to measure the degree of integration (Phillips & Saharso, 2008) .
Hence, such uses of gender equality in political debates and their resulting poli-
cies have stigmatized Muslim parts of society and given rise to exclusionary
immigration policies (Yurdakul & Korteweg, 2013): An entangling of Islam,
gender equality and immigration/integration can, thus, be detected in the political
and media discourse as well as in the policies resulting from them.
Consequently, integration issues and women’s rights in Islam have turned
into an intersection of sexism and racism. This intersection also constitutes a
challenge to ‘Western’ feminism as reported by Selby (2007) for instance, who

C. Volkmann, Muslim Women in Austria and Germany Doing and Undoing Gender,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-23952-7_1
2 1 Introduction
argued that “French feminist organizations often hold neo-Orientalist positions,

seeking to ‘save’ Muslim women in the banlieue [French for suburbs], and ulti-
mately reinforcing negative stereotypes about the headscarf and gender politics
in Muslim communities” (Selby, 2007, p. iii). Ironically, it is thus not only patri-
archy as well as Islamophobic and right-wing anti-immigration discourses, but
also Eurocentric feminism, which ‘others’ Muslim women and, in doing so,
conceals their agency and identities (Essers & Tedmanson, 2014) .
Secondly, the relevance of the topic has further increased due to political
developments in recent years, both in predominantly non-Muslim ‘Western’
countries and predominantly Muslim countries: The rise of ISIS as well as the
war in Syria and Iraq, have contributed – among other factors – to a leap in the
migration flows from predominantly Muslim countries in the Middle East to
European countries. And also from other regions such as the Maghreb and sub-
Sahara African countries, the migration of presumably Muslim people to Euro-
pean countries has increased. In addition, Islamist1 processes of radicalization
among certain groups in the Middle East (e.g. ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the
Levant) seem to have had ramifications in European countries, as is reflected in
several terrorist attacks in France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Germany, and
other countries that were claimed by Islamist organizations. And also in Europe-
an countries, some – compared to the overall population very small – parts of the
Muslim population have radicalized.
At the same time, right wing populism has boomed in many European coun-
tries in the past few years as is reflected in the activities of groups such as Pegida
(Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes) in Germany,
and the electoral successes of right-wing parties such as the FPÖ (Freiheitliche
Partei Österreich) in Austria, the Front National lead by Marine Le Pen in
France, and the United Kingdom Independence Party. This development has
further fueled Islamophobia. The fact that Islamophobia is a gendered phenome-
non in that it greatly relies on women’s veil as a symbol of gender inequality, is
also reflected by the “gendered dimensions of manifestations of Islamophobia in
the public sphere” where veiled women are “’ideal subjects’ against whom to
enact anti-Muslim hostility” (Chakraborti & Zempi, 2012, p. 269) .
Despite the considerable societal relevance of the topic, research actually
investigating the implications that sex category has among Muslim women living
in predominantly non-Muslim countries is still comparatively scarce and in a
large part, i.e. in positivist research, based on concepts of gender that are not
only outdated, theoretically vague, and methodologically debatable, but – as a
1 In the following, the terms Islamist and Islamism will be used when referring to the political
and often radicalized branches of Islam. The terms Muslim, Islam, Islamic, on the contrary, re-
fer to believers and practices that do not imply a radicalization.
1 Introduction 3
consequence – also risk upholding the stereotypes present in the political and
media discourse. Constructivist research on the role of gender, on the other hand,
is more open, both in theoretical terms and regarding the methods it uses, and
thus is generally more suited to gaining new insights into populations who iden-
tify as Muslim themselves. However, none of these constructivist approaches is
based on gender concepts that systematically remedy the theoretical limitations
of positivist approaches: Neither do they distinguish between horizontal and
vertical differences that may exist between women and men and, hence, make
membership in a sex category relevant. Nor do they systematically theorize the
ir-relevance of sex category, i.e. of being a woman or a man. These conceptual
drawbacks are, however, particularly important when researching populations
that are (presumed to be) Muslim, considering the societal context of the topic.
Consequently, the first purpose of this study is the development of a more so-
phisticated theoretical approach to gender. The second aim of this study lies in
the application of this new gender theory to women living in predominantly non-
Muslim countries, who identify as Muslim or are ascribed to be Muslim. In par-
ticular, this study investigates how these women do gender as horizontal and/or
vertical differences between women and men as well as how they undo these
differences, i.e. how women may make sex category potentially irrelevant. More
specifically, and to address gaps in previous research, the present study investi-
gates this (un-) doing of gender with regard to three particular domains, namely
income generation, motherhood, and abstract affiliations, i.e. with Islam, the
‘culture of origin’, and the non-Muslim ‘mainstream’ society.
This study aims at providing further insights into what being a woman
means for women who identify as Muslim or to whom this affiliation is ascribed
to by the ‘mainstream’ society. Also, in doing so, it is hoped that this study fos-
ters knowledge about Muslim fellow citizens and, thus, lead to a more differenti-
ated dealing with the intersection of gender and Islam in not-predominantly
Muslim societies. Finally, such insights may contribute to dissolving stereotypes
about Muslim women in political and media discourses, reduce the fears associ-
ated with stereotypical thinking and, thus, also foster the integration of various
parts of society.
Considering the context, however, two further remarks seem indicated.
First, one easily runs the risk of being taken in by this very discourse when doing
research on ‘Muslims’ in European societies, especially as someone who does
neither identify nor is being identified by others as Muslim, even with the best
intentions. The study by Zulehner (2016), a catholic, Viennese religious scholar,
is an example of such a well-meant study. On the one hand, Zulehner aims at
shedding light on Muslim lives in Austria in order to offer information in reply
to the growing Islamophobia and, thus, to foster the integration of Muslim parts
4 1 Introduction
of the population. In so far, he critically reflects on the societal discourse on

‘Muslims’ and the dangers it implies. On the other hand, however, it must be
noted that he does not call into question the very category ‘Muslim’ (he merely
talks about ‘religious affiliation’ without distinguishing between self-identified
and ascribed Muslims and even less so between adherents of different schools of
thought, e.g. Sunnis, Shi’as, Alevis, etc.). This diction reflects his standpoint as
an outsider who is taken in by the construction of a ‘Muslim community’ that is
created by the very discourse he tries to challenge. In conclusion, Zulehner re-
flects on the societal context only within this very discourse, without challenging
its most fundamental assumptions. In contrast, it is hoped that the present study
achieves to challenge the very assumptions of this discourse and that this also be
reflected in the language used here.
Second and lastly, as in every discussion on that subject matter, academic or
private, here too, I feel the need to make it clear that the purpose of this research
is by no means to deny any injustice done to women that – according to the per-
petrators – are committed in the name of Islam. As a feminist and friend of man-
kind in general, I very strongly oppose any kind of injustice (legal, physical,
mental, social, moral, or any other) based on gender or any other social category
such as race/ethnicity, religious and political affiliation, sexual orientation, disa-
bilities, etc.
This study is structured as follows: The second chapter will give an over-
view of the Muslim population in Austria and Germany. In particular, it deline-
ates the difficulties in defining who is actually Muslim, which are partially due
to the mingling of culture and religion in the public discourse. The chapter then
sheds light on the history of Muslim live in these two countries and the demo-
graphic characteristics of their current Muslim populations. In addition, it de-
scribes the institutional and legal context of Islam in Austria and Germany. Last-
ly, the chapter concludes with an analysis of the current political and societal
context in which Islam is embedded at present.
The third chapter presents and discusses positivist and constructivist theo-
ries on gender that exist so far.
In light of the respective strengths and shortcomings of these theories, chap-
ter four presents a new and comprehensive approach to gender. The major bene-
fit of this new theoretical approach to gender consists in its capacity to also con-
ceptualize ways in which sex category can become irrelevant.
In chapter five, previous literature on the role of gender among Muslim
women in Western countries is reviewed. In line with the distinction used in
chapter three, this chapter, too, examines both positivist and constructivist re-
search on the role of gender among Muslim women in Western countries.
1 Introduction 5
The sixth chapter presents the research question informing the current study
as well as the methodological approach employed in order to answer it. Due to
the iterative character of the study, this chapter also delineates how both the
research question and the methodological approach developed in the course of
the research process.
The seventh chapter presents this study’s findings on how Muslim women
in Austria and Germany construct and practice gender in the domains of income
generation, motherhood, and abstract affiliations. Using documentary method,
different types of implicit gender-related knowledge were reconstructed for each
domain of analysis, i.e. so-called sensegenetic type formations. The first two of
these sensegenetic type formations, i.e. the ones on income generation and moth-
erhood, are complemented by correspondence analytical and sociogenetic con-
siderations, which attempt to explain the genesis of these types of implicit gen-
der-related knowledge. Following the logic of documentary method, which sug-
gests that it is the belonging to certain milieus, which forms implicit knowledge,
such correspondence analytical and sociogenetic considerations would imply a
redundancy for the third type formation and were, thus, not undertaken.
Lastly, chapter eight discusses these findings in terms of their theoretical
implications as well as the methodological strengths and weaknesses of the pre-
sent study. Moreover, this chapter discusses the practical and political implica-
tions and suggests perspectives for future research.
2 Muslim population in Austria and Germany: Its
origins, current contexts and definitional
challenges
Muslim population in Austria and Germany
While the term ‘Muslim’ is easily and often used in the media, politics, and re-
search, it is not always clear whom one is referring to. This is partly due to the
current societal embedding of Islam and of the people affiliated with it in Euro-
pean countries. The present chapter will, thus, discuss the challenges in defining
‘Muslim’ and present some historical as well as current demographic back-
ground information on Muslim life in Austria and Germany, as well as on its
legal, institutional, and political context at present.
The first section delineates different approaches to defining ‘Muslim’. In
particular, it argues that inferring a person’s religious affiliation from one’s na-
tional or ethnic background constitutes a mingling of different aspects that im-
plies the risk of othering and even demonizing Muslims. Resulting from this, this
section suggests relying on a person’s self-identification as Muslim and to fur-
ther distinguish between various Islamic denominations and schools of thought
as well as to take differing degrees of religious identification and practice into
account. The second section sheds some light on the history of Muslim life in
Austria and Germany and elaborates on the Muslim segment of the population in
these two countries at present in terms of their ethnic background and affiliation
with various Islamic denominations and schools of thought. The third section,
then, briefly presents the major Muslim institutions in Austria and Germany and
outlines the current legal context of Islam and Muslim institutions in these two
countries. Lastly, the fourth section delineates the most recent developments of
the political and societal context of Islam and Muslims in European societies.
2.1 Ascription vs. identification in defining “Muslim”: The mingling of

nationality, ethnicity and religious affiliation
Ascription vs. identification in defining “Muslim”
Who is Muslim? As simple as the question may seem, it is equally important and
challenging to define whom one is talking about when referring to ‘Muslims’ or
the ‘Muslim population’ in Austria and Germany. This question arises in various
contexts, such as, for instance, state institutions trying to quantify various parts

C. Volkmann, Muslim Women in Austria and Germany Doing and Undoing Gender,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-23952-7_2
8 2 Muslim population in Austria and Germany
of the overall population with regard to their background and living conditions
(e.g. in the framework of censuses and other surveys), or regarding the question
which Muslim organization legitimately represents which and how many Mus-
lims, especially in relation to state institutions. Last but not least, the definition
of ‘Muslim’ is particularly important in scientific contexts where it must be
made clear who the research actually relates to. However, despite its obvious
importance, the definition of ‘Muslim’ has proven quite complex both in theoret-
ical and empirical terms and that all the more so due to its embedding in a socie-
tal discourse that shows little consideration for such definitional matters.
In the following section I will first describe in what ways it is difficult to
determine who is Muslim and how the term is used in the public discourse. Fol-
lowing that, I will delineate the consequences of this discourse, which, in return,
further impede clear definitions of who is ‘Muslim’. Lastly, I will argue for al-
ternative approaches to defining who is ‘Muslim’.
As mentioned above, state institutions, as well as Muslim organizations, and
researchers are interested in quantifying the ‘Muslim population’ and, hence, in
defining who counts as ‘Muslim’. One core aspect making the identification of
people affiliated with ‘Islam’ difficult lies in the fact that there is no such central
institution in Islam as a ‘church’ in Catholicism keeping track of the number of
its members (Bader, 2007; Ruthven, 1997). Instead, there is a multitude of
schools of thought (Schimmel, 1992) and again a myriad of organizations related
to these schools, often also in relation to different countries, regions, or ethnici-
ties (Öktem, 2016; Robbers, 2009; Rohe, 2011; Schmidinger, 2013a). Hence,
statistics on people affiliated with ‘Islam’ are not as readily available as they are
on Catholics or Protestants.
Additionally, censuses in most European countries such as Germany tradi-
tionally do not (or only do so on a voluntary basis) collect data on people’s reli-
gious affiliation as this is regarded as contradicting the constitutional right of
religious freedom in the sense that religion is viewed as a private matter that
must not be of interest to the State (Spielhaus, 2013a). Consequently, most statis-
tics on the ‘Muslim population’ are estimates based on different “‘religious-
proxy’ methods” (Brown, 2000, p. 87), i.e. using nationality, country of birth or
the (grand-) parents’ country of birth, for instance, as indicators of religious
affiliation. Both in Austria and Germany, many immigrants have been natural-
ized in the past 15-20 years and, consequently, disappeared from the statistics as
‘Muslim’, thus making estimations of the size of the ‘Muslim population’ even
less reliable (Brown, 2000; Spielhaus, 2011). Using such proxies, however,
means that religious affiliation is ascribed to people, independently of their self-
identification with this religion.
2.1 Ascription vs. identification in defining “Muslim” 9
Now, even if there were data on religious affiliations in census data, i.e. if
religious affiliation was based on people’s self-identification rather than on as-
criptions, the question remains what actually constitutes Muslim identity: Does
self-identification as Muslim necessarily “presume the profession and practice of
the faith of Islam” (Brown, 2000, p. 89) or does a ‘cultural’ or geographic at-
tachment to a place of birth suffice? Brown, for instance, argues for Muslim
identity as a “highly fluid concept” with “soft edges” (2000, p. 90), distinguish-
ing between a cultural Muslim identity (i.e. a loose attachment to a predominant-
ly Islamic ‘culture’ or region based on descent), a nominal religious identity (i.e.
identifying with the faith of Islam without practicing it in every day life) and a
devout religious identity (i.e. one that actually includes Islamic practice). Ac-
cording to this conception, the former two identity types are actually considered
‘Non-Muslim’ and only the latter one is ‘Muslim’ in the narrower sense.
Defining ‘Muslim’ is all the more difficult, considering that the question is
embedded in a quite brisk and judgmental public discourse. First of all, as indi-
cated above, not only in the media and politics but also in surveys by state insti-
tutions and academic researchers, religious affiliation is ascribed using proxies
such as nationality, ethnicity or place of birth.
Such ‘definitions’ that ascribe a Muslim identity based on ‘religious-pro-
xies’ (Brown, 2000) are, however, highly questionable, as they homogenize,
other, and even demonize Islam and Muslims. These three aspects will be delin-
eated in more detail in the following.
First, regarding the homogenizing effect, these ascriptions mingle different
aspects of a person’s identity and, in doing so, construct both a Muslim identity
and a community that do not exist as such (Spielhaus, 2006): These construc-
tions are problematic in that they neglect the ethnic, cultural, and religious dif-
ferences between Muslims, i.e. they disregard the diversity within the ‘Muslim
population’ (Hellgren & Hobson, 2008) , on the one hand, and overlook the
common ground between Muslims and Non-Muslims on the other hand. These
ascriptions, thus, construct a ‘Muslim identity’ by misrepresenting Muslims as a
monolithic entity (Dustin & Phillips, 2008) as opposed to non-Muslims. This
construct of a ‘Muslim community’ has been diagnosed as the result of the inter-
play of media, politics, and research (Spielhaus, 2013b). Even in analyses stress-
ing the heterogeneity among ‘Muslims’ (e.g. Frindte, Boehnke, Kreikenbom, &
Wagner, 2011) , the existence of one or more overarching ‘Muslim milieus’ is
still assumed as explaining different orientations and lifestyles (Franz, 2013),
hence homogenizing the ‘Muslim population’ after all.
Secondly, definitions of a ‘Muslim identity’ that rely on homogenizing as-
criptions rather than self-identifications are highly questionable regarding their
consequences in that they also other the people to whom this affiliation is as-
cribed (Spielhaus, 2013b): Up to the mid-1990s, public discourses focused on

ethnicity, ‘culture’, or nationality as the bases of otherness, i.e. people belonging
to certain ethnicities or stemming from certain countries were identified as ‘oth-
ers’ as opposed to the German, Austrian, or otherwise ‘European’ self. Resear-
chers, politicians and the media were concerned with “migrants” and “Turks”
etc. (Spielhaus, 2006) and paying little attention to the religious affiliation of the
latter. Since the mid-1990s, however, it is the (presumed) religious affiliation
that serves as point of reference in order to construct this otherness (Ramm,
2010; Spielhaus, 2013b). This tendency to refer to ‘Islam’ for identifying the
‘other’ held all the more true in the time following the amendment to the German
citizenship law in 2000: As 200.000-300.000 people with migration background
were naturalized every year (Schiffauer, 2007; Spielhaus, 2006) in the course of
this amendment, the broader public became aware of the fact that the migrants
who had come to Germany and Austria as Gastarbeiter in the 1960s and 1970s
were here to stay. At the same time, migrants disappeared from the statistics due
to naturalization and, consequently, citizenship could no longer serve as a distin-
guishing characteristic. Subsequently, debates and statistics increasingly focused
on ‘Muslims’ (Spielhaus, 2006) with former ‘Turks’, ‘migrants’, etc. being
“muslimized” (Karakaşoğlu, 2009, p.186) respectively “islamized” (Ramm,
2010, p. 185) in the media, politics and research: Instead of becoming ‘Ger-
mans’, ‘foreigners’ are now seen as ‘Muslims’ in the public discourse (Spiel-
haus, 2013b). Hence, by shifting the framing from nationality to religious affilia-
tion it became possible to still view migrants who have officially become Ger-
man as the foreign other.
Thirdly, such homogenizing and othering ascriptions of a Muslim identity
also demonize Muslims. For the so constructed gap between the Christian occi-
dental ‘us’ and the Muslim ‘other’ (Rostock & Berghan, 2008) appears all the
more insurmountable, as this ‘Muslim other’ is routinely related to negatively
connoted topics, stereotypes and assumptions: Much research, for instance, is
based on the assumption that Islam was incompatible with modernity, question-
ing whether Muslims can be integrated in ‘Western’ societies at all (so-called
‘Integrierbarkeit’ in German) or that a ‘cultural conflict’ caused identity prob-
lems for Muslims inciting them, in turn, to religious fundamentalism (e.g. Brett-
feld & Wetzels, 2007; Frindte et al., 2011) . Research based on such assumptions
has been criticized as an unreflecting bias of researchers (Inowlocki, 1998) con-
tributing to a “folklore of sciolism” (Beck-Gernsheim, 2004, p. 13; for more
detailed critiques of such assumptions in research see, e.g. Franz, 2013; Tezcan,
2003).
In the political discourse, Islam and Muslims are usually linked to security
and integration issues: the proportion of speeches in the German Bundestag
2.1 Ascription vs. identification in defining “Muslim” 11
framing Islam as a threat, for instance, increased from 9,4% in 2000/2001 to

24,4% in 2003/2004 (Halm, 2013). Similarly, in the context of integration de-
bates, gender equality has been employed „opportunistically in order to demon-
ize Muslim immigrants and ‘prove’ their backwardness“ (Rostock & Berghan,
2008, p. 354) .
Studies investigating media discourse in Europe found the German media
discourse, for instance, to rely on symbols more than on information and to arbi-
trarily link topics and pictures (Schiffer, 2005), as well as to employ ‘exclusion
strategies’, i.e. to frame Muslims and Islam as not being part of Germany’s core
culture (Halm, 2013). In particular, over 80% of the instances that Muslims and
Islam were alluded to in the two public service television programs (ARD and
ZDF) between July 2005 and December 2006 was in the context of negatively
connoted pictures and topics such as terrorism, international conflicts, religious
intolerance, fundamentalism and integration problems (Hafez & Richter, 2007) ,
hence contributing to the demonization of Islam. In his in-depth analysis of the
German media discourse on Islam, Karis (2013) has pointed out that even when
Muslims are not plainly depicted as a homogenous group and Islam is not direct-
ly opposed as the other to ‘the West’ or exclusively related to negatively connot-
ed topics, but instead mention is made that ‘not all Muslims are radical but most
are moderate’, it is the use of this very distinction that perpetuates the othering
and the negative framing of Islam and is, hence, discriminatory: On the one
hand, using this “differentiation formula” (Karis, 2013, p. 313) serves as legiti-
mization for less careful phrasings in the following and the use of pictures that
symbolize Islam as a whole. This formula, thus, makes it possible to say or pic-
torially imply (negative) things that otherwise could not be said (directly) about
Islam or Muslims. In addition, this differentiation between ‘radicals’ and ‘mod-
erates’ is discriminatory in that it is not applied to other groups in society (Chris-
tians, Bavarians, etc.) and it is this very distinction that makes it seem plausible
that ‘Muslims’ constantly have to declare which of these two groups they belong
to. Consequently, Karis (2013) concludes that the differentiation between ‘radi-
cals’ and ‘moderates’ reintroduces the opposition between ‘Islam’ and the
‘Western world’ at least partially.
Through all of these tendencies, i.e. by homogenizing, othering, and even
demonizing Islam and Muslims, this public discourse has made a bogeyman out
of Islam and people affiliated (or assumed to be affiliated) with it. In such a
societal climate, clear definitions of who is Muslim fall from view easily even in
well-intended research such as the one by Zulehner (2016, cf. Introduction), for
instance, a representative survey study on Muslim life in Austria in terms of
gender relations, family and work. This study lacks any consideration as to who
is researched as ‘Muslim’. This mere ignorance of the definitional issue and the
writing in an ascribing way on ‘the Muslims’ reflects the author’s position as a

non-Muslim writing about the ‘others’. This, however, despite his good inten-
tions of fostering the mainstream society’s knowledge on people affiliated (or
assumed to be affiliated) with Islam, further contributes to the construction of a
Muslim community and, thus, hinders a differentiated and open discourse on
who is Muslim – and, if so, what kind of Muslim: For instance, does Islam con-
stitute a cultural, nominal, or devout religious identity (Brown, 2000, cf. above)
and which inner-Islamic school does one affiliate with, etc.? The same holds
true, and all the more so, for research that uses the terms ‘migrants’, ‘Turks’ (or
people with nationalities of / born in other predominantly Muslim countries) and
‘Muslims’ interchangeably: Such mingling contributes to the ascription of a
Muslim identity through the entangling of different dimensions (e.g. C. Diehl,
Koenig, & Ruckdeschel, 2009; Yurdakul & Korteweg, 2013) and, consequently,
impedes a sober, differentiated definition.
Resulting from all this, it seems indispensable to emphasize the importance
of three aspects: Generally, the need to explicitly define whom one is talking
about when referring to ‘Muslims’ or ‘the Muslim population’. Secondly, such
definitions should be based on self-identifications rather than on ascriptions
given the consequences that such ascriptions based on a mingling of different
dimensions have. Lastly, definitions of who is Muslim should capture multiple
dimensions of Islamic identities including various beliefs, practices, and inner-
Islamic affiliations. This would allow for a more differentiated picture of people
identifying with Islam and, thus, avoid the construction of a homogenous group
of a ‘Muslim other’. In particular, such alternative approaches to defining ‘Mus-
lims’ or ‘the Muslim population’ should take into account the specific relation
one has to this religion or aspects of this religion, e.g. whether one avows oneself
a Muslim(a) and/ or in which way one practices one’s faith etc. Rieger and Mir-
bach (2008), for instance, distinguished six core dimensions of Muslim religiosi-
ty, namely interest in religious topics, belief in god, public as well as private
religious practice, religious experiences and the general relevance of religion in
everyday life (2008).
An alternative or additional means of differentiating among self-identified
Muslims more precisely might be the taking into account of people’s affiliations
with different denominations and schools of thought within Islam. In that vein,
distinguishing between the two major denominations, i.e. Sunni and Shia as the
broadest differentiation might be a first step. In a second step, one might take
into account the different schools of thought within these broad denominations.
Believers within the Sunni denomination, which is the largest one, follow Quran
(i.e. the holy book) and the Hadith (i.e. one of the reports describing the words,
actions, or habits of the prophet Muhammad) and believe the first four caliphs,
2.2 Historical, demographic and religious background 13
who were elected, to be the rightful successors to the prophet Muhammad. This
denomination can further be differentiated between four main schools of
thought, namely the Hanfi, Hanbali, Malikik and Shafi’i (Blanchard, 2005). A
political branch within Sunni Islam, for instance, is the Salafi movement
(Schmidinger, 2013b). Believers within the second largest branch of Islam, the
Shia, consider that prophet Muhammad appointed his son-in-law, Ali ibn Abi
Talib, as his rightful successor and first Imam. The main branches of the Shia
denomination are the so-called Imami or Twelvers (the largest branch), Zaidi and
Ismaili, as well as Alevi (who are somewhat prominent in Austria and Germany)
and Alawites (Nigosian, 2004). In any case, such definitions should be reflective
of Muslim identity as a “highly fluid concept” with “soft edges” (Brown, 2000,
p. 90) and, thus, contribute to the dissolution of the monolithic picture of ‘Islam’
as the foreign ‘other’.
While much of the research cited so far and in the following sections does
not (yet) define who is ‘Muslim’ in such a differentiated way, the present study
itself (cf. chapters 6, 7, and 8) distinguished between people to whom the affilia-
tion with Islam is ascribed to on the basis of their national, ‘cultural’, or ethnic
background on the one hand, and people who identify as Muslims themselves.
Among these self-identified Muslims, the present study, following Brown
(2000), distinguishes between a nominal religious identity (i.e. identifying with
the faith of Islam without practicing it in everyday life) and a devout religious
identity (i.e. one that actually includes Islamic practice).
2.2 Historical, demographic and religious background
The recruitment of immigrant workers (so-called “Gastarbeiter”) from South

and South-Eastern European as well as Maghrebian countries subsequent to the
recruitment agreements (so-called “Anwerbeabkommen”) in the 1960s and 70s
by the economically thriving post-World War II Germany and Austria, is usually
considered the point of departure of Muslim life in these countries (Larsson &
Račius, 2010) . This perspective, however, ignores the presence of Muslims2
before that time: In Germany, there was a flourishing community life in big
cities such as Hamburg and Berlin in the period between the world wars, notably
with the construction of the first mosque in Germany that is still in use nowadays
(Spielhaus, 2013b). During the Nazi-regime, Muslim life mostly came to a halt:
Muslim associations were dissolved, Muslim media were no longer published,
German members stopped their activities and foreign members left the country
2
As mentioned in section 2.1, most of the research cited in the following does not explicitly
define whom they refer to as ‘Muslim’. Concerning census data, however, self-identification as
(Bauknecht, 2010; Höpp, 2004). Following the end of World War II, however,
first Muslim organizations were founded in refugee camps (Bauknecht, 2010)
and in 1957 and 1961 two mosques were built in Hamburg.
In Austria, Muslim life predates the immigration of workers from predomi-
nantly Muslim countries in the 1960s and 1970s as well: At the end of the 9th
century, nomads from Asia following Islam came to the Pannonian Planes, i.e.
even before the Ottoman Empire expanded into the Habsburg territory in the 16th
century (Balic, 1995). While all Muslims were deported in the 17th century when
Austria conquered the region occupied by the Ottoman Empire, a large number
of Muslims came under the control of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1878 as a
result of the occupation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (Schmidinger, 2011). This
was the first time that a major segment of the population (roughly half a million)
was Muslim (Kreisky, 2010). In the period up to World War I, the Austro-
Hungarian empire shaped the religious life in Bosnia and Herzegovina on an
institutional level: In 1882, the Mufti of Sarajevo as the spiritual head accompa-
nied by the congregation of the Ulema was appointed (in order to detach Bosnia
and Herzegovina from the Osman Empire), and in 1881 Muslim soldiers were
conscripted to the k.u.k-army. The preliminary conscription law conferred spe-
cial rights to the Muslim soldiers (Fridays and Bayram, i.e. the end of Ramadan,
for instance, were holidays) and both Imams and a Mufti were included in the
army in order to cater to their needs (Kreisky, 2010). Following the formal an-
nexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, and its autonomy in religious mat-
ters in 1909, the Islam law was introduced in 1912 (s. section 2.3) for a better
integration of the Muslim minority in the multi-confessional state.
After the collapse of the monarchy in World War I and the loss of these ter-
ritories, only few Muslims remained on the territories of the newly created First
Republic (Schmidinger, 2011). Austrian Muslims, then, assembled in private
associations such as the “Oriental Association” (“Orientbund”) or the “Islamic
Cultural Association” (“Islamischer Kulturbund”), but the latter was dissolved in
1939 due to Austria’s ‘Anschluss’ to Nazi-Germany. From 1943 to 1948, the
“Islamic community of Vienna” (“Islamische Gemeinschaft zu Wien”) was regis-
tered as an association and supported by the NSDAP.
After World War II, in 1951, the “Association of Muslims in Austria”
(“Verein der Muslime Österreichs”) was founded, but new impetuses to Muslim
communities were only achieved in the early 1960s with the foundation of the
“Muslim Social Service” (“Muslimischer Sozialdienst”) in 1962 and the increas-
ing immigration of workers (due to the above mentioned recruitment agree-
ments) from Turkey (1964) and Yugoslavia (1966) (Schmidinger, 2013a), as
well as diplomats and business people from Islamic countries (due to interna-
tional organizations’ offices in Vienna such as the UNO and OPEC) and refu-
gees from Islamic countries such as Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq and, in the 1990s
from Kosovo, Albania, and Bosnia (Schmidinger, 2011).
In 1979, the request of the “Muslim Social Service” to be officially
acknowledged as a religious community was acceded to by the Ministry of Edu-
cation and Art, enabling the foundation of the “Islamic Religious Community in
Austrian” (“Islamische Glaubensgemeinschaft in Österreich“, IGGiÖ) (Heine,
Lohlker, & Potz, 2012) . From 1987, due to a holding of the Constitutional
Court, the IGGiÖ comprised not only members of the Hannefite school of reli-
gious jurisprudence (due to historic reasons, namely the Hannefite tradition of
Bosnia and Herzegovina), but generally all the Sunni and Shiite Muslims. In
2013, the Alevi Community in Austria (“Islamische Alevitische Glaubensge-
meinschaft”, IAGÖ) was officially recognized as a religious community in its
own right, i.e. independent of the IGGiÖ (Bundeskanzleramt- Rechtsinforma-
tionssystem, 2013).
To conclude, both in Austria and Germany, Muslims have been present well
before the immigration of workers (and, later, their families) from Turkey, Yu-
goslavia, etc. Yet, it was in the course of this labor migration from the 1960s
onwards, that the (presumed) Muslim population in these countries (as in Europe
in general) has continuously grown – even though it was not until the late 1990s
that the religious affiliation of these migrants became relevant in the public dis-
course (Spielhaus, 2013b).
In the following, I will briefly delineate the demographical development of
the (presumed) Muslim segment of the population in Austria and Germany as
well as their current ethnical and confessional composition.
In Austria, the national institute for statistics (“Statistik Austria”) in its cen-
suses in 1951 and 1961 concluded that 23.093 and 31.386 persons respectively
were affiliated with religions other than Christian and Jewish ones, i.e. including
Muslims. From 1971 on, Islam was included in the censuses and numbers are,
hence, available for the four censuses since then: in 1971 the Muslim population
comprised 22.267 people (0,3%), in 1981 it rose to 76.939 (1%), in 1991 it,
again, rose to 158.776 (2%) and by 2001 it comprised 338.988 people (4,3%)
(Statistik Austria, 2007b). In 2001, the distribution over the 9 states (“Länder”)
is quite uneven with 36% living in Vienna and another 39% living in three other
states (Upper and Lower Austria and Vorarlberg), such that only 25% live in the
remaining five states (Aslan & Heinrich, 2009) .
In default of other censuses since then, two estimations have been done: One
in 2009 by a demographer with the national institute for statistics (Marik-Lebeck,
2010) concluding that roughly 6,2% of the Austrian population were affiliated with
an Islamic confession (i.e. 515.914 people). In 2012 another estimate, based on the
one in 2009 was undertaken by two professors of Islamic studies (Aslan & Yildiz,
2014) concluding that approx. 573.876 people were Muslim, amounting to 6,8%
of the overall population. While in 2001 only 28% of the people of Islamic faith
held the Austrian citizenship (Statistik Austria, 2007a), in 2009 this was the case
for almost half of the Muslim population (49%) due to naturalizations and nativi-
ties (Marik-Lebeck, 2010). The remaining other half is composed of people hold-
ing the Turkish (21,2%), Bosnian (10,1%), Montenegrin/Serbian/Kosovar (6.7%),
Russian (3,6%) and various other citizenships such as Afghani, Egyptian, Iranian,
Pakistani, Iraqi, Bangladeshi (Öktem, 2016).
Regarding the confessional affiliations, no reliable numbers are available so
far. Generally it is agreed upon that the vast majority follows the Sunni-Hanafi
rite, which is the dominant school in Turkey and most Balkan countries. The
Shia population, too, can only roughly be estimated based on immigration from
predominantly Shia countries, which amounts to about 1% of all the Muslims in
Austria (Aslan & Yildiz, 2014) . Regarding the number of Alevi, a particular
school of thought that originated from Shia Islam, but now claims to be an inde-
pendent denomination, however, the estimates vary considerably. While some
suggest that 10% – 20% of Austrian Muslims belong to this school of thought
(Medien-Servicestelle Neue ÖsterreicherInnen, 2015 as cited in Öktem, 2016),
others estimate their number to range between 25% and 30% (Schmidinger,
2008). In conclusion, this suggests that a far more differentiated picture of Mus-
lim parts of the Austrian population is still needed.
While such official statistics are available for Austria, this is not the case for
Germany, where the Federal Office for Statistics (“Statistisches Bundesamt”)
does not collect data on religious affiliation as it is regarded as contradicting the
constitutional right of religious freedom. In addition, the public interest in ‘Mus-
lims’ is relatively recent and focused on ‘migrants’ or even ‘guest workers’ ra-
ther than the religious affiliation of the latter prior to the late 1990s.
Hence, until recently, the number of Muslims could only be roughly esti-
mated by ascriptions of religious affiliations (s. section 2.1) that are based on a
person’s migration background in terms of nationality. According to the German
Federal Office for Statistics, someone is considered to have a migration back-
ground, if they or at least one of their parents is born without the German nation-
ality (Statistisches Bundesamt Wiesbaden, 2016). People with a migration back-
ground from predominantly Muslim countries such as Turkey, Bosnia, Maghre-
bian or Middle Eastern countries were then presumed to be Muslim, regardless
of their self-identification and/or religious practice (e.g. Bundestag-Drucksache
16/5033, 2007). This mingling of religious affiliation with nationality is prob-
lematic not only in that it contributes to the construction of a homogenous Mus-
lim community as delineated above (cf. section 2.1), but also in that it is quite
imprecise given the considerable number of naturalizations, especially in the past
15 years. Despite these ambiguities, however, it seems safe to say that it was
mostly in the wake of the recruitment agreements with Turkey in 1961, Morocco
and Tunisia in 1965 and Yugoslavia in 1968 (i.e. predominantly Muslim coun-
tries) as well as the agreements enabling their families to follow (Meier-Braun,
2012), that the (presumed) ‘Muslim’ population in Germany has substantially
and continuously started to grow. Another factor contributing to this develop-
ment was the migration of often well-educated people from Middle Eastern
countries (especially Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, and Lebanon) as well as asylum
seekers from Northern Africa, India, the Middle East, and – with the wars on
Balkan in the 1990s – Bosnia, Albania, Kosovo, and Macedonia (Rohe, 2011).
The first study not merely inferring the affiliation with ‘Islam’ from one’s mi-
gration background, but investigating the ‘Muslim population’ in Germany in a
more differentiated and representative manner is a supplement to the worldwide
2008 religion monitor (“Religionsmonitor”) (Rieger & Mirbach) . While Muslim
affiliation was ascribed in the first step (i.e. respondents were sampled based on
typical Turkish, Bosnian, Arabic, and Persian family names), the survey then as-
sessed religious attitudes and practices in such a differentiated way that the classi-
fication as non-religious was possible, hence, disentangling those who identify as
Muslims themselves from those to whom this affiliation is only ascribed.
The most recent demographical and statistical information on the Muslim
population in Germany is a study presented by the Federal Office for Migration
and Refugees on behalf of the German Islam Conference (cf. section 2.3) on
“Muslim life in Germany” from 2009 (Haug, Müssig, & Stichs) . According to
this source, 4,6% – 5,2% of the German population are affiliated with Islam, i.e.
3,8 – 4,3 million people. Due to naturalization and including an unknown num-
ber of converts, 45% of them hold the German citizenship. In terms of their mi-
gration background, people of Turkish decent constitute the largest subgroup
with 63% of the overall Muslim population, 14% originate from Southeast Euro-
pean countries (Bosnia, Bulgaria, Albania), 8% stem from the Middle East, an-
other 7% from North African countries and the remaining 8% from central
Asia/CIS countries, Iran, South and South-East Asia as well as other African
countries (Haug et al., 2009).
In terms of confessions, Sunnis constitute the largest group with 74,1% (Ro-
he, 2016), followed by Alevi with 13% (most of them considered themselves Mus-
lims in this study; the religious affiliation of the latter with Islam generally remains
an open question both among Alevi and believers from other Islamic schools of
thought, cf. above and section 2.1). Shias constitute the third biggest group with
7% and the remaining 6% are made of people affiliated with various smaller reli-
gious communities such as the Ahmadis, Sufis, and Ibadis. Hence, in terms of the
(assumed) confession, data are only available on rather broad categories that do not
further differentiate between different schools of religious jurisprudence, such as

Hanafi, Maliki, Shafi’i, and Hanbali within Sunni Islam, for instance. Yet, despite
these broad categories and the substantial percentage of Sunnis, the composition of
the Muslim population in Germany is fairly heterogeneous.
The distribution over the 16 states (“Länder”) is quite uneven with 98% liv-
ing in the former Western states of Germany (including East Berlin), and, in
particular, one third living in North-Rhine-Westphalia (Haug et al., 2009). Sub-
stantial concentrations of Muslims are also found in bigger cities such as Berlin,
Cologne, Hamburg, Stuttgart, and Munich (Robbers, 2009).
2.3 Institutional and legal context
The institutional and especially the legal context of Muslim life in Austria and
Germany differs quite a bit, in that the situation in Austria is quite unique due to
historic reasons: After the Austro-Hungarian Empire had annexed Bosnia and
Herzegovina in 1908, it aimed at controlling and managing their Muslim popula-
tions via the so-called Islam Law (“Islamgesetz”), introduced in 1912. Although
the latter was rather obsolete until the 1960s, it has afforded a certain legal secu-
rity and formal structures to Muslim communities in Austria ever since (Öktem,
2016), as it provided recognition of the Hanafi rite (a school of Sunni Islam that
most Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina were affiliated with) as a religious
community according to Art. 15 of the Basic Law of the State (Staatsgrundge-
setz, StGG), which guarantees religious freedom on the corporate level. In par-
ticular, it enabled – together with the law concerning the recognition of religion
(“Anerkennungsgesetz”) from 1874 – the official recognition of two Muslim
communities: the Muslim Religious Community of Austria (“Islamische Glau-
bensgemeinschaft in Österreich”, IGGiÖ) in 1979, who – following a verdict of
the Constitutional Court in 1987 – represented all the Muslims in Austria, not
just those affiliated with the Hanafi school. In 2013, the Muslim Alevi Commu-
nity in Austria (“Islamische Alevitische Glaubensgemeinschaft”, IAGÖ), after
years of legal dispute was recognized as a second Muslim community (Bun-
deskanzleramt- Rechtsinformationssystem, 2013). The recognition of the latter
was made possible by a decision of the Austrian Constitutional Court in 2010
according to which the official acceptance of only one Islamic community (i.e.
the IGGiÖ) by the Austrian state was a violation of the religious freedom on the
corporate level (Schmidinger, 2013a). With this official recognition as a reli-
gious community, the status as a ‘corporation under public law’ (“Körperschaft
des öffentlichen Rechts”) is conferred (Gartner, 2010) and, with this, certain
rights come along, such as the autonomous administration of its inner affairs, the
protection of its assets against secularization, the creation of private denomina-
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CHAPTER VI
MRS. SEDLEY’S TALE

It is very strange how a moral weakness in her child gives a mother
the same sense of yearning pity that she has for a bad bodily
infirmity. I wonder if that is how God feels for us when we go on year
by year doing the thing we hate? I think a mother gets to understand
many things about the dealings of God that are not plain to others.
For instance, how it helps me to say, “I believe in the forgiveness of
sins,” when I think of my poor little Fanny’s ugly fault. Though there
is some return of it nearly every day, what could I do but forgive?
But forgiveness that does not heal is like the wretched ointments
with which poor people dress their wounds. In one thing I know I
have not done well; I have hardly said a word to John about the poor
little girlie’s failing, though it has troubled me constantly for nearly a
year. But I think he suspects there is something wrong; we never talk
quite freely about our shy pretty Fanny. Perhaps that is one reason
for it. She is such a nervous timid little being, and looks so
bewitching when the long lashes droop, the tender mouth quivers,
and the colour comes and goes in the soft cheek, that we are shy of
exposing, even to each other, the faults we see in our graceful fragile
little girl. Perhaps neither of us quite trusts the other to deal with
Fanny, and to use the knife sparingly.
But this state of things must not go on: it is a miserable thing to
write down, but I cannot believe a word the child says! And the evil is
increasing. Only now and then used Fanny to be detected in what
we called a fib, but now the terrible doubt lest that little mouth may
be at any moment uttering lies takes the delight out of life, and
accounts for the pale looks which give my kind husband so much
concern.
For example, only within the last day or two I have noticed the
following and other such examples:—
“Fanny, did you remember to give my message to cook?”
“Yes, mother.”
“And what did she say?”
“That she wouldn’t be able to make any jam to-day because the
fruit had not come.”
I went into the kitchen shortly after, and found cook stirring the
contents of a brass pan, and, sad to say, I asked no questions. It
was one of Fanny’s circumstantial statements of the kind I have had
most reason to doubt. Did she lie because she was afraid to own
that she had forgotten? Hardly so: knowing the child’s sensitive
nature, we have always been careful not to visit her small
misdemeanours with any punishment whenever she “owned up.”
And then, cowardice would hardly cause her to invent so reasonable
an answer for cook. Again:
“Did you meet Mrs. Fleming’s children?”
“Oh, yes, mother! and Berty was so rude! He pushed Dotty off the
curb-stone!”
Nurse, who was sitting by the fire with baby, raised her eyebrows
in surprise, and I saw the whole thing was an invention. Another
more extraordinary instance:
“Mother, when we were in the park we met Miss Butler, just by the
fountain, you know; and she kissed me, and asked me how my
mother is”—said à-propos of nothing, in the most quiet, easy way.
I met Miss Butler this morning, and thanked her for the kind
inquiries she had been making through my little girl; and—“Do you
think Fanny grown?”
Miss Butler looked perplexed; Fanny was a great favourite of
hers, perhaps because of the loveliness of which her parents could
not pretend to be unaware.
“It is more than a month since I have seen the little maid, but I
shall look in soon, and gladden her mother’s heart with all the
praises my sweet Fan deserves!”
Little she knew that shame, and not pride, dyed my cheek; but I
could not disclose my Fanny’s sad secret to even so near a friend.
But to talk it out with John is a different matter. He ought to know.
And, certainly, men have more power than women to see into the
reasons and the bearings of things. There had I been thinking for
months in a desultory kind of way as to the why and wherefore of
this ingrained want of truthfulness in the child, and yet I was no
nearer the solution.
A new departure in the way of lying made me at last break the ice
with John; indeed, this was the only subject about which we had ever
had reserves.
“Mother, Hugh was so naughty at lessons this morning! He went
close up to Miss Clare while she was writing, nudged her elbow on
purpose, and made her spill the ink all over the table-cloth.”
I chanced to meet Miss Clare in the hall, and remarked that I
heard she had found Hugh troublesome this morning.
“Troublesome? Not at all; he was quite industrious and obedient.”
I said nothing about the ink, but went straight to the schoolroom to
find the table neat as Miss Clare always leaves it, and no sign of
even a fresh inkspot. What possessed the child? This inveterate and
inventive untruthfulness was like a form of madness. I sat in dismay
for an hour or more, not thinking, but stunned by this new idea—that
the child was not responsible for her words; and yet, could it be so?
None of our children were so merry at play, so intelligent at lessons.
Well, I would talk it over with John without the loss of another day.
“John, I am miserable about Fanny. Do you know the child tells

fibs constantly?”
“Call them lies; an ugly thing deserves an ugly name. What sort of
lies? What tempts her to lie?”
John did not seem surprised. Perhaps he knew more of this
misery than I supposed.
“That’s the thing! Her fi—lies are so uncalled-for, so
unreasonable, that I do not know how to trust her.”
“Unreasonable? You mean her tales don’t hang together; that’s a
common case with liars. You know the saying—‘Liars should have
good memories’?”
“Don’t call the poor child a liar, John; I believe she is more to be
pitied than blamed. What I mean is, you can’t find rhyme or reason
for the lies she tells.” And I gave my husband a few instances like
those I have written above.
“Very extraordinary! There’s a hint of malice in the Hugh and the
ink-bottle tale, and a hint of cowardice in that about the jam; but for
the rest, they are inventions pure and simple, with neither rhyme nor
reason, as you say.”
“I don’t believe a bit in the malice. I was going to correct her for
telling an unkind tale about Hugh, but you know how she hangs on
her brother, and she told her tale with the most innocent face. I am
convinced there was no thought of harming him.”
“Are you equally sure that she never says what is false to cover a
fault; in fact, out of cowardice?”
“No; I think I have found her out more than once in ingenious
subterfuges. You know what a painfully nervous child she is. For
instance, I found the other day a blue cup off that cabinet, with
handle gone, hidden behind the woodwork. Fanny happened to
come in at the moment, and I asked her if she knew who had broken
it.
“‘No, mother, I don’t know, but I think it was Mary, when she was
dusting the cabinet; indeed, I’m nearly sure I heard a crash.’
“But the child could not meet my eye, and there was a sort of
blenching as of fear about her.”
“But, as a rule, you do not notice these symptoms?”
“As a rule, poor Fanny’s tarradiddles come out in the most quiet,
easy way, with all the boldness of innocence; and even when she is
found out, and the lie brought home to her, she looks bewildered
rather than convicted.”
“My dear, I wish you would banish the whole tribe of foolish and
harmful expressions whose tendency is to make light of sin. Call a
spade a spade. A ‘tarradiddle’ is a thing to make merry over; a fib
you smile and wink at; but a lie—why, the soul is very far gone from
original righteousness that can endure the name, even while guilty of
the thing.”
“That’s just it; I cannot endure to apply so black a name to the
failings of our child; for, do you know, I begin to suspect that poor
little Fanny does it unawares—does not know in the least that she
has departed from the fact. I have had a horrible dread upon me
from time to time that her defect is a mental, and not a moral one.
That she has not the clear perception of true and false with which the
most of us are blessed.”
“Whe—ew!” from John; but his surprise was feigned. I could see
now that he had known what was going on all the time, and had said
nothing, because he had nothing to say; in his heart he agreed with
me about our lovely child. The defect arose from a clouded
intelligence, which showed itself in this way only, now; but how dare
we look forward? Now I saw why poor John was so anxious to have
the offence called by the blackest moral name. He wished to save us
from the suspicion of an evil—worse because less open to cure. We
looked blankly at each other, John trying to carry it all off with a light
air, but his attempt was a conspicuous failure.
I forgot to say that my sister Emma was staying with us, the
‘clever woman of the family,’ who was “going in” for all sorts of
things, to come out, we believed, at the top of her profession as a
lady doctor. She had taken no part in the talk about Fanny—rather
tiresome of her, as I wanted to know what she thought; but now,
while we were vainly trying to hide from each other our dismay, she
broke out into a long low laugh, which, to say the least of it, seemed
a little unfeeling.
“Oh, you absurd parents! You are too good and earnest, and
altogether too droll! Why in the world, instead of sitting there with
blank eyes—conjuring up bogeys to frighten each other—why don’t
you look the thing in the face, and find out by the light of modern
thought what really ails Fan? Poor pet! ‘Save me from my parents!’ is
a rendering which might be forgiven her.”
“Then you don’t think there’s any mental trouble?” we cried in a
breath, feeling already as if a burden were lifted, and we could
straighten our backs and walk abroad.
“‘Mental trouble?’ What nonsense! But there, I believe all you
parents are alike. Each pair thinks their own experiences entirely
new; their own children the first of the kind born into the world. Now,
a mind that had had any scientific training would see at once that
poor Fanny’s lies—if I must use John’s terrible bad word—
inventions, I should have called them, are symptomatic, as you
rightly guessed, Annie, of certain brain conditions; but of brain
disease—oh, no! Why, foolish people, don’t you see you are
entertaining an angel unawares? This vice of ‘lying’ you are
mourning over is the very quality that goes to the making of poets!”
“Poets and angels are well in their places,” said John, rather
crossly, “but my child must speak the truth. What she states for a
fact, I must know to be a fact, according to the poor common-sense
view of benighted parents.”
“And there is your work as parents. Teach her truth, as you would
teach her French or sums—a little to-day, a little more to-morrow,
and every day a lesson. Only as you teach her the nature of truth will
the gift she has be effectual. But I really should like to know what is
your notion about truth—are we born with it, or educated up to it?”
“I am not sure that we care to be experimented upon, and held up
to the world as blundering parents,” said I; “perhaps we had better
keep our crude notions to ourselves.” I spoke rather tartly, I know, for
I was more vexed for John than for myself. That he should be held
up to ridicule in his own house—by a sister of mine, too!
“Now I have vexed you both. How horrid I am! And all the time, as
I watch you with the children, I don’t feel good enough to tie your
shoes. Don’t I say to myself twenty times a day, ‘After all, the insight
and love parents get from above is worth a thousandfold more than
science has to teach’?”
“Nay, Emma, ’tis we who have to apologise for being jealous of
science—that’s the fact—and quick to take offence. Make it up,
there’s a good girl! and let Annie and me have the benefit of your
advice about our little girl, for truly we are in a fog.”
“Well, I think you were both right in considering that her failing had
two sources: moral cowardice the first; she does something wrong,
or wrong in her eyes, and does not tell—why?”
“Aye, there’s the difficulty; why is she afraid to tell the truth? I may
say that we have never punished her, or ever looked coldly on her
for any fault but this of prevarication. The child is so timid that we
feared severe measures might make the truth the more difficult.”
“There I think you are right. And we have our fingers on one of the
weak places: Fanny tells lies out of sheer fear—moral weakness;
causeless it may be, but there it is. And I’m not so sure that it is
causeless; she is always in favour for good behaviour, gentleness,
obedience, and that kind of thing; indeed, this want of veracity
seems to me her one fault. Now, don’t you think the fear of having
her parents look coldly on her and think less well of her may be, to
such a timid, clinging child, a great temptation to hide a fault?”
“Very likely; but one does not see how to act. Would you pass
over her faults altogether without inquiry or notice?”
“I’m afraid you must use the knife there boldly, for that is the
tenderest way in the end. Show little Fan the depth of your love—
that there is no fault you cannot forgive in her, but that the one fault
which hurts you most is, not to hear the exact truth.”
“I see. Suppose she has broken a valuable vase and hides the
fact, I am to unearth her secret—not, as I am very much inclined to
do, let it lie buried for fear of involving her in worse falsehood, but
show her the vase and tax her with hiding it.”
“And her immediate impulse will be to say, ‘I didn’t.’ No; make
sure of your ground, then show her the pieces; say the vase was
precious, but you do not mind about that; the thing that hurts you is
that she could not trust her mother. I can imagine one of the lovely
scenes you mothers have with your children too good for outsiders to
look in upon.”
The tears came into my eyes, for I could imagine the scene too. I
could see the way to draw my child closer and closer by always
forgiving, always comprehending and loving her, and always
protesting against the falsehood which would rise between us. I was
lost in a delicious reverie—how I might sometime come to show her
that her mother’s ever-ready forgiveness was but a faint picture of
what some one calls the “all-forgiving gentleness of God,” when I
heard John break in:—
“Yes, I can see that if we both make a point of free and tender
forgiveness of every fault, on condition that she owns up, we may in
time cure her of lying out of sheer fear. But I don’t see that she gets
the principle of truth any more. The purely inventive lies go on as
before, and the child is not to be trusted.”
“‘Purely inventive,’ there you have it. Don’t you see? The child is
full of imagination, and figures to herself endless scenes, evolved
like the German student’s camel. The thousand and one things
which might happen are so real to her that the child is, as you said,
bewildered; hardly able to distinguish the one which has happened.
Now, it’s perfect nonsense to lament over this as a moral failing—it is
a want of mental balance; not that any quality is deficient, but that
her conceptive power runs away with her perceptive; she sees the
many things that might be more readily than the thing that is. Doesn’t
she delight in fairy tales?”
“Well, to tell the truth, we have thought them likely to foster her
failing, and have kept her a good deal on a diet of facts.”
“I shouldn’t wonder if you are wrong there. An imperious
imagination like Fanny’s demands its proper nourishment. Let her
have her daily meal: ‘The Babes in the Wood,’ ‘The Little Match-Girl,’
‘The Snow-Maiden,’ tales and legends half-historic, above all, the
lovely stories of the Bible; whatever she can figure to herself and live
over and over; but not twaddling tales of the daily doings of children
like herself, whether funny or serious. The child wants an opening
into the larger world where all things are possible and where
beautiful things are always happening. Give her in some form this
necessary food, and her mind will be so full of delicious imaginings,
that she will be under no temptation to invent about the
commonplaces of every-day life.”
My husband laughed: “My dear Emma, you must let us do our
best with the disease; the cure is too wild! ‘Behold, this dreamer
cometh!’—think of sending the child through life with this label.”
“Your quotation is unfortunate, and you have not heard me out. I
do believe that to starve her imagination would be to do real wrong
to the child. But, at the same time, you must diligently cultivate the
knowledge and the love of the truth. Now, the truth is no more than
the fact as it is; and ’tis my belief that Fanny’s falsehoods come
entirely from want of perception of the fact through pre-occupation of
mind.”
“Well, what must we do?”
“Why, give her daily, or half-a-dozen times a day, lessons in truth.
Send her to the window: ‘Look out, Fanny, and tell me what you see.’
She comes back, having seen a cow where there is a horse. She
looks again and brings a true report, and you teach her that it is not
true to say the thing which is not. You send a long message to the
cook, requiring the latter to write it down as she receives it and send
you up the slate; if it is all right, the kiss Fanny gets is for speaking
the truth: gradually, she comes to revere truth, and distinguishes
between the facts of life where truth is all in all, and the wide realms
of make-believe, where fancy may have free play.”
“I do believe you are right, Emma; most of Fanny’s falsehoods
seem to be told in such pure innocence, I should not wonder if they
do come out of the kingdom of make-believe. At any rate, we’ll try
Emma’s specific—shall we, John?”
“Indeed, yes; and carefully, too. It seems to me to be reasonable,
the more so, as we don’t find any trace of malice in Fanny’s
misleading statements.”
“Oh, if there were, the treatment would be less simple; first, you
should deal with the malice, and then teach the love of truth in daily
lessons. That is the mistake so many people make. They think their
children are capable of loving and understanding truth by nature,
which they are not. The best parents have to be on the watch to
hinder all opportunities of misstatement.”
“And now, that you may see how much we owe you, let me tell
you of the painful example always before our eyes, which has done
more than anything to make me dread Fanny’s failing. It is an open
secret, I fear, but do not let it go further out of this house. You know
Mrs. Casterton, our friend’s wife? It is a miserable thing to say, but
you cannot trust a word she utters. She tells you, Miss So-and-So
has a bad kind of scarlet fever, and even while she is speaking you
know it is false; husband, children, servants, neighbours, none can
be blind to the distressing fact, and she has acquired the sort of
simpering manner a woman gets when she loses respect and self-
respect. What if Fanny had grown up like her?”
“Poor woman! and this shame might have been spared her, had
her parents been alive to their duty.”
CHAPTER VII
ABILITY
“Be sure you call at Mrs. Milner’s, Fred, for the address of her
laundress.”
“All right, mother!” And Fred was half-way down the path before
his mother had time to add a second injunction. A second? Nay, a
seventh, for this was already the sixth time of asking; and Mrs.
Bruce’s half-troubled expression showed she placed little faith in her
son’s “All right.”
“I don’t know what to do with Fred, doctor; I am not in the least
sure he will do my message. Indeed, to speak honestly, I am sure he
will not. This is a trifling matter; but when the same thing happens
twenty times a day—when his rule is to forget everything he is
desired to remember—it makes us anxious about the boy’s future.”
Dr. Maclehose drummed meditatively on the table, and put his lips
into form for a whistle. This remark of Mrs. Bruce’s was “nuts” to him.
He had assisted, professionally, at the appearance of the nine young
Bruces, and the family had no more esteemed friend and general
confidant. For his part, he liked the Bruces. Who could help it? The
parents intelligent and genial, the young folk well looking, well grown,
and open-hearted, they were just the family to make friends. All the
same, the doctor found in the Bruces occasion to mount his pet
hobby:—“My Utopia is the land where the family doctor has leave to
play schoolmaster to the parents. To think of a fine brood like the
young Bruces running to waste in half-a-dozen different ways
through the invincible ignorance of father and mother! Nice people,
too!”
For seventeen years Dr. Maclehose had been deep in the family
counsels, yet never till now had he seen the way to put in his oar
anent any question of bringing up the children. Wherefore he
drummed on the table, and pondered:—“Fair and softly, my good
fellow; fair and softly! Make a mess of it now, and it’s my last chance;
hit the nail on the head, and, who knows?”
“Does the same sort of thing go on about his school work?”
“Precisely; he is always in arrears. He has forgotten to take a
book, or to write an exercise, or learn a lesson; in fact, his school life
is a record of forgets and penalties.”
“Worse than that Dean of Canterbury, whose wife would make
him keep account of his expenditure; and thus stood the entries for
one week:—‘Gloves, 5s.; Forgets, £4, 15s.’ His writing was none too
legible, so his wife, looking over his shoulder, cried, ‘Faggots!
Faggots! What in the world! Have you been buying wood?’ ‘No, my
dear; those are forgets;’—his wife gave it up.”
“A capital story; but what is amusing in a Dean won’t help a boy to
get through the world, and we are both uneasy about Fred.”
“He is one of the ‘Boys’ Eleven,’ isn’t he?”
“Oh, yes, and is wild about it: and there, I grant you, he never
forgets. It’s, ‘Mother, get cook to give us an early dinner: we must be
on the field by two!’ ‘Don’t forget to have my flannels clean for Friday,
will you mumsy?’ he knows when to coax. ‘Subscription is due on
Thursday, mother!’ and this, every day till he gets the money.”
“I congratulate you, my dear friend, there’s nothing seriously
amiss with the boy’s brain.”
“Good heavens, doctor! Whoever thought there was? You take my
breath away!”
“Well, well, I didn’t mean to frighten you, but, don’t you see, it
comes to this: either it’s a case of chronic disease, open only to
medical treatment, if to any; or it is just a case of defective
education, a piece of mischief bred of allowance which his parents
cannot too soon set themselves to cure.”
Mrs. Bruce was the least in the world nettled at this serious view
of the case. It was one thing for her to write down hard things of her
eldest boy, the pride of her heart, but a different matter for another to
take her au sérieux.
“But, my dear doctor, are you not taking a common fault of youth
too seriously? It’s tiresome that he should forget so, but give him a
year or two, and he will grow out of it, you’ll see. Time will steady
him. It’s just the volatility of youth, and for my part I don’t like to see a
boy with a man’s head on his shoulders.” The doctor resumed his
drumming on the table. He had put his foot in it already, and
confounded his own foolhardiness.
“Well, I daresay you are right in allowing something on the score
of youthful volatility; but we old doctors, whose business it is to study
the close connection between mind and matter, see our way to only
one conclusion, that any failing of mind or body, left to itself, can do
no other than strengthen.”
“Have another cup of tea, doctor? I am not sure that I understand.
I know nothing about science. You mean that Fred will become more
forgetful and less dependable the older he gets?”
“I don’t know that I should have ventured to put it so baldly, but
that’s about the fact. But, of course, circumstances may give him a
bent in the other direction, and Fred may develop into such a careful
old sobersides that his mother will be ashamed of him.”
“Don’t laugh at me, doctor; you make the whole thing too serious
for a laughing matter.” To which there was no answer, and there was
silence in the room for the space of fully three minutes, while the two
pondered.
“You say,” in an imperious tone, “that ‘a fault left to itself must
strengthen.’ What are we to do? His father and I wish, at any rate, to
do our duty.” Her ruffled maternal plumage notwithstanding, Mrs.
Bruce was in earnest, all her wits on the alert. “Come, I’ve scored
one!” thought the doctor; and then, with respectful gravity, which
should soothe any woman’s amour propre,
“You ask a question not quite easy to answer. But allow me, first,
to try and make the principle plain to you: that done, the question of
what to do settles itself. Fred never forgets his cricket or other
pleasure engagements? No? And why not? Because his interest is
excited; therefore his whole attention is fixed on the fact to be
remembered. Now, as a matter of fact, what you have regarded with
full attention, it is next to impossible to forget. First get Fred to fix his
attention on the matter in hand, and you may be sure he won’t forget
it.”
“That may be very true; but how can I make a message to Mrs.
Milner as interesting to him as the affairs of his club?”
“Ah! There you have me. Had you begun with Fred at a year old
the thing would have settled itself. The habit would have been
formed.”
To the rescue, Mrs. Bruce’s woman’s wit:—“I see; he must have
the habit of paying attention, so that he will naturally take heed to
what he is told, whether he cares about the matter or not.”
“My dear madam, you’ve hit it; all except the word ‘naturally.’ At
present Fred is in a delightful state of nature in this and a few other
respects. But the educational use of habit is to correct nature. If
parents would only see this fact, the world would become a huge
reformatory, and the next generation, or, at any rate, the third, would
dwell in the kingdom of heaven as a regular thing, and not by fits and
starts, and here and there, which is the best that happens to us.”
“I’m not sure I see what you mean; but,” said this persistent
woman, “to return to this habit of attention which is to reform my Fred
—do try and tell me what to do. You gentlemen are so fond of going
off into general principles, while we poor women can grasp no more
than a practical hint or two to go on with. My boy would be cut up to
know how little his fast friend, the doctor, thinks of him!”
“‘Poor women,’ truly! and already you have thrown me with two
staggering buffets. My theories have no practical outcome, and, I
think little of Fred, who has been my choice chum ever since he left
off draperies! It remains for the vanquished to ‘behave pretty.’ Pray,
ma’am, what would you like me to say next?”
“To ‘habit,’ doctor, to ‘habit’; and don’t talk nonsense while the
precious time is going. We’ll suppose that Fred is just twelve months
old to-day. Now, if you please, tell me how I’m to make him begin to
pay attention. And, by the way, why in the world didn’t you talk to me
about it when the child really was young?”
“I don’t remember that you asked me; and who would be pert
enough to think of schooling a young mother? Not I, at any rate.
Don’t I know that every mother of a first child is infallible, and knows
more about children than all the old doctors in creation? But,
supposing you had asked me, I should have said—Get him each day
to occupy himself a little longer with one plaything than he did the
day before. He plucks a daisy, gurgles over it with glee, and then in
an instant it drops from the nerveless grasp. Then you take it up, and
with the sweet coaxings you mothers know how to employ, get him
to examine it, in his infant fashion, for a minute, two minutes, three
whole minutes at a time.”
“I see; fix his thoughts on one thing at a time, and for as long as
you can, whether on what he sees or what he hears. You think if you
go on with that sort of thing with a child from his infancy he gets
accustomed to pay attention?”
“Not a doubt of it; and you may rely on it that what is called ability
—a different thing from genius, mind you, or even talent—ability is
simply the power of fixing the attention steadily on the matter in
hand, and success in life turns upon this cultivated power far more
than on any natural faculty. Lay a case before a successful barrister,
an able man of business, notice how he absorbs all you say; tell your
tale as ill as you like, he keeps the thread, straightens the tangle,
and by the time you have finished, has the whole matter spread out
in order under his mind’s eye. Now comes in talent, or genius, or
what you will, to deal with the facts he has taken in. But attention is
the attribute of the trained intellect, without which genius makes
shots in the dark.”
“But, don’t you think attention itself is a natural faculty, or talent, or
whatever we should call it?”
“Not a bit of it; it is entirely the result of training. A man may be
born with some faculty or talent for figures, or drawing, or music, but
attention is not a faculty at all; it is simply the power of bending such
faculties as one has to the work in hand; it is a key to success within
the reach of every one, but the power to turn it comes of training.
Circumstances may compel a man to train himself, but he does so at
the cost of great effort, and the chances are ten to one against his
making the effort. For the child, on the other hand, who has been
trained by his parents to fix his thoughts, all is plain sailing. He will
succeed, not a doubt of it.”
“But I thought school-work, Latin and mathematics, and those
sorts of things, should give this kind of intellectual training?”
“They should; but it’s the merest chance whether the right spring
is touched, and from what you say of Fred’s school-work, I should
say it was not touched in his case. ’Tis incredible how much solid
learning a boy will contrive to let slip by him instead of into him! No;
I’m afraid you must tackle the difficulty yourself. It would be a
thousand pities to let a fine fellow like Fred run to waste.”
“What can I do?”
“Well, we must begin where we are; Fred can attend, and
therefore remember: and he remembers what interests him. Now, to
return to your question, How are you to make a message to Mrs.
Milner as interesting to him as the affairs of his cricket club? There is
no interest in the thing itself; you must put interest into it from
without. There are a hundred ways of doing this: try one, and when
that is used up, turn to another. Only, with a boy of Fred’s age, you
cannot form the habit of attention as you could with a child. You can
only aid and abet; give the impulse; the training he must do for
himself.”
“Make it a little plainer, doctor; I have not yet reduced your
remarks to the practical level of something I can do.”
“No? Well, Fred must train himself, and you must feed him with
motives. Run over with him what we have been saying about
attention. Let him know how the land lies; that you cannot help him,
but that if he wants to make a man of himself he must make himself
attend and remember. Tell him it will be a stand-up fight, for this habit
is contrary to nature. He will like that; ’tis boy nature to show fight,
and the bigger and blacker you make the other side, the more will he
like to pitch in. When I was a boy I had to fight this very battle for
myself, and I’ll tell you what I did. I stuck up a card every week,
divided down the middle. One side was for ‘Remembers’; the other
side for ‘Forgets.’ I took myself to task every night—the very effort
was a help—and put a stroke for every ‘Remember’ and ‘Forget’ of
the day. I scored for every ‘Remember,’ and ‘t’other fellow’ for every
‘Forget.’ You don’t know how exciting it got. If by Thursday I had
thirty-three ‘Remembers’ and he thirty-six ‘Forgets’ it behoved me to
look alive; it was not only that ‘Forget’ might win the game, which
was up on Saturday night, but unless ‘Remember’ scored ten in
advance, the game was ‘drawn’—hardly a remove from lost.”
“That’s delicious! But, I wish, doctor, you would speak to Fred
yourself. A word from you would go a long way.”
“I’ll look out for a chance, but an outsider cannot do much;
everything rests with the boy himself, and his parents.”
CHAPTER VIII
POOR MRS. JUMEAU!

“Now, young people, when I go out, let there be no noise in the
house; your mother is ill, so let her little folk be thoughtful for her!”
“Oh, is mother sick again?” said little Ned with falling
countenance.
“Poor Neddie! he doesn’t like mother to be ill. We all have to be so
quiet, and, then, there’s nowhere to be! It isn’t like home when
mother isn’t about.”
“Mary is right,” chimed in Charlie, the eldest of the family; “if I
were big enough, I should run away and go to sea, mother’s so often
bad! But, father, isn’t it funny? Yesterday she was quite well, and
doing all sorts of horrid things, helping the maids to clear out
cupboards; and now, I dare say, she is too ill to move or speak, and
to-morrow, perhaps, she’ll be our jolly mother again, able to go
shrimping with us, or anything else.”
“That’s because your dear mother has no self, Charlie, boy; no
sooner does she feel a bit better than she does more than she can
for us all, and then she is knocked up again. I wish we could teach
her to be selfish, for our sakes as well as hers, for to have her with
us is better than anything she can do for us; eh, Charlie?”
“Indeed, yes! We’d take lots of care of her if she’d let us. But her
illness must be queer. You know when we had scarlet fever, father?
Well, for weeks and weeks, after the fever was gone, I had no more
strength than a tom-tit; and you know I could not go about and do
things, however unselfish I was (but I’m not, though). That’s what is
so queer. Do you think Dr. Prideau understands about mother?”
“Much better than you do, depend upon it, Charlie; but I confess
your mother’s illness is puzzling to all of us. There, children, off with
you! I must write a letter or two before I go out.”
Mr. Jumeau forgot to write his letters, and sat long, with his head
between his hands, pondering the nature of his wife’s ailments. What
Charlie had put with a boy’s rude bluntness had already occurred to
him in a dim way. Mrs. Jumeau’s illness certainly did not deprive her
of bodily vigour; the attacks came on suddenly, left her as suddenly,
and left her apparently in perfect health and gay spirits. And this was
the more surprising, because, while an “attack” lasted, the extreme
prostration, pallid countenance, and blue lips of the sufferer were
painful to behold. Besides, his wife was so absolutely truthful by
nature, so unselfish and devoted to her husband and family, that it
was as likely she should be guilty of flagrant crime as that she
should simulate illness. This sort of thing had gone on for several
years. Mr. Jumeau had spent his substance on many physicians,
and with little result. “No organic disease.” “Overdone.” “Give her
rest, nourishing food, frequent change of scene and thought; no
excitement; Nature will work the cure in time—in time, my good sir.
We must be patient.” This sort of thing he had heard again and
again; doctors did not differ, if that were any consolation.
He went up to have a last look at the sufferer. There she lay,
stretched out with limbs composed, and a rigidity of muscle terribly
like death. A tear fell on the cold cheek of his wife as Mr. Jumeau
kissed it, and he went out aching with a nameless dread, which, if
put into words, would run—some day, and she will wake no more out
of this death-like stillness.
And she? She felt the tear, heard the sigh, noted the dejected
footfalls of her husband, and her weak pulse stirred with a movement
of—was it joy? But the “attack” was not over; for hours she lay there
rigid, speechless, with closed eyes, taking no notice of the gentle
opening of the door now and then when one or another came to see
how she was. Were not her family afraid to leave her alone? No; we
get used to anything, and the Jumeaus, servants and children, were
well used to these “attacks” in the mistress of the house. Dr. Prideau
came, sent by her husband, and used even violent measures to
restore her, but to no effect; she was aware of these efforts, but was
not aware that she resisted them effectually.
Business engagements were pressing, and it was late before Mr.
Jumeau, anxious as he was, was able to return to his wife. It was
one of those lovely warm evenings we sometimes get late in May,
when even London windows are opened to let in the breath of the
spring. Nearly at the end of the street he heard familiar strains from
Parsifal, played with the vigour Wagner demands. His wife? It could
be no one else. As he drew nearer, her exquisite touch was
unmistakable. The attack was over, then? Strange to say, his delight
was not unmixed. What were these mysterious attacks, and how
were they brought on?
The evening was delightful. Mrs. Jumeau was in the gayest
spirits: full of tenderness towards her husband, of motherly thought
for her children, now fast asleep; ready to talk brightly on any subject
except the attack of the morning; any allusion to this she would laugh
off as a matter of too little consequence to be dwelt upon. The next
morning she was down bright and early, having made up her mind to
a giro with the children. They did not go a-shrimping, according to
Charlie’s forecast, but Kew was decided upon as “just the thing,” and
a long day in the gardens failed to tire mother or children.
“I must get to the bottom of this,” thought Mr. Jumeau.
“Your question is embarrassing; if I say, Mrs. Jumeau is suffering

from hysteria, you will most likely get a wrong notion and discredit
my words.”
Mr. Jumeau’s countenance darkened. “I should still be inclined to
trust the evidence of my senses, and believe that my wife is
unfeignedly ill.”
“Exactly as I expected: simulated ailments and hysteria are
hopelessly confounded; but no wonder; hysteria is a misnomer, used
in the vaguest way, not even confined to women. Why, I knew a man,

Muslim Women in Austria and Germany Doing and Undoing Gender Making Gender Differences and Hierarchies Relevant or Irrelevant Constanze Volkmann

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Muslim Women in Austria and Germany Doing and Undoing Gender Making Gender Differences and Hierarchies Relevant or Irrelevant Constanze Volkmann

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Available Formats

Muslim Women in Austria and Germany

Doing and Undoing Gender Making

Women Doing Intimacy: Gender, Family and Modernity in

Women, Men and Language: A Sociolinguistic Account of

Psychology of Women and Gender Miriam Liss

Gender Regulation, Violence and Social Hierarchies in

Transformations : women, gender and psychology Third

Writing African Women Gender Popular Culture and

Doing Fandom: Lessons from Football in Gender,

Affirmative Aesthetics and Wilful Women: Gender, Space

Muslim Women in Austria

Muslim Women in Austria

Doctoral dissertation at the Bremen International Graduate School of Social Sciences

Dissertation defence on November 3rd, 2017

ISBN 978-3-658-23951-0 ISBN 978-3-658-23952-7 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018958469

I am deeply grateful to my wonderful family and friends for their support

List of figures ..................................................................................................... XI

2 Muslim population in Austria and Germany: Its origins, current

3 Theoretical approaches to gender ........................................................... 29

4 Integrating the theoretical perspectives: A comprehensive

5 Review of the literature on the role of gender among Muslim

6 Research question and methodological approach:

7 How Muslim women in Austria and Germany construct and

7.3.5 Living gender equity: Islam as a tool to integrate different

8 Discussion ................................................................................................ 233

References ......................................................................................................... 255

Figure 1: Gender in context model .............................................................. 49

Table 1: The intervieweesʼ background characteristics –

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019

argued that “French feminist organizations often hold neo-Orientalist positions,

of the population. In so far, he critically reflects on the societal discourse on

Muslim population in Austria and Germany

2.1 Ascription vs. identification in defining “Muslim”: The mingling of

© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden GmbH, part of Springer Nature 2019

cribed (Spielhaus, 2013b): Up to the mid-1990s, public discourses focused on

framing Islam as a threat, for instance, increased from 9,4% in 2000/2001 to

writing in an ascribing way on ‘the Muslims’ reflects the author’s position as a

2.2 Historical, demographic and religious background

The recruitment of immigrant workers (so-called “Gastarbeiter”) from South

further differentiate between different schools of religious jurisprudence, such as

2.3 Institutional and legal context

MRS. SEDLEY’S TALE

“John, I am miserable about Fanny. Do you know the child tells

POOR MRS. JUMEAU!

“Your question is embarrassing; if I say, Mrs. Jumeau is suffering

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