American Ethnologist !
Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and
Conversion in the New Europe. Esra Ozy urek.
Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2015. ix + 171 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12183
ALISA PERKINS
Western Michigan University
Every year thousands of ethnic Germans convert to Islam.
This is a surprisingly large number, yet the rate is compa-
rable to those found across Europe. Esra Ozy urek
traces
the social and political consequences of conversion in
the context of the extreme scapegoating, stigmatization,
and marginalization experienced by Muslims in Germany.
Through a grounded and fine-grained analysis situated
urek
mainly in Berlin, Ozy explores conversion as a poten-
tially redemptive processes of boundary crossing in which
ethnic German converts creatively resignify the historically
opposed categories German and Muslim in a way that
could widen the borders around national belonging. Yet,
urek
as Ozy discovers through her fieldwork, part of the
process of becoming Muslim for some ethnic Germans also
involves a self-conscious effort to distance themselves from
immigrant Muslims and a denigration of what is seen as the
culturally specific aspects of immigrant Muslims religious
practices. This tendency to dissociate from immigrant
co-religionists significantly limits the counterhegemonic
potential of conversion as culture work and also contributes
to reifying the racial and religious hierarchies that keep
disenfranchised Turkish and Arab Muslims firmly in their
places.
urek
In five richly textured chapters, Ozy shows how
converts efforts to give Islam a German face (p. 24)
have mixed implications for German prospects of living
together with difference. On the most personal level,
urek
Ozy features life stories detailing how a quest for
spirituality leads some ethnic Germans into intimate
relationships with immigrant Muslims. Yet these same
German converts also tend to preserve segregationist
residential patterns that mainly keep them living apart
from Muslim immigrant populations. While partially
mediated by their relatively higher social standing and
because they do not always appear Muslim, ethnic Ger-
man converts also face stigmatization and scapegoating.
urek
Ozy shows how ethnic Germans experience their
marginalization as a call to political engagement. Converts
disproportionally take on leadership positions in national
organizations, internalize responsibility for promoting the
rights of Muslims, and strive to defend Islam in the public
eye.
The institutions founded by converts stress Ger-
man language as the medium for religious education
and promote a nonsectarian mode of interpretation and
798
practice that is seen as free of culture and tradition. Some
of these institutions attract equal numbers of converts
and born Muslims, thus offering sites for interchange and
cooperation across racial and ethnic lines. Converts and
born Muslims also come together in Salafi organizations.
urek
Ozy analyzes Salafism in Germany as a postnational
form of practice that may destabilize some of the hierar-
chies perpetuated by the other ethnic German-inclusive
congregations she studies. In offering portraits of German
urek
Salafis, Ozy importantly helps decouple Salafism from
overwhelmingly negative associations found in media and
some scholarly accounts.
Notwithstanding the Salafi examples, for many eth-
nic German converts, creating a German face for Islam
includes unearthing a core German essential identity that
is discovered to be reflective of universal human values,
including an open-ended form of deism and tolerance for
difference. In these discourses, Germany is imagined to
offer a neutral public space in which a version of Islam
can develop, which would be free of the problematic
cultural and traditional accretions that mar the practice
urek
of immigrant Muslims. Ozy notes that despite the
stress on seemingly universal reason in practice [ . . . .] the
German or European Islam that is being promoted comes
across as best suited to the rational European mind, and
unsuited to Oriental minds muddled by oppressive cultures
and traditions. It thus ends up being Europeanist and
Eurocentric (pp. 4950). For Ozy urek,
this conception
of German Islam depends on a paradox of purification
centered on the mistaken notion that it is possible for
individuals to stand apart from their societies and discern
the lines between religion from culture within them in an
ureks
unbiased way. Ozy work capturing how convert Mus-
lims use German nationalist scripts about cultural purity
to buttresses their social projects makes Being German,
Becoming Muslim as much an anthropology of secularism
as it is a study about Islam and Muslims.
Through examining the different ways that ethnic
converts embrace Islam while categorically rejecting the
majority immigrant Muslims living around them, Ozy urek
invites us to consider: Can we call converted Muslim
criticism of born Muslims and their traditions Islamopho-
urek
bia? (p. 3). In taking up this question, Ozy offers us
a productive vantage point from which to understand the
complex intersection of biological and cultural aspects of
anti-Muslim sentiment in Europe. Based on her reading of
German cultural history, Ozy urek
locates German Islam-
ophobia as a form of stigmatization that falls between a
biologically based anti-Semitism that searches for national
purity, and culturally based homophobia, in which differ-
ence is perceived as an individuals free choice to orient
against civilizational advance.
In a balanced style, the negative aspects of converts
exclusionary sentiments are offset by an analysis of the

social and cultural work they do to create a positive space
for Islam in Germany that is being carried out at the
boundaries between convert and immigrant communities.
urek
In a lighthearted section of book, Ozy describes how
Muslim youth from convert and immigrant backgrounds
work together to bring new, German-style experiences of
fun and enjoyment, including hip-hop culture, into Muslim
practice. One Muslim youth organization invited a convert
Muslim hip-hop artist to perform at its gathering. As the
celebrity figure took the stage, the organizations leaders
pleaded with the audience to remain still and silent during
the performance in order to maintain Muslim standards of
piety and modesty. This request proved nearly impossible
to meet because of the infectious nature of the music.
The confusion at the start of the show led to modification
of the leaderships stance, and in future performances
the constraints were partially removed, within acceptable
limits.
Being German, Becoming Muslim is a highly readable
ethnography that offers a significant contribution to a
range of different fields. In concise and clear language,
urek
Ozy provides readers with sufficient background
information to appreciate how her work advances schol-
arly debates on topics such as the dynamics of religious
conversion; the meaning and appeal of fundamentalism
and religious revival; the importance of race, ethnicity, and
religion to the construction of national identities; and the
formation of the public sphere in liberal secular societies.
It also offers new information about Salafism, the forma-
tion of ethnic and religious difference in post-Holocaust
Germany, and the integration of Muslims in Europe. It is
recommended for scholars across the disciplines, while
its compelling narrative style would make it an appealing
text to use in upper-level undergraduate and graduate
classrooms.
Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality. Dick
Houtman and Birgit Meyer, eds. New York: Fordham Univer-
sity Press, 2012. 482 pp.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12184
THOMAS J. CSORDAS
University of California, San Diego
Materiality is a theme that has captured the anthropolog-
ical imagination, and Things traces this theme by asking
how things and objects figure into an understanding of
religion and religious experience. In their introduction,
Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer assert that championing
materiality signals the need to pay urgent attention to a real,
material world of objects and a texture of lived, embodied
experience (p. 4). In relation to the issues taken up by the
Book Reviews ! American Ethnologist
contributors, however, there is less explicit attention to
embodiment than there is to objectswith exceptions, cor-
porality and bodily experience recede in the face of things
themselves. Nevertheless, both the materiality of things and
the materiality of our own bodies tell us something about
embodiment per se, that is, about the subjects of religion
who engage and deploy the objects in religion. I will inflect
my reading in this direction, considering the chapters
slightly outside the organization of the book into sections
on images and incarnations of the divine, sacred artifacts,
bodily fluids, religious habitation of public space, and
transformations of religious being in the world by digital
technologies.
Among the framing themes that arise are the op-
positions of spiritualmaterial, idealismmaterialism,
materialityimmateriality, and transcendence
immanence, as well as the distinction between when
the material domain is regarded as intrinsically sacred
and when the sacred becomes materially incarnate. Such
distinctions are not only empirical but are also inherent in
scholarly conceptualizations of religion. Thus, the editors
emphasize that the problematic of idolatry and fetishism
critical to earlier studies of religion requires the distinction
between spirit and matter as well as an ideology of an
appropriate relation between them. This observation is
central to the recognition that the concern with materiality
in the study of religion is intimately connected with the
denigration of materiality in Protestantism. The deep
Protestant ambivalence is epitomized in the theological
debates among Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin about the
material presence of the divine in the Eucharist (Ernst
van den Hemel). The problematization of materiality
was inherent in the Victorian-era formation of the social
sciences characterized by an abstract materialism that was
heir to the abstraction of Protestant dissent (Peter Pels). It
continues to be a defining practice for some Protestants,
such as contemporary apostolic Christians in Zimbabwe
who avoid the Bible as if it were an idol and do not have
church buildings; for these apostolic Christians, medicines
for ritual healing are regarded as words rather than things
even though paradoxically they take the form of water,
honey, or pebbles (Matthew Engelke).
Several chapters focus on images of the divine. The
contribution on Buddhism is primarily an account of
development among Europeans of the idea of the Buddha
based on representations considered as idols or things,
whose devotees were idolaters or worshipers of things,
with recognition of the Buddha as a historical figure and
religious leader coming only as recently as the 19th century
(Donald S. Lopez, Jr.). Idols are understood as condensa-
tions of radical evil in images that must be destroyed, along
with those who believe in them (p. 115), although it is pos-
sible to identify a critique and inversion of the binary pair
idolatryiconoclasm as in the works of Friedrich Nietzsche,
799
American Ethnologist ! Volume 42 Number 4 November 2015
William Blake, and Nicolas Poussin (W. J. T. Mitchell). A
discussion of the Roman Catholic devotion to the Sacred
Heart of Jesus includes differentiation among its aspects
as a fetish, icon, and symbol, touching on the embodied
nature of this devotion and the association of the heart
with the Eucharist, as well as distinguishing Catholic and
Orthodox modulations of devotion (David Morgan). The
contemporary Thai cult of King Chulalongkorn centered
on portraits of the sacred figure presents an example of
progressive materialization of the sacred as the kings image
takes the form of a picture, then a statue, then the imme-
diacy of an abbot in a monastery, as well as combining
the agency of objects with an embodied experience of
the sacred insofar as the portrait chooses the devotee to
whom it will belong (Irene Stengs). By contrast, among
Pentecostals in Ghana, pictures of Jesus are suspect as
potentially demonic precisely because of their materiality
against the background of pagan fetishism, and where
social practices of acting and looking entail an optichaptic
visuality such that there is a two-way visuality subjecting
the observer to the return gaze from the picture (Birgit
Meyer). The distinctive instance of a performative mate-
rialization of the supernatural in film and on stage allows
for an analysis of the relations between performance and
belief, mimesis and imitation, and aesthetics and salvation
(Freddie Rokem).
Similarly, faith can be invested in objects as in the case
of stones and alasitas or miniatures among the Aymaras
of Bolivia in their syncretic devotion to the indigenous
Pachamama and the Catholic Virgin Mary (Sanne Derks,
Willy Jansen, and Catrien Notermans). Muslim prayer
beads in North Cameroon play a role in political, ethnic,
and religious identity, as well as marking the distinction
between Sufi and Wahhabi Muslims and constituting evi-
dence that there is no clear division between material and
spiritual (Jose C. M. van Santen). The Dutch ban on Islamic
face veils in public provides the occasion for understanding
how the veil as an affective object is mutually constituted
by how it is named or referred to, how it is experienced by
those who wear it and by the public, and how it becomes
simultaneously a locus of both fascination and disgust
(Annelies Moors). Even more experientially and somatically
immediate are gendered meanings of blood and mothers
milk in a comparison of Christianity and Islam with respect
to substance and symbol, power and pollution (Willy
Jansen and Grietje Dresen). A vivid material pivot between
the religious and political is evident in the case of Catholic
workers protesting by pouring human blood at a military
recruiting center on the eve of the Iraq War, who were
subsequently prosecuted for dumping bottles of biohazard
and mounted a defense in terms of blood as a Eucharistic
800
symbol of sacrifice (Elizabeth A. Castelli). Christs blood
as depicted in Mel Gibsons film The Passion of the Christ
and taken up by a group of Dutch Pentecostals offers the
opportunity to compare Pentecostal and Catholic sensibil-
ities of bodily materiality and also shows the divine blood
as an embodied and directly experienced source of divine
power and, even more significantly in my view, offers spec-
tators a way of seeing that engages their bodies (p. 260;
Miranda Klaver).
The religious construction and inhabitation of space
is a compelling feature in considering the Jewish Sukkah, a
temporary structure for the Sukkoth festival evocative of no-
madism, wandering, pilgrimage, and migration, and which
is not merely an artifact but also a thing that accumulates
traces of lived religious experience (Galit Hasan-Rokem). A
discussion of the Ottoman coffee house in the emergence
of the public sphere as a heterotopic feature of modernity
and secularity in contrast to Europe also makes the critical
point that an abstract public sphere cannot be understood
apart from the materiality of lived and experienced public
space (p. 268; Michiel Leezenberg). Devotion to the semi-
apocryphal Saint Expeditus among Catholic Charismatics
in Brazil provides an instance in which the saint is variably
materialized in sculpted, print, and digital images, in which
pneuma becomes viscous spirit and subsequently tangible
oil consecrated to the saint, and in which mobility and ne-
oliberal flexibility are enshrined in his mediation between
swiftslow, brokenwhole, todaytomorrow, and presence
absence (Maria Jose A. de Abreu). An example of digital
enchantment via participation in Massively Multiplayer
Online Role Playing Games establishes a contemporary
polarity between authentic religious experience and com-
modity fetishism and problematizes a distinction between
the commodification of spirituality and the spiritualization
of commodities (Stef Aupers). New Edge spirituality in Sil-
icon Valley exhibits a take on the spirituality of technology
where technology is an extension of the senses elaborated
in a tradition extending from the Merry Pranksters through
Aldous Huxley, biofeedback, and virtual reality (Dorien
Zandbergen). A comparison of spiritual sensibilities among
website designers representing Dutch Catholic, Protestant,
and Holistic traditions illustrates yet another form of digital
spiritualization of technology (Ineke Noomen, Stef Aupers,
and Dick Houtman).
Taken as a whole, this volume is a necessary read for
scholars and students concerned with religion, materi-
ality, and embodiment in contemporary and historical
perspectives. It also is a useful introduction to contem-
porary scholarship on religion in the Netherlands and its
conversation with scholarly trends in Anglophone social
anthropology.