Conclusion: Intellectual, Spiritual, and Cultural Renewal

Summary

THE POST-9/11 MUSLIM TURN in German literature and the increasing participation of Muslims in German public life generally are shaping the cultural scene at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is part of the many transformations that take place within the wider cultural mêlée: Christianity itself came initially from the East, and Islamic culture and thought have influenced Germany and Europe in earlier epochs. Indeed, many Sufi mystics, such as Ibn Arabi, came from Moorish Spain; thus the authors studied in this book are partly reestablishing a connection with a forgotten European Islamic heritage in their writing. Although the drive to halt such cultural transformations, fix identities, and “purify” cultures is perhaps part of a historically specific need for a stable and coherent sense of self and, by extension, community, such thinking ultimately leads to stagnation and conflict. It obscures the cosmopolitan and spiritual potential these authors locate in the heterogeneous nature of identity and of our interconnected being-in-the-world.

The complex and innovative notions of spirituality, community, and identity conveyed in the writing of Şenocak, SAID, Zaimoglu, and Kermani are of central importance to today's global debates around otherness, inclusion, religion, fundamentalism, and cosmopolitanism; they also have a particular importance for both Germany and Islam. As Clemens Pornschlegel comments, the German attitude is too often “Mitreden in unseren Angelegenheiten sollt und könnt ihr mangels ‘citizenship’ und guter deutscher Herkunft nicht, auch wenn es dabei um eure Aufenthaltsgenehmigungen und Rentenkassenbeiträge geht, aber eure wunderbar fremdländische Kultur interessiert uns natürlich!” (Having no citizenship and no good German heritage, you can't and shouldn't join in conversations about our affairs, even if they are about your residence permits and pension contributions. But we find your wonderfully exotic culture interesting, of course!) The work of nonethnic German writers is often received as mere exotic cultural enrichment, a passive symptom of broader intellectual movements, instead of being taken seriously for its contribution to current philosophical and political debates and literary trends. The current intellectual paradigm of interkultureller Germanistik, the canonical use of labels such as “Turkish-German,” and the Chamisso Prize, contribute to this situation by separating so-called minority authors from wider German culture.