“Like the father's home:” perceived state of the Turkish-Sunni community in Germany

Abstract

Focusing on a mosque organization, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs (DITIB), this paper engages with the Turkish-Sunni diaspora's complex perception of the ‘state’ in Germany. DITIB is a Sunni-Islam based mosque organization that oversees over 900 mosques across Germany. However, the Turkish-Sunni diaspora does not consider DITIB mosques as simply religious or cultural spaces but instead attributes a highly complex quasi-stateness to it. My field research between 2016 and 2018 reveals that for this community, DITIB reflects an intimate familial version of the Turkish state in Germany. While DITIB has significant connections to the state in Turkey, based on my findings I argue that these connections alone do not explain why the diaspora perceive DITIB like a state. Rather, DITIB's perceived stateness has been constructed through a historical process that brings to the fore diasporic experiences, feelings, and memories centered at the ethnoreligious spaces of mosques. Thus, this research produces new questions for, and theoretical approaches to geographies of states, extending this literature's emphasis on everyday and intimate perspectives. I build on feminist geopolitics and diaspora studies to contribute to this scholarship by analyzing the role of feelings and memories in forming perceptions of the state. I explain how spaces of perceived states become fluid, cross the borders of officially defined national territories, and exceed the classical spaces and embodiment of states. Instead, spaces like mosques come to be perceived like a state through their association with care, unity, and a home. This analysis points to the emotional and memory-based production of what is perceived as a state and how those perceptions are formed.