Sexism and Islam: ‘Where I’m From, This is Handled By Men’
The Erich Gutenberg College is a trade propagandize in Mülheim, an economically dull district in Cologne. Two-thirds of a students here are first- or second-generation immigrants, and many are Muslim. A few days after a incidents in perfume on New Year’s Eve, in that a vast throng of organisation with ostensible newcomer backgrounds tormented and intimately assaulted women in a city’s categorical sight station, a womanlike clergyman stood in front of her category during a propagandize and attempted to pronounce to her students about that night’s events.
She was frightened by their reaction. “What accurately do we want?” one of a students shouted. “That’s what women can design if they travel around there during night!” No one in a classroom protested. The girls were silent. “They have their thoughts on a issue, yet they mostly contend nothing,” says a school’s principal, Rolf Wohlgemuth. After a incident, he went into a teacher’s classroom and attempted to explain to a students that a organisation protects a rights of everyone, including women. He is doubtful that a summary will have a durability impact on all a students.
Three weeks have upheld given New Year’s Eve in Cologne. About 800 women have filed complaints with a military given then, and a shockwaves from perfume are still inspiring politicians in Berlin. The military are still acid for some-more suspects, even as a nation stays confounded by their motives. perfume could go down in story as a branch indicate in Germany’s interloper debate, yet there is also another, some-more elemental dimension. Even yet a perfume perpetrators consecrate usually a tiny, rapist minority within a migrant and interloper population, a many critical aspect of a attacks is that their victims were women, bringing women’s rights to a forefront of a formation debate.
The attacks sparked a vital discuss in Germany and lifted critical questions about gender roles in society. Critics have remarkable that many Muslim societies have congenital inclinations that conclude gender roles between organisation and women distant some-more narrowly than in a West. Did a attacks in perfume expel light on tensions between these congenital tendencies and Western notions of multitude and equal rights for women? The Economist tackled a emanate in mid-January a essay “Migrant Men and European Women.” In an talk with SPIEGEL, heading German thinker, author and Islam academician Navid Kermani acted a doubt of possibly Germany will attain in a formation challenge. Meanwhile, a left-leaning weekly journal Die Zeit asked: “Who Is a Arab Man?”
It’s a doubt that many women in Germany are seeking themselves in a arise of Cologne. There is innumerable anecdotal justification of German women experiencing a enlightenment strife firsthand. There are reports of organisation who exclude to shake hands with women. Some womanlike teachers have to bargain with fathers of students who exclude to pronounce to them, or relatives who don’t wish a lady training their child. And there are instances in a business universe where organisation exclude to work with women and direct that a woman’s masculine higher be allocated as their indicate of hit in dealings. “This macho enlightenment can already be found in Germany,” says Ahmad Mansour, a Palestinian-Israeli who works as a clergyman focused on formation issues.
New Debates about Islam
Representatives of central Muslim eremite organizations explain that taste and assault opposite women have zero to do with Islam. “Islam assumes that lady and masculine are equal before God and a law,” says Aiman Mazyek, authority of a Central Council of Muslims in Germany. It is loyal that Islam and patriarchy are not fundamentally intertwined, and given Islam has no autarchic personality like a pope who can settle a contracting interpretation, a sacrament permits a magnanimous interpretation of a Koran. In reality, however, a tellurian Muslim mainstream has really opposite notions of equivalence than a West, and a Koran is mostly used to transparent congenital and misogynistic convictions.
In primarily Muslim regions, a state of women’s rights is generally troubling. Polling indicates that a infancy of Muslims do not take it for postulated that organisation and women have a same rights. The Pew Research Center in Washington surveyed 38,000 Muslims between 2008 and 2012. More than half — and a whopping 87 percent in a Middle East and North Africa — hold a viewpoint that a lady should always conform her husband. In fact, usually a entertain of those questioned in a Middle East and North Africa felt that daughters and sons should get equal shares of their parents’ money, and usually a third pronounced that women have a right to get divorced.
Lamya Kaddor is sleepy of a discuss over Islam. The magnanimous Islamic academician has been operative as a go-between for years. She explains Islam to non-Muslims in Germany, and she explains non-believers to Muslims. There has been many to explain given Sept. 11, 2001, when al-Qaida terrorists flew airliners into a World Trade Center in a name of Allah. The contention about terrorism was followed by a array of debates, on forced marriages and honour killings, womanlike genital mutilation, Salafists, a construction of mosques and now, once again, a picture of women. “Now I’m starting to explain what Islam is all over again,” says Kaddor.
The 37-year-old teaches Islamic Studies in Dinslaken, in northwestern Germany. The picture of women hold by many migrants is indeed a problem, she says. They have come to a giveaway nation from “oppressed societies,” she says. “Then they have to wait 15 months to find out possibly or not they can stay. This is too long. It allows people to tumble behind into aged patterns,” says Kaddor.
‘Where I’m From, This is Handled By Men’
Many women come into hit with these patterns in Germany, not usually in a form of passionate harassment, yet in situations where it becomes transparent that they are not being supposed in their professions and amicable roles. Most of a women SPIEGEL spoke with about a theme were reluctant to be quoted by name, fearing that they could be labeled as xenophobic, and they highlight that problems are a exception, and that many Muslim organisation radically have no problem with women.
“Muslim offenders mostly have a problem usurpation womanlike judges,” says one decider from Hamburg. She claims they provide her with contempt, and use gestures or facial expressions to uncover that they do not honour a lady in her position. A womanlike moody attendant says she “often has problems with Muslim organisation operative as belligerent personnel.” To equivocate upsetting situations, she says, crews mostly confirm to send a masculine co-worker instead.
Female German Federal Police officers who routine immigrants during a limit with Austria contend that organisation omit or insult them. Some separate on a belligerent in front of them, says one officer. “That infrequently requires a some-more clever effort.”
The crew manager for a association in a southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg remembers how a masculine worker snapped during her, observant that she, as a “German woman,” had no business revelation him what to do. On another occasion, an worker asked to accommodate with a masculine co-worker instead of her. “I have zero opposite you,” he said, “but where I’m from, this is rubbed by men.”
Maresi Lassek, boss of an facile propagandize in a northern city of Bremen for 20 years, remembers “how fathers kept their hands clasped behind their backs” to equivocate carrying to shake her hand. An facile propagandize clergyman from a Odenwald segment south of Frankfurt speaks of “outlandish experiences,” and says: “I mostly had a feeling that fathers didn’t take me seriously, given I’m a woman.” A clergyman from Hamburg says that fathers attempted “to equivocate us women and inverse with a masculine colleagues instead.” And when Annelie Hobohm, who teaches ignorant children in a Hamburg school, asks everybody in a category to purify up, a boys infrequently exclude to brush a floor. Cleaning is women’s work, they say.
Sineb El Masrar was innate in Hanover in 1981, a daughter of Moroccan immigrants. She’s also a member of a German Islam Conference and a colonize in a Islamic women’s movement. Her book “Emancipation in Islam — a Reckoning with Its Enemies,” is set to be published in Germany subsequent month. “There is a misogyny, a loathing for women,” she says.
A Dichotomy in Images of Women
El Masrar says that a story of Islam, adult until a present, has been made by a congenital hardship of women. She argues that a perfume assaults were spurred by a series of things: swarming vital conditions for migrants in hostels or tiny apartments, their miss of prospects and a slight they knowledge when they miss a support and organisation of a family.
But there is also another reason, says El Masrar: “A enlightenment that creates all things passionate taboo.” The organisation came from an sourroundings in that there is no proposal sexuality, she explains. “Everything that’s connected with love and sex is placed in a context of prostitution.”
She speaks of a schematic picture in that women are possibly saints or whores, in that there is no room for self-determined women. For some Muslim men, says El Masrar, it is vitriolic and frustrating that not each lady in Germany is available, “just given she’s walking in a miniskirt.” Some, she explains “react by apropos intensely religious, while others turn aggressive.”
El Masrar points to Moroccan organisation as an example, observant that many knowledge disappointment not usually in Europe, yet also in a nation of their origin. “Sex is taboo, on a one hand,” she says, “but on a other it’s downloadable everywhere.” There are even sex hotlines in Arabic, she says. The organisation act out their insecurities on a street, where women are tormented and propositioned. But women in a nation have been fighting behind for some time. In a transformation identical to #Aufschrei (#Outcry), a German Twitter commencement to lift approval about sexism and passionate harassment, women in Morocco have taken to a streets to criticism “against all that donkey and breast grabbing, a whispers and a perversions that women face.”
Young organisation are also commencement to find alternatives to slight congenital purpose models. Asmen Ilhan is a box in point. A few years ago, a immature masculine from Berlin hold himself pigeonholing a girls in his category into possibly “sluts” or “non-sluts,” into girls who had a boyfriend, went out during night or wore parsimonious pants, and girls who behaved in a approach deemed suitable by a Turkish community.
At a Carl-von-Ossietzsky High School in Berlin’s Kreuzberg neighborhood, a doubt of that girls were deliberate “sluts,” and that ones were not, was an critical one — both for a boys who kept a tighten eye on their sisters, even yet they themselves were creation out and carrying sex with girls, and for a girls, who were improved off staying divided from organisation altogether. No one would have been repelled to hear someone scream in a schoolyard: “I’ll kill my sister if anyone touches her.” And it would have been tough to tell possibly statements like that were meant seriously.
Program to Change Minds
Ilhan was always hold in a middle. His relatives came to Germany from Turkey in a late 1970s, and he was innate in Berlin. To Germans, he was a Turk, and to Turks he was a Kurd. He was never supposed as a normal Muslim given his father is an Alawite. His mom is endangered in a women’s transformation within a newcomer community: a word like “slut” would never have been authorised during their cooking table.
But opposite manners practical in a classroom. Girls were approaching to be pristine and still and boys clever and loud, a latter fixated on their fixed purpose as guardians and destiny breadwinners. Ilhan had already gotten used to this division, if usually to fit in, yet when he was 16, he began carrying doubts.
At a time, a crony invited him to join a organisation that met frequently to doubt their judgment of how girls and boys should behave. The organisation members were during contingency with a enlightenment in that a honour of an whole family depended on possibly a daughter was still a pure during her wedding, and in that boys were thankful to urge that honour — possibly they favourite it or not.
Ilhan and his friends became partial of a project, called Heroes, in that immature organisation from newcomer families debate for women’s rights. It has already lerned 35 immature men. Those who turn “Heroes” are given a certificate to hang in their rooms. The module includes several role-playing games: In one, a despotic father sends his son to pierce home his sister, who is unresolved out with friends, in another, a family forbids a son from marrying his Swedish girlfriend. The boys also play a purpose of a girl.
Heroes has hold some-more than 1,000 of these role-playing workshops in schools and girl centers in a final 7 years. Even a German boss has visited a award-winning project. A print taken on a day of a president’s revisit hangs on a wall, opposite from a print with a quote from Albert Camus: “Nothing is some-more inhuman than honour formed on fear.”
A Bizarre Understanding of Honor?
“Cologne brought a issues to a fore,” says museum clergyman Yilmaz Atmaca, one of a co-founders of a Heroes project. Ilhan, now 23, studies psychology and works as a organisation leader. Seven boys from a module got together in a initial week of Jan to try to come adult with an reason for a perfume passionate assaults. In their view, a assaults simulate a weird bargain of honor. “I’m fearful that a perpetrators felt that women who were wearing Western garments and were out alone during night had no honor. This is precisely a opinion we wish to forestall with a work.” At a same time, a immature organisation also felt attacked. They have been campaigning for women’s rights for years, “and now people are unexpected observant opposite a house that a Arab masculine is a threat.”
Muslim organisation are not a usually ones who feel unsettled given Cologne. Many people in Germany are endangered about a tragedy between a enterprise to mount adult for women’s rights and a enterprise to uncover oneness for refugees. Is it excusable to reduce a standards on emancipation in esteem to unfamiliar customs? The Federal Employment Agency is also grappling with this question. It trains a employees in both “intercultural sensitization” and “gender sensitivity.” The problem is that “intercultural competency” and “gender competency” are not always compatible. What happens, for example, when a Muslim patron refuses to shake a womanlike coworker’s hand? Should a lady accept this as being scold from an intercultural perspective, or should she take a standpoint of gender attraction and insist on a handshake? “There can be contradictions between a conference that focuses on attraction to migrants and one that emphasizes gender sensitivity,” says Eva Peters, executive of a plan that provides modernized training advice.
For Julia Klöckner, antithesis personality for a center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) in a western state of Rhineland-Palatinate, a preference was clear. About 4 months ago, she chose not to accommodate with an imam who refused to shake her hand. It was a confidant move, yet one that raises a required doubt about a boundary of tolerance. She was creation a indicate that women can't be approaching to accept taste out of care for informative differences.
This assembly of these cultures is, obviously, not always problematic. A 41-year-old government consultant who volunteers to learn German during a interloper hostel in Essen, for instance, has zero yet good things to contend about her students. They embody construction workers and automobile mechanics from Afghanistan, as good as pharmacists from Syria. Her students are always helpful, deferential and respectful, she says. “Every time we meet, they are accessible when they hail me and contend goodbye, they appreciate me after a lesson, and they offer to lift my bags when they are heavy. And they also honour my privacy. No one has ever called me during an inapt time.”
On a Saturday in a Advent season, in a lead adult to Christmas, a organisation orderly a cooking evening. Men and women chopped vegetables together, influenced a pots and seasoned a food, and finally served adult Syrian appetizers and an Afghan rice plate — joined in a unapproachable approval that their backgrounds and cultures were being respected in this way. As a proffer clergyman put it: “These Muslim organisation are some-more elegant than many Germans we know.”
By Christiane Hoffmann, Julia Jüttner, Sarah Kempf, Ann-Kathrin Müller, Cornelia Schmergal, Katja Thimm, Andreas Ulrich
Article source: http://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/sexism-and-islam-debated-in-germany-after-cologne-attacks-a-1073751.html#ref=rss