Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2014
471-2
“Islam light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms
61
2014
Heidi Denzel de Tirado
Whereas Germany has not yet produced a Muslim sitcom— like the Canadian Little Mosque on the Prairie or the British Citizen Khan— the last twenty years have witnessed an increasing number of Turkish-German recurring characters in German television series. While most of these protagonists are constructed as hyper-assimilated, secular, and liberal, two characters have been explicitly marked as Muslim in television sitcoms: Yağmur in Alle lieben Jimmy, and Fatma in Türkisch für Anfänger. In my analysis of these two teenage girls, whom I interpret as representatives of “Islam light,” which Hamed Abdel-Samad defines as an “ideal form of Islam” without jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension, I reveal that these sitcoms reflect common trends among the second- and third-generation of the Turkish-German Diaspora. I discuss the sitcoms within their historical contexts and examine to what extent the actions and decisions of these important symbolic Muslim counterfigures reflect current debates on Islam’s contested place in German society.
cg471-20107
“Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 107 “Islam light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms Heidi Denzel de Tirado Georgia State University abstract: Whereas Germany has not yet produced a Muslim sitcom—like the Canadian Little Mosque on the Prairie or the British Citizen Khan —the last twenty years have witnessed an increasing number of Turkish-German recurring characters in German television series. While most of these protagonists are constructed as hyper-assimilated, secular, and liberal, two characters have been explicitly marked as Muslim in television sitcoms: Yağmur in Alle lieben Jimmy, and Fatma in Türkisch für Anfänger. In my analysis of these two teenage girls, whom I interpret as representatives of “Islam light,” which Hamed Abdel-Samad defines as an “ideal form of Islam” without jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension, I reveal that these sitcoms reflect common trends among the secondand third-generation of the Turkish-German Diaspora. I discuss the sitcoms within their historical contexts and examine to what extent the actions and decisions of these important symbolic Muslim counterfigures reflect current debates on Islam’s contested place in German society. Keywords: Muslim sitcoms, Leitkultur, Islam light, stereotypes, gender roles After 9 / 11, German mainstream media coverage presented quite a standardized image of Muslims, which illustrated the “old orientalist idea” that all men were hostile, dangerous, and threatening, and all women were victims of one monolithic fate (see, e. g., Heeren and Zick). Many scholars have described this homogenization of Muslims, which influenced and limited audiences’ views on Islam and all of its believers (see, e. g., Morey and Yaquin). These processes of Othering were also prominent in German film, as several productions of the twenty-first century linked Islam to violent men who imposed their old-fashioned traditionalist value systems on female and younger family members who had embraced Western culture. Honor killing, criminality, and machismo be- 108 Heidi Denzel de Tirado came staple themes in films like Zeit der Wünsche (dir. Rolf Schübel, 2005), Ayla (dir. Su Turhan, 2009), and Die Fremde (dir. Feo Aladağ, 2010), which seemed to visualize common characteristics for the whole Muslim community. In contrast to this extensive Othering, German fictional television series have introduced a small number of Muslim main characters that I interpret as necessary counterfigures, harbingers of pacification and symbolic resistance to common viewers’ expectations and paranoia. In this article, I analyze the presence and the sometimes even more telling absence of Islam as a plot-relevant theme in three German sitcoms, which focus on Turkish-German main characters: König von Kreuzberg (Sat1, 2005), Alle lieben Jimmy ( RTL , 2005-2007), and Türkisch für Anfänger ( ZDF , 2006-2009). I discuss the series within their historical contexts and examine to what extent the characters are constructed as Muslims, emphasizing the ways in which their actions reflect current debates on Islam’s contested place in German society. My study reveals that all of the male Muslim main protagonists exemplify hegemonic German narratives of integration by embodying a benign, discreet, and liberal form of Islam on the one hand, and assimilation to German mainstream worldviews and ideologies on the other hand. But I argue that the three sitcoms have become more and more audacious in creating an increasingly wider and more diversely populated spectrum of Muslim positionalities, espousing a sort of “Islam light.” The term “Islam light” describes an “enlightened Islam,” devoid of jihad, sharia, proselytism, or pretension, and was coined by Hamed Abdel-Samad, one of Germany’s most prominent “Islamkritiker” and “Vorzeige-Muslim der konservativen Politiker” (Follath). According to Abdel-Samad, “Islam light” is a form of the religion that is open to discussion, questions, and criticism. While he described his concept as a not-yet-existing utopia, I claim that German television has made this “imaginary” ideal of Islam a sitcom reality. 1 I demonstrate that the sitcoms do occasionally allow Islam to play a pivotal role in the male characters’ development, but only when it is introduced by the youngest—or, in a variation on this theme, the very oldest—female family member, who cannot be misinterpreted as threatening. While König von Kreuzberg does not feature an explicitly Muslim protagonist, it introduces cultural issues that are often associated with Islam, a tendency that continues with Alle lieben Jimmy. This family sitcom also introduces the first explicit Muslim recurring character, Jimmy’s little sister Fatma, who, however, is only rarely the focus of the plot. By contrast, the youngest sibling Yağmur in Türkisch für Anfänger, who can be described as the show’s main character, is more explicitly and visibly constructed as a Muslim, as she wears the hijab and goes to Koran School. The fact that only two German sitcoms have featured clearly defined Muslim characters is not extraordinary because the existence of Muslim recurring char- “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 109 acters in Western sitcoms is a rather new phenomenon. Minority sitcoms like the black-themed, Latino-themed or mixed-race-themed series (e. g., The Cosby Show, The George Lopez Show, or Ugly Betty ) were only recently developed after studies of scholars like Stuart Hall and George Gerbner had emphasized the important role of television as a cultural instrument that influences and constructs its viewers’ cognition of social realities and perception of minorities (see Hall and Morgan et al.; Denzel de Tirado). The Muslim-themed sitcom is the newest format of the minority sitcom and has become a rare but recurring format during the last decade. The first Muslim sitcom, which was critically acclaimed and quite popular, was Little Mosque on the Prairie (Canada, CBC , 2007-2012). Like its Canadian predecessor, the controversial Citizen Khan ( UK , BBC One, 2012-present) too features several members of a larger Muslim community, while focusing on one Muslim family. In the United States, the new series Halal in the Family ( USA , Funny or Die, 2015) introduces the Muslim Qu’Osby family, which is constructed as an obvious parody of the Cosbies. Until now, the show’s four episodes have only aired on the website Funny or Die, because its producer, writer, and star Aasif Mandvi feared that American networks and audiences were “not ready for a Muslim sitcom yet” (Mandvi quoted in Hale). While Germany has not yet produced a Muslim-themed sitcom, it should be emphasized that Fatma in Alle lieben Jimmy and Yağmur in Türkisch für Anfänger were trailblazing in the global context of recurring Muslim figures appearing in sitcoms produced in non-Muslim-majority countries. Introduced in 2005 and 2006, respectively, Fatma and Yağmur preceded other Muslim recurring characters like the Moroccan Muslims Abdullah “Ap” Bentarek and Leila in the quite successful Shouf Shouf! (The Netherlands, Nederland 3, VARA, 2006-2009) or Raja Musharaff, the sixteen-year-old Pakistani Muslim exchange student in the rather unsuccessful show Aliens in America ( USA , CW Network, 2007). Even if König von Kreuzberg does not explicitly address Islam, it needs to be mentioned in this analysis, as it was the first German sitcom that dared to focus on a Turkish-German lead character. The title König von Kreuzberg clearly echoes the nickname of Metin Kaplan, the notorious Kalif von Köln, who had haunted German justice and media since the 1990s. Kaplan was the leader of the clandestine radical Islamist movement Kalifatsstaat, or the Union of Islamic Associations and Communities, which was founded by his father, Cemaleddin Kaplan, commonly known as the Khomeini von Köln. In 2001, the Kalifatsstaat was banned in Germany after Kaplan advocated the killing of non-Muslims and it was revealed that he had sent his supporters to trainings in Afghanistan, Chechnya, and Bosnia; he is also said to have sent emissaries to meet with Osama bin Laden in order to discuss an attack on Kemal Atatürk’s mausoleum in Ankara (Roy and Steir 366-67). In 2004, when König von Kreuzberg was filmed, 110 Heidi Denzel de Tirado there was renewed media attention on Kaplan because of the impending end of the Caliph’s prison sentence for inciting the murder of his Berlin-based rival. In this context, German authorities wanted to revoke Kaplan’s refugee status to facilitate his extradition to Turkey, despite a pending death penalty for him there (Farmer 43). Despite their similar-sounding names, however, the show König von Kreuzberg and its central characters have little in common with the Kaliph von Köln. While “The New World Order” advocated by the Kalif von Köln was explicit in demanding that Islam should control everyday life and “become the state” and that “the Koran should become the constitution” (Kaplan, quoted in Farmer 43), König von Kreuzberg disappoints any expectations of Muslim-themed issues and instead emphasizes the utter and complete assimilation of the titular König, kebab-shop owner Attila. All of the episodes—as well as many of the sitcom’s jokes—revolve around the unexpected fact that Attila and his best friend Hakan are so well integrated into German society that they are unable to understand the Turkish language and are alienated from the traditions of their ancestral homeland. König von Kreuzberg features the typical problems of young adults living in Berlin, while interspersing them with comical scenarios exposing linguistic and intercultural misunderstandings and misinterpretations. For the purposes of my analysis, it suffices to shortly analyze the first episode in order to reveal how the show created a harmless, fully assimilated counter-figure to the common stereotype of fundamentalist Turkish-German Muslim men so familiar to viewers of the news and other popular media. While the König von Kreuzberg is constructed as an obvious counter-figure to the Kalif von Köln, Attila’s religious identity remains unaddressed in the series, so we can at best speculate whether he is a representative of “Islam light,” an atheist, a Christian, or an agnostic. But what the show does emphasize is how fully the two Turkish-German friends Attila and Hakan have internalized the threatening stereotype of Turkish men as fundamentalist killers, which produces a comedic situation in which they overreact and are ultimately ridiculed for their hysteria. Hakan and Attila, who speak only rudimentary Turkish, misinterpret a letter from Hakan’s vacation flirt from Turkey and believe that her brothers are on their way to Berlin in order to force Hakan to marry their sister. Convinced that Hakan’s life is at stake, Attila agrees to marry his best friend in order to save him from the Turkish brothers’ wrath. In the end it turns out that Hakan’s Turkish summer flirt only wanted to invite him to her brothers’ double wedding in Berlin, and Attila and Hakan’s overreaction could be read as a fable about exaggerated fear, with the moral that many hysterical Germans should reconsider their own xenophobic and Islamophobic prejudices in order to avoid the devastating misunderstandings they can produce. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 111 The sitcom was not successful and was relegated to a late-night timeslot in the middle of its first season. While we could attribute this lack of popularity to the screenplay’s superficiality, this is only part of the story. A full account of the show’s unpopularity must also consider the period in which it was broadcast: König von Kreuzberg was produced in the year in which the term Parallelgesellschaft —describing social collectivities like ethnic or religious minorities “with a high degree of ethno-cultural homogeneity”—became the second most common word, according to the Gesellschaft für deutsche Sprache. The term was coined in 1996 in recognition of Germany as a receiving country of international migration that faced the challenges of a culturally diverse society. With its distinctly negative connotations, Parallelgesellschaft evokes the hidden, dark side of the multiculturalism that some scholars saw as the most constructive model for German society (Geißler 19). The term Parallelgesellschaft suggested a lurking threat and was reminiscent of the Schläfer Mohammed Atta and other members of his Hamburg terror cell, who became key operatives in the 9 / 11 attacks despite their seemingly perfect integration into German society. Moreover, König von Kreuzberg was aired only two months after the young Turkish-German mother Hatun Sürücü was murdered in a highly publicized honor killing perpetrated by her youngest brother, Ayhan. When Sürücü’s murder was first reported, it did not raise a particular paranoia in the mainstream media. Only when it became public that several Turkish-German schoolboys had declared that the victim “only had herself to blame,” and “deserved what she got” did the media go into full alarm mode, with newspapers running exaggerated headlines like “The Death of a Muslim Woman: ‘The Whore Lived like a German’” (Biehl). This particular article in Der Spiegel informed its readers that “[i]n the past four months, six Muslim women living in Berlin have been killed by family members,” and that very often fathers—and sometimes even mothers—would “single out their youngest son to do the killing […] because they know minors will get lighter sentences from German judges” (Biehl). 2 The months following Sürücü’s murder saw several other widely publicized crimes connected with Islamic extremism across Europe: the London Underground bombings ( July 2005), the murder of film director Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam (November 2005), and the riots in the suburbs of Paris (November 2005). While König von Kreuzberg certainly had some fans, many viewers saw it as a failed example of a “Comedy auf politisch-korrekten [sic] Multi-Kulti Niveau” (Ronny), which tried to convince German audiences that Muslim migrants in Germany would be eager to integrate and assimilate, while ignoring the rising dangers of the Parallelgesellschaft. In this context of rising pan-European fear and Islamophobia, Alle lieben Jimmy —a sitcom about a loveable, highly integrated, modern, and liberal Turk- 112 Heidi Denzel de Tirado ish-German family—invited viewers into this notorious Parallelgesellschaft and was the first of its kind in deconstructing the Parallelgesellschaft as a misconception. While the hyper-assimilated hero in König von Kreuzberg gets a German girlfriend and has more German than Turkish-German friends, RTL’s Alle lieben Jimmy differs from the short-lived Sat1 show in following the minority sitcom format. As is the case with the Cosby Show, Black-ish, or The George Lopez Show, viewers become familiar with a minority family in their own domestic space, get introduced to their lifestyle and culture, and understand that no one needs to be afraid of them because they are not so different from “white people” after all. In contrast to König von Kreuzberg, which emphasized the absolute Germanness of its Turkish-German characters, Alle lieben Jimmy promised more insights into the diasporic culture, the notorious Parallelgesellschaft : its Turkish-German writer and producer Tac Romey interrogated many contemporary stereotypes about Muslims and Turkish-Germans. The show is centered on the first-born son of the Arkadaş family, Jimmy, who has a truly telling name. Not only does the last name Arkadaş mean “friend” in Turkish, but through the assimilation of his first name Cem, the eponymous protagonist opts for a diminutive form of the English-language equivalent: Jim. Thuss, the main character unmistakably communicates that he has adopted Western values. The other members of the Arkadaş family are also very westernized; they inhabit the typical beautiful sitcom house with garden. In good minority sitcom tradition, stay-at-home mom Gül is the primary authority figure, and she constantly exercises power over husband Metin and son Jimmy, the disadvantaged subordinates who serve most of the time as the butt of jokes. But Jimmy is not only henpecked by his mother, he also becomes the victim of his two younger sisters, Leyla and Fatma. Leyla Arkadaş is an attractive, fashion-oriented, and naïve vamp and does whatever she likes: she has a new boyfriend every week and buys expensive miniskirts and makeup. While Leyla’s character has similarities with other sitcom Muslim girls of her age, like Leyla in Shouf Shouf! and Alia in Citizen Khan, she does not lead the double life that is characteristic of these other two Muslim teenagers, who play the obedient and devout daughter at home but transform into liberal, self-determined young women when their parents are not around. Mother Gül Arkadaş is very explicit here: “Leyla ist eine moderne junge Frau und so haben Metin und ich sie auch erzogen, absichtlich. Wir sind eine emanzipierte Familie […]” (“Die nackte Wahrheit”). This explicit depiction of the modern liberal Turkish family is at the core of all the episodes. But here it is important to point out that Tac Romey decided—nonetheless—to introduce one family member who is clearly marked as a practicing Muslim: the youngest daughter Fatma. In contrast to her eccentric and egocentric older brother and sister, she is very modest. She knows many “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 113 facts about Islam and reveals her knowledge of the Koran in various episodes, when she quotes full passages by heart, to the surprise and pride of her family. While it is never explained why she is so erudite on the subject of Islam, her character seems to be quite representative of the Turkish-German Diaspora. Several studies have claimed that many members of the second generation have a “cognitive” and “very intellectual approach towards Islam” (Sirseloudi 814; Kaweh 3). For instance, Matenia Sirseloudi explains that the second and third generation often feel the need to reorient themselves and that Islam “offers a lifestyle allowing them to cope with the challenges of modernity in a foreign country” (814). Such diasporic subjects read the Koran with a “new self-confidence” (Sirseloudi 813) and possess the conviction that it gives them a valuable additional perspective to the Western education system. Whereas the first generation practiced a form of “folk Islam” and participated in oral traditions of sharing their knowledge of popular Islamic practices in their homeland, the second generation gears towards “High Islam, which stands for an intellectual-rational approach to Islamic sources” (Sirseloudi 813). In Alle lieben Jimmy, we do not learn the history behind Fatma’s interest in Islam: it is left open to speculation whether Fatma simply decided one day to go to the mosque and to start reading the Koran, which she seems to quote like an interesting novel, or if all the Arkadaş family members went to a Koran School and just do not exhibit the same enthusiasm for their religion (anymore). The latter explanation seems to be more convincing, as the Arkadaş family members do not appear to see Fatma’s religious enthusiasm as something “foreign” or “strange,” but rather as a familiar experience or a phase. Even if Koran Schools have lost their popularity since the 1970s, they are still widespread in Germany, and Muslims commonly attend classes offered by associations like the Verband islamischer Kulturzentren ( VIKZ ), the Islamische Gemeinschaft Millî Görüş e. V. ( IGMG ), and the Türkisch-Islamische Union der Anstalt für Religion e. V. ( DITIB ). According to Silvia Kaweh, such classes are designed for all age groups, but students usually take them only for a short time period. In Alle lieben Jimmy, we never meet other members of the Muslim community, but we do learn that Fatma is very active in its outreach activities. While Muslim community outreach activities have often been associated with recruitment and radicalization in the news, Fatma is constructed neither as fundamentalist nor as radical, and, within the context of the other Turkish-German characters with Muslim backgrounds, she is not Othered at all. By contrast with them, and also in the wider context of a non-Muslim viewership, her religious benevolence resembles the Christian cardinal virtue of charity, and her actions give viewers insights into Islam’s similar philanthropic values. 3 Even when Fatma gives away her father’s best coat and her sister’s expensive dresses to the homeless, or when she nearly causes a fire 114 Heidi Denzel de Tirado by baking cookies for the poor, she does not come across as the kind of “missionary Muslim” who wants to strengthen “the moral order of Islam against the forces of unbelief ” within the German society (Sirseloudi 808). Viewers never have reason to fear that she might attract “marginalized outcasts” to join the ten thousand converts to Islam in Germany, whom experts of radical Islam often deem to be especially dangerous, a “potenzielle Bombe” (“Schlagloch Konvertiten: Deutscher Islam”). 4 Instead of embodying a zealot or a threat, Fatma is a perfect personification of Abdel-Samad’s concept of “Islam light.” Islam for her is a personal lifestyle and belief; she never tries to convince or convert anybody. Her family neither approves nor disapproves of her religious enthusiasm, and only her grandmother expresses her pride and happiness about her religious passion. In this liberal and “light” context, all of the episodes are centered on a systematic reversal of the common stereotype of subservient Muslim women as victims of Turkish patriarchy. Following typical genre conventions of suburban family sitcoms, Alle lieben Jimmy focuses on the family patriarch and the first-born son as “henpecked simpletons” (Haralovich 71). Like in other sitcoms about notoriously misogynist minorities—e. g., George Lopez and Black-ish, which constantly deconstruct the common stereotypes of the Mexican and African-American machos—these typical dynamics of sitcom family interactions gain even greater political and intercultural significance. Through the constant reversal of the patriarchal construction of the difference between masculinity and femininity as “political difference between freedom and subjection” (Pateman 207), the ethnic and religious gender stereotype of the frightening, potentially abusive, Turkish-Muslim man gets deconstructed and transformed into a harmless buffoon. The innocuous “henpecked Muslim family patriarch” has become an important new counterfigure in the media: other Muslim sitcoms like Citizen Khan, Halal in the Family, and Little Mosque on the Prairie also follow this pattern of characterization. In Alle lieben Jimmy, this already becomes clear in the first episode, “Weniger ist mehr,” when Jimmy’s grandma—not his grandpa—comes from Turkey to see Jimmy for his eighteenth birthday. She has a great present for him: a convertible Mercedes Benz from the 70s, a beautiful car that Jimmy would like to have. But there is one condition: Jimmy must first undergo circumcision. Jimmy tries to convince his grandmother that in Germany expectations are different: “Ach Mensch, Oma, wir sind hier in Deutschland und hier fahren doch fast alle unbeschnitten.” But Grandma remains firm: no circumcision, no Benz. By dictating circumcision as the condition of possibility, the Turkish matriarch functions not only as a guardian of Turkish-Muslim tradition and hegemonic masculine embodiment but also as the medium through which Jimmy can acquire the ultimate symbol of virility: an antique German car. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 115 In this episode, like in others, Alle lieben Jimmy tackles contemporary debates over the cultural practices of Muslim migrants that differ from hegemonic traditions in Germany. Circumcision has been a popular trope and cultural marker in the depiction of Turkish-German men on German television and film of the twenty-first century: jokes about the removal of the foreskin and its presumed side effects of infertility or hyperfertility were also central to comedic scenarios in Meine verrückte türkische Hochzeit (dir. Stefan Holtz, 2006), Evet ich will (dir. Sinan Akkuş, 2008), and Ayla (dir. Su Turhan, 2009). Circumcisions—like honor killings and arranged marriages—are considered cultural practices but have often been directly associated with Judaism and Islam in the German media. This connection was at the heart of arguments that escalated in the year 2012, when Germany was haunted by the so-called Beschneidungsdebatte, or “circumcision debate,” over whether circumcision for boys under fourteen qualified as a Menschenrechtsverletzung. In December of the same year, the lower house of Parliament, the Bundestag, voted against this argument and for the right to circumcision, thereby affirming “that Jewish and Muslim life is clearly welcome in Germany,” according to Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger, Germany’s justice minister at that time (Eddy). As its title might imply, the entire episode of “Weniger ist mehr” in Alle lieben Jimmy revolves around the removal of the foreskin and its association with ideas about masculinity and virility. The choice Jimmy must face—to circumcise or not—becomes all the more amusing when the viewer learns his father Metin’s deepest secret: he is not circumcised either. Metin escaped his circumcision against the odds, having evaded the man who was charged with performing the rite, “Machmud, dem Schrecklichen,” several times, and then deceived his friends and his parents. The only one who knows his secret is his wife Gül, and she uses her knowledge to hold sway over him in ways that symbolically emasculate him. Gül forces Metin to do domestic chores in exchange for her silence. The most humiliating scene for Metin takes place during Jimmy’s sünnet töreni, his circumcision party, when Metin must launder Gül’s undergarments while the rest of the family celebrates: “Alle feiern und ich muss Wäsche aufhängen.” In the end, Jimmy, his best friend Ben, and his father all get circumcised after finding out that circumcisions are supposed to increase their virility. But even after his circumcision, father Metin remains subordinate to his wife because, although Gül may have lost the power to blackmail her husband, she still has the power of seduction. Therefore, Metin still has to clean the bathroom and do other household chores in order to get rewarded in the bedroom (“Andersrum”), and his effeminate cleaning skills remain a running gag throughout the sitcom. For instance, in episode 10, Jimmy reprimands his father: “Du machst immer noch Frauenkram, seitdem du zum Mann geworden 116 Heidi Denzel de Tirado bist: Putzen, bügeln, Fotos kleben.” The sitcom thus dismisses the popular misconception that any relationship exists between circumcision and virility or masculinity. While circumcision is depicted as a practice important to (some) Turkish-Germans, the series does not explore the motivations behind it. We do not learn whether the liberal Arkadaş family’s insistence on Jimmy’s circumcision has to do with ethnic customs or religious rite, so it left open to speculation whether sünnet töreni matters more to them as a Turkish tradition, or whether they believe in the purification that is often associated with Khitān, the rite of male circumcision in Islamic cultures, which is not explicitly mandated in the Koran (see Newby). We can therefore read Alle lieben Jimmy as participating in a larger progressive, anti-Islamophobic trend of distancing cultural practices from religious traditions. Like in “Weniger ist mehr,” in which the humor revolving around masculinity and the male body touches on contemporary debates about multiculturalism, Muslim belonging, and German laws, the episode “Andersrum” uses jokes about misgendered bodies and sexual desire in order to assert that Muslim Turkish-Germans like the Arkadaş family members have internalized German values of openness and acceptance. In a comedic scenario that doubles as a litmus test for his family’s eligibility for German citizenship, Jimmy believes he might be homosexual because he misreads an attractive pair of buttocks as male. The reactions of his friends and family members recall debates about the liberal German Leitkultur and controversial questions on the citizenship test. As I want to show that the fictional televised Muslims of my analyses are meant to symbolize the potential of integration, I draw the attention to the controversial concept of the Leitkultur. Introduced into public discourse by Syrian-German sociologist Bassam Tibi in his book Europa ohne Identität, Leitkultur is defined as the “dominant or leading culture,” whose cultural values should be respected by immigrants: “The values needed for a core culture are those of modernity: democracy, secularism, the Enlightenment, human rights and civil society” (Tibi 154). In 2006, eleven of the twenty-four European countries had introduced naturalization tests. Prior to its official release in Germany, it was discussed whether the proposed test should be a purely knowledge-based Einbürgerungstest or a more culture-specific Gesinnungstest für Ausländer including questions about cultural core values in order to test the cultural integration potential of the migrants. The so-called Nackt-Test —confronting foreigners with photos of topless women and kissing gay couples, imitating the informational DVD for the Dutch naturalization test—was discussed but never introduced in Germany (see “Nackt-Test für Ausländer? ”). In the following analysis of two more episodes of Alle lieben Jimmy, I suggest that this sitcom played with some of the most controversial questions of the Gesinnungstests in order to convince the viewers that “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 117 there are Muslim families in Germany who would pass any kind of “difficult” question with summa cum laude. In the episode “Andersrum,” the Arkadaş family proves best that they are no threat to Germany’s neoliberalism. This episode deals with one of the most controversial Gesinnungstest questions, number 29: “Stellen Sie sich vor, Ihr volljähriger Sohn kommt zu Ihnen und erklärt, er sei homosexuell und möchte gerne mit einem anderen Mann zusammen leben. Wie reagieren Sie? ” (Schlandt). This particular question was considered but never appeared in the written version of the test. In contrast to written tests in The Netherlands, the German versions refrain from asking questions that are easily related to social norms and moral issues like marriage, family, and child education. But during the time when the show was conceived, this question was tested in oral interviews in Baden-Württemberg and Hesse, and Muslims and Germans complained that this particular question was only posed to Muslims. 5 In “Andersrum,” Jimmy thinks that he might be gay. During a visit to a hammam, Jimmy receives a massage from a man named Yussuf that he describes as “besser als Sex.” Afterward, Jimmy gets excited when he sees the buttocks of the friend of a friend, Alex. Confused, Jimmy convinces his best friend Ben to do a “Testkuss” in order to determine whether he is really attracted to men, but father Metin interrupts them before it even begins. The family members do not get upset, but instead try to help Jimmy through this process. Only father Metin wants to subtly influence him and takes his son to a strip club in hopes of arousing his heterosexual desires. Unfortunately, it happens to be ladies’ night, the male massage therapist Yussuf is working the stage as a stripper, and Jimmy’s mother’s friends see him and his father there and assume that the two are gay. After rumors of their homosexuality spread through the Turkish-German community, the episode ends with the revelation that Jimmy is in fact heterosexual: Alex, the owner of the attractive buttocks, is a girl, and everybody is relieved. This episode suggests not only that the majority of the Turkish-German community in this sitcom is “sexually liberated”—both men and women go to strip clubs—but also that all of them would have passed the hotly debated question 29 with flying colors. Instead of reacting with violence or contempt, they accept Jimmy’s feelings and try to help and understand him. While the topic of Ehre and perhaps even Ehrenmord —which has often been related to homosexuality, sex before marriage, promiscuity, and shame—has seemed to be a perennial obsession of German films like Ayla, Die Fremde, and Lola + Bilidikid (dir. Kutluğ Ataman, 1999), it is absent in Alle lieben Jimmy. 6 Tac Romey does not tackle this difficult issue in his sitcom, but he did write an episode about the concept of honor in connection with Muslim identity. By linking honor with Muslim femininity in the character of Fatma but troubling traditional gender expectations, the show negotiates representations of “Islam 118 Heidi Denzel de Tirado light” and interrogates Islamophobic stereotypes. In the episode “Der Pornostar,” the first-born son’s virility and sense of honor is satirized when everybody thinks that Fatma made a porn film featuring her brother, and Jimmy tries to convince the director of his school that he alone is responsible for it. What is interesting in this episode is that the director of the school never questions Fatma’s culpability and does not run to the rescue of “the oppressed Muslim girl” that has been dominating the media since 9 / 11; rather, he tries to save Jimmy from taking the blame for his sister. Jimmy cannot convince the director that he had found a video on his sister’s phone that showed him sleeping with his thumb in his mouth and that he had accidentally sent it to all her contacts, when he tried to delete it. He fails to make the director understand that he felt forced to send another video—which was supposed to represent him as “erwachsen, sexy und cool,” lying in bed with oiled-up muscles and an obviously fake erection—since the first video had made him the object of ridicule for all of his schoolmates. In this scene of confession and explanation, we can see an interesting play with stereotypes of the Turkish family. The director is still convinced that Fatma, Jimmy’s pious young Muslim sister, made and distributed the pornographic film and suspects that Jimmy, as the first-born male, just wants to save the family’s honor. When he tells Jimmy that taking the blame for Fatma’s films was a misinterpretation of the concept of honor, “falsch verstandener Familienstolz,” Familienstolz is seen not as an archaic, sexist, and dangerous atavism of a backwards-oriented Islamic culture, but rather as an altruistic and heroic self-sacrifice that the brother makes in order to save his sister’s reputation. In an attempt to exculpate himself by exposing the staged character of the “porn” video, Jimmy points out that nobody sleeps lubricated in oil, but the school director is not convinced and suggests that the explanation may really be Jimmy’s ethnic Otherness: “Andere Länder, andere Sitten.” This episode may come off as rather silly, but it touches upon deadly serious themes. Writer Romey constructs Jimmy as a victim of benevolent Othering on the director’s behalf, who traffics in the kinds of clichés about misconstrued honor and socio-ethnic difference that often make their way into discussions about honor killings (“falsch verstandener Familienstolz,” and “Andere Länder, andere Sitten”). While we could interpret the school director’s statements as a parody of cultural relativism and multiculturalism, which have often been criticized as being too tolerant in the context of honor killing, this connection is not explicitly developed and is left to the viewer to explore—or dismiss. I therefore read this primarily as a parody of stereotyping and the tendency to reduce the majority of Turkish-German men to one not very representative dimension of their culture. In the mid-2000s, Alle lieben Jimmy introduced us to a Turkish-German family whose members are probably all Muslims, but the show makes no issue of “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 119 their religious identity—even though the humor sometimes centers on jargon that evokes contemporary debates about Islam in Germany. The series thematizes its protagonists’ ethnicity and cultural traditions as Turkish-Germans who happen to also be Muslim, but these characters are nonetheless still able to integrate perfectly into the German Leitkultur. They fit Abdel-Samad’s utopia of “Islam light” and represented important counterfigures at the time when the sitcom was released. In times of rampant Islamophobia, Turkish-German writer Romey tackled controversial issues—often falsely—associated with Germany’s biggest minority, but he did not dare yet to exploit Islam as an important theme. Fatma, the only figure explicitly portrayed as Muslim, is the least developed character in the family, and we never learn whether she is too young, too moderate, or too liberal to wear the headscarf, or if the producers were just afraid of tainting the image of this friendly family that embodies “Islam light” with such a loaded symbol. While a woman in Germany might wear a headscarf for a variety of reasons—as Reyhan Şahin and Bassam Tibi have shown in their monographs Die Bedeutung des muslimischen Kopftuchs and Mit dem Kopftuch nach Europa —it has often been misperceived as a “marker of her ability to participate in a modern, Enlightened German or European society, defined by its values of secularism and tolerance” (Weber 109). The show is noteworthy for projecting an image of a pious Muslim woman without this visual marker, but viewers might also wonder whether this was part of a larger strategy of avoiding controversy by not depicting the headscarf. When Alle lieben Jimmy was aired, the so-called “headscarf debate,” the Kopftuchstreit, had been underway for several years, and in the mainstream media, “the hijab was alternatively seen as a threat to German secularism, Christian culture, feminist progress, Enlightenment, and European values” (Weber 106). 7 At the height of this debate, in 2006, when the famous second-wave feminist Alice Schwarzer called the hijab “die Flagge des Islamismus” and argued for the vital emancipation of Islamists’ daughters in Germany (Schwarzer), the ZDF production Türkisch für Anfänger introduced the young teenager Yağmur Öztürk to the screen. Yağmur is the sole explicitly Muslim character in this sitcom and practices Islam against the will of her father. Not only does Yağmur wear the headscarf, but her entire personality and lifestyle seem to be defined by her belief in Islam. Yağmur is a main protagonist in Türkisch für Anfänger and thus Islam is omnipresent throughout the sitcom. The muezzin’s morning call to prayer from an alarm clock in the shape of a plastic mosque is heard in several episodes, and Yağmur’s Muslim ideals play a distinctive role in the plot development. From the beginning, Yağmur is very proud of her Islamic values and shows contempt towards non-Muslims. Even at the first meeting with her new stepfamily in the first episode, she categorically insists that she cannot eat from 120 Heidi Denzel de Tirado a plate on which a pork dish might have been served. But Yağmur’s adherence to Islam is about more than what she wears and eats: in addition to wearing the veil and avoiding pork, she attends Koran School in order to learn more. While Yağmur is an assertive and proud Muslim, she is—like Fatma—a representative of “Islam light” and does not seek to convert anybody. This becomes clear when her stepmother Doris suggests that she take along her new stepsister Lena to the Koran School. In the sequences in the Koran School, the Turkish-German screenwriter and director Bora Dağtekin was very careful never to make fun of Islam. Instead, Lena’s ignorant behavior is the axis of the episode’s comedy when she makes every possible faux pas : not only does she bring a yoga mat with a naked man printed on it, but she also performs the “Ibiza Dance” when the Koran schoolmistress invites the girls to meditate. This angers Yağmur, and viewers understand why: Lena’s behavior would have been embarrassing in any other school or institution. But, interestingly enough, the Koran teacher simply accepts Lena’s extravagancies and does not intervene when Lena dances during silent meditation. The fact that Lena had brought the music to accompany her dance in her backpack might suggest that she had planned her performance in order to ridicule Yağmur and her religion. Indeed, after the class, Lena admits that she has no respect for Islam: “Hey, wenn Religion heißt Schleiereulen und Panflötenmusik, dann hab ich auch keinen Respekt davor” (“Die, in der ich keine Schwester will”). Lena’s behavior is so absurd, insensitive, and arrogant that the viewers are unquestionably on Yağmur’s side. So when Yağmur declares that she does not like Germans because they always think that they are “bessere Menschen,” viewers can sympathize with her and understand that she does not mean it as an attack against them. In contrast to Yağmur, Lena’s Turkish-German brother Cem is not religious at all. He is uncircumcised and does not fast during Ramadan, because he claims to be “ein Sportler.” Besides, as Cem explains to Yağmur, he cannot fast because he needs food for his muscles in order to be able to spank her. This highly provocative comment is uttered in Cem’s typical casual and self-ironic manner and is—like many other politically or ideologically contentious punch lines in the sitcom—immediately absorbed by a fast cut and the subsequent focus on a new sequence concentrating on something completely different. Nonetheless, it is worth elaborating on this particular remark because it represents one of the most common stereotypes related to Islam, the stereotype of violent patriarchy and the submission of women. 8 As commentator Thea Dorn suggested in the talk show “Literatur im Foyer: Frauenrechte, Liebe, Sexualität: Gibt es einen zeitgemäßen Islam? ” the “berühmteste and meist diskutierteste Sure aus dem Koran in Deutschland” is what she calls the “Prügelsure,” the Surat An-Nisā’, in which men are declared to be in charge of women and in which it is suggested to “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 121 first advise wives, then forsake them in bed, and finally strike them ( The Koran 4,34). 9 At first sight, Cem seems to fit the cliché of the typical “macho-youth […] that join the veiled women on the ‘stage’” and are “busy tyrannizing their sisters” (Stehle 91). But Cem is neither violent nor religious and even turns into the opposite of the patriarchal male, the aforementioned new favorite sitcom stock character of the hen-pecked man who does the chores and gets bossed around by the women in the house. Tellingly, this is also the case with Cem’s father Metin Öztürk, who—like his televised Turkish-German patriarch-predecessor Metin Arkadaş—is not violent at all. Metin Öztürk is as submissive to his girlfriend and later wife Doris as Metin Arkadaş is to his wife Gül. Both familial fathers are less patriarchs than subordinates: they are completely under the spell of their wives’ erotic charm, and it is also worth noting that both women seem to repeatedly and successfully follow the advice of the Surat An-Nisā’ of “forsaking them [their spouses] in bed” whenever their husbands do not exactly what they want. Like Cem, Metin is not religious either. As he explains in episode 4, he left Turkey because he did not agree with several of its traditions and did not have the right to speak his mind there: “Es gibt viele Dinge, die nicht richtig sind. Aber weil es im Koran steht, wagt niemand daran zu rütteln. Und jetzt hungerst du für diese Religion? ” (“Die, in der ich keine Freunde finde”). Moreover, he describes his agnosticism and emigration as a rebellion against his father, who was a drunkard who spent all the family’s money on prostitutes. So why did Yağmur choose to become a strict Muslim and to wear the headscarf, if nobody else in the family “forces” her to do so? In an interview with the Islamische Zeitung, the actress Pegah Ferydoni defines her sitcom character Yağmur as a young woman who wants to find her own identity. She declares that in contrast with the hijab’s purpose in constructing other fictional female characters—where it typically functions as a folkloric signifier to mark the woman as hailing from a Muslim country—for Yağmur it has a different meaning. Instead, the actress suggests interpreting it as the conscious gesture of a daughter who wants to emancipate herself from her liberal father. In addition, Islam and the headscarf also serve as links to Yağmur’s dead mother and as a shield against her new stepmother Doris. In an interview with the feminist magazine Emma, Ferydoni even goes a step further and describes Yağmur as a sort of juvenile rebel: “Ich habe Yağmur mehr als pubertierenden Punk gesehen. Ein Mädchen, deren Mutter früh gestorben ist und die mit 14, 15 anfängt, sich ihre eigene Identität zu basteln. Da muss sie natürlich gegen den liberalen Vater rebellieren” (Ferydoni 49). Is Yağmur therefore a sort of postfeminist girlie, who fashions an identity by “dressing up” in a headscarf, a gesture that is, in this context, subversive and yet reinscribes traditional values at the same time? There are many scenes 122 Heidi Denzel de Tirado that imply exactly that. In episode 4, when Metin asks his daughter why she refuses to eat, he immediately looks to typical “German” explanations for this quite common phenomenon among female teenagers: “Bist du magersüchtig? Nimmst du Drogen? ” Doris explains to Metin that Yağmur participates in the “Ramadings,” the fasting. This angers Metin, and Yağmur defends herself with another typical teenager argument: her girlfriend Szuna does it, too. Metin’s liberal answer suggests that he views his daughter’s fasting as a rebellious rather than a religious gesture—“Von mir aus kannst du dir den Sex und das Rauchen sparen. Das ist auch Ramadan”—and this outrages his daughter, who promises never to have sex in her life. Metin orders Yağmur to stop Ramadan immediately, but she rejoins with a simple but effective defense: “Von einem Deutschen lasse ich mir gar nichts befehlen! ” Metin is obviously flabbergasted and affected: “Komme ich deutsch rüber? ” In the above-described scene we witness a reversal of a typical “ethnic framing of the conflict between generations” (Sirseloudi 816). While the first generation of the Diaspora often remains Muslim due to its loyalty to Turkey, this is different in the case of Metin Öztürk, who has rejected Turkish and Muslim traditions in a total assimilation to the German culture. He is sad to learn that his daughter is starving herself for a religion that he feels oppresses so many people. But Yağmur explains to him that “diese Religion” is the religion of her mother, of his former wife, and of his fatherland. She rejects her father’s argument that they have a new and good life now, and explains to him that she still needs time to adapt to these new circumstances. In her statement that Islam is her only comfort since her mother’s death—“Alles ist anders. Du hast Doris, Cem hat seine Freunde und ich? Ich hab nichts außer Mamas Religion” (“Die, in der Cem keine Wurst sein will”)—many trends of the second and third generations come to the surface. According to recent studies, the Turkish-German demographic under the age of thirty appears to be “growing increasingly religious” (Diehl and König 242). Experts have attributed this phenomenon to an initial “Germanisation” among the youth, who first want to dissociate themselves from their parents, their religion, and their culture, but then return to Islam due to frustrating experiences of discrimination and constant Othering. The religious community speaks to their “feeling of futility, loss of identity, and forsakenness” and invites them be part of a group of people with similar backgrounds and experiences (Sirseloudi 813). Similar to father Metin Arkadaş, who joined his son Jimmy in getting circumcised after many years of resistance, Metin Öztürk not only allows his daughter to go on with Ramadan, but even joins her in the fasting, even if it goes against his own convictions. His supportive agnostic wife Doris is very proud of Metin’s sensitive and empathetic fathering skills and does everything she can to help “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 123 them. However, Metin and Yağmur accidentally eat German pork meatballs instead of the kofta that Doris was supposed to buy. Yağmur is devastated, but she defends her father and blames Doris for what she perceives as a damning mistake: “Sie ist Schuld! Sie hat das Schweinefleisch gekauft und dafür komme ich in die Hölle.” Yağmur castigates herself in order to avoid Allah’s punishment and berates her agnostic stepmother. As with the earlier sequence in the Koran School, screenwriter and director Bora Dağtekin focuses his mockery on Doris and not on the young Muslim girl, and their theologically explosive dispute is deflected into a parody of Doris in her role as psychoanalyst: “Toll, schrei dich mal frei! Mensch, du platzt ja vor negativen Gefühlen. Rauslassen, Yağmur, nicht rein! ” The ensuing sequences deal with Yağmur’s suffering and guilt, so Doris reaches out to Yağmur’s Koran School teacher for help. However, in this naïve attempt to help her stepdaughter, Doris unintentionally outs Yağmur’s sinful act to the entire school, and the other girls react by harassing her stepdaughter, insulting her, and ripping off her headscarf. This could have been an important narrative turning point in an ethnocentric Western sitcom: the Turkish-German girl might have come to see her Muslim friends as cruel and unreliable and Islam as a fanatical religion, and she could then have turned away from them and become happily assimilated to German norms. It would have been a logical closure of the reversal of the “ethnical framing of the conflict between generations,” in Yağmur’s case a movement from “Germanization” to Islam and then back to “Germanization.” But this is not the case: it is not Yağmur who understands that she was wrong; it is her stepmother Doris. Even if Doris sees in Allah nothing other than an “imaginary friend” and compares him to her own former imaginary friend Anke—“Anke hatte schütteres Haar, saß im Rollstuhl und hatte ganz furchtbar viel Akne auch am Rücken. Aber sie war meine Freundin und ich konnte ihr alles anvertrauen”—she wants Yağmur to be what she is. When Yağmur argues that Doris just wants her to be a “normal” girl—“Du freust dich doch, dass ich endlich normal bin und kein Kopftuch mehr trage”—Doris replies: “Yağmur, normal, das gibt es doch gar nicht” (“Die, in der ich leider erwachsen werde”). This episode develops a representation of “Islam light” by contrasting two adult female figures, one agnostic and one Muslim, who are both empathetic and respectful, but in different ways. I argue that the feminist, New Age psychotherapist Doris has not learned to respect Islam as a religion per se, but she respects it as a personal choice of self-fulfillment for Yağmur. Even if she sees her stepdaughter’s religion as a patriarchal system that discriminates against women, she does everything to help reintegrate her into the Muslim community, thereby showing empathy and intercultural competence, since she accepts Yağmur’s disposition, despite her own second-wave feminist convictions and 124 Heidi Denzel de Tirado predilections. An important character foil to Doris is Yağmur’s Koran teacher Mrs. Sismallooglo, who is depicted as a very understanding and tolerant Muslim. Male Muslims are not even mentioned during the sequences in the Koran School, and so it is the open-minded Mrs. Sismallooglo who most robustly comes to embody both Islam and tolerance in the series. In contrast to Yağmur’s classmates, who are unwilling to accept that their friend did not sin on purpose, she is forgiving and not at all strict. This contrast implies that strictly religious characters are immature, whereas more educated and older characters, like Metin and Mrs. Sismallooglo, live a form of “Islam light.” Mrs. Sismallooglo’s and Doris’s collaboration to teach the girls a lesson in forgiveness and tolerance is an interesting case of intercultural cooperation, as both women act against their own ideological convictions and worldviews: in order to reconcile Yağmur with a religion that Doris considers atavistic and misogynist, Doris gets Mrs. Sismallooglo’s permission to pretend that she put some pork meatballs among the kofta of the school’s buffet to celebrate the end of Ramadan. In the end, the girls welcome Yağmur back into their community, under the condition that Doris keep the “Kofta-Geheimnis” to herself. Screenwriter Dağtekin gives us several possible ways of interpreting this integration project. On the one hand, these sequences seem to follow a typical domestic sitcom narrative pattern: daughter gets bullied, mother solves the problem, and everybody is happy. Indeed, we can read the bullying sequences in the larger context of the bullying problem in schools, and compare them to studies that show that teachers are very often helpless to stop the bullies. Doris, who is in this case both a parent and a professional psychotherapist, is the one who solves the problem and confirms recent studies that stress the importance of “regular communication between children, parents, teachers and health care professionals with regard to bullying incidents” (Fekkes). Additionally, we can view Doris’s successful trick with the pork meatballs as one of the “new effective ways to deal with bullying incidents” that teachers could benefit from learning and implementing (Fekkes). But Yağmur’s exclusion from the community—because she brought “shame” to her fellow Muslims through her “sin”—also echoes discourses on honor killing. The fundamentalist behavior of her Muslim classmates recalls the claims made by the boys in the Berlin school who criticized honor-killing victim Hatun Sürücü and thought that she needed to be punished for rejecting Muslim traditions. It also resonates with studies of young Muslims of the second generation of the Diaspora, whose religiousness is not “necessarily violent” but “at the least very conservative” (Sirseloudi 815). Through the construction of Yağmur as a representative of “Islam light” who temporarily removes her headscarf but ultimately embraces it, the sitcom repeatedly emphasizes that integration is not a passive process but an active “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 125 and ongoing negotiation. When Doris finds out that Yağmur has contacted her grandmother in Turkey in order to arrange a marriage with a Turkish Muslim, she understands that her stepdaughter seeks comfort in the international Ummah, or Muslim community, but misunderstands “dass sie dominiert werden will,” as she calls it. Again, she intervenes and coaches Yağmur’s Greek-German ex-boyfriend Costa on how to reconquer her: “Du hast dich in ein ausländisches Mädchen verliebt, dann darfst du sie auch nicht mit soviel Rücksicht und Zärtlichkeit wie eine Deutsche behandeln … morgen will ich Bruce Willis sehen” (“Die, in der Schläge auch nichts bringen”). Costa’s seductive masculine victory ensures Yağmur’s protection from the marriage to an unknown Turkish Muslim, and her integration process seems to finally be complete when she removes the hijab because Costa asks her to do so. However, she soon puts it on again. “Für mich war es irritierend, als Yağmur das Kopftuch wieder aufzusetzen, nachdem man mir jahrelang versprochen hatte: Du darfst es dann abnehmen,” complained the actress Pegah Ferydony in an interview (Bonstein). But, according to Caren Toennissen, the sitcom’s editor-in-chief, Yağmur was “ohne Kopftuch schlicht unglücklich.” She states that this twist was not meant as a political statement: “Wir sagen damit nicht allen Muslima: Lasst eure Kopftücher auf! ” But she claims that for their story “it was just the right ending” (Bonstein). Even if it seems dubious to debate whether a fictional character’s decisions are “right”—especially when Yağmur’s well-rounded character could have been written as happy without the hijab—this was admittedly probably the “right” political and fictional decision. By breaking the well-known story pattern of a typical coming-of-age story of immigrants, one that travels from exoticism to assimilation, Türkisch für Anfänger created a new female Muslim television character that explores and celebrates a new possible way of being a “normal” Muslim Turkish-German girl: Yağmur is every bit as German as her assimilated father and her brother, even though she remains unassimilated and actively negotiates the terms of her own cultural belonging. She is a Muslim, and she is smart, brave, assertive, and enlightened, and, perhaps most importantly, she is not at all submissive. By ending the story with a young woman who wears the hijab and becomes a mediator between the cultures and religions, e. g. through her habit of purposely embellishing culturally insensitive remarks by German and Turkish politicians in order to avoid unnecessary intercultural misunderstandings, she becomes a new immigrant figure of successful integration beyond common notions of the Leitkultur and assimilation. She turns out to be a wise and witty, self-determined transnational woman who is proficient in multiple cultures, a sort of modern Scheherazade. These representations of “Islam light” in twenty-first-century German sitcoms notwithstanding, Islam still has little visible presence in fictional tele- 126 Heidi Denzel de Tirado vision series. This is the case even though contemporary visual media have introduced evergrowing numbers of Turkish-German characters since the mid- 2000s. Until this day, Yağmur is still the only recurrent practicing Muslim lead character on German television, even though recently we have seen more and more Turkish-German protagonists who have all been represented as perfectly integrated, modern, and even married to German spouses. Whereas the moviegoing public had to wait until the 2010s to see such representations on the silver screen with Evet, ich will and Einmal Hans mit scharfer Soße (dir. Buket Alakuş, 2013), German television series have been featuring Turkish-German relationships and weddings since 2005; some examples include Arzu and Philip ( In Aller Freundschaft, Das Erste, 2005), Yasemin and Raúl ( Marienhof, Das Erste, 2006), Semra and Daniel ( Rennschwein Rudi Rüssel, Das Erste, 2010), and Ayla and Philip ( Gute Zeiten, Schlechte Zeiten, RTL , 2012). Apart from feature-length interreligious culture-clash comedies like Zimtstern und Halbmond (dir. Matthias Steurer, ARD Degeto, 2010)—which features “einen muslimisch-katholischen Glaubenskrieg” during Christmas (Tittelbach), when a young female pilot introduces her Palestinian boyfriend from Bethlehem to her Catholic family—the representation of Islam in fictional television formats remained rather rare. In contrast to this scarcity, Islam and especially fundamentalist forms of Islamism have been popular topics of discussion and debate in German talk shows like Hart aber Fair, Anne Will, Menschen bei Maischberger, Maybrit Illner, and Markus Lanz, among others. Apart from Germans who converted to Islam—like the radical Islamist preacher and former boxer Pierre Vogel—liberal Muslims like Lamya Kaddor, author of the autobiography Muslimisch, weiblich, deutsch! Mein Weg zu einem zeitgemäßen Islam and co-founder and president of the Liberal-Islamischer Bund, have recently diversified the voices of Muslims in German media. 10 Talk shows like the Forum zum Freitag ( ZDF , 2007-present), which was inspired by the Christian Wort zum Sonntag and aims to give Germans and Muslims the chance to discuss current events from a religious perspective, continue to play an important role in the interreligious dialogue. However, the Forum is still not aired on television and only accessible on the website of the ZDF . In the face of recent developments—like the growth of the political movement PEGIDA ( Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes ) and the terrorist attacks in Paris and Istanbul—the visibility of moderate fictive and real Muslims has become more important. The challenge to integrate Muslims on Western television screens is on, as most popular sitcoms featuring Muslims, such as the popular Dutch series Shouf Shouf! and the successful Canadian sitcom Little Mosque on the Prairie, have been canceled. The challenge of representing moderate Muslim characters is one that Western broadcasters should take seriously, as the relationship be- “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 127 tween the popular media and the underrepresentation of minorities has been an important issue for activists, psychologists, media monitors, and cultural theorists for several decades. Until this challenge is met head-on, German-speaking viewers seeking Muslim representation will find entertainment in reruns of Rennschwein Rudi Rüssel, which features Muslim guest characters who one after the other become interculturally and interreligiously competent by coming to see that the little piggy Rudi, the house pet of the Froehlich-Koray family, is not at all “unrein.” While all the Turkish-German Muslims finally understand that the piggy Rudi poses no threat to Islam, the German viewers are liberated from any form of Islamophobia, as all of the reputedly ominous members of the Koray family turn out to be friendly representatives of “Islam light” in the end. notes I would like to thank Faye Stewart for her eloquent suggestions that tremendously improved this article. 1 Hamed Abdel-Samad’s concept of “Islam light” has a lot in common with Bassam Tibi’s concept of “Euro-Islam.” However, I have chosen to work with the term “Islam light” instead of “Euro-Islam” because the latter has many different meanings and connotations: scholars like Tariq Ramadan ( To be a European Muslim, 1999), Jørgen S. Nielsen ( Towards a European Islam, 1999), and Maria Luisa Maniscalco ( „Islam Europeo.“ Sociologia de un incontro, 2014) have used this term and interpreted it in different ways. 2 While Ayhan Sürücü was sentenced to nine years in prison for the murder of his sister, his two older brothers, Mutlu and Alpaslan, were accused of having planned and incited the murder but could not be convicted due to lack of evidence. The brothers, who have since fled to Turkey, are now the defendants in a new trial against them there. 3 Almsgiving is authorized in the Koran and in the Hadith. Zakat is considered as one of the five pillars of Islam, and Sadaqa is a voluntary form of charity; “both are governed by the Sharia” (Campo). 4 Converts are often a topic in talk shows, and several scholars have analyzed the attraction of Islam for German outcasts: “Je mehr der Islam in der deutschen Gesellschaft marginalisiert und kriminalisiert wird, desto attraktiver wird er für marginalisierte Nichtmuslime” (“Schlagloch”). See also Berna Gueneli’s article in this issue. 5 See for instance, AbuMubarak, and the discussions on the Muslim website Ummah on this “controversial new law […] which requires Muslims to take an extra cultural test when applying for citizenship.” 128 Heidi Denzel de Tirado 6 While many activists and scholars refrain from using the term “honor killing” because it Others migrants, it remains an important theme in the European discourse on migration and integration of Muslims, even if many scholars have warned that it is falsely associated with Islam. Recep Doğan, the author of “Is honor killing a ‘Muslim phenomenon’? ” comes to the conclusion that Muslim communities are more vulnerable for “differing cultural interpretations of honor,” but explains the phenomenon in a more general way: “In communities where there is a high incidence of honor killings there is a powerful sense of the concept of honor and a shared belief that honor is the most fundamental value in life” (423). 7 The headscarf debate started when the young Muslim teacher Fereshta Ludin sought placement in a public school in Baden-Württemberg and did not want to take off her hijab . When she was refused a position in a state school of that province, Ludin appealed to municipal and state courts and initiated several years of passionate debates about the headscarf. Ludin lost all her cases: “The judges overruled Ludin’s private religious rights in favor of that of students’ right to secular education, citing the so-called negative freedom of religion act, which states that students must not be confronted with religious symbols against their will” (Batur 160). However, in September 2003, the Bundesverfassungsgericht —the Federal Constitutional Court, the highest court in Germany—ruled in favor of Ludin, because there was no unambiguous law in Baden-Württemberg that explicitly banned religious symbols in the classroom. Yet this ruling did not put an end to the debate, but instead initiated a controversy about the necessity of creating a legal basis for banning the hijab for teachers at public schools. 8 A Google search in February 2015 with the two keywords “Islam” and “violence” generated more than 90.5 million hits. 9 The Surat An-Nisā’ is a very controversial issue all over the West. Canadian scholar Ahmad Shafaat describes verse 34, about men and women, as “perhaps the one most often misunderstood or misused by both Muslims and non-Muslims,” and Asra Q. Nomani, the author of Standing Alone: An American Woman’s Struggle for the Soul of Islam, suggests: “For critics of Islam, 4: 34 is the smoking gun that proves that Islam is misogynistic and intrinsically violent.” 10 Kaddor, who considers herself to be a representative of the majority of German Muslims, has invited Muslims in Germany to be more vocal and visible in the media and society in order to even out the so-called Meinungsführerschaft of a “fundamentalist minority,” mainly represented by associations like the DİTİB (Diyanet İşleri Türk İslam Birliği, the Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs) or the Milli Görüş. “Islam Light”: Girly Muslim Power and Moderate Islamic Men in German Sitcoms 129 Works Cited Abdel-Samad, Hamed. “Und es gibt ihn doch - den Islam! ” Der Tagesspiegel. 5 Jan. 2010. 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