Laying the Foundations for a European Islam in the Modern Age: Islam and Muslims in Interwar Germany as a case study

In today’s Germany the public perception tends frequently to associate the beginnings of the Muslim presence in the country with the immigration of Turkish and North African guest workers after WWII, who came to participate to the creation of the German Wirtschaftswunder (“economic miracle”). That Muslims have been living in Germany and participating actively to its socio-cultural and political life more than half a century before the coming of the later migrants is something that seems to be known only to few experts and interested parties. This vivid historical episode is for a variety of reasons still very far from constituting a “lieu de mémoire” in the collective memory of the Germans. The big majority still reduces Islam in their country during the first half of the 20th century – if at all – very often either to the collaboration between the notorious Palestinian nationalist Amīn al-Ḥusaynī (the so-called Mufti of Hitler) and the NS-regime, or to the Bosnian SS-Brigade “Handschar”, whose pictures in Nazi-military uniform performing the Muslim prayer are known from recent documentaries on the subject. But the historical reality was way more complex and diverse than that.
In my presentation I will address a set of questions, in order to highlight the historical importance of Muslim life in Germany in the period 1919-1945: What did the Muslim presence in Germany after WWI look like? Which Muslim trends were represented and how did they interact with the German society? What were the positions of the German authorities in the Weimar republic and later in Nazi-Germany towards these Muslims? And last but not least, why should they be considered as the “real” pioneers of Islam in Germany? Studying and re-discovering this unique Muslim European episode can in many ways contribute to put the ongoing debate about the place of Islam and Muslims in Germany (which became very tense since the emergence of the right-wing PEGIDA movement) into perspective.