Mosques in the Metropolis

Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe

Elisabeth Becker

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780226781648
  9780226781501
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226781785
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Mosques in the Metropolis offers a unique look into two of Europe's largest mosques and the communities they support. Elisabeth Becker provides a complex picture of Islam in Europe at a particularly fraught time, shedding light on both experiences of deep and enduring marginalization and the agency of Muslim populaces. She balances individual Muslim voices with the historical and structural forces at play, revealing, in all their complexity, the people for whom the mosques are centers of religion and community life. As her interlocutors come to life in the pages, the metropolis emerges as a space alternative to the nation in which they can contend with degrading images of Islam and Muslims. Ultimately Becker insists that caste is a crucial lens through which to view Muslims in Europe, and through this lens she critiques what she perceives as the failures of European pluralism. To amplify her point, she brings Jewish history and twentieth-century Jewish thought into the conversation directly, drawing on scholars such as Walter Benjamin, Zygmunt Bauman, and Hannah Arendt to describe both Jewish and Muslim life and marginality. By challenging Eurocentric notions, from "progress" to "civility," "tolerance" to "freedom" and "equality, what is at stake, Becker insists, is the possibility of a truly plural Europe.

CHAPTER 1

The European Metropolis: Where Doors and Walls Meet

Thinking the city moves towards thinking the world.

Henri Lefebvre1

This is the story of flesh, bone, spirit, and stone. It is the story of two mosques, and their inhabitants called to the European metropolis by countries that wanted their bodies but never their souls. “Man hat Arbeitskräfte gerufen, und es kommen Menschen”—“We called for labor, but people came instead,” Swiss writer Max Frisch famously wrote of the post–World War II (WWII) wave of immigration in 1965.2 It is the story of the shells they fashioned to protect and cultivate those souls.

I begin this book on the threshold between what is, what was, and what might have been. I am standing where the Puerta de Moros once stood in Madrid, Spain, off of Cava Baja, the street where I reside. Destroyed in 1412 during the Reconquista, this door to the city and its surrounding plaza were rebuilt a century later.3 The door is now long gone, the plaza dotted with coffeeshops, bakeries, and discount clothing stores: a center of commerce and social communion, where the city’s residents sip café con leche and chew on brined sausage, charred pepitas, and oranges ripened by the sun. Yet each street evokes a sense of suspension in time, the past etched into the architectural face of the metropolis. As I walk through the neighborhood, I imagine the city in another time, this district once inhabited by Muslims and Jews. Although it is only by chance, by circumstance, it feels fitting for myself, a Jewish ethnographer of European mosques, to live and to pause here.

My book project is thus born, paradoxically, in the very place where my research cannot come to fruition. It is my failure as an ethnographer in Spain, itself a geographical threshold on the southern edge of Europe, where the straits of Gibraltar meet the land, that allows me to see and to feel this history, stretching from the present in a temporal backbend towards the Reconquista. This book begins to take its shape here in early 2015. It is, more precisely, early January, the week after the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris, when I come to recognize the deep and enduring liminality of Muslim lives. Uncertainty is alive across Europe. Muslim men and women rally at Atocha, the main train station in Madrid, holding signs above their heads: “Islam equals peace”; “I am a Muslim not a terrorist.” There is a certain unsettledness not only in their words on this square, but across the city. In its streets, its stores, its mosques, a condensation of fear hovers in the air.

I have set out to comparatively study three capital city mosques across Europe, in London, Berlin, and Madrid, to understand both the constraints and the interstitial opportunities endowed by marginality on Muslim bodies and institutions. While the unraveling of my Spanish case is both sudden and unsettling, it is preceded by premonition-like moments. First, I cannot find a research site. In the largest mosques of the city, women claim that no activities take place, and security guards man entrances dually surveilled by video cameras. In a small mosque close to my home, those who have agreed to meet me never arrive. When I ask about the city’s mosques, non-Muslim city dwellers shake their heads, advising me to travel south to Córdoba, once heart of the Umayyad Dynasty in Spain (756–1031).4 Later, my interlocutors in both Berlin and London will tell me their own stories of Córdoba, the prohibition of prayer they encountered upon entering the Mosque-Cathedral. “I went to Córdoba on my honeymoon and a guard took me aside and warned me ‘you cannot pray here,’” says Imani, a medical resident who I meet one afternoon at the East London Mosque (ELM). Tuba, a law student who leads tours at the Şehitlik Mosque in Berlin, similarly explains,

I had the weirdest experience. I entered the Mezquita and literally a guard in the section came close to me and walked by me. When I left his vicinity, someone else came, then someone else came. So I was accompanied the entire duration of my stay in the Mezquita by someone in close range, and I had a feeling they were looking out to see if I was attempting to pray.

In her ethnography of Muslim encounters in Granada, Mikaela Rogozen-Soltar writes about deep historical memories of the Moors, inscribed as much into the bodies of edifices as into the collective memory of Spain’s southern cities.5 Chris Lowney calls this “a vanished world.”6 Yet in southern Spain, as in the Spanish capital, we can still see—and feel—the reverberations of this history, the blurring of boundaries between present and past. The unraveling of my research in Spain does not occur in Córdoba nor in Granada, however, but in a nearby southern city, where I am suddenly enmeshed in a day of questioning by those who appear to be covert security forces. They simply cannot make sense of my interest in Spanish Muslims. When I call the United States (US) embassy, diplomats castigate me without pause for trusting Muslim communities, and warn me not to join a terrorist organization. I am suddenly caught in the web of uncertainty and surveillance that constrains Muslims’ everyday lives, the labyrinth of the minotaur-like security state—part monster, part man—guarding a blinding maze of sacrifice.

The next day, I return to Madrid. In place of ancient doors opening to the city, I now see the walls, just as old, closing it off. And I find myself at one insurmountable, immaterial wall: that of Muslims deemed uncivil. In the central neighborhood of Lavapiés, I watch West African refugees calling out the name of Allah, beating drums in rhythm with their hymns of discontent. In my own neighborhood, once inhabited by Muslims and Jews, I notice remnants of a history that castigated both: from forced conversions to expulsions and murder determined by a single drop of Muslim or Jewish blood. Standing on the Plaza Mayor, an early trade market and center of executions during the Inquisition, I now see something that I had somehow overlooked: depictions of this history carved into its lightposts, the strata of the metropolis inscribed onto its modern body in miniature form. “The city as palimpsest.”7

My experience in Spain splits the skin of its capital open, revealing threads of continuity that weave the present to the past in its upright and crumbling body of iron welded to glass and stone. Residents speak of the Moors as if alive in the metropolis, while ignoring the architectural remnants of Islamic empire buried all around us, right beneath our feet (Madrid’s Royal Palace, for example, erected at the very site where the Alcazar stood from the ninth century until 1734).8 As I walk through Madrid one last time and night sets in, the city comes alive. I visit the Fountain of the Fallen Angel in Retiro Park, inspired by Milton’s Paradise Lost.9 I continue south of the park, entering the Barrio de las Letras, and glance down at the ground. My eyes together with my feet settle on a sonnet written by seventeenth-century poet and novelist Francisco de Quevedo. Inscribed onto the cobblestone streets in gold, it begins with the words “I looked upon my native country’s walls.” Setting out in Madrid with a quest to find the ghost of a door built by the Moors, my time in Spain ends with a sonnet to the walls of the Spanish imaginary. I am acutely aware in this moment, in a city so bright that I cannot see the stars, that the door and the wall can never be pulled apart; they meet and unite at the site of the threshold, a liminal point of entry, exit, history, and new beginning.

Metropolis as Labyrinth and as Palimpsest

Stars are invoked at the conclusion of the three parts of Dante’s Divine Comedy—Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso—to symbolize coming into the light, into the presence of God.10 The modern metropolis obscures the stars, just as it often obscures the lives of its many residents.11 Much is in fact obscured by the city, with its incongruent passageways and glass that cuts into rubble. Still more can be gleaned from its daily life as a built environment made into home, where physical nearness and affective remoteness bind private and public lives.

The very word polis, denoting the ancient Greek city-state, references the form of the walled city, with fortifications built as a physical barrier to entry or attack. The European metropolis is both ancient and future-looking, inward- and outward-facing, today metaphorically walled off in the imaginary rather than surrounded by material walls. I primarily use the word metropolis to reference the urban arenas at the heart of this book, drawing on its two meanings: (1) “mother city,” signifying a city of import, and (2) the colonial or imperial core.12 The term “metropolis” is often employed in reference to cities as economic hubs during the height of the colonial era. I instead draw attention to the ways in which metropoles are today cultural hubs in Europe’s uncertain postcolonial/postimperial age, and an evocative microcosm of global struggles over how plurality is bounded and lived. The “mosque in the metropolis” invokes both the colonial/imperial and postcolonial/postimperial connotations of the term, as at once spatial, temporal, and cultural threshold.

When I leave Madrid, I do not go home, but instead to Berlin to continue my research. As the plane lands in the German capital, I am left ruminating over the place, and limits, of the modern European metropolis. This soon draws me to the work of Walter Benjamin. Fascinated by modern cities, how they intertwine present and past, Benjamin’s collected works on Berlin and Paris are often read as a manifesto on the failures of capitalism. They can alternatively be read as critical theory13 written from a position of liminality, from exile, or as a love letter to the fragmented form of the city itself. Benjamin laments, “The pathos of this project . . . I find every city beautiful.”14 It is not only splendor, however, that Benjamin finds in urban life, but also a sense of betrayal: his childhood Berlin—“the city god itself”—in ruins, and the shattered Paris of his dreams.15

The modern metropolis emerged in staggered timelines across Europe from early to late modernity. Like the nation-state, it has always functioned as both idea and material reality. In Thinking with History, Carl Schorske traces “the idea of the city in European thought,” evoking a productive tension between the city as virtue and the city as vice. For Voltaire, nineteenth-century London was particularly virtuous, allowing men to transcend social hierarchies by bringing enlightened “reason and taste” to the masses; finding “lost paradise” in the German city of the same era, philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte came to understand the city as an enlightened, civilizing agent of the nation.16 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, intellectual social reformers like Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, shifted from the city as virtue to the city as vice in their writings on urban poverty.17 As a geographical condensation of imperial remnants, aftermath, and Muslim afterlives, today the metropolis rises as a lived form suspended between virtue and vice, the devastations and utopic strivings of European modernity. It rises as both palimpsest, a text to be read, with the traces of its many pasts never fully washed away, and labyrinth to carefully tread.18

The concurrent possibilities and shortfalls of modernity come alive in the metropolitan everyday, whether in the Parisian arcades through which Benjamin once wandered, or the mosques in London and Berlin, where I root my research. Rather than a time-centric understanding, e.g., as post-Enlightenment and temporally progressive or a distinct juncture/state, I focus on the dialectical construction of European modernity, seeking order and coherence through violently upheld hierarchies. In “Eurocentrism and Modernity,” Enrique Dussel argues that modernity is “a European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content.”19 In Dussel’s understanding, modernity is created through not only contrast but imagined superiority, suggesting hierarchy, as well as its lived repercussions, including violent projects of domination that span the globe. Zygmunt Bauman argues that it is modernity’s rationality—specifically, the “problem of order” in what he terms “a gardening state”—that creates both impetus and opportunity for violence.20 “Modernity’s sacrificial-mythical character,” with its labyrinths and its minotaur, forges insiders and outsiders, silence, and, according to Arendt, absence of full-belonging.21 For my interlocutors, constituents22 of European mosques, this absence is both acute and enduring.

Within this prism of modernity, the European metropolis is not only the magnetic once-nucleus of empire, with its “knotted and complex histories” of power and marginality, but it is also a center of resistance against it as such.23 And while it appears on the surface as the inner stratum of a set of nesting dolls, inside of the European state and the broader European imaginary, it remains a locus of community life and belonging in its own right. Like the sun, the city rises as a point of orientation for human organization and governance, while also a place of self-determin...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Spirit Meeting Stone
• 1   The European Metropolis: Where Doors and Walls Meet
• 2   Caste, or the Order of Things Defied
• 3   Kaaba in Papier-Mâché: Inside the Şehitlik Mosque
• 4   Ordinary Angels: Şehitlik Mosque and the Metropolis
• 5   Messianic Horizon: Inside the East London Mosque
• 6   Hope, Interrupted: The East London Mosque and the Metropolis
• 7   Unsettled Europe: On the Threshold of Remembrance
• Afterword: The Memory of Trees
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index