Stolen Honor

Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin

Katherine Pratt Ewing

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780804759007, 9780804758994
• eBook ISBN: 9780804779722
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

The covered Muslim woman is a common spectacle in Western media—a victim of male brutality, the oppressed and suffering wife or daughter. And the resulting negative stereotypes of Muslim men, stereotypes reinforced by the post-9/11 climate in which he is seen as a potential terrorist, have become so prominent that they influence and shape public policy, citizenship legislation, and the course of elections across Europe and throughout the Western world. In this book, Katherine Pratt Ewing asks why and how these stereotypes—what she terms "stigmatized masculinity"—largely go unrecognized, and examines how Muslim men manage their masculine identities in the face of such discrimination.

The author focuses her analysis and develops an ethnographic portrait of the Turkish Muslim immigrant community in Germany, a population increasingly framed in the media and public discourse as in crisis because of a perceived refusal of Muslim men to assimilate. Interrogating this sense of crisis, Ewing examines a series of controversies—including honor killings, headscarf debates, and Muslim stereotypes in cinema and the media—to reveal how the Muslim man is ultimately depicted as the "abjected other" in German society.

Part 1

MYTHOLOGIZING THE “TRADITIONAL” MAN

1

IMAGINING TRADITION

The Turkish Villager

THE IMAGE OF THE OPPRESSED TURKISH MUSLIM WOMAN is a symbol for the cultural challenge of absorbing large Muslim immigrant populations into German and other European societies, just as, for two centuries, the position of women in Islam has been central to a powerful Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Muslim social formations. Despite Edward Said’s far-reaching intervention into Western scholarship and public discourse through the delineation of the discursive structure of Orientalism (1978), the dichotomies that he challenged—between West and East, modernity and tradition, vigorous globalizing society and a civilization in decline—continue to shape conversations about the problems of integration. It is a discourse in which Muslim and Turkish models of manhood and gender organization have been reified and portrayed as utterly alien to modern society, both in Turkey and in Germany.

In this chapter I trace the genealogies of contemporary representations of Turkish and Muslim manhood, focusing on several distinct genres that have been generated by differently positioned actors operating with very different goals. These actors range from nineteenth-century Western travelers who began to visit sites within the Ottoman Empire in increasing numbers in the mid-nineteenth century, to twentieth-century anthropologists looking to describe and analyze traditional social and cultural structures and the effects of modernization on Turkish villages, to late-twentieth-century Turkish feminists and scholars concerned with equal rights for women whose perspectives have been shaped not only by transnational feminisms but also by the history of Turkish nationalism and secularism. These diverse discursive strands have converged to generate a limited range of hegemonic representations of Turkish manhood.

The convergence of these strands is not coincidental. It is the manifestation of a deeper discursive process, the juggernaut of modernity and “Western” values, which rests on the postulate that Enlightenment ideas of individual freedom and equality can be universalized and are the legitimate standard against which all other ways of life are to be judged. By tracing the history of these images of Muslim and Turkish men, my goal is to disrupt this often implicit universalized standard, to foreground the contingent nature of these images, and to indicate how they emerge from the recurrent effects of European power and its Orientalist gaze. Making explicit the continuities and shifts within this discourse also parochializes images of the modern Western man, challenging their foundation in a universalized understanding of modernity by questioning the contrasts that are made between him and the culturally backward Turkish Muslim man.

What are the dominant images that recur in media representations and everyday conversations about the Turkish Muslim minority in Germany? The most blatantly stereotypical formulations map the dichotomy of modernity-tradition onto Germany-Turkey, so that Germany is understood as modern and Turkey as traditional. This is especially common within the context of discussions of Turkish men, despite obvious manifestations of Turkish cosmopolitanism (and German traditionalism) in other contexts such as advertisements for tourism and German political debates that draw on Turkey’s secularism to reinforce arguments in favor of banning the headscarf in the German classroom. Much of this discourse about the traditional man revolves around the concept of honor. As traditional honor is understood, it subsumes all of the dimensions that mark Turkish masculinity as not-modern: a group orientation rather than individuality, given that honor is a property of the family rather than the individual; the hierarchical control of women and submission to elders rather than equality; a gendered division of labor in which women are forced to do most of the work while men relax and socialize in order to maintain their status and dignity; violation of the autonomy of women and, hence, the basic legal principle of the free and autonomous subject. Honor is also viewed as a prime motive for violence, which is seen as a characteristic behavior of the traditional Turkish Muslim man.

The actions of Turkish men vis-à-vis their families tend to be understood as a manifestation of a traditional masculinity based on the maintenance of family honor through hierarchical authority, the control of women, and violence. For those men who have integrated into German society, however, their adaptation is usually taken as evidence that they have given up their Turkish culture and adopted a modern, egalitarian orientation and individualistic autonomy. I question this dichotomizing assumption.

Public focus on honor as the core conceptual framework for thinking about the Turkish Muslim man is in many respects a popularization of the concept of the honor-shame complex, which was developed within the discipline of anthropology and in the 1960s was identified as characteristic of the whole Mediterranean region (see Péristiany 1966). I begin with a discussion of the anthropological theorization of this concept of honor and provide a context for it more specifically within the ethnographic literature on the Turkish village. I then turn to earlier representations of Turkish men, looking at recurrent images that appear in histories of the Ottoman Empire and in Western travel writing. German historians have over time been quite active in scholarship on the Ottoman Empire and have viewed the Ottoman through a lens that reflected German preoccupations with national character.¹ The European travelogue is a genre that goes back more than two hundred years. In these travel writings, shifts in how men and women are represented can be identified in ways that throw into relief how historically contingent current views of traditional Turkish Muslim gender practices are.

Finally, I consider twentieth-century perspectives within Turkey itself. I look at the scholarship of Turkish gender scholars within the context of the modernizing, secularist discourse of the Turkish state, which was established in the early 1920s and has from its inception seen the transformation of gender relations to be an important component of the constitution of the modern Turkish citizen. This discourse casts traditional village life and its organization of gender in a generally negative light. Turkish feminist arguments for gender equality have gone even further and tended to emphasize the extent to which even the modernizing state has retained its patriarchal organization, often in the name of preserving Turkish culture.

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE CONCEPT OF HONOR

Anthropological ethnographies of the Turkish village have sought to present an insider’s view of village life, as if from the villager’s own perspective. A recent trend within anthropology has been to return to rurally focused ethnographies in order to situate local practices and actions as integral to national and global processes. Earlier ethnographies, in contrast, were the products of a discipline that distinguished itself from sociology and history by its focus on the nonmodern. The goal was to describe and analyze the social structure of a village, its culture, or both as they existed before their transformation by the forces of modernity, as if village structure and culture were timeless traditions separate from the forces of history. This approach tended to create a sharp boundary between the modern man and the traditional man and to detach the village from modernity, confining it to the boundaries of tradition or culture, thereby reinforcing the archaic quality of a traditional masculinity that was discursively linked to the village. Many of these studies addressed the question of social change associated with the growing presence of the Turkish state at the village level and the large out-migration of villagers but framed this change in terms of the loss of tradition and viewed the state as external to village life, as Yael Navaro-Yashin has pointed out (2002).²

Within the anthropological tradition, the honor-shame complex is an influential, if now discredited, concept that has become a stereotype of gender relations from Spain to Turkey (Herzfeld 1987: 76). In the 1960s it came to be the defining feature of a Mediterranean culture area with the publication of J. G. Péristiany’s edited volume Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (1966). At that time, the discipline’s organization of cultural phenomena into “culture areas” resulted in the concept of honor bearing the burden of delimiting the Mediterranean area, much as caste did for South Asia or the “big man” complex did for Melanesia. In addition to creating an artificial boundary between the Mediterranean and other areas, the concept gave rise to an overemphasis on the elements that were seen to constitute this peculiarly Mediterranean cultural complex and a neglect of other aspects of social life. The honor-shame complex became a cultural essence that sharply distinguished its practitioners from modernity, even though Péristiany’s book itself focused primarily on southern Europe and drew links with the structure of honor in Western Europe more broadly. The idea of an honor-shame complex was challenged by Michael Herzfeld (1980), who argued that such terms of moral valuation must be understood within specific linguistic and social contexts and suggested that the term honor as a general analytic category be replaced by the more neutral concept of reputation (Herzfeld 1980: 348), thereby attempting to disrupt the us-them dichotomy that the term honor had come to embody. Several years later, David Gilmore (1987) revisited the concept with an edited volume in which he acknowledged that honor and shame are basic organizing mechanisms in nearly all small communities or face-to-face groups such as gangs. He nevertheless sought to maintain the distinctiveness of the Mediterranean complex by foregrounding the specific linkage of male honor and female sexuality, thereby placing an even greater analytic burden on stereotyped gender differences in the conceptualization of honor.

Carol Delaney’s ethnographic study of gender organization and its cultural logic in a Turkish (Anatolian) village, The Seed and the Soil (1991), focused directly on concepts of gender in rural Turkey. It is an instance of the interpretive approach to culture that characterized a dominant strand of American anthropology in the 1970s. Her argument supported the idea of a regional honor-shame complex by seeing it as the manifestation of a cultural system of meaning characteristic of the monotheistic worldview that had its roots in the Middle East. (Delaney contributed a chapter to Gilmore’s 1987 volume.)

Delaney argued that women are subordinated through a pervasive cultural metaphor that gives the male the active role in creation and procreation and presumes the woman to be merely the environment, the “soil,” that makes the seed of procreation successful. Aside from her characterization of a single cultural metaphor as the essence of Turkish village culture, encapsulated in her title, her argument makes an interpretive leap from the idea that a man is the source of generative life force and a woman is the soil that must be fertilized and protected to the analytic label “patriarchy.” Her analysis ignores the possibility that villagers draw on competing sources of meaning and a range of interpretive strategies in their everyday negotiations and activities.

The analytic bias generated by the culture area framework has passed from anthropology into the media. Even as such area-delimited conceptualizations became obsolete within anthropology, the complex came to be viewed outside of anthropology in terms of “a cultural essence, an intractable and problematic ‘syndrome,’” as Amanda Weidman has concisely put it (Weidman 2003: 520).

When one looks at other ethnographically based analyses of honor and its role in the enactment of masculinity, some of the oversimplifications of the popular stereotype become apparent. Even in Péristiany’s early volume, the complex as it has come to be known—in which men’s honor is a group rather than an individual phenomenon and is defined in terms of men’s success at controlling the sexuality of their women—was not the primary focus of analysis. The chapter by Pierre Bourdieu, for example, focused on honor as a “sentiment” that is enacted in a “dialectic of challenge and riposte” among the Kabyle of northern Algeria (Bourdieu 1966: 197), in which men jockey for self-respect and public recognition, both for themselves as individuals and for their families, through a complex set of strategies that establish and maintain honor in the face of various challenges. This dialectic is similar to the eghoismos (aggressive self-regard) that Herzfeld (1985) analyzed in the performance of masculinity among Cretan shepherds. Bourdieu demonstrated how the term honor actually encompasses several distinct categories among the Kabyle, only some of which focus on defending one’s home and one’s women.

Other ethnographic studies disrupted the idea of a unitary culture complex by foregrounding how terms glossed as “honor” are configured and used distinctively in different regions and communities. Michael Meeker (1976), for example, compared honor as a system of meaning among Black Sea Turks and Levantine Arabs and found that, though the system of meaning was similar for both, resting on a distinction between (in Arabic) sharaf (honor in a broad sense) and ‘ard (sexual honor), the cultural structuring of that system was significantly different in the two societies, resulting in differing relationships between the two categories that had important implications for behavior.³ Lila Abu-Lughod’s study of honor and poetry in a Bedouin society identified quite a different ideology of honor that “serves to rationalize social inequality ... in a system that idealizes the equality of agnates and the autonomy of individuals.” In this system women share these ideals, even though “their path to honor ... is different” (Abu-Lughod 1986: 33). Furthermore, Abu-Lughod demonstrated that this ideology of honor is not all-encompassing by identifying expressions of sentiment in poetry that articulate quite a different sense of self.

Terms that can be translated roughly as “honor” abound in Turkish, beyond the two categories Meeker identified.⁴ Each, of course, has its specific history and range of contexts in which it might be appropriately deployed in the negotiation of social positioning, power, and self-esteem. The term şeref (the Arabic sharaf, discussed by Meeker) is used across the Muslim world to describe a man’s reputation within the community. Within the context of Islam, the term is associated with the prophet Muhammad to mean someone whose actions and orientations are moral. Şeref is also associated with the accomplishments of one’s male kin and ancestors and can be used as a kind of class marker of social worth.

In Turkey, şeref has also come to be associated with performing military service, an important instance of how an apparently traditional institution was given new meaning through the intervention of state institutions in the early Republican period. The introduction of universal military service was linked to efforts to reorganize the structure of public life and the family away from a masculine public constituted of elder heads of extended households and the elite to a broader public composed of heads of nuclear families (Mardin 1969). The performance of military service became a crucial marker of adulthood for men: “In order to be recognized as equal participants in the public sphere, [men] needed only to perform military service and to establish a nuclear household” (Koğacioğlu 2004: 127). To be fully recognized in the public sphere was to be şeref.

Namus is the term (equivalent to the Arabic ‘ard, according to Meeker) for sexual honor, which has as its opposite shame (ayıp), though a man who does not treat his wife fairly is also shameful (ayιp).⁵ Paul Stirling characterized namus in the following terms: “An honourable man is ready to fight, resentful of insults, able to keep his women pure from all taint of gossip, if necessary by killing them, and incapable of underhand and deceitful practices” (Stirling 1965: 231). Though in some contexts honor overlaps with religious ideas of merit and uprightness, in others it contradicts them: “Honour requires intransigence and implacability; insults must be pursued and avenged, and never taken lying down. On the other hand, God is merciful, and it is the duty of a good Muslim likewise to be merciful, and to live in peace” (Stirling 1965: 232). In attempting to resolve quarrels, a person may draw on the principles of Islam against arguments based on honor.

When a man does resort to violence, the reasons are often far more complex than the straightforward enactment of a code of honor. The complexity of the possible sources of honor, reputation, and self-esteem that individuals may draw on as they negotiate social relationships in various contexts means that there are no simple formulas for action. Furthermore, for a man negotiating his self-esteem and reputation in a diasporic setting, it is not a matter of a dichotomous choice between the “traditional” path of honor and the “modern” path of individuality and freedom. Just as the sources of şeref have changed within the Turkish village as universal military service has come to be seen as a basic component of manhood (Altinay 2004), young men of Turkish background in Germany have found new sources of honor and prestige but do not necessarily experience these new ways of establishing and maintaining their reputations as involving a total rupture with the practices of an older generation.⁶

AMBIVALENT REPRESENTATIONS OF THE TURK

Just as anthropological models have shaped popular representations of the honor-shame complex and the relationship of the village to modernity by constituting the Turkish man as traditional, interpretive paradigms of historians and Orientalists over centuries have also played a role in shaping public perceptions of the Turk. Furthermore, these models have been closely intertwined with the political and economic interests of Western states. The rejection of Eurocentric histories in the wake of Said’s critique of Orientalism has over the past several decades stimulated among Ottoman historians efforts to develop new models that disrupt these Eurocentric narratives⁷ and has generated considerable interest in critically examining earlier interpret...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Table of Contents
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• Part 1 - MYTHOLOGIZING THE “TRADITIONAL” MAN
• Part 2 - STIGMATIZED MASCULINITY AND THE GERMAN NATIONAL IMAGINARY
• EPILOGUE
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX