Alevis in Germany On the Way to Public Recognition?

In the past decade, Alevis in Germany have stressed their distinctness mainly in terms of culture when negotiating with the majority society. Since recently, however, an increased emphasis on religion can be observed, which is not so much due to a regained strength of religiosity. It is rather a response to changed public discourses and an adjustment to the prevailing legal and institutional conditions. In Germany, the issue of immigration has been treated in terms of cultural difference since long ago, the religious identity of the mainly Muslim immigrants having nearly no impact on integration policy. Yet since the end of the 1990s, when attention was drawn to fundamentalist tendencies among the Muslim youth, the religious dimension of immigration has been brought to the fore

The New Garments of Alevism

In the past decade, Turkey's official image as a country of Sunni Muslims has been vigorously challenged by the 'coming out' of the Alevis, a large heterodox Islamic minority, which consists of approximately 15 million Turkish- and Kurdish-speaking members. Until that time, due to the official definition of Turkey as an ethnically and religiously homogenous nation, public expressions of deviating collective identities had been banned by law. However, a shift in government policy in the early 1990s enabled the Alevis to come to the fore and to inaugurate an ethno-political movement to achieve official acknowledgement