Gritt Klinkhammer. Modern Forms of Islamic Life: A Qualitative-Empirical Investigation of the Religiousness of Turkish Women in Germany Shaped by Sunnite Tradition. Diagonal- Verlag: Marburg, 2000, 314 p., 24.54 € [in German only: “Moderne Formen islamischer Lebens- führung. Eine qualitativ-empirische Untersuchung zur Religiosität sunnitisch geprägter Türkinnen in Deutschland”]

In her doctoral thesis in sociology, Gritt Klinkhammer examines the manner in which young Muslim-Turkish women of the second and third generation live out their Islamic religious affiliation in Germany. Their parents generally belong to the religiously conservative first “guest worker” generation, from whose life and religious practises the young, educated women clearly want to make a break. The parents encouraged their daughters’ Koran school lessons, for example, or observance of Islamic social rules; however, they were often able to give their “enlightened” daughters little justification and explanation for celebrations, manners and religious obligations – justification demanded by the children in the secular environment. Although these parents have now lived in Germany for up to 35 years, they do not see themselves as “Germans”, nor do their children.

After a discussion of various sociological surveying methods and the specification of a theoretical framework – from which a specialist will draw his actual profit – the detailed interviews of seven Turkish women and the evaluation of the interviews form the centre of Klinkhammer’s study. All of the women are between 20 and 35 years old, but they all deal with the “religion” factor in very different ways. Some women have utterly devoted themselves to Islam after a phase of rejecting the Islamic obligatory teaching, sometimes under the protest of their parents, who feared it would hinder their professional career. Others consider themselves Muslims but are not very active in practising Islam. They have overcome their initial rejection of the “texts on women” of the Koran by retreating to an interpretation of the Islamic sources (Koran and tradition) that justify the freedoms they do not wish to give up in the Western context.

All of the women report that they live in “two worlds”, the world of Islam and the German world, and are constantly changing from one world to the other. Most of the women sense some distance between themselves and their parents’ “poorly educated” generation, but at the same time the distance between themselves and German society is considerably greater -even though they have spent their whole lives in the West. Even if they have had some bad experience with Turkish society and its rules, it has not led these young women to turn their back on it and become “Germans”.

Klinkhammer’s study refutes the oftenheard thesis of the “wearing off” of the Islamic faith in the second and third generations. These women may have arranged their lives to fit life in Germany, but they are firmly rooted in Islam and in their own tradition. It would be most desirable to draw conclusions from such studies for the education and German politics of integration. A study worth reading on the selfimage of modern Turkish women and their relationship to Islam.