Suffering Rights and Incorporation. The German Islam Conference and the integration of Muslims as a discursive means of their racialization Open Access

In 2006 against the background of the increasing problematization of Muslims and Islam in Germany, the German government established the German Islam Conference. In a post 9/11 world, this was a time period shaped by the global ‘war on terror’ changes in the German naturalization law, the proliferation of racism targeting Muslims and migrants in the country, and the expansion of security apparatuses. The DIK's stated aims are the integration of Muslims in German society and the institutional integration of Islam. I argue that this latter goal to integrate Islamic institutions into existing institutional structures in Germany traps Muslim organizations in the paradox of suffering rights. On the one hand, they find it hard to refuse the additional rights associated with the institutional integration of Islam; on the other hand, integration is deployed as a site of control and regulation. This is in addition to the use of integration as a call for cooperation in national security matters and the underlying racialization of Muslims that are central to the integration project of the German government.

The German Islam Conference (DIK)² was founded in 2006 by the former Minister of the Interior, Wolfgang Schäuble, as ‘the first national reaction, involving federal, regional and local authorities, to the relatively recent presence in historical terms of Muslims as a significant population group in Germany’ (Dik 2010b).³ The DIK holds meetings once a year at the minister's invitation under a chosen topic of public interest; it understands itself as a dialogue forum including representatives of various Muslim organizations in Germany. The DIK develops political programs and initiates conferences, working committees and projects, for example about interreligious dialogue and religious education. This includes a set of measures ranging from the planning and execution of studies about the Muslim population in the country to the issuing of recommendations, plans, and policies in areas such as education, family, marriages, gender equality, employment, the training of imams, and national security.⁴

In this contribution I explore a dimension of the DIK's work that is of particular political relevance, namely its discourses concerning the institutional incorporation of Islam in Germany. I address this issue by conducting a discourse analysis of the DIK's own publications. Drawing on Foucault's (1973, 2010) concept of discourse and its methodological operationalization by Jäger and Maier (2010), I approach discourses as social practices and as institutionalized forms of speech; discourses are key mediums in the ongoing structuring of subject positions, institutions, and the state.⁵ Departing from an interpretation of integration as a deployment of racial historicism (Goldberg 2002), I contend that such a process creates a ‘suffered paradox’ (Brown 2000: 208) for Muslim organizations participating in the DIK. The DIK has offered rights to Muslim organizations, particularly the acquisition of the Public Law Corporation status, which brings with it a series of rights such as the introduction of Islamic religion courses in public schools. However, the acquisition of such rights is contingent on compliance with a range of prescriptive requirements. First, Muslim organizations need to develop centralized and representative structures. Second, they have to take as their duty to support the German government with the integration of Muslims. Third, the organizations have to cooperate with security authorities against extremism, radicalization, and ‘Islamism’. Against this background, I contend that integration can be seen as a form of racial historicism positing two different kinds of historical development for ‘Germans’ and ‘Muslims’. This context creates a suffered paradox for Muslim organizations: while they may want the rights available through participation in the DIK, fulfilling the DIK's requirements contributes to a racialization of Muslims and ultimately undermines their rights.

By analyzing the DIK's practices, I explore the complex discursive dynamics involving the institutionalization of Islam in the public domain, a process that needs to be considered against the background of the problematization of Muslims in public discourses as a form of racialization. The discursive field in which the institutionalization of Islam unfolds provides hints about the intertwining of the governmental attempts to control, regulate, and refashion Muslim subjectivities; the deployment and strengthening of the state's security apparatuses; the internal contradictions of secular rule; and the dissemination of racial tropes about Muslims and Islam. Thus, far from being merely a bureaucratic and legal procedure, the DIK's institutionalization of Islam has involved the intervention of the state in the form of integration and security politics that limit the enfranchisement of Muslims in the country.

This contribution unfolds in three sections. Firstly, I briefly describe the DIK; secondly I make a case for reading the rationale of integration as a form of governmental racial historicism (Goldberg 2002; Sayyid 2014); and thirdly, I delve into the DIK's conditions for involvement of member organizations as power strategies of governmental rule, and elaborate upon the suffered paradox: that is, the political situation where Muslim organizations want the rights associated with the institutionalization of Islam in spite of its problematic conditions, or as Spivak (1993: 45) would put it, rights becoming ‘that which we cannot not want’.

The DIK emerged in the German political landscape as a reaction to what was deemed ‘growing problems’ and ‘cultural conflicts’ between Muslims and Germans. The aim was to address a wide range of issues including concerns about the attempt of some Muslim groups to replace the German political order by an Islamic state ruled by Shari'ah law (Dik 2011b), the threat of terrorism, and the problems emerging from ‘parallel societies’ such as radicalization, ‘Islamism’ (Dik 2008a: 14), the prevailing gender inequality in Muslim communities (Dik 2009), and the spread of anti-Semitism among Muslims (Dik 2011b).⁶ In this regard the DIK was established to help achieve two explicit aims of the German government: first, to foster and enhance the integration of Muslims into German society, and second to institutionally incorporate Islam within the existing relations between the German state and religious communities. The expected outcome of greater institutional integration was the establishment of a representative Muslim organization that could enter into an official dialogue with the German government on further issues regarding Islam and Muslim life in Germany, both in the public and the private sphere.⁷ In this sense, the DIK can be seen as the German government's attempt to manage and regulate Islam as a religion in the public space, thereby intruding into the social existence and the private life of Muslims as well.

According to Peter (2010), as well as Brunn (2012) and Lewicki (2014), the DIK marks a rupture with previous German migration politics since this administrative agency not only acknowledges Islam and Muslims as a part of Germany – an issue neglected in the past – but it also has a positive stance concerning the institutional incorporation of Islam. Furthermore, the DIK represents the German case as part of a wider trend in Europe. Against the background of the global threat of terrorism, different governments have sought to incorporate Islam in the public domain via centralized councils, which ideally work as mediators between states and Muslim populations, connecting the latter with the government and civil society organizations (Peter 2014: 85). Peter (2014) argues that such interventionist policies seek to ‘shape the kind of Islam which is being institutionalized’ (Peter 2014: 85). Thus, regulative and normalizing motivations inform the project of creating national councils, which seem to be representative of the Muslim population and moderate in regard to the interpretation of Islam.

One of the central impetuses of these councils can be traced back to the governments’ attempt to develop national versions of Islam. In Germany, the DIK seeks to produce an ‘Islam of Germany’ (BAMF 2010: 31) whereby ‘Muslims living in Germany end up becoming German Muslims’ (Schäuble in Dik 2008a: 2). The institutionalization of Islam aims at the disciplining of a set of beliefs and practices through the rearrangement of organizations and their relations with the state, while the integration project seeks to reshape Muslim subjectivities with the addition of qualities deemed to be German. The intersection of both would produce an Islam of Germany with German Muslims.⁸

The institutionalization of Islam through the DIK has already been analyzed in comparison with other European nations such as France and Britain (Brunn 2012), focusing on integration politics and between Germany and Britain analyzing social justice and citizenship (Lewicki 2014). The DIK has also been approached through the lens of new institutionalism, exploring the development of Muslim organizations in Germany (Rosenow-Williams 2012). There are descriptions of the DIK (Busch and Goltz 2011), and studies focusing on the German press’ reactions to the DIK (Cantzen 2007; Shooman 2010). Moreover, the DIK's strategy of integration as prevention has been analyzed from the perspective of securitization, highlighting how the DIK as a state actor turned Islam and Muslims into an issue of national security (Rodatz and Scheuring 2011). Particularly, a group of scholars (Amir-Moazami 2011a, 2011b; Peter 2010; Tezcan 2008, 2011, 2012) used Foucault's (2007, 2008) governmentality concept to explore the emergence of the DIK as a site of control and regulation of the Muslim population. They have focused on the discussion and managing of gender relations (Amir-Moazami 2011a), related to the tolerant politics of the DIK (Peter 2010), and the production of a Muslim subject through the DIK, which is legitimatized through its association with the government (Tezcan 2008, 2012).

This study follows Frank Peter, Schirin Amir-Moazami, and Levent Tezcan's ideas about the DIK as a governmental agency seeking the control, regulation, and normalization of Muslims. I complement this perspective by offering an interpretation of the DIK as a technology of power bearing racial discourses, underlying the production of Muslim subjects and the attempt to reform and refashion them. The body of literature about the DIK, although problematizing the institution's self-presented neutrality, and highlighting its presence and work as a means of control and regulation, has not considered the central linkage between racism and institutional control. The aforementioned studies, with the exception of Shooman (2010) and Rodatz and Scheuring (2011), did not consider racism as a constitutive element in the irruption of the DIK, its integration politics, its representations about Muslims, and how racism interacts with some of the categories they studied such as tolerance, gender, representation, and citizenship.

In the next section I discuss the concept of racial historicism (Goldberg 2002) precisely as an analytical tool shedding light on how racial discourses underpin the representations of Muslims as a historically underdeveloped group. This discourse, in turn emphasizes the legitimacy and need of the DIK. Thus I propose reading the DIK's integration politics as a deployment of racial historicism.

Racial historicism is a modality of racial distinction operating through ‘contrasting claims of historical immaturity’ (Goldberg 2002: 74); that is, racial historicism is a deployment of racism positing the idea of dissimilar ontologies as an effect of different historical developments. Thus, in racial historicist regimes those subjects conceived of as inferior are identified ‘as historically differentiated in maturity and development’ (Goldberg 2002: 106). Racial historicism thus produces racialized bodies by drawing on historical arguments about development and progress.⁹ The idea of Muslims as non-integrated due to their supposed historical underdevelopment underlies the DIK's integration project; Schäuble's (2006) declaration in his function as the former Minister of the Interior about the need to have enlightened Muslims for the enlightened German nation is an example of this rationale.¹⁰ Racial historicism presupposes the construction of the racialization of Others in the process of historical development. In this case the main objectives of the DIK are closing the gap between unenlightened Muslims and enlightened Germans and guiding the historical development of Muslims precisely through integration politics. The imperative to integrate, echoes racial historicism producing two different historical paths of development, namely that of ‘the Germans’ and ‘the Muslims’. The latter, on account of their integration deficit, are still chasing the integrated state of the former, and the DIK positions itself as the governmental guide in this process.

Integration and assimilation – both concepts used by the DIK – have been, according to Goldberg (2002), strategies whereby racial historicism has operated, presupposing the project of racial uplifting by means of the methodical undoing of racialized Others, and their refashioning according to specific racial standards and moral frames (Goldberg 2002: 79–84). Integration and assimilation projects have posed and demanded the undoing of racially constructed subjects deemed inferior due to their historical underdevelopment. The DIK's slogan, ‘Muslims in Germany–German Muslims’ (Schäuble in: Dik 2008a: 2), precisely captures that tension; the need to transform and refashion the Muslim subject by adding the quality of being German through a hyphen.¹¹

One of the most frequently recurring discourses within the DIK concerns secularism and Muslim's lack thereof. This part of the discourse also depends on racial historicism and posits the need to regulate Muslims’ conduct. In this sense, the DIK marks a shift not only in the way state agencies address Muslims, but also a new explanation for the source of the troubles. According to the DIK, Islam per se does not generate difficulties with integration or produce sociocultural conflicts. Rather, these issues relate to the country of origin of Muslims, the Orient (Said 1978) or in the DIK's terms the ‘predominantly Muslim countries’ (Haug et al. 2009: 35).

The category ‘predominantly Muslim countries’ has its origin in the DIK's study Muslim life in Germany (Haug et al. 2009), up to now, the most ambitious project to understand Muslims’ way of life. ‘Predominantly Muslim countries’ comprise three continents; this means 49 countries are arbitrarily characterized and defined by the religious category Islam despite individual histories, secularization processes, political events, languages, internal differences, local and international conflicts, and even the particular place of Islam in those countries and the different Islamic denominations. The study on Muslim life in Germany reduces all these elements into an enclosed unity encompassing several countries and continents under the single category of religion, further conflated with an identity, a strategy akin to the colonial creation of the Orient as an imagined geography and the Oriental as the West's Other (Said 1978). According to the DIK, the lack of secularism in these countries constitutes one of the sources of the problems that Muslims represent in Germany:

This quote presents several problematic assumptions. First, it presupposes a normative construction of secularism, and characterizes its lack implicitly as deviant. This reductionism obscures the complex and interconnected relation between the secular and the religious, and the different ways in which this multifaceted relation has developed and changed in those ‘predominantly Muslim countries’. To simply lump together countries like Turkey, the former states of Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, to name only some of the 49 identified countries, means glossing over a vast diversity of relations between religion and the state, which is only possible through the latent authority of the Orientalist discourse.

Second, the emphasis on Germany's achieved secularism obscures the fact that several aspects of German political, cultural, and social life are intertwined with religion. For example, Hans-Peter Friedrich, Minister of the Interior from 2011–2013, defined Germany's guiding culture (Leitkultur) as Judeo-Christian, emphasizing that historically Islam does not belong to Germany (Reuters 2011).

A third assumption relates to the idea that immigrants face difficulties understanding secularism and its benefits. This point is not further explained; it is merely assumed that Muslims lack an understanding of secularism. Muslims as pre-modern subjects, the argument goes, will learn the secular historical development of Germany through integration. Finally, the statements suggest that immigrants (Muslims) somehow do not fully acknowledge the German legal system. Again this is gross generalization only made possible through the DIK's authority. All in all, the paragraph is constructed around the representation of Muslims as foreigners with a lack of knowledge about the modern organization of the German state. In sum, the statements depict the non-modern character and attitudes of Muslims, obscuring the fact that Muslims have been living in Germany for decades, and that half of them are German citizens. A high percentage of them were born, educated, and raised in the country. Some of them most likely have not even visited their supposed countries of origin, yet a strong generalization about how something in the past (the alleged lack of secularism in the countries of origin) still influences their present has been made in order to distinguish two different kinds of subjects, secular-integrated-Germans vis-à-vis non-secular, non-integrated-Muslims. This version of secularism aims, as pointed out by Mahmood (2006), to legitimize the exercise of state control upon certain kinds of religiosity, to seek their reformation by creating subjects compatible with an explicitly liberal order. This is the secular normativity identified by Mahmood (2006: 328), whose main purpose is to reform Islam and discipline its adherents. Muslims are defined then through their lack of secularism, establishing a distinction between modern and pre-modern subjects.¹²

In addition to the symbolic recognition of Islam and Muslims, the DIK also emerges as an institution that is attempting to solve the ‘difficulties relating to the coexistence of people from different cultures [which] indicates that we are certainly experiencing problems with integration’ (Dik 2008a: 4). That is, the DIK can also be seen as the institutional reaction of the German state to the problematization of Muslims and Islam. This problematization, in turn, comprises a wide set of so-called cultural problems mostly falling into the wider category of violence. First, there is gender violence bifurcating into two registers. On the one hand, the DIK signals those behaviors as against the law and prosecutable: forced marriages, domestic violence, and honor killings (Böhmer 2010; Dik 2013; Maizière de 2010). On the other hand, the DIK highlight attitudes deviant from normality but not necessarily against the law, such as the alleged refusal of Muslim parents to let their children take sport and swimming lessons, attend sex education classes, go on school trips, and the dissimilar rates of employment between Muslim men and women (Dik 2013).

Second, Muslim violence also refers to the terrorist threat, and again in reference to the law some distinctions arise. For instance, radicalization is not directly prosecutable since it constitutes a preliminary step in the formation of a terrorist subject, but DIK see it as preventable (Dik 2010a). The same applies to organizations labeled as legalist Islamist (Dik 2011b). Although they shun violence and have pledged loyalty to the German constitution, these organizations still seek to supplant the democratic order with an Islamic one by legal means (Dik 2011b). The fact that these issues are not prosecutable does not imply that the security apparatuses leave them unchecked; different surveillance and preventive methods are already at work against these phenomena (Rodatz and Scheuring 2011; Schiffauer 2008, 2012, 2014). A third form of violence refers to ‘Muslim anti-Semitism’ (Dik 2010a, 2011b). Anti-Semitist acts as well as extremist and terrorist actions represent violations to the law.

However, for the DIK Muslims also represent ‘problems’ outside the category of violence. These are mostly referred to as ‘cultural’ incompatibilities. Although the right of religious freedom protects the construction of mosques, the issue has sparked heated polemics and critical voices (Dik 2008a, 2014a). Other types of symbolic cultural conflicts revolve around halal butchery practices, Islamic funerals (Dik 2008a), and male circumcision (a topic never mentioned within the DIK despite its prominence in the media and political debate). Troubles have also emerged in regard to the incompatibility of religious practices in the work place, for example, regarding the handling of alcohol (Dik 2012a), but most prominently about the wearing of headscarves for school teachers and public servants (Dik 2009, 2012a, 2014b).

Integration, then, works by identifying problems in reference to the cultural distance of Muslims vis-à-vis the German culture. Therefore, the meaning of culture bifurcates. On the one hand, culture becomes the conceptual tool to understand the emergence of deviance and troubles. On the other hand, the transmission of (German) culture emerges as the solution to these problems. If Muslim immigrants can be acculturated following the parameters of the German culture, the problems will gradually disappear (Dik 2008a: 1). The complex racial formation informing the DIK's representation of Muslims has already been analyzed in-depth through the study of the entangled dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, and time discursively producing Muslims as not-yet-ready subjects (Hernández Aguilar 2014, 2015); thus I use the lack of secularism here as an example of racial historicist working assumptions. In this sense, integration constitutes the DIK's frame through which the DIK functions and its different projects unfold, including the incorporation of Islam.¹³ In the following section instead of approaching the incorporation of Islam through a legal or bureaucratic lens, I will expose the power operations circulating in and through the state project of incorporating Islam, and the discursive effects of this project.

The DIK's institutionalization of Islam comprises different projects. Explicitly, it involves the recognition of Muslim organizations as Corporations of Public Law, the introduction of Islamic religious education in public schools, the training of imams, the establishment of Islamic theology programs at German universities, and the appointment of spokespersons with whom the state can dialogue. Implicitly, the DIK calls on Muslim organizations to cooperate against extremism, radicalization, social polarization, and to support the integration of Muslims. Following Amir-Moazami (2014: 232), the DIK's impetus in organizing Muslims can be seen ‘as an attempt to empower organized Muslim groups in Germany via their regulation and control’, that is, the DIK seeks to politicize Islam in a particular way for the purposes of the state's control (Tezcan 2011: 115).

In this sense, the incorporation of Muslim organizations can be conceived as a suffered paradox (Brown 2000). Although important rights have been offered to Muslims by the German state through the DIK, and for the first time since the beginning of the so-called guest-worker's program in the 1950s German authorities have recognized the belonging of Muslims and Islam to Germany, the offering of rights and recognition are conditional, depending on the fulfillment of prerequisites: Muslim organizations are required to develop representative and centralized structures (BAMF 2010; Böhmer 2010; Dik 2011b; Schäuble 2006), but are also expected to cooperate with German security authorities in preventing terrorism and radicalization processes within Muslim communities (Dik 2008a; Friedrich 2011; Maizière de 2010).

The suffered paradox for Muslim organizations in Germany resides in the acquisition of rights in exchange for what they cannot not want, paraphrasing Spivak (2004): the price of rights is racialization and the acceptance of the conditions of integration and cooperation in national security. In other words, Muslims are incorporated into the nation and granted rights under the precondition of being discursively racialized. Their acceptance as members of the nation and the granting of rights reproduce power asymmetries and domination structures, and create possibilities for the state's techniques of surveillance, control, and regulation targeting Muslims.¹⁴

This recognition of rights by the state depends on the fulfillment of two prerequisites. The first entails the imperative to integrate Islam. The current Minister of the Interior, Maizière de (2010), exemplifies this position through his statements positing the social integration of Muslims as the precondition for the structural integration of Islam, that is, the legal incorporation. Social integration addresses for instance the development of ‘interethnic’ friendships and partnerships (Haug et al. 2009: 258), while structural integration addresses the inclusion of Muslim organizations as a religion, including the guarantee of a legally acknowledged corporate status. But why should for instance the rates of ‘interethnic’ marriages be a precondition for a bureaucratic procedure such as the granting of a corporate status? This is precisely the utility of the DIK's ambiguous representational politics (Tezcan 2012). It allows the institution to move with ease through different registers of representation and to condition the recognition of rights. Additionally, as already argued, the integration of Muslims depends on their construction as racialized-problematic subjects.

The second tacit condition that has to be met for social inclusion presupposes cooperation in national security issues. The discourse on security constructs Muslims as the internal enemies of the nation and attributes the task of monitoring and defending their communities from Islamist and radical guises to them. In addition, the security authorities’ gaze upon Muslim organizations locates them under constant suspicion of not being loyal to the nation. Therefore, the second discourse assumes the acceptance of the threat that Muslims represent in general and the need for their cooperation to fight against Islamist threats. Together, this discourse positions the recognition of rights as a suffered paradox. Rights, rather than challenging the unequal legal and social status of Muslim organizations vis-à-vis other religious organizations in Germany, are constructed as part of a regulative setting. If Muslim organizations want to acquire a legal status, they have to fulfill these legal requirements, to support the integration of the wider Muslim community, and thus to work as security subcontractors. In other words, the DIK strategically uses the issue of religious rights as a means to enhance the mechanisms of control and regulation. The following paragraph from a study by the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees (BAMF),¹⁵ concerning Muslim organizations and their relationships with European states succinctly summarizes the DIK's approach to Muslim organizations:

The DIK starts from the assumption of Muslim organizations’ disorganization – a dissatisfactory situation – an argument that always emerges when comparing Islam with Christian churches (Schäuble 2006). Thus, the DIK – as a necessarily imperfect solution – irrupts as an agency seeking to solve such disarray. Furthermore, the statements depend on a we–they narrative, we-Westerns vis-à-vis they-Muslims; yet, a possessive and paternalist relation between the two groups also appears, they are our Muslims thus we need to guide them so that they finally organize themselves appropriately. Briefly put, the DIK's second axis of work aims at governing Islam through the rearranging, regulation, and control of Muslim organizations, or as has been put by Sara Silvestri, it aims at ‘a “domestication” or “normalization” of a European version of Islam’ (Silvestri in: BAMF 2010: 45).

The state's recognition of Muslim organization has been, following Schiffauer (2012, 2014), Tezcan (2008, 2011), and Peter (2014), marked by general suspicion towards the organizations framed by the threat of terrorism in the post 9/11 era. For instance, Schiffauer (2012) argued that after 9/11, membership of a Muslim organization under the surveillance of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) started to play a detrimental role in naturalization processes for Muslim subjects. This is an issue that can influence the official membership of Muslim organizations, which in turn is an expectation of the DIK as a proof of representativeness. Thus, suspicion, lack of organization and representativeness are the arguments blocking the acquisition of corporate status for Muslim organizations.

At present, the largest Muslim organizations are still pursuing their incorporation as Corporations of Public Law, which, according to Tezcan (2012), was one of the central reasons for the organizations to participate in the DIK. Lewicki (2014) raised a similar argument. While the Muslim organizations saw the DIK as an opportunity to pursue their recognition, the state's representatives conceptualized the DIK, ‘as an opportunity to specify the conditionality of the legal recognition’ (Lewicki 2014: 78). That is, the DIK was established not only to integrate Islam but also to determine how such a process would take place. Likewise, the lack of concrete efforts to grant the legal recognition influenced the withdrawal of the Central Council of Muslims in Germany (ZMD) as participant of the DIK (Köhler 2010).¹⁶

One of the explicit and implicit prerequisites for incorporation is the cooperation of Muslim organizations with security authorities, and this is one of the DIK's unique features in comparison with other manifestations of integration such as the National Integration Plan (Bundesregierung 2014b) and the Integration Summit (Bundesregierung 2014a). Thus, the DIK can also be seen as a security apparatus whose purpose involves engaging Muslims in the fight against extremist violence within their communities. For instance, within the frame of the DIK, the German government launched the Prevention and Cooperation Clearing Point (CLS), a nationwide agency coordinating the different security projects between Muslims and the German authorities (Dik 2008a: 15). The CLS works as a federal panopticon in order to establish a continual gaze upon the cooperation between Muslims and security agencies and upon the radicalization of Muslims. Likewise, the CLS works as a guiding institution managing social relations, gathering and providing information about Islamist threats (BAMF 2012; Dik 2008a: 31, b).¹⁷

One of the impetuses behind the establishment of the CLS is rooted in the creation of a nationwide system of coordination that can monitor the conduct of Muslims vis-à-vis security authorities and within Muslims themselves. Another focus is the production and distribution of useful knowledge for obstructing radicalization and extremism among Muslims. Thus, four technologies of power (Foucault 2007, 2008) intersect and complement each other in the CLS: first, governmentality as the rationale for guiding Muslims to cooperate, and to become cooperative subjects; second, making Muslims accountable in matters of national security, responsible for security within their community and consequently for the security of Germany; third, positioning the Muslim community as a site of government, thus operating through what Rose (1996: 327) termed ‘governing through community’; fourth and finally, establishing a relation of truth telling between Muslim and security authorities able to produce knowledge, which works by means of pastoral power (Foucault 2007; Medovoi 2012; Tezcan 2008).

The DIK's attempts to institutionalize the cooperation of Muslim organizations resulted in the first prevention summit, the Initiative Security Partnership ‘together with Muslims for security’, and the counseling center for radicalization. The origin of these initiatives harks back to the DIK's plenum in 2011, when the Minister of the Interior Friedrich called for the cooperation of every Muslim living in the country to find new ways to defuse the threat of Islamist terrorism against the background of the killing of two American soldiers at the Frankfurt airport by a Muslim. Using this single event as source of legitimacy, Friedrich launched a nationwide strategy to defuse Islamist terrorism, the plan ‘together against extremism–together for security’ (Friedrich 2011: 2).¹⁸ On Friedrich's initiative new institutional summits developed – in addition to the DIK, the Integration Summit, the Youth Islam Conference, and the Youth Integration Summit – focusing on the prevention of extremism, radicalization, and ‘Islamism’ (BMI 2011a, b). Friedrich's invitation to Muslims unfolded in the first prevention summit (Präventionsgipfel) (BMI 2011b), and later it was established as the ‘Initiative security partnership – together with Muslims for security’, which aims at counteracting the ‘Islamist’ radicalization of youth in cooperation with Muslim organizations (BMI 2012). Although the DIK has stated that the intention is to identify Muslim extremists, that is, singular cases, it approaches the totality of Muslims with suspicion and calls for their cooperation with the security agencies, using the violent acts of a few Muslims to address the totality of Muslims as a homogenous population:

Here the DIK calls for Muslims’ engagement in detecting radicals at an early stage. Therefore, they have to actively participate and cooperate with security authorities to counteract the process of radicalization. Subsequently, it suggests the necessity of building trust – a central concept in the strategy of governing through community – to work together in detecting potential radicals. Thus, Muslims’ representatives and security authorities have to carry on dialogue critically and Muslims have to tell the truth about what is happening within their communities. And so, the threat represented by ‘Islamism’ can only be counteracted by the engagement of everyone and through Muslims’ collaboration with security authorities, open dialogue, and integration politics.

These statements illustrate Rodatz's and Scheuring's (2011) argument about the strategy of prevention using integration as a political intervention as well as imputing responsibility to Muslims as subjects in dialogue and as potential risks. Hence, the call for shared responsibility attempts to regulate the conducts of Muslims as responsible for the risk their religion represents for German liberal democracy and national security. Since ‘Islamist’ extremism constitutes a common problem for Germans and Muslims alike, the DIK compels Muslims to cooperate in spotting, detecting, providing information, and standing against extremism. Thus, along with the development of centralized structures, Muslim organizations are also required to cooperate with the security authorities.

Therefore, integrating Islam can be seen as an exclusionary incorporation in Partridge's (2012) terms or as a conditional acceptance following Peter (2010). The DIK declares its support for the legal incorporation while conditioning such a process through tacit and explicit requirements. Even though legal recognition as Corporations of Public Law does not require that Muslim organizations fight against extremism, monitor their communities, or help the state in the integration of Muslims, the DIK has nevertheless expressed these purposes.

In this contribution I have made a case for considering racial discourses and the strengthening of German security apparatuses as dimensions that influence the institutional incorporation of Islam. The aforementioned suffered paradox precisely reveals the conditionality of rights and incorporation offered to the Muslim organizations participating in the DIK. Moreover, I problematized the DIK's institutionalization of ‘Islam’ by emphasizing the strategic use of rights as a site of regulation and control. The meta-frame of integration provides the underlying platform to interpellate ‘the Muslim’ as an inherently problematic subject through the discursive construction of different historical and hierarchical trajectories of development.

Furthermore, the case of the DIK sheds light on new dynamics about the German government's attempt to deal with Islam in the public domain, that is, the project of staging a platform of dialogue between state and Muslim organizations in order to set up the basis for the appearance of a ‘German Islam’ in the public sphere. However, the DIK's highly calculated range of projects does not preclude the impossibility to resist, challenge, and appropriate some of those power techniques since some of them also constitute rights – albeit the DIK frames them as integration tools – such as the introduction of Islamic religion courses in public schools. Those moments – almost untraceable in the DIK's edited documents – in which some of the Muslim organizations expressed dissent, furthermore, provide hints about the contested and contingent nature of the DIK's governmental strategies revealing the relational and dynamic characteristic of relations of power and resistance.

Although in the previous pages I stressed the links between the DIK, the racial problematization of ‘Muslims’ and the institutionalization of Islam, it should also be noted that the DIK can be used to channel and subvert hegemonic power. In other words, this institution can be set in motion to problematize the problematization of ‘Muslims’ itself and to signal both the different exclusions and discrimination that Muslims face in their everyday lives and the institutional racism permeating German society. But it remains the case that the most prominent discourse about ‘Muslims’ in Germany coming out of this institution continues to be based on the representation of them as ‘different’, ‘problematic’, and ‘in need of guidance’. What should not be forgotten is that despite its contributions to proliferating racism and placing conditions on the enfranchisement of Muslims, the DIK is still a platform whereby Muslim organizations can claim rights, expose their concerns (although the DIK often did not listen to them) and channel their aims.

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar is working as a researcher in the project ‘Countering Islamophobia Through the Development of Best Practice In the use of Counter-Narratives in EU Member States’. He received his PhD in 2015 from the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main. His research explores the articulation of racism and Islamophobia in the state, further research interests are discourse analysis and Postcolonial studies.