Beyond religious recognition in Europe: religious recognition and its relationship to feelings of belonging of Alevi and Sunni community members in Basel, Hamburg and Vienna

In this dissertation, I offer a comparative microsociological examination of the relationship between official religious recognition of migrant communities in Western Europe and their members’ feelings of belonging. Through ethnographically embedded qualitative interviews with ordinary Alevi and Sunni community members in Basel, Hamburg and Vienna, I examine wether and how their feelings of belonging change in light of official recognition processes. Such processes of religious recognition of Sunni and Alevi communities occur in the context of contentious public and political debates on the place of Islam in Europe and the ability of Muslims to belong. Studies on such incorporation processes have not, however, examined official recognition’s connection to the feelings of belonging of individual community members. Historically, Europe has grappled with the incorporation and equal treatment of groups deemed “Other”. Muslims have come to constitute the embodiment of difference in Europe, where they have been excluded institutionally and societally. Meanwhile, some European countries have extended or amended their recognition of Muslim communities, including burial provisions, holidays and religious education. The official recognition of Alevi communities from Turkey often proceeds alongside Islam’s incorporation. As a minority in Turkey, Alevis look back on a history of oppression and persecution. In Europe, they assert their difference from Sunni Muslims and their compatibility with European values. However, differences within the (attributed) category of Muslims have not been sufficiently taken into account. Therefore, I offer an analysis on the manner in which differentially positioned community members negotiate the relationship between recognition and belonging. I show that, not religious recognition itself, but rather the national politics of belonging within which such recognition is embedded, and in which the position of participants as racialised migrants comes to the fore, impinge on their feelings of belonging. Moreover, Alevis’ and Sunnis’ starkly contrasting relationships to the Turkish state, which represents the latter, while excluding the former from its definition of a national community and denying them its recognition, are critical to the way in which they conceive of recognition in Europe. The significance of this study is that it provides a nuanced and differential understanding of state-granted recognition of religious minorities in the transnational context of popular and institutional racism, derived from the personal accounts of recipients of such recognition.