Alevis in Germany On the Way to Public Recognition?

Abstract

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.