Mosques as Spaces of Everyday Geopolitical Tensions

• Published in: Geopolitics Vol. 27; no. 2; pp. 629 - 654
• Main Author: Öcal, Devran Koray
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Abingdon Routledge 15.03.2022; Taylor & Francis Ltd
• Subjects: Community; Cultural activities; Cultural property; Feminism; Geographers; Geography; Geopolitics; Islam; Mosques; Mosques & temples; Muslims; Religion; Religion & politics; Transnationalism; Europe
• ISSN: 1465-0045; 1557-3028
• DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2020.1820485

Mosques in Europe have long been and are still at the centre of political debates, despite the decades-long presence of migrant Muslim communities in Europe. Scholars within geography and other disciplines have studied mosques extensively with a focus on urban space politics, and examined tensions and conflicts between migrant mosque communities and the broader segments of the local people. In this paper, I focus on DITIB, a Turkish umbrella mosque organization in Germany, and I carry these debates into a transnational terrain, re-theorizing mosques not only as political sites, but also everyday geopolitical spaces where national imaginaries and territorial struggles take place in the daily lives of mosque communities. Through this approach, I draw on the studies of feminist geographers who have provided a renewed perspective to classical geopolitics discussions by revealing how geopolitical relations, struggles, and interactions also operate in everyday spaces, relations, and bodies of ordinary people by reproducing the deep-seated exclusions, discriminations and contestations. This paper contributes to critical geopolitics and geographies of religion literatures as well as to broader discussions on the geopolitics of religion by analysing how a mosque organization is situated at the centre of geopolitical tensions, and how transnational and transregional controversies operate on the walls and properties of mosques and in everyday social/cultural activities of mosque communities.