From “Guest Worker” to “Muslim”

THIS EXCERPT, from the essay collection Wer ist Wir? Deutschland und seine Muslime (Who Is We? Germany and Its Muslims, 2009), by the prizewinning author and Islamic studies scholar Navid Kermani, is illustrative of the widespread exclusion of those deemed to be Muslims from contemporary Germany's collective sense of self. However, Reim Spielhaus's 2006 study suggests that this divide has not always been perceived in the same way. She notes a shift in categorization whereby the label “Muslim” began to be favored over others such as “guest worker” (Gastarbeiter), “migrant,” “foreigner” and “Turk” after 2000, the year when Germany's citizenship laws changed from jus sanguinis to incorporate an element of jus soli, and minority citizens could no longer be singled out on the basis of their passports alone. This transformation was substantially accelerated shortly afterward by the terrorist attacks committed by al-Qaeda on September 11, 2001. Islamist terrorism has since remained at the forefront of German consciousness as a result of the discovery that Mohamed Atta, one of the 9/11 perpetrators, had lived and studied in Hamburg, and also because of events such as the 2011 Frankfurt Airport shooting and the foiled plot in Hanover in the recent aftermath of the 2015 Paris attacks.