Table Of ContentMigration and Religion
Christian Transatlantic Missions,
Islamic Migration to Germany
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Beihefte zum Daphnis
Herausgegeben von
Barbara Becker-Cantarino – Mirosława Czarnecka
Franz Eybl – Klaus Garber – Ferdinand van Ingen
Knut Kiesant – Ursula Kocher – Wilhelm Kühlmann
Wolfgang Neuber – Hans-Gert Roloff – Alexander Schwarz
Ulrich Seelbach – Robert Seidel – Jean-Marie Valentin
Helen Watanabe-O’Kelly
BAND 46
Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
Migration and Religion
Christian Transatlantic Missions,
Islamic Migration to Germany
Edited by
Barbara Becker-Cantarino
Cover Photo: Persian Tile. Photo by Vicente Calabuig Cantarino
The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of
“ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents -
Requirements for permanence”.
ISBN: 978-90-420-3536-2
E-Book ISBN: 978-94-012-0811-6
© Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2012
Printed in The Netherlands
CONTENTS
Preface…………………………………………………………………………1
Barbara Becker-Cantarino:
Religion and Migration: Christian Missionaries in North America, Muslim
Populations in Germany……………………………………………………….5
Wolfgang Breul:
Theological Tenets and Motives of Mission: August Hermann Francke,
Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf……………………………………………41
Pia Schmid:
Indians Observed: Moravian Missionary John Heckewelder’s Account of the
History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations (1819)….….……..…61
Ulrike Gleixner:
Remapping the World: The Vision of a Protestant Empire in the Eighteenth
Century……………………………………………………………………….77
Ulrike Strasser:
From “German India” to the Spanish Indies and Back: Jesuit Migrations
Abroad and Their Effects at Home…………………………..………………91
Cornelia Niekus Moore:
“A Source of Praise”: The Wanderings of a Devotional Book....…………..111
Rebekka Habermas:
Islam Debates around 1900: Colonies in Africa, Muslims in Berlin, and the
Role of Missionaries and Orientalists..……………………………………..123
Claudia Breger:
Christian Universalism? Racism and Collective Identity in Twenty-First-
Century Immigration Discourses..…………………………………………155
David Gramling:
“You Pray Like We Have Fun”: Toward a Phenomenology of Secular
Islam………………………………………………………………………...175
Kamaal Haque:
Iranian, Afghan, and Pakistani Migrants in Germany: Muslim Populations
Beyond Turks and Arabs…….……………………………………………..193
Thomas Schmitt:
Mosque Debates as Space-Related, Intercultural, and Religious Conflict…207
Karl Ivan Solibakke:
Muslim Migration to Germany: A Response to Thilo Sarrazin, Deutschland
schafft sich ab...………..…………………………………………………….219
List of Contributors…………………………………………………………237
Index ..……………………………………………………………………...239
PREFACE
Most of the essays in this volume had their origin in a conference
organized as a Humboldt Kolleg at The Ohio State University in April
2011: “Migration, Religion, and Germany.” My research interest in
radical Pietism and the teaching of a general education undergraduate
course “The German Experience in America” lead me to organize this
conference. I was most fortunate to find a partner in Georges S.
Tamer (M. S. Sofia Chair in Arabic Studies at Ohio State University)
who co-chaired the meeting. We decided to focus on the intersection
of religion and migration, on Christianity and Islam: their religious
organizations, religious cultures and rituals that played and still play
an important role in migration and in the creation of new
communities. Christian migration and religion have shaped in
particular the United States but also the German-speaking territories
of Central Europe during the religious wars in the wake of the
Reformation. Religious organizations, fellowship in ethnic churches
with its familiar linguistic and cultural content are still important for
today’s migrants. They have also led, once again, to major clashes and
controversies in the present political debate on Islam and Muslim
immigration in Germany and in Europe.
Given the wide and fascinating field of religion and migration and
the heterogeneous, often eclectic nature of migration studies, we
narrowed our focus, also in accordance with our own interests and
backgrounds, to the historical period of Christian transatlantic mission
out of Germany and to the new Islamic presence in contemporary
Germany. This diachronic, transnational pairing may serve to show
communalities and differences over time and space, can speak to each
other, and take away the notion of uniqueness in the migration
situation. Concentrating on Christianity and Islam regrettably leaves
out other world religions that certainly also belong to this picture, and
it does not claim to speak exclusively for the issues of migration and
religion. On the contrary, it wishes to make a contribution to the
ongoing discussion about the role of religion and migration.
A first group of invited lectures at the migration conference
presented and discussed recent research on the historical phase of
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2 Barbara Becker-Cantarino
early German transatlantic migrations and colonization: on Pietists
and Moravians in eighteenth-century North America, especially in
Pennsylvania and Ohio, on Jesuit missionary work in “New Spain”
(Mexico and California), and on the Halle mission networks in the
West Indies. The second conference day began with a history of the
debate over Islam in Germany introducing the sessions that addressed
Muslim immigrants, from Turkey and the Near East, to Germany in
the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and focused on the political
and religious controversies and cultural clashes as well as efforts at
resolution in Germany. Papers explored the theme of symbolic
ethnicity and religious socialization in looking at Muslim immigration,
Christian universalism, secular Islam, Mosque conflicts, and the
controversy surrounding multiculturalism and integration with special
consideration of Turkish immigrants in Germany. Central to the
conference framework was the recognition that symbolic ethnicity and
religious identity continue to influence how individuals react to, and
how states or nations deal with, social and spatial mobility.
Conference speakers (and contributors to this volume) come from a
range of fields whose scholarship relates to the theme of migration,
religion, and Germany: theology and church history, colonial history,
history of education, literary and cultural studies, cultural geography,
and linguistics.
The present volume of essays resulting from the migration
conference also pays tribute to the 200th anniversary in 2012 of the
founding of the city of Columbus with its reference to eighteenth-
century migration in Ohio. Since its modern statehood in the
nineteenth century, Ohio has been a place of immigration. The
foundations and infrastructure of Columbus (established in 1812) were
laid by immigrants especially from central Europe and Germany to be
extended by successive waves of immigrants from Eastern Europe,
Latin America, and Africa (the Somali immigrant community in
Columbus now numbers 35,000). During the nineteenth century,
German immigrants literally built the city of Columbus and the
present State of Ohio (established in 1803) — in the year Napoleon
abolished the ancient Roman Empire of German Nation. Immigrant
settlers from German lands helped build the city (and later the
university) as craftsmen, artisans, stone masons, nursery men,
bricklayers, farmers and dairy men, ministers and teachers, and not to
forget also as maids, mothers, nurses, and caretakers. Today the early
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Preface 3
settlers from German-speaking countries are remembered in the
historical suburb called “German Village” with its beloved Schiller
Park named after the “poet of freedom,” Friedrich Schiller (1759–
1805), the most important author for German-Americans in the
Midwest in the nineteenth century. Ohio State University, a land-grant
institution established as the Ohio Agricultural and Mechanical
College in 1872, changed its name to The Ohio State University in
1878, reflecting its broad-based liberal arts education with a wide
range of study and an emphasis on research. The University was later
patterned after institutions of higher education in Germany much as
designed by Wilhelm von Humboldt (the older brother of Alexander)
and developed into a major Research I institution of the “Big Ten.”
Eighteenth-century migration before European settlers forged
the modern state of Ohio after the Revolutionary War has been largely
forgotten. It was the century of Native Americans’ struggle for
survival, depopulation and dispossession in what was then the
Backwoods of the old Northwestern Territory, today’s Western
Pennsylvania and Ohio. The eighteenth century was also the century
in which — starting around 1750 — Moravian missionaries began
their missionary work in order to enable and to facilitate
communication with Native Americans whom they hoped to convert
to Christianity. For that missionary purpose (not for acquiring and
possessing land, as did nineteenth-century century immigrants as
settlers), the Moravians endeavored to live with and among Native
Americans and, perhaps even more important, to learn their languages,
their customs and lifestyle in order to establish mission congregations.
Unfortunately, already by the middle of the nineteenth century people
who settled on the lands in Ohio where “once Indians worshiped” and
that had belonged to the Delawares had never even seen a Native
American. Several essays in the present collection will take us back to
religious missions and Native Americans in the eighteenth century.
Central to the volume framework is the recognition that religion —
belief systems, religious socialization and identity — continue to
influence how individuals react to, and how states or nations deal
with, social and spatial mobility.
I wish to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for their
generous support of the conference under their Humboldt Kolleg
program. I am also grateful for the financial support from Ohio State’s
College of Arts and Humanities, the Department of Germanic
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