B4 | Mosques and the Production of Belonging

The research project B4, which focuses on the sociology of religion, investigates the ways in which mosques produce local, national, and transnational belonging in addition to their religious functions and thus emerge as important focal points in migration societies. Mosques are conceptualised as both local and transnational infrastructures actively engaged in the production of ›transnational communities‹, fostering forms of communal identity between and across different nation-states.

The project focuses on Turkish-German mosques in Germany. These mosques mobilise various identity categories and produce a sense of belonging not only to local (religious) communities but also to the (imagined) homeland of Turkey, helping to maintain or strengthen Turkish-national and Turkish-Muslim loyalties. They also influence the spatial mobility of their community members.

A particular focus is placed on gender, examining how young women's sense of belonging is shaped within mosque spaces. The growing diversity within the mosque community introduces new meanings to gender roles and family structures. The project aims to explore how gender is negotiated and performed by young women and how these negotiations shape their sense of belonging.

The project further examines how mosques collaborate and compete with a variety of actors within the Islamic-religious field (e.g., other mosque communities and associations) as well as outside it (e.g., with schools, sports clubs, political actors, media, families, migrant communities, etc.). To capture these negotiations and conflicts over belonging, the project draws on Pierre Bourdieu's theory of the religious field as a guiding research approach. This approach helps explain the power struggles over the authority of interpretation over religion and belonging and the mechanisms of the formation of positions in the Islamic religious field.

Empirically, the project focuses on a mosque affiliated with the Turkish-Islamic umbrella organisation DITIB (Turkish-Islamic Union for Religious Affairs). Through extensive ethnographic field research, it seeks to unravel the complex interconnections between different categories of belonging and their negotiation, along with the specific dynamics, forces, and configurations that arise within and through the mosque community. The shifting and sometimes contentious relationships and connections of the mosque (for a DITIB mosque, these include the Turkish state and the state religious authority) are examined for their influence on the production of religious, local, national, and transnational forms of belonging.