Progress, Function and Structure of Mosque Archives of Turkish Immigrants in Germany

What is it about?

The mosques of Turkish immigrants and their archives are the historical and cultural heritage of Germany that needs to be explored in its depths and breadths. Mosques reflect the history of migration, integration, negotiation, homemaking, and all in all, the interaction context that has become much more complex. The archives contain invaluable empirical material, whose fruitfulness is characterized by the possibility of looking behind the scenes and making long-term analyses. The historical retrospection into the nature of the archives reveals their gradual, but also at times erratic, structural and functional development, which itself provides important evidence of the upheavals in and around the Mosque landscape. They allow a comparative, diachronic and synchronic decoding, thus a deep analysis of the persistence, transformation and process dynamics of the cultural and religious field of organization and action of mosques, individual congregations, umbrella organizations, their authorities, norm-finding and normative commitments. The temporal and spatial persistence but also the changes in material inventories or in the (in)pronounced choice of words, themes and language of official documents, sermons, appearances on the Internet and in social media provide the best ex-post evidence proofs of why some structures survived and which transformations took place under which influences, in which periods of time.

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