Petra Kuppinger situates her detailed ethnographic study in a working-class neighborhood of Stuttgart, Germany. She begins with a vignette of an elementary school's back-to-school assembly, featuring the school's principal alongside a Protestant Minister, Muslim Imam, and lay representative of the Catholic Church. Faithfully Urban carefully examines the complicated processes taking place in German cities where pious Muslim lifeworlds intersect with a mostly secular German culture. Rather than adding to a proliferating literature about Muslims in Germany, Kuppinger presents Muslims as “active debaters of their own lifeworlds, traditions, subjectivities, and religiosities” (p. 5). Moreover, her book is a significant contribution to contemporary urban religious studies, which seeks to highlight how piety is lived in multiethnic and predominantly secular cityscapes. Via this theoretical framing, Kuppinger breaks out of the often-limiting debate that pits Germans against foreigners, and instead is able to focus more broadly on the contest between secularism and religiosity. Those two ideological forces cut across ethnic and national lines. Rather than asking, “Can Muslim migrants integrate into German society?”—her short answer is that they have already done so—Kuppinger queries, “How do urban residents manage to live religious lives amidst strong secular pressures?”
Sidestepping the debate about the recent challenges posed by large numbers of Muslim refugees from Syria, Afghanistan, and Iraq to Germany's asylum system, Kuppinger insists that Islam and Muslims have a long history in Germany, dating back to diplomatic and economic relations between the Prussian and Ottoman Empires. Turkish citizens later became the largest immigrant group of Muslim background in Germany, recruited post-World War II to fill labor demand in German factories. The “guest worker” program, similar to the United States Bracero program, consisted of bilateral agreements between heads of state. Industrial Stuttgart was a prime destination for such imported labor, and as a consequence, Stuttgart today ranks among the top German cities in terms of number of residents with migrant backgrounds. Kuppinger picked the working-class neighborhood of Nordbahnhof, and three local mosques as her primary field site. Enrolling her then eight- and five-year-old daughters in Nordbahnhof's Park School, she was able to meet parents, many of whom became friends and collaborators in her research.
The multiethnic, multigenerational, working-class neighborhood of Nordbahnhof is introduced in detail in Chapter 5, with individual residents’ stories of migration to Stuttgart, including Catholic Bavarian Werner Friedrich, whose parents fled to Stuttgart right after World War II from a different part of Germany, and Lale Öztürk, whose father came to work from Turkey in the early 1960s. Enlisting workers in railroad jobs as well as in car factories, among other industries, Stuttgart has absorbed German and foreign laborers for many decades, and the workers and their families stayed. If the first generation remained for the most part invisible within ethnic enclaves, the members of the second and third generation demand to be heard and to participate in public debates. The unique perspective that urban spaces offer to scholars interested in migration is their long history of mobility and cultural mixing. This mixing manifests, for instance, in different religious spaces in buildings across the street from each other, or even on different floors inside the same building. Nordbahnhof also boasts an annual international street festival that exhibits folk dances, artifacts, and foods from cultures across the world. Members of the neighborhood Nashqbandi Turkish Hussein Mosque participate in annual kermes fairs, where they sell pillowcases and needlework, as well as traditional foods, to raise money for their community. They open their house of worship to non-Muslim visitors in order to facilitate dialogue and exchange. The German and Arabic language Al-Nour Mosque offers Qurʾan and Arabic language classes to children of Muslim families or persons interested in Islam, and its members discuss aspects of the religion with each other and with non-Muslims in public events. Kuppinger gives the example of community dialogue in the context of a new mosque permit, which is negotiated, initially refused, and then granted by the municipal council in a different, more accessible neighborhood of Stuttgart. Kuppinger describes in careful detail many instances of interaction and exchange between pious Muslims and their non-Muslim neighbors, and in one instance, between one kind of Turkish Muslim—the consul general for the government-run Islamisch-Türkische Union der Anstalt für Religion (DITIB) mosques—and another—the representative of the Verband der Islamischen Kulturzentren (VIKZ) mosques. In this intra-Turkish conflict, the Turkish consul general disagreed with the Naqshbandi community over the need for a new mosque building in Stuttgart, declaring that there were “enough prayer places in the city for the religious needs of the Turks” (p. 46).
Kuppinger's fine-grained ethnographic account of a German neighborhood with a very diverse population yields a fractured and complex picture of urban Islam lived by individual Muslims. For instance, in Chapter 3, the author presents us with the lives of “six individuals of different genders, ages, ethnicities, classes, educational backgrounds, work situations, religiosities, and types of formal religious associations. Some of the individuals vaguely represent larger groups, others are more unique” (p. 105). The six different lifeworlds illustrate that being Muslim can mean different things. For some Muslims, it is mostly a private spiritual search, for others, it is a life in search of connection with members of the wider, global Muslim community. Several of Kuppinger's interlocutors shared stories of their conversion to Islam (German nationals) and re-version to Islam (persons of Muslim background who did not practice their faith growing up). The book highlights individuals on their spiritual quests in contemporary postsecular modernity.
Faithfully Urban is first and foremost an urban ethnography and should be included on urban ethnography syllabi, but each chapter contains its separate literature review that goes beyond space and place theorists to include literatures on the representation of Islam in the West; the role of religion and piety within modernity and globalization; the use of social media and satellite television in generating new interpretations of Islam, especially among the younger faithful; and the idea of subaltern counterpublics that allow disenfranchised groups to speak and be heard. With her book, Kuppinger encourages other scholars to explore the “elusive evidence of the ordinary” (p. 110). Her twenty-two-page bibliography underlines that the book is thoroughly researched and embedded in wider debates on the complex social webs of urban life, the resurgence of piety in what scholars believed to be thoroughly secular spaces, and the important role of everyday encounters of neighbors in parks, schools, cultural centers, and kermes festivals in deconstructing stereotypes and misunderstandings about actively practiced piety.
Kuppinger presents us with stories of unskilled and skilled labor migrants, their descendents, as well as their German spouses and German converts, demonstrating that they are the builders of mosques, organizers of community events, leaders of study groups and prayer sessions, and negotiators of the public image of Islam in Germany. They are also parents, neighbors, council and board members, teachers, university students, accountants, hairdressers, and social workers doing everyday activities and living everyday lives. The book shows that third-generation Muslims in Germany live very different lives than their grandparents, and that they actively participated to make this so.
