„I Have Become a Stranger in My Own Homeland.“ The Symbolic Stakes of Swiss Converts to Islam In Shaping Muslim Selves in Public and Muslim Arenas. A Performative Reconstruction of the Swiss Muslim Debate Between 2008 & 2011.

Leuenberger, Susanne (2013). „I Have Become a Stranger in My Own Homeland.“ The Symbolic Stakes of Swiss Converts to Islam In Shaping Muslim Selves in Public and Muslim Arenas. A Performative Reconstruction of the Swiss Muslim Debate Between 2008 & 2011. (Dissertation, Universität Bern, Philosophisch-historische Fakultät)

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In the immediate aftermath of the approval of the ban on constructing minarets in a national referendum in late 2009 initiated by right wing populist parties to support their anti-immigration politics, the Swiss Muslim debate took an ironic turn, as a number of Swiss converts to Islam entered public arenas in an ostentative salafi guise, triggering heated debates on the “integratedness” of Switzerland’s Muslim “minority. Dominating news coverage on Muslims and Islam in Switzerland in the first half of 2010, the Swiss converts heading the newly founded Muslim organization, the Islamischer Zentralrat Schweiz, were to replace the minarets as nodal points of problematizing a perceived lack of common symbolic ground between Swiss society and the Muslim migrant population.

This thesis places the symbolic stakes of Swiss converts to Islam in both public and Muslim arenas into the centre of its analytical focus in order to reconstruct the Swiss Muslim debate and the shaping of Muslim selves as interrelated processes by the analysis of media coverage on the IZRS and ethnographic data gained in Muslim fields between 2008 and 2011.

To do this, the symbolic stakes of Swiss converts to Islam of either gender are reconstructed before the epistemic background of what is often rhetorically invoked as a „crisis of multiculturalism“ (see for example Grillo 2003; Turner 2006; Lentin and Titley 2001; Van Reedom, Dyuvenadak and Bertossi 2012; Vertovec 2011) fuelled by a global „hyperdiscourse“ on Islam that has undergirded public debates on immigration, integration, nationalism and secularism in Swiss public debates just as in other national European contexts.

The analytical focus chosen brings together a range of research perspectives and conceptual outlooks. Differing from existing research on European converts to Islam that focusses on questions developed in the field of religious sociology or phenomenological sociology, this study adopts a performative approach on conversion to Islam as a paradigmatic form of subjectivation in line with a Foucauldian discourse analytical perspective. To do this, it develops a deconstructive reading on subjectivation that draws on approaches developed in the field (post)structuralism, psycholanalysis and gender studies which it combines with narratological perspectives on religious conversion as a theme and dramaturgy.

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