Barbara Frischmuth’s Turkish characters and Hülya Kandemir’s Himmelstochter (English)
Veronika Bernard
Barbara Frischmuth’s Turkish characters and Hülya Kandemir’s Himmelstochter
– a contrasting analysis of an outside and an inside view of Islam
Most of readers will know Barbara Frischmuth; some of them may have heard of Hülya Kandemir. Both have published texts in which Muslim culture holds a prominent position.
Some of Frischmuth’s major texts reflect the writer’s strong interest in Turkish culture. Indeed, Barbara Frischmuth has recently, in fact since the late 1990s, written a minimum of four texts in which Turkish characters and their Muslim backgrounds hold prominent positions: Die Entschlüsselung1, Die Schrift des Freundes2, Eine Liebe in Erzurum3, and Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war4. Die Entschlüsselung leads the reader back in time and develops a fictitious and highly mystic relationship between a medieval Catholic nun and a Turkish Sufi, and in doing so also brings in the development of Turkish Sufism. Die Schrift des Freundes is set at present telling a story of political and religious exile embedded in an Turkish-Alevite environment in Vienna. Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war and Eine Liebe in Erzurum both tell 20th century love stories being placed in Christian-Muslim cultural environments.
Hülya Kandemir’s book Himmelstochter. Mein Weg vom Popstar zu Allah5 of 2005 is a rarity on the German book-market as it tells the story of a young woman of Turkish migrant background living in Germany and having decided to turn to living a life as a strictly and publicly believing Muslim. The book tells her story of having grown up in a family environment in which religion has been constantly present in an un-reflected way and has been a deeply private and personal matter at the same time. No one has been urged to be a believing Muslim, and no one has been hindered to be one.
In terms of Encounters with Islam one of the thrilling questions to be discussed concerning Frischmuth’s and Kandemir’ texts is in which way Frischmuth’s outside view on Islam, which is represented predominantly by the Turkish characters in her books, corresponds or contrasts with an inside view on Islam, as presented by Hülya Kandemir in her autobiographical text.
The article therefore in its first part analyzes the aspects and implications of Frischmuth’s incorporation of Muslim culture in her texts. In its second part it will analyze Kandemir’s approach to Islam. In its third part the article contrasts the findings in order to reach a conclusion on potential structural differences and/ or similarities between Frischmuth‘s view of Islam from the outside and Kandemir’s view of Islam from the inside.
Let me start off the discussion by quoting a representative passage from Barbara Frischmuth’s text Die Schrift des Freundes which depicts the female protagonist’s first visit of an Alevite festival in Vienna. She has joined a colleague to go there in order to find out more about the Alevite community and its culture. The passage combines dialogues between Anna and her colleague and narrative text in representing Anna’s impressions on what is for her a rather exotic experience: “Anna wippte nun ebenfalls mit dem Fuß. ‘Gibt es diese Aleviten nicht schon seit Jahrhunderten?’ ‘Doch. Sie bewahrten die Glaubensvorstellungen der Verlierer, der eingewanderten turkmenischen Stämme, die bei den großen politischen Umverteilungen in der islamischen Welt leer ausgegangen waren. […] Jetzt soll aus dem Alevismus eine großstadt- und auslandstaugliche Glaubens- und Schicksalsgemeinschaft werden, die die Herausforderung eines anderen Teils der islamischen Welt, nämlich der sich radikalisierenden Islamisten, anzunehmen bereit ist. Ist das alles, was du wissen wolltest?’ ‘Für diesmal reicht es. Ich bin gerade dabei, es zu speichern.’ […] Nicht alle sind Aleviten, die hier sitzen oder auf und ab gehen, aber die meisten. In der Kleidung kaum von Österreichern zu unterscheiden, es sei denn in puncto Sorgfalt, die Festlichkeit strahlt nur so aus ihnen. Sie sind gut angezogen, die jüngeren Frauen und Männer eher modisch, und sie wirken fröhlich, dem Anlaß gemäß aufgekratzt. Sie legen einander die Hand auf den Arm oder den Arm auf die Schulter, wenn sie sich begrüßen oder freundschaftlich miteinander reden. Nur wenige Frauen tragen ein Kopftuch, möglicherweise die Gattinnen sunnitischer Freunde, die als Gäste geladen sind. […]‘Wenn ich dir noch länger zuhöre, kenne ich mich am Ende weniger aus als am Anfang.’ ‘Da ergeht es dir nicht anders als so manchem Aleviten, nämlich jenen, die sich erst jetzt darauf besinnen, dass sie eigentlich aus alevitischen Familien stammen. […] Jetzt aber, da der Alevismus eine tatsächliche und nicht-westliche – was sehr wichtig ist – Alternative zum orthodoxen Islam und zum sogenannten Fundamentalismus ist, entdecken sie ihn wieder. […] In den achtziger Jahren bekannten sich einige Ultralinke in den türkischen Großstädten zum Alevismus, und in den neunzigern wird er unter den nichtradikalen Türken und Kurden in Europa immer beliebter.’ ‘Du hast mich überzeugt. An dir hat die Firma tatsächlich einen Experten zur Verfügung, mein Lieber.’ […]‘Soll ich dir noch etwas verraten?’[…]‘Es gibt keinen anderen, schon gar keinen, der die Szene von innen her so gut kennt.’“6
Indeed, the vocabulary of the passage is most telling in terms of Encounters with Islam. Apart from the terms Alevism, non-radical Turks, and Kurds you find most of the keywords concerning Islam in those two lines which people are increasingly confronted with when consuming non-Muslim media which at the same time convey and shape a current interest taken in Islam by a growing number of non-Muslims: Orthodox Islam, headscarf, Sunnis, non-western, fundamentalism, Islamism. Besides you also find two typical (western) situations: you find the public listening to some expert on Islamic and/or Eastern culture, who has been declared expert by the non-Muslim community, and you meet the public’s wish for filtered and limited information on Islamic culture in order not to be confronted with too many details on the subject because “otherwise [they] know and understand less than before”7. The focus on Alevism and Turkey, however, is the specific Frischmuth part of the lines quoted.
Most of Frischmuth’s texts which incorporate aspects of oriental culture predominantly represent Islam in its Alevite version. The majority of her Turkish characters are Alevites. In the epilogue of Die Schrift des Freundes this interest in Alevism held by Frischmuth is traced back to the fact that she wrote her doctoral thesis on the Bektashi order’s writings and their links to the occult doctrine of Alevism and by this has been established as sort of an external expert on Alevism in Turkey within European literary circles.8 So, one of the central aspects in the discussion of the above question, if not the central one, is in which way Frischmuth’s texts represent what may be called mainstream Islam (Sunnism) in relation to Alevism, as one of the non-mainstream versions of Islam.
Significantly, in Die Schrift des Freundes, which on the surface is the tragic love-story between Anna Margotti and a young Turkish man named Hikmet, it is not one of the Turkish-Alevite characters or a so-called Westener who speaks the lines quoted above but Jussuf. Jussuf is of Arabic origin, and has been living in Austria for a long time. He is what may be regarded as an assimilated migrant. He is Anna’s colleague at a Vienna based IT company for which he works as a Middle East expert. This company regularly receives state funded contracts from Anna’s long-term lover Haugsdorff, a representative of the Austrian ministry of the interior, to design data management programmes one of which is PACIDIUS, a programme to both monitor and sort out migrants according to their cultural and political backgrounds.
Jussuf is the character in Frischmuth’s text who in a way reflects the writer’s external expert status. He is an expert declared to be by a non-Muslim community. Anna, who is a completely ignorant stranger to the cultural system of Alevism and Islam, in contrast to Jussuf, represents the average general European public in a way. And this public actually is the one who Jussuf provides with a survey on Alevite and Muslim culture. The way to this public, however, leads via Anna who has become eager to understand what is going on with Hikmet and the members of his family after she has fallen in love with Hikmet.
The Turkish-Alevite characters, as there are: Anna’s current lover Hikmet; his brothers; his mother, and his dead father; Samiha Yılmaz, whose dead husband belonged to a calligrapher’s dynasty and was Hikmet’s calligraphy teacher, correspondingly are supposed to present a view on Turkish-Alevite life from the inside. However, the inside view conveyed by them is rather an outside view, as they are characters made up by a non-Muslim writer’s mind.
Through them Turkish Alevism is represented as a highly mysterious community based on very strong ties of friendship, relation and belonging. Those values re-appear together with an intense sense of hierarchy, tradition and protection of one’s family in the way in which the characters are shown to live their Turkish Alevite family lives. The mysterious aspect is particularly fostered by the fact that Hikmet appears and disappears without warning; by the calligraphic symbols and their links to names and hidden meanings behind the symbols and names; by Anna’s sneaking suspicion that Hikmet’s brothers keep changing their names and identities, and finally by her lover Haugsdorff’s suspicion that all of them might be involved in some illegal business of lending their identities and passports to people who would like to immigrate into Austria. The character of Samiha Yılmaz, in the way she is presented, adds the aspect of an Alevite eagerness to adapt to modernity (as far as the relation between men and women is not concerned by this) to this list. This quality is expressed particularly well in that passage of the text in which Samiha Yılmaz gives Anna an insight into her married life as a Turkish migrant woman living in Vienna: “‘Wir waren sehr glücklich miteinander, so glücklich, daß wir noch alleine bleiben wollten. Nur wir beide. Ich war jung, und wir sagten uns, daß wir auch später Kinder haben könnten. Für meine Eltern, die sich immer mehrere Kinder gewünscht hatten, wäre das einer Versuchung Gottes gleichgekommen, hätten sie gewusst, dass wir verhüteten. […] Wir sind viel ausgegangen, mein Mann und ich. Es machte ihm große Freude, mir alles zu zeigen und zu erklären, was er schon gut kannte und ich noch nicht. Wir gingen ins Kino, ins Theater und sogar tanzen. Wir dürften uns, meinte er, wenn wir schon hier lebten, nicht abschließen. […] Ich war zwar muslimisch erzogen worden, aber meine Eltern waren keine Fanatiker, und so konnte ich mir immer sagen, daß allein das zählt, was man im Herzen geblieben ist. Schließlich taten wir nichts Böses. Nicht wirklich. Das bißchen Wein, das wir hin und wieder tranken, machte uns kein Kopfzerbrechen, und auch das nicht, daß wir die Speisenvorschriften nicht immer einhalten konnten. Ich betete noch und rezitierte manchmal den Koran für meinen Mann. […] Das einzige, worin ich mich ganz als Muslimin fühlte, war meine Beziehung zu meinem Mann. Ich nahm ihn als Maßstab, und was immer er entschied, das galt auch für mich. Wenn er noch keine Kinder wollte, dann sollte mir das recht sein. Wenn er wollte, daß ich mich mit seinen Freunden ohne Scham unterhielt, wieso nicht? Wenn es ihm gefiel, dass ich mich modisch kleidete, hatte ich gewiß nichts dagegen. Wenn er fand, dass ich meine Ausbildung ruhig bis zum Abschluß machen sollte, nun, ich lernte gerne, und ob ich einmal unterrichten würde, hing einfach und allein von ihm ab. Ich sollte in Gesellschaft mitreden können, fand er. Gut, das hatte auch meine Mutter schon auf ihre Art so gehalten. Ich tat einfach, was er wollte, und er freute sich an dieser Art von Gehorsam.’”9
The mysterious aspect attributed to Alevism in Die Schrift des Freundes is also present on a more general oriental scale in Frischmuth’s text Die Entschlüsselung. There it is linked to a bulb of a Turkish plant which the main character receives by mail at her Austrian home without knowing who has sent it, and it is linked to a mysterious male character, who identifies himself as an oriental by his specific way of greeting the main character in public, and who subsequently appears at her house all of a sudden pretending to do research on the correspondence between a medieval Catholic nun having lived in the area and the founder of Turkish Sufism. The fact that the nun and the Sufi lived in different centuries but still are said to have been in contact with each other introduces the mystic qualities of Turkish Sufism to the text.
In Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war Alevism is again presented as the more modern, moderate and tolerant version of Islam, just like Jussuf characterizes it in his survey for Anna, from which was quoted above. In this text, however, Alevism is directly contrasted by three non-Alevite, and most probably, Sunnite characters: the current Turkish leaseholder of the restaurant next to Anna’s house where Anna spent most of her youth, and his two daughters. The two girls are the same age as Anna’s daughter Nilüfer. They wear scarves, attend Muslim religious education provided by a Hodja, take the words of the Koran literally, will not take any criticism on this, and will not search for reason behind the words and the rules laid down in the Koran. Their Alevite counterpart is Ali, Anna’s Alevite husband, who has never talked about religion to his wife and children, in particular about his religion, until his daughter Nilüfer joins the two neighbour girls in their religious efforts after her mother has left her family without notice and also turns to wearing a scarf and clothes covering all parts of her body leaving open just her face. Only then he tells his daughter the three central rules his people believe in: Watch your tongue, watch your hands, and control your sexual desires.
Nilüfer is sort of a cultural, and religious, in-between character, in a way similar to Jussuf in Die Schrift des Freundes. She is the one who in time starts to question the rules of mainstream Islam as being formalistic and lacking reason and who by this gets into conflict with her two friends. Finally she reduces her religious efforts and once more changes her way of clothing. She turns to wearing a cap instead of a scarf, trousers and blouses or T-shirts which just cover the upper parts of her arms down to the elbow.
Anna’s mother who has come to live with Anna’s husband and children after her daughter has disappeared and Anna’s childhood nanny are shown to appreciate this second turn in Nilüfer’s behaviour after they have been worrying about the girl, and after Anna’s mother has been deeply disapproving of the girl’s religious ambitions. From their statements it becomes clear that from their point of view Nilüfer is about to turning back to normality and showing all signs that reason has won over non-reason.
Finally, in the radio play Eine Liebe in Erzurum Turkish Islam dissolves into sort of an underlying system of social conventions concerning the relation between males and females in public, sexuality, love and marriage which people cling to but do not necessarily see as religiously inspired, and which the Austrian female main character feels to be oppressive on her.
So, all in all, it can be said concerning the outside view on Islam present in Frischmuth’s texts that Islam is seen as a religious and cultural system stretching from a mystic and mysteriously exotic spiritualism to a felt threat to a so-called western life-style. It is felt to be threatening in its strict rules (which are felt to be restrictions) and its insistence on belief instead of reason to be found with its mainstream version; but it is felt to be exotic, promising, enriching and fit for what is considered modern western society in its non-mainstream versions, that is Alevism (or Sufism).
What is said in the texts in a way gives the impression that mainstream Islam is seen as one of Europe’s (religious) Others for the reason that Christianity’s hierarchical structures and its replacement of reason by belief are said to have been overcome in European society by the ideas of Western enlightenment and modernity; in mainstream Islam, however, they still seem to be intact, just as they are with believing Christians in Europe and other parts of the world.
Let us turn to Hülya Kandemir’s autobiographical text Himmelstochter which presents a quite different but nonetheless evaluating view on Islam. The structure of the book follows the idea of a before and an after of what may look like a conversion but, in fact, rather is a religious coming-out. It reflects the pattern of an experience of religious enlightenment: “Prolog – Wurzeln – Suche – Erfolg – Zweifel – Erfüllung – Neuausrichtung – Liebe”10 (prologue – roots – search – success – doubts – fulfilment – re-orientation – love). The narrative parts of the text recall and evaluate relevant incidents in the protagonist’s life from the perspective of her current position as a believing Muslim. All this is illustrated by photo material showing a young Turkish girl, respectively, a young Turkish woman who does not really look different from her German peers in terms of clothing. It is sort of interrupted by passages of commenting on current developments in the Muslim world which may give non-Muslims a negative image of Islam and of pointing out that the people responsible of those developments (the so-called fundamentalists, the suicide bombers) are not to be considered true Muslims.
In the prologue to the book Hülya, the narrator-protagonist, introduces the reader to her present life by describing how she does her prayers before her last concert, and how this new habit of hers has changed her colleagues’ and friends’, and even her mother’s, behaviour towards her. In a way, she has taken the same way as Nilüfer in Frischmuth’s text Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war but has not turned back on this way but has proceeded and has attributed a spiritual quality to her life by this: “Der große Saal im Münchner Schlachthof war gerammelt voll, das Publikum raunte in gespannter Erwartung. […] Dabei wurde ich langsam unruhig. […] Ich war unruhig, weil die Sonne nur mehr knapp über dem Horizont stand. Durch das kleine Fenster in der kargen Garderobe konnte ich sehen, wie ein sommerlich-glutroter Ball hinter ein paar Lagerhallen zu verschwinden begann. Ich wurde unruhig, weil es höchste Zeit war für mein Abendgebet, das ich unter keinen Umständen versäumen wollte. Das kein Muslim versäumen möchte, denn es ist eines der fünf täglichen Gebete, die unverzichtbar sind für einen Gläubigen.“11
In the following chapters she gives an account of her life in a Turkish family who has migrated to Germany in search of work and which consists of an originally strong but later weakening mother who made it possible for all of the family to move to Germany, a physically ill father, and nine brothers and sisters. She talks about having attended a German school, having been an ambitious pupil, having taken part in sports competitions, still, finally having dropped out of school because she felt attending school was an obstacle in living a meaning life based on music.
Furthermore, she talks about opposing to cultural and family traditions by leaving her father’s house and moving to a flat of her own in order to live a life of her own; about her father offering this opportunity to her as the only possible way out and at the same time accepting her decision to take the opportunity without cutting ties with her. She talks of having friends who consume alcohol and drugs and of consuming alcohol and drugs herself, and, of course, she also talks about her career as a quite popular singer.
A further point in her account is that she describes how religion has been present in her family mainly in stories told to the children when they were still young, in form of religious festivals and in a quite un-reflected trust in god’s good will to help mankind. She also talks about how she and her sister ridiculed their elder brother’s religiously inspired attempts to cover them with towels when sunbathing on the beach in Turkey during some summer holidays.
Still, she tells the reader all this just to sum up by saying that she felt she had been lacking something while leading that sort of life: “Nun bin ich eine verheiratete Frau, trage das Kopftuch, trete nicht oder nur mehr selten als Sängerin in Erscheinung, und dann nur bei reinen Frauenkonzerten. Ich lebe einen neuen Alltag – den einer Muslima. Das regelmäßige Beten und die Konzentration auf das, was ich für wesentlich halte, schenken mir einen inneren Frieden, wie ich ihn früher nicht gekannt habe. Seit ich mich vom Modediktat verabschiedet habe und meine körperlichen Reize nicht mehr zur Schau stelle, fühle ich mich frei. Ich lebe ein glückliches, ausgeglichenes Leben.“12
Inspired by her elder brother she has started dealing with the teachings of Islam. Her interest in Islam also makes her first marriage. She marries a German who agrees to convert to Islam. With him she plans to live a religiously inspired life of wife and husband. However, this endeavour turns out to be a failure because she feels that her husband does not respond to her ambitions and efforts in the way she had expected this, and they get a divorce.
After her divorce she intensifies her religious efforts. She involves men not only in discussions on their concepts of family life but also on religion and belief, for instance, whenever a man shows interest in her. However, she does not believe without reasoning yet.
Although she has regularly joined the Friday prayers at a mosque, for instance, she starts a discussion with a man there about the fact that she took off her scarf after the prayers had ended and people were sitting together in the mosque canteen to chat. By retelling this episode of her disputing matters of belief she illustrates how far away she still was from her true destination of being a true believer at that time of her life: „Ohne zu überlegen, nahm ich das Kopftuch wieder ab, weil ich mich jetzt wieder im Alltagsleben fühlte. Doch ich spürte gleich, dass es einige Muslime provozierend empfanden, auf dem Gelände der Moschee eine Frau ohne Kopftuch zu sehen. Der Pächter der Kantine sprach mich darauf an: Du weißt schon, dass du ein Kopftuch tragen musst. Ich sagte ihm, dass ich es ja zum beten aufgesetzt hatte. Der Mann war zwar freundlich zu mir, aber er ließ nicht locker: Aber du weißt auch, dass das nicht alles ist, das Freitagsgebet? Er dachte wohl, dass ich sonst nicht betete, weil ich kein Kopftuch trug. Oder er dachte, es ei mir nicht bewusst, dass Muslimas in der Öffentlichkeit eigentlich immer ein Kopftuch tragen sollten, wie das der Koran empfiehlt. Doch ich winkte lachend ab. Bruder, ich bete fünfmal täglich, ich kenne Gottes Wort, sagte ich. Da musste auch er lächeln, aber es blieb doch eine Spannung. Ich konnte dem Mann anmerken, dass ihm mein verhalten nicht recht war und dass auch ein paar der Männer, die unsere Unterhaltung mit angehört hatten, auf seiner Seite standen. […] Ich hörte auch, dass viele der Frauen, die ganz selbstverständlich in die Moschee kamen, nicht die fünf täglichen Gebete verrichteten. Auch viele der Männer kamen nur zum Freitagsgebet, beteten sonst aber gar nicht oder nicht regelmäßig – was mich in meinem Kopftuchverzicht nur bestärkte: Wenn sich die anderen nur die Rosinen aus ihrem Glauben herauspickten, warum sollte ich das nicht auch tun.”13
Her final step in wilfully becoming a strictly believing Muslim she describes as a deeply spiritual and mystic experience: “Auf eine mir bis dahin unbekannte Art wirkte das Gebet an diesem Abend noch stärker: Ich merkte schon bei den ersten arabischen Versen, die ich sprach, wie sich die Verkrampfung, die mich seit dem Ende des Konzertes gefangen gehalten hatte, löste. Wie mich ein warmes, weiches Gefühl durchströmte. […] Ich bat Allah aus tiefstem Herzen, er möge mir zeigen, was ich noch tun könne, um ihm näher zu kommen. Ich konzentrierte mich auf meine Liebe zu Allah. Auf Sein Licht, Seine Kraft, Seine Güte. Ich spürte Seine Stärke körperlich, wie eine warme Welle, die mich durchflutete. Plötzlich stand mir das Bild zweier Wege vor Augen. Auf der einen Seite sah ich mich auf dem Weg zum Ruhm. Zum Durchbruch als Sängerin. Auf der anderen Seite sah ich mich mit einem Kopftuch über die Straße gehen, auf dem Weg Allahs. Ich betrachtete die beiden Seiten. Ich sah mir selbst zu, wie ich auf der Bühne stand, wie mir Leute zujubelten. Und ich sah, wie ich mit dem Kopftuch vor meinem Haus stand. Wie ich bedeckt in ein Geschäft hineinging. Ich sah mich beten. Ich betrachtete die beiden Seiten wie zwei Gemälde, die nebeneinander an der Wand hingen. Als ich mir die Seite des Ruhmes ansah, fiel mir nichts Besonderes auf. Es war so, als hätte dieses Bild nichts mit mir zu tun. Ich spürte mich nicht. Es ließ mich kalt. Dann wanderten meine Gedanken zur anderen Seite. Auf dieser Seite sah ich mich glücklich und frei. Ich wusste in dem Moment, dass das für mich die richtige Seite war. Ich spürte die Hingabe, die im Tragen des Tuches zum Ausdruck kommt.”14
From that moment on she subordinates to the rules of a life according to the words of the Koran without questioning and reasoning: she turns to wearing a scarf, she does not embrace and (socially) kiss male friends in public anymore, she does not stay in a room alone with a male who is not a member of her family, and she points out that she still shakes hands with non-Muslims because shaking hands is the common way of greeting people politely in Germany (and not doing so would be considered impolite), although actually she would not do so anymore if she had the choice. Furthermore, she decides not to sing in front of a male (or mixed) audience any longer and finally not to be a singer at all because she is convinced that performing on a stage is incompatible with man’s true subordination to Allah. Only then, after having taken all these steps, she says, she felt secure and at peace with her life and her femininity. And as if to give evidence that the way chosen has been the right one she ends her book by telling the reader that she is pregnant from her second husband who is a strictly believing Muslim just like her.
From all this, it can be concluded concerning the view taken on mainstream Islam from the inside as shown in Hülya Kandemir’s book that here Islam is also seen as a religious and cultural system having the potential of providing personal spiritual and mystic experience. However, it is by no means considered threatening and frightening because of limiting people’s personal freedom by giving strict rules. It is rather seen as a system in which the main character feels personally safe due to the clear and strict rules and limits given and agreed on by believers.
If compared in terms of a general attitude to religion, so, Frischmuth’s and Kandemir’s texts show a striking similarity: In both texts the attitude towards religion is personalized. It shows to be a matter of personality features. As the personalities of those characters concerned by questions of religion in general, and by Islam in particular, are quite different from each other in the texts discussed, if not to say, opposed to each other, the views on the aspects of religion are opposed to each other, too. Whereas freedom means an almost total absence of formal rules and a permanent responsibility put on people to individually define the moral standards and limits of their behaviour for the relevant characters in Frischmuth’s texts, the relevant characters in Kandemir’s text define freedom as the protection provided by the rules put under taboo by a religious and cultural system. The very rules which are welcome to them as means of providing security give feelings of suppression to Frischmuth’s characters.
Beyond this similarity, however, the texts show a striking difference in terms of an intellectual approach to Islam. In Frischmuth’s texts the reader is confronted with a search of a version of Islam convenient to Western thinking. Islam is judged according to a western cultural system. Considering the aspects pointed out above Western thinking and culture is indirectly defined as secular, non-hierarchical and emancipated from formalistic rules and taboos. In addition, with Frischmuth’s texts you get the impression that some of the non-mainstream versions of Islam consciously and wilfully try to adapt to a western life style. Consequently they are not seen as religious movements which are self-content and entities in their own right but as systems which take efforts in defining themselves in relation to extra-Islamic standards.
With Kandemir’s text an evaluation of Islam only takes place on inner-Islamic standards and not on extra-Islamic ones. However, evaluation and reflection are restricted to a person’s individual position within the religious system: Islam is found to be the suitable religion for the protagonist’s particular personality demands. As far as belief is concerned the reader meets a rather un-reflected attitude towards Islam: It is (taken) as it is. It is not judged according to a different cultural system. It is seen as a religious and cultural entity in its own right.
1 Frischmuth, Barbara, Die Entschlüsselung (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003).
2 Frischmuth, Barbara, Die Schrift des Freundes (Berlin: Aufbau, 22002)
3 Frischmuth, Barbara, Eine Liebe in Erzurum (Klagenfurt, Wien: Verlag Kitab, 2002).
4 Frischmuth, Barbara, Der Sommer, in dem Anna verschwunden war (Berlin: Aufbau, 2004).
5 Kandemir, Hülya, Himmelstochter. Mein Weg vom Popstar zu Allah. (München, Zürich: Pendo, 2005.
6 Frischmuth, Die Schrift des Freundes, 180-182.
7 Frischmuth, Die Schrift des Freundes, 182.
8 See Frischmuth, Die Schrift des Freundes, 349-352.
9 Frischmuth, Die Schrift des Freundes, 210-211.
10 Kandemir, Himmelstochter, table of contents.
11 Kandemir, Himmelstochter, 7-8.
12 Kandemir, Himmelstochter, 12.
13 Kandemir, Himmelstochter, 191.
14 Kandemir, Himmelstochter, 17.