“I have become a Stranger in my own Homeland”. The public entry of Swiss converts to Islam. A performative reconstruction of the Swiss Muslim debate. 

In the immediate aftermath of the approval of the ban on constructing minarets in a national referendum by 57,5&% of Swiss voters in late 2009, the Swiss Muslim debate took an ironic turn, as a number of “native” Swiss converts to Islam in an ostentative salafi guise entered public arenas, triggering heated debates on integrating Switzerland’s Muslim “migrant” minority along religious and moral categories. Dominating news coverage on Muslims and Islam in Switzerland in the first half of 2010, the 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. Applying a performative approach, the PhD-project analyzes the Swiss Muslim debate as a specific rehearsal of what is narrativized as a Europe-­wide “crisis of multiculturalism” (see for example Meer 2010; Modood et al. 2010; Lentin and Titley 2011; Turner 2006) as a mediated “symbolic politics”. Notably, it works out how the entry of the convert protagonists triggered public arbitrations on acceptable forms of constructing religious authority and “being Muslim” in diverse media, mainly spelt out by the public demand to endorse “female agency” and “religious freedom”. Combining media analysis with ethnographic fieldwork in various Muslim venues, the project traces how between 2008 and 2011, Switzerland has experienced a wave of Muslim self-formation along normative and ethical criteria among young Muslims which is set against the background of the current culturalization of the social ontology by time-­spatial differentiations. As I try to show in the diachronic analysis, while up until 29 November 2009, the public debate on Muslims and Islam was characterized by a particular lack of addressable Muslim actors in terms of problematized Islamic visibilities, the Central Council has given “Muslim strangeness” a visible guise, opening up a public space of arbitrating the social location of the Muslim migrant population in Switzerland along religious and moral categories. As the project aims to work out, current problematizations of immigration and integration, fuelled by a “rhetorics of crisis” perpetuate the modern enlightenment narration of a historical rupture between religion/secularity along the axes of irrationality/rationality; heteronomy/ autonomy; collectivity/individuality; Orient/Occident in a gendered register in the current culturalization of the social ontology. The project relates to ongoing works in the field of Islam in Europe, notably to media analytical and social anthropological approaches which aim to reconstruct what is often termed as Islamophobia, understood as an assemblage of discourses and practices of government in present (post)secular, immigrant societies. Thereby, it focusses on the  role of time­‐spacial differentiations constitutive for the social ontologisation in current and future European societies.