Dispelling the Myth of 'Parallel Societies': Are Berlin's Muslims a Model for Integration?

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The report cites the creation of the Islamforum in Berlin 2005 as a positive development in promoting participation in civic life. The forum provides a platform for representatives of Muslim organizations to meet with politicians representing the disctrict and the city on a regular basis. Those interviewed said they saw more possibility of having an influence on the local politics in Kreuzberg than on a city or national level.

Yet this isn't just a rosy picture of successful integration. Muslims in Kreuzberg face regular discrimination in their daily lives. Almost four in five of those asked said they had been subjected to at least one incident of racist discrimination in the previous year; and 74 percent had experienced religious discrimination. The most common complaints were related to education and the labor market, as well as the housing market.

The first instances of discriminations many Muslim children face is dealing with the prejudices of their own teachers. The system is already stacked against them because many with immigrant backgrounds are brought up in a language other than German. In school, they are often steered toward the Hauptschule, the lowest of the three-tier German schools in an education system based entirely on tracking, rather than the vocationally oriented Realschule or the university preparatory Gymnasium. Mühe says that teachers' negative images of Islam is often projected onto the children, who become victims of "stigmatization, a lack of challenges and low expectations."

Barriers in Education and Jobs

Many of the Muslims interviewed thought that a better mix of Muslim and non-Muslim children would lead to an improvement in education and regretted that ethnic Germans sometimes moved out of the area when their children were of school-going age or chose to send their children to schools outside Kreuzberg.

Parents also voiced concerns about the particular discrimination faced by girls who wear headscarves. They expressed a perception that teachers often assumed they were oppressed or less intelligent and that they did not get as much attention as other pupils for that reason.

The issue of headscarves also created barriers for Muslim women on the labor market, according to the report. In 2005, the city of Berlin implemented the Neutralitätsgesetz, or Law on Neutrality, which bans the display of religious symbols in schools and other public services. This has effectively led to a ban on the wearing of headscarves by public employees, effectively cutting off many potential career paths to some Muslim women. To add to this, the OSI report found that there was evidence of a knock-on effect, with similar discrimination against women who wear headscarves in the private sector. One of the report's key recommendations is that Berlin politicians take another look at the law in view of its discriminatory affect.

A Positive Example

Another recommendation made in the report is that the city introduce better documentation of cases of discrimination, particularly in schools, so that children have somewhere to turn to if they run into prejudice or negative stereotyping.

One criticism of the report is that it chose to focus on Kreuzberg, which has a relatively affluent and tolerant population, compared to other poorer districts in Berlin with large Muslim populations. Neighboring Neukölln to the south and Wedding to the north, for example, are often described as "problem districts" and also have more diverse Muslim communities, compared to the predominantly Turkish population in Kreuzberg.

Mühe says that the choice of Kreuzberg was deliberate. "Kreuzberg has many very positive political measures, many positive attitudes, where diversity and the acceptance of diversity are an example for integration." She hopes that the positive experiences there could be applied to other districts and areas in Germany.

"Perhaps Kreuzberg could serve as an example for how we view our society. To help us answer the question of what it means to be German, what it means to be a Berliner," Mühe says. "Do I have to be ethnic German or can I be someone with a Turkish background who wears a headscarf and still be a perfectly ordinary German?"

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• Part 1: Are Berlin's Muslims a Model for Integration?
• Part 2: 'Stigmatization, a Lack of Challenges, Low Expectations'