The Impact of Social Structure, Discrimination and Violence on the German Muslim Community

西欧穆斯林的宗教信仰和宗教认同在学术研究和公共话语中受到越来越多的关注。然而，尽管在过去十年中进行了广泛的研究，但在西欧移民社会中，穆斯林对宗教传统的有力维护仍然是一个悬而未决的模式。宗教认同的一个主要解释是多数人歧视或排斥穆斯林移民。然而，除了在日常情况下经常单独经历的歧视之外，穆斯林个人还受到一种更严重和越来越明显的仇外形式的影响：暴力和恐怖行为，明确地不分青红皂白地针对穆斯林。此外，激进的伊斯兰恐怖组织试图助长这种恶性循环。在激进的穆斯林派别和敌对的伊斯兰恐惧症分子之间，世俗的穆斯林人口处于尴尬的境地，他们感受到了来自不同方面的怨恨和压力。然而，令人惊讶的是，我们几乎没有关于这种双管齐下的暴力威胁如何影响德国穆斯林的实证研究。拟议的研究项目解决了这一研究差距中的核心问题：出于宗教动机的暴力如何改变宗教认同？身份认同、歧视和暴力如何影响公民或政治行为？这些反应如何随着个人所处的社会地位而变化？毕竟，社会流动性从根本上改变了德国社会，使其多样化，其中包括最大的穆斯林移民群体--土耳其客工社区。今天，许多穆斯林裔移民在政治、经济和社会中持有广泛的立场，结果是宗教交叉了许多其他可能与个人社会身份相关的维度。我们建立在RISS研究的理论框架上，并通过说明外部事件(如伊斯兰和反穆斯林暴力)如何扰乱社会结构、身份和行为之间的联系来扩展它。拟议的项目使用对德国穆斯林的原始调查来检查这些问题，我们将作为RISS本土化调查的一部分收集这些调查。我们依靠创新的测量策略，使用联合实验来评估宗教在个人多维社会认同中的重要性。此外，我们建议的实证分析使用一个实验设计来评估社会认同以及政治偏好和行为是如何与暴力和歧视的认知相联系的。

The religiosity and religious identity of Western European Muslims has received increasing attention in academic research and public discourse. Yet, despite extensive research over the past decade, Muslims’ strong preservation of religious traditions remains an unsolved pattern in Western European immigration societies. A dominant explanation of religious identity is the discrimination or exclusion of Muslim immigrants by the majority population. However, beyond the often individually experienced discrimination in everyday situations, Muslim individuals are subject to a more severe and increasingly visible form of xenophobia: violence and acts of terror, which explicitly target Muslims indiscriminately. Moreover, radical Islamic terror organizations try to fuel this vicious cycle. Caught between a faction of radicalized Muslims as well as hostile, islamophobic elements of the majority population, secular segments of the Muslim population are in an awkward position, where they feel resentment and pressure from different sides.Surprisingly, however, we have very little empirical research on how this two-pronged threat of violence affects Muslims in Germany. The proposed research project addresses core questions within this research gap: How does religiously motivated violence alter religious identity? How does identity, discrimination and violence affect civic or political behavior? And how do these reactions vary with the social position which individuals occupy? After all, social mobility has fundamentally altered and diversified German society, including the largest Muslim-origin immigrant group, the Turkish guestworker communities. Today, many Muslim-origin immigrants of all generations hold a wide range of positions in politics, economy and society, with the result that religion cross-cuts many other dimensions which are potentially relevant to individuals’ social identity.We build on the theoretical framework of the overarching RISS research and expand it by illuminating how exogenous events, such as Islamist and anti-Muslim violence, perturb the association between social structure, identity and behavior. The proposed project examines these questions using an original survey of German Muslims, which we will collect as part of the RISS Internalization Survey. We rely on innovative measurement strategy using a conjoint experiment to estimate the importance of religion within individuals’ multidimensional social identity. Furthermore, our proposed empirical analysis uses an experimental design to evaluate how social identity as well as political preferences and behavior are linked to perceptions of violence and discrimination.