Young Islam Conference and Trans-Atlantic Education

First of all, how can it be July already? Wasn't it just the beginning of June and I was scrambling to study for finals and pack to leave? It seems like that was both ages ago and just a few seconds ago.

Anyways, back to my days in Berlin. This morning we all met at 9:30 to head to a place near the University of Humboldt to hear a presentation about the Young Islam Conference. Despite the name of the program, the Young Islam Conference is a forum for youth (17-25) with and without religous beliefs and with or without a migration background. The Young Islam Conference is a nation wide forum in which youths have discussions and debates about the role of Islam in Germany. They discuss topics such as migration laws, but more prominently, problems with the education system. An interesting point was made about teachers with migration background. Less than five percent of the teachers in Germany have a migration background, and this is due to two possible reasons. The first is that discriminatory practices prevent young people of migrant background from being able to receive a higher education. Also though, there is this notion that a teacher of migrant background must play a special role in a school as a bridge between teachers and parents of migration background. There is an expectation that they are bi- or multilingual, that they are knowledgeable of another culture, and that they want to be a mentor for students of migration background. However, just like any other person, a person of migrant background who goes in to teaching may just want to teach, and can't or doesn't want to take on these additional roles. They also mentioned that teachers, even though they are in a position of authority as a teacher, may still face discrimination from students and staff if they appear physically of someone of an ethnicity other than German. There were many other things discussed during the presentation, and they were very interested in our commentary of parallels between the German-Islam relationship, and the American relationships with minority groups.

After the Young Islam Conference we had a break for lunch before we reconvened for a lecture by Reinhard Isensee, who is a professor in the American Studies Program at Humboldt University. He had a very intriguing lecture that gave us a good foundation to start thinking about topics such as knowledge and who knows what, migration politics, and other topics related to identity.

Once class was done for the day, we all headed back to the hostel to rest and get some work done before dinner. For dinner we decided to go to an indian restraunt. We attempted to avoid going to the same indian restraunt we have been to two other times before, but the manager of this indian restraunt seems to own several other restraunts in the area including a mexican restraunt and two indian restraunts that we know of. Its not really bad indian or mexican food, but it also isn't the best cuisine and the service is incredibly slow. It was so slow that i had to give money to my friends to pay for my dinner so that i could leave to get to a theater show on time.

The third show i went to see was called Aufstand, and it was performed on a smaller stage in the Maxim Gorki Theater. It was certainly an interesting performance since it was only one person performing and during several parts of the performance a fog machine was used, which made it impossible to read the English subtitles. However I did get the main idea of the performance, even if parts of it seemed completely random and unrelated to the monologue. This man was sharing his personal story as a Kurdish artist. Kurds are citizens of Kurdistan which is part of Turkey, Iran, and Syria and they all speak Kurdish, though each region has a different dialect. The Turkish government committed forced evictions of Kurdish villages and towns and provided no support for the displaced peoples, and no ethical reason for their eviction. I missed the part where he said his family moved to, but a significant part of his monologue related to his formal education as an artist. He didn’t want to do the same art pieces as the rest of the students, he wanted to do films relating to his cultural history. This eventually got him kicked out of the art school, so he moved away with his wife to another place where he could do art. He also participated in several demonstrations which only increased his frustration for people who wished for him to conform to be more German. With his German passport he has more rights and freedom to move about, but he prefers to use his Turkish passport because that is what he identifies as. The whole point of his performance is that he is standing up for himself and everyday he chooses to rise up against those who try to tell him to conform.