Some days, when Necla Kelek talks about her childhood in Istanbul in the 1960s, her birthplace sounds like a lost paradise. When she raves about the Bosphorus, about summer cinema in the open air, about families who put on their good clothes and strolled after dinner. About a carefree time when Turkey believed that modernity belonged to it. Kelek, now 68 years old, is sitting in her adopted home of Hamburg, smiling and saying: “I’m still in love with Istanbul.” Her refuge, Germany, which once gave her “freedom of thought,” is becoming stranger to her.
It is an insight that reveals a lot about a woman who took her life into her own hands: from the child of a guest worker to an economist, sociologist and best-selling author. Kelek's path represents half a century of immigration history. She neither romanticizes nor accuses her origins, but instead takes “the best of both worlds,” as she describes it.
With her recently published autobiography “Glückskind: Growing up between Istanbul and Bückeburg”, the well-known Islam critic now reveals the foundation of her beliefs, her commitment to fighting forced marriages, honor killings and patriarchal power structures. In addition to gratitude towards “the great Federal Republic”, her book also expresses anger at the mistakes of integration policy.
“In my childhood and youth I had the feeling that things were moving forward in Germany,” says Kelek at a meeting with WELT AM SONNTAG in Hamburg. She explains: “I realized that when I finish school, complete the training and study, something changes.” She now has the impression that a lot of things are stagnating. “There are problems popping up all over this country that seem unsolved.” If even announced reforms were not implemented, many people asked themselves why they should still vote for the political center. "In the past, everyone talked about the large popular parties or red-green coalitions. Today we face different challenges."
What fundamentally annoys Kelek is that migration policy is only symbolic policy: "We now have over 20 million people with a migration history in Germany. When will we stop talking about minorities? When there are 50 or 60 million?" Anyone who goes through Hamburg, Berlin and other cities has long seen how diverse the country has become. "But we need a consensus about common values," emphasizes Kelek vehemently, "about values that originally distinguished Germany: independence, responsibility, the opportunity to go our own way. If we give up these values, then I don't know what will happen."
Her story also contains a number of hurdles - and yet Kelek describes herself as a “lucky child”. Every person experiences breaks, the important thing is how to overcome them in a positive way. Kelek: “I’m a lucky child because I succeeded.” The first turning point begins long before the family emigrates to Germany; it begins with her grandmother. Emine, known only as “Emmana,” ruled a court in central Anatolia. When her husband once wanted to marry a second wife, she quickly drove sheep, cows and goats out of the stables, got on her horse and rode away. He would have been ruined. The men of the village watched. A woman with a cigarette in her hand and a whip in her belt. “She showed me that women can do anything men can do,” said Kelek.
This grandmother becomes a kind of archetype in Kelek's life. A woman who doesn't subordinate herself. This may explain the contradiction that runs through Kelek's memoirs. She is a passionate advocate of modernity. But she found her first role models not in the West, but in the women of her own family. Her mother had left her village. The father had moved to Istanbul to free himself from the constraints of his origins. Both belonged to the generation that benefited from the opportunities of the young Turkish republic. For Kelek, its founding by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk is a turning point in civilization. “Women were made human,” she quotes her mother as saying.
What is meant is the political idea behind it: secularism, individual freedom instead of religious tutelage, education for girls, participation in public life. When Kelek's parents went to Germany with their children in 1966, they took with them the spirit of optimism and optimism. Torn between two cultures, nine-year-old Necla initially ended up in Bückeburg in Lower Saxony; Germany seemed like a fairytale landscape to her. The half-timbered houses reminded her of the stories of the Brothers Grimm.
The family was amazed at everything. About order, cleanliness, the garbage collection that came on time. “Take a close look at everything,” the father warned the children. “We can do the same thing later here in Turkey.” But what was supposed to be a temporary stay turned into a permanent life. And with that admission, the family changed. The father, previously full of curiosity, became stricter and more disappointed, and his dream of entrepreneurial success did not come true. The man who once crossed boundaries became the patriarch who established new ones. This was a turning point for Necla Kelek.
While her siblings returned to Turkey, she began to find her own, arduous path in Germany. At school she was repeatedly asked the typical German teacher question: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” confronted. Kelek initially reacted strangely, as the question from her home country was “Who are you going to marry?” used. The fact that a girl should think about her own career was liberating for her.
Kelek later trained as a technical draftsman, became involved in the trade union, and studied economics and social sciences in Hamburg. She realized that she had to acquire knowledge in order to become independent - and from then on she enjoyed life in the area around Paulinenplatz in Altona, where she lived as a student.
Since then, almost every answer from Kelek to questions about integration and cohesion has revolved around the same belief: people must be given the opportunity to break away from their origins, family and environment. That's why the 68-year-old sees integration less culturally than existentially. The ability to become economically independent and to pursue a job is crucial in order to arrive. "School. Education. Then maybe marriage." She has been preaching this order for years.
This is exactly where the conflict that Kelek has been facing for a long time begins. As an expert in the sociology of migration and parallel Islamic societies, she sees many traditional Muslim family structures as an obstacle on the path to individual freedom. "The main difference to Christianity and Judaism is that the Islam practiced today demands submission and places the religious community of all Muslims above the rights of the individual," she says - and adds: "Freedom is only the freedom to believe, not the freedom not to believe. Islam is a patriarchal order. In the name of Allah, men rule, the older over the women, the younger."
At the time when Kelek's first work "The Foreign Bride" (2005) was published - an analysis of arranged marriages in Turkish-Muslim families in Germany - there were certainly attempts to identify and solve problems such as forced marriage, paternalism, parallel societies and honor killings. With the Islamic Conference, politicians wanted to enter into discussions with the Islamic associations. Kelek: “When it was determined that this was not fruitful, the issue was dropped and ignored.” In addition, the SPD and the Greens relied on “diversity”, another term for laissez-faire.
Kelek's conclusion sounds sobering when she says: "Migration science has failed across the board. To date, there are no empirical studies on forced or child marriages." The debate about children's headscarves in schools was also ridiculed, as was recently the case by the Greens in the Bundestag. The headscarf is not just a piece of clothing. It represents a larger system of family control.
As a result, nothing has improved in certain parts of almost all European cities over the past few decades, where a parallel world has been established. “On the contrary,” says Kelek, “Islam isolates itself, Islamization and Islamism are lived and celebrated.” The influx and the borders, which have not been closed since 2015, have made the situation worse - "whereas secular Muslims, far from all of this, are successful in the trades, in the IT industry, in education and health care." She hopes that these liberal migrants will be heard more in politics and society in the future.
While supporters describe Kelek as a courageous enlightener, critics accuse her of acting as a provocateur who generalizes Muslim milieus and reproduces negative stereotypes. Kelek now responds to this with calm: “Do a fact check,” she says. And: “What I wrote about social development, about cultural differences and the dangers of disintegration, about the headscarf and patriarchy is confirmed in reality.” The influence of political Islam, Islamist attacks, femicide and social fraud are just the tip of a development that is lastingly changing Germany for the worse. “Since democracy is no longer defensible, demographics will determine the future.”
Necla Kelek misses the spirit of optimism of her youth. The confidence that problems can be solved. The willingness to address conflicts. Nevertheless, their view does not end in pessimism. And that is because of her family, her husband, five grandchildren, and Hamburg, as she says. If you ask Kelek what happiness means, she says friendships, family and freedom. Freedom in particular, she realized, was not a state, but rather a path that she had worked for and was allowed to take.
