Emine: Muslim University Student in Berlin (Turkish Student in Germany)

Abstract

I first met Emine in a Berlin public library in Germany in the fall of 1999. Neatly dressed in a long skirt, light raincoat, and color-coordinated headscarf with delicately crocheted edges, she was looking through a rack of videos. I had come to this library, located in the heart of Berlin’s large Turkish community, in the vain hope of finding a specific Turkish film, Yalnız Değilsiniz (You Are Not Alone), which is about the tribulations of a young Muslim woman in Turkey who had decided to adopt the headscarf in defiance of her secularist parents and was barred from classes by her college professors. I approached her and explained in my halting Turkish and German that I was a professor from the United States, and asked her if she knew the film. Trying to explain that I needed to know the name of the director of the film for an article I was writing, I finally gave up and resorted to English, which she said she spoke a little. She not only had the film, but also offered to lend it to me. We arranged to meet again at the library a couple of days later, and she handed me, a complete stranger, a bag with two films and a couple of Turkish novels that she thought I might be interested in. Much later she told me that she had been at the video rack on that first day looking for American videos to improve her English, and that our encounter was the first occasion when she had ever spoken English outside the classroom.