Paper short abstract:

The discourses on "liberal Islam" in Germany profess it as compatible with western norms & sensibilities, thus as a "good" & docile difference. I explore how Islamic difference is regulated not by revoking its premises, but rather by distinguishing between tolerable & intolerable difference.

Paper long abstract:

Several institutions and public figures in Germany have been lately associated with a "liberal Islam" regarded as tolerant, reform-oriented, and compatible with western norms and sensibilities. Inevitably, public discourses on liberal Islam denotes other forms of Islam as illiberal, suggesting to negotiate the line between the tolerable and the intolerable. By reading them as politically and historically contingent discourses of power, Wendy Brown shows how tolerance discourses construct and position liberal and non-liberal subjects and regulate the presence of the Other inside and outside the nation-state, not only by marking the tolerable objects as marginal, deviant and inferior vis-à-vis those (selves) who practice tolerance but also by circumscribing the limits of tolerance and thus justifying dire actions when these limits are breached. Following this line of argumentation, this article tries to illuminate that difference can be regulated, not necessarily through revoking its premises; but rather by shifting its boundaries; by distinguishing between a "good" difference, towards which the self can be attached and an impermissible one, whose presence triggers fear and thus one must move away from. Taking a cue from Sara Ahmed's work on politics of emotions and based on interviews and field observations, the article addresses how an encounter with Islam in a form and space labeled as liberal is grounded on a conditioned "love for difference" that paradoxically banish other forms of difference.