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Paper short abstract:

The Holocaust figures as an exceptional space-time in European claims of living in secular tolerance. This paper complicates these assumptions by taking the case of a plea for Muslim prayer at Auschwitz Memorial to interrogate how European imaginaries of humanity regiment religious difference.

Paper long abstract:

Scholars have attended to how the secular, as the worldly episteme, has consolidated and shaped the modern notion of religion. But what if the secular is predicated upon paradoxical and localized nodal points in modern history, including and not limited to the genocide of European Jewry and others during the Holocaust? The Holocaust figures as an exceptional space-time in European claims of living after religious violence and in secular tolerance. And although perennially commemorated and sacralized as an exception to European liberal-democracy, Holocaust memorial sites are national heritage sites employed by EU states for secular purposes. Based on long-term ethnographic research with a secondary-school in Berlin, this paper discusses how a school trip to Auschwitz Memorial as a form of claiming universal humanity is challenged by the presence of Muslim religious practices at the Memorial site. By attending to a case of Muslim prayer at the memorial site and the anxieties it triggered, this paper contrasts Muslim religious difference with the notion of secular humanity. In taking this contrast as a starting point, the paper addresses how Muslim practices in public and particularly so at Holocaust Memorial sites contest and disturb the exceptional character of genocidal violence as it has been folded into a narrative about European secularism. By bringing out Auschwitz as the paradigmatic space of exception (Agamben 2005; Das & Poole 2009) this paper will explore how European secularism feeds on the Holocaust as a space-time that legitimizes the governance of religious minorities in the present.