Kübra Gümüşay

Kübra Gümüşay née Yücel (born 28 June 1988, Hamburg)^[1] is a German–Turkish journalist, activist,^[2] public speaker^[3][4] and author of SPIEGEL best-selling book^[5] Sprache Und Sein,^[6] translated into English as Speaking and Being.^[7] She came into the public eye through her blog, A Foreign Dictionary, where she wrote from 2008-2019.^[8]

Kübra Gümüşay is the granddaughter of a Turkish guest worker in Germany.^[9] Her parents left Turkey because her mother was no longer allowed to work as a lecturer at Istanbul University in Turkey due to her headscarf.^[10] Kübra Gümüşay studied political science in Hamburg and at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London. Since 2012, she has lived with her husband Ali Aslan Gümüşay in Oxford in the United Kingdom.^[9][11][12] She is a practising headscarf-wearing Muslim and describes herself as a German Turk and feminist.^[13][14]

Gümüşay started a blog in 2008 entitled A Foreign Dictionary, in which she wrote about the internet, politics, society, feminism and Islam until the end of 2019 and which was accessed up to 13,000 times a month.^[15] With her blog, she wanted to "break down stereotypes" and "give a voice to those who are otherwise not in the media."^[11] Her blog was nominated for a Grimme Online Award in 2011.^[16]

The specialist journal Medium Magazin then voted Gümüşay one of the "Top 30 to 30" most promising young journalistic talents in Germany.^[17] Ina Wunn listed Gümüşay under the headline New Paths for Muslim Women in Europe in Das Parlament among the Muslim feminist activists who "actively intervene in politics to address the discrimination of (not only) Muslim women."^[18] In 2012, Deutschlandradio reported on Gümüşay in a series entitled "Formative Minds of Islam".

Upon the invitation of Daniel Schulz, head of department at Die Tageszeitung, Gümüşay told her stories from the world of a German Muslim woman wearing a headscarf in the regular Taz column Das Tuch from 2010 to June 2013,^[19] through which she became one of the first hijab-wearing columnists in Germany.^[20] She compared this to the development in the women's movement. "First, a few would have to be specifically invited to participate in order to be visible and pave the way for others."^[9] Matthias Matussek wrote in his debate article on integration for Spiegel Online that Gümüşay does not wear the headscarf out of submissiveness, but out of pride. She wanted to show her religion. It was her form of punk, her form of rebellion.^[21]

Gümüşay was editor-in-chief of the Hamburg youth magazine Freihafen in 2008. As a freelance journalist, she has published on the topics of immigration and integration, including in Die Zeit, Migazin^[22] and Mädchenmannschaft. She contributed to the debate on Thilo Sarrazin's book Deutschland schafft sich ab with a contribution to the anthology Manifest der Vielen - Deutschland erfindet sich neu edited by Hilal Sezgin.^[23] In 2011, she interviewed Thilo Sarrazin as a guest on a radio program on the BBC.^[24]

In 2010, Gümüşay co-founded the EU-funded network Zahnräder, which aimed to provide a platform for Muslims from business, politics, media, academia and the social sector to get to know and support each other.^[25][26] In 2018, she was named in Forbes magazine's Top 30 under 30 in Europe for Media and Marketing.^[27] From June-August 2021, she was a recipient of the Tarabya Artist in Residency Fellowship of the German Kulturakademie.^[28]

She has been part of various initiatives aimed at increasing diversity and inclusion, and creating new spaces, including as a co-founder of eeden, a feminist co-creation space in Hamburg,^[29] a co-founder of future_s, a feminist research and advocacy organisation;^[30] as an expert advisor to Imagine Hamburg,^[31] a festival imagining what Hamburg in the future could be like; and as a jury member of Brand New Bundestag.^[32]

In 2020, her book Sprache & Sein was published by Hanser Berlin and named as one of the best non-fiction books in 2020 by Die Welt;^[33] as a 'must-read' book from tipBerlin for 2020;^[34] and as one of the best non-fiction books for April 2020 by Deutschlandfunk Kultur,^[35] as chosen by a jury of 30 critics.

From January to September 2022, Gümüşay was appointed a Visiting Fellow and Mercator Senior Fellow at CRASSH and the Leverhulme Center for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge,^[36] where she explored how imaginations of the future impact realities. In 2023, Gümüşay was awarded a fellowship at the New Institute based in Hamburg, where her research focused on "just futures, real utopias and the politics of imagination."^[37]

As a hijab-wearing and politically-active woman in Germany, Gümüşay has often been labelled, perceived or even attacked as being representative of a larger social or religious group^[38] – a criticism she addresses in detail in her book, Speaking and Being, noting that she wants to have the right to speak for herself.^[7] German journalist Daniel Schulz noted that with hindsight, he often underestimated the amount of pressure Gümüşay was under to "say the right things" in her Taz column due to this type of criticism.^[39]

A 2021 profile of Gümüşay published in German media outlet Die Zeit entitled Symbolfrau ('Symbol Woman') analysed the ways in which she has been attacked in the media based on public perceptions or assumptions of her position, often due to her personal choice to wear the hijab.^[39] Examples of this type of criticism include German-Turkish rapper Dr. Reyhan Sahin a.k.a. Lady Bitch Ray, who criticised Gümüsay in 2016 for purportedly not addressing racist structures within Islam enough, nor the then-Turkish government's actions against women's rights, members of the LGBT community and their supporters. ^[40]

Similarly, Alice Schwarzer, a prominent anti-Muslim^[41][42] German feminist criticised Gümüsay in her magazine EMMA through similar allegations in January 2018,^[43] in response to which Gümüsay filed a defamation suit. Schwarzer's approach has been identified by academics as a strategy shared between German feminists and the far-right with the goal of "preventing the public engagement of specific Muslim women who are wearing headscarves by publicly defaming them",^[44] with Gümüşay explicitly identified as one of these women targeted by Schwarzer. Gümüşay's open embrace of Islam, the hijab and feminism, is described as one that "disrupts the connections made throughout anti-headscarf arguments" and claims a new feeling of being at home in Germany based on civic participation.^[45] Other feminists have criticised Schwarzer's approach as ignoring the diversity of feminist approaches in Germany.^[46]

In 2021, FAZ columnist Ronya Othmann criticised Gümüşay's book Language and Being for recommending that German schools should read the Turkish poet Necip Fazıl Kısakürek, among others, alongside Goethe. ^[47] Othmann's article was condemned by columnist Hanna Lakomy in an article for the Berliner Zeitung as being aimed at "destroying Gümüşay's integrity" with malicious intent, noting that Othmann's conclusions are based on false assumptions and stereotypes of a Muslim woman that chooses to wear a headscarf, instead of on Gümüşay's own work, actions and writing.^[48]