Erman, T.2019-02-132019-02-132013-09-010272-7919http://hdl.handle.net/11693/49464This article investigates a mosque community established by “lower-class” Turkish immigrant tailors in the United States called the “Sultan” mosque. Based on an ethnographic study, the article makes the following points: The mosque is the inclusion project of this group of tailors in a foreign society. Being a “lower-class” community built around the mosque, the tailor community faced exclusion both from the secular and religious upper-class Turkish immigrant groups and so remained a small group. The ecology of the small group produced a politics of tolerance in the mosque despite the first-generation migrants’ efforts to draw strict boundaries between themselves and the others (“us vs. them”), reversing their own stigmatization. The 9/11 event in their host country, moreover, increased toleration in the mosque, as the mosque administration had to take on the new role of fighting against the stigmatization of Muslims as Islamist fundamentalists. More recently, under the influence of politics in the immigrants’ home country of Turkey, the mosque has entered a process of transformation from a modest community of tailors, where moderation is observed, to a community of a tarikat (religious sect), where a radical form of Islam is observed.EnglishArticle