ABSTRACT
This chapter critically engages with representational accounts that dwell on the alleged intransparency of Muslims, staging it as particularly evident in the opaque status of mosques and their activities in contemporary Germany. The chapter demonstrates how the demands for transparent Muslims stipulate certain modes of visibility, forms of knowledge, political actions, and regimes of surveillance. It also investigates the conspirational fantasies about Islam by which these demands are imbued as well as the secular conceptions of time, space, and language that put them forward. The chapter argues that the labour of fear is central to understanding how these demands are effectively structured in ways that secure hierarchies, cohere the boundaries of a political community, while ostentatiously constructing whiteness as a deterring norm. The analysis focuses on a TV series titled Der Moscheereport, created and presented by writer and journalist Constantin Schreiber and broadcast on German public TV between 2017 and 2019.
