Hamburg - The most senior Muslim in German public life, 38- year-old Aygul Ozkan, gives a lot of the credit for her success to an alterations tailor who has been sewing hems for more than 40 years.
At 74, Aydin Ozer, her father, still opens his workshop along a busy Hamburg main road every day, accepting trousers to shorten, jackets to let out and dresses that could pass for new again with a little nip and tuck.
Ozer remembers the exact day when he arrived in Hamburg from Ankara, Turkey: December 2, 1963. After five years as a postal worker, he set up his shop and brought his wife, Nuran, to Germany, where their two daughters were born.
Last month, Ozkan, who had been an executive with the Dutch-based world parcels group TNT, was sworn in as a minister in one of Germany's 16 state governments, the first and so far only Muslim in such high office.
She now directs social-welfare policy in Lower Saxony state.
"My father was on the parent-teacher board when I was in primary school," Ozkan recalled in television interview. "He knew exactly how the school system functioned."
When teachers said the daughter was not talented enough to advance to an academic high school, the father went, in German fashion, straight to the principal and put the case for his daughter to get a second chance.
She got it, and completed high school with high marks, took German citizenship when she became an adult, completed a law degree at German university and married a gynaecologist from Turkey.
Dr Ozkan, her husband, is to remain in Hamburg with their 7-year- old son until his wife has found them a house suitable for a cabinet minister in the Lower Saxony capital Hanover.
On her website, Ozkan says she has been interested in politics since a 1997 internship at the European Parliament.
In 2004, she joined the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of Chancellor Angela Merkel, a conservative party which has an ambiguous relationship with Germany's 2 million Turkish residents, often criticizing them for not learning German and integrating.
Political scientists have said that despite its perceived distance from Muslims - and the Christian in its name - the CDU does in fact attract support from those Turkish migrants who are socially conservative and believe in the virtues of education and hard work.
"I told the children you have to learn German," said father Ozer, whose own German remains unpolished. "Language is a weapon. Without it you are nothing."
He never agreed with fundamentalist Muslim parents who oppose girls sharing pools with boys for mixed-sex swimming classes.
"I let her do swimming classes, and everything necessary for her education," he said in the shop, which still has a 1960s air with its solid old sewing machines and yellowed wooden furniture.
Ozkan was elected to Hamburg's state legislature in 2008 and rose rapidly in the local CDU, which has a more liberal flavour in Hamburg, where the party is eager to reach out to minorities whose votes can often swing a close election.
Offering the legislator from the next-door state a cabinet portfolio was seen as a daring coup by Lower Saxony Premier Christian Wulff. All of a sudden Ozkan was being called by 60 journalists a day.
Ozkan, who often wears sharply cut suits and needs very little makeup, kept her perpetual smile and seemed untiring as she handled wall-to-wall attention from German and Turkish television alike.
"I have always seen her as the superwoman type," one of her colleagues at TNT was quoted saying.
She received a quick tutorial in the rough and tumble of government when a news interviewer asked her views on Muslim women and headscarves. Ozkan offered the standard secularist answer: "Schools should be neutral. In Turkey, headscarves are banned."
And what about crucifixes on school walls? Yes, said Ozkan, the neutrality principle applied to them too.
Within hours, there were anonymous death threats and conservative politicians were baying for her blood from Germany's deep south, in two Catholic states where support for school crucifixes is a litmus test for conservative voters.
Ozkan had to climb down, endorsing her party's pro-crucifix policy.
Hilal Sezgin, a Turkish-origin German novelist, said: "It wasn't something she tried to say, but something where the interviewer put her on the spot. ... Following the logic of her argument, she had to say, 'No crucifixes either.' She got cornered by being consistent.
"It was a bit clumsy, rather touching really, and not at all calculating. And then, bang! She got her thrashing."
Speaking on DLF national radio, Sezgin commented that this had not been a Muslim point of view about crucifixes at all.
"As far as I know she's not a strict one. She's said her parents observed Islamic festivals but didn't bring up the girls that way at all. She even attended Christian religion classes at school.
"On her website, she says her hobbies are tennis and cooking. Nothing about Islam. But now, all the Islamophobes in Germany are gunning for her. I think it's simply because that sort don't want any Muslim person, any Turkish person, to be a minister here."
Wichard Woyke, a University of Muenster political scientist, said rightists regard Islam with deep suspicion: "Since the Islamist terrorist attack on New York on September 11, 2001, many of them perceive every Muslim as a potential fanatic."
Police will say little, but reports say the minister now has her own police security detail. Just in case.
About Us
