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This contribution reflects on the structural constraints facing critical scholars of the Middle East in German academia, particularly those working on Palestine, Islam, racialized subjectivities, and colonial violence. Anchored in personal experience as a Muslim woman of color working on gender and politics in the Middle East, the paper examines how epistemic boundaries are policed through the language of neutrality, objectivity, and academic propriety. These terms, I argue, do not function as politically innocent ideals but as affective technologies that regulate dissent, discipline scholars, and depoliticize the structural violence to which knowledge is tethered.
The article takes Palestine not merely as one example among others, but as a paradigmatic site through which the limits of German academic neutrality become visible. In the context of Gaza, neutrality is not simply a refusal to take sides; it becomes an institutional practice that demands silence in the face of violence while masking active political alignment. German universities, while professing freedom of thought, have increasingly embraced punitive logics that deplatform, surveil, isolate, and delegitimize those who speak in solidarity with Palestine. Within Islamic Studies and Middle East scholarship , this has produced an environment of self-censorship, moral exhaustion, and institutional gaslighting. Scholars who refuse the colonial grammar of ‘balance’ are accused of activism, while those who conform are rewarded with legitimacy, funding, and protection.