When Turkish immigrants first came to the Federal Republic of Germany as part of a foreign labor program in the 1960s, both the German government and the Turkish workers themselves considered their stay a temporary one. However, when West Germany halted the Gastarbeiter [guestworker] program in 1973, many Turkish workers, seeing their chance to return for work at a later date disappear, decided to extend their stay in the country and bring their families over to live with them. Perhaps more controversial than any other consequence of Turkish immigration was the proliferation of Muslim religious spaces in the form of mosques and Koranschule (Qur’an schools). In the debates sparked by the growing presence of Islam, the media, politicians, and, to an extent, the public attempted to define these emerging religious spaces, and delineate the borders between them and broader German society. In this paper, I focus on the connection (and disconnection) between how media constructed “the mosque” and its borders, and how Turkish immigrants understood and experienced them in their own lives. To examine this relationship, I do three things: First, I examine German media coverage of the topic of Islam and of mosques more specifically in the 1970s and 1980s to see what prompted its focus on Muslim immigrants, where the media placed “the mosque” and its members in relation to broader German society, and how their coverage reflected the perception of Turkish immigrants and their children by German society. Then, I turn my attention to how Turkish media in West Germany constructed its own image of the mosque abroad. Lastly, I examine the place and purposes of mosques in the narratives of Turkish immigrants and their children to compare how they understood, experienced and used local mosques in comparison to how media presented them. For this final section, I focus on the local level experiences of Turkish residents of a neighborhood in Berlin-Wedding, and use these examples to suggest how Turkish immigrants and their children both challenged and reinforced the borders between their religious spaces and “secular” German society.