In January 1980, the Turkish teacher Celalettin Kesim was murdered in Berlin. That Kesim’s killers had emerged from a nearby mosque marked the event in the contemporary press and in popular memory as a religiously-motivated act, what was referred to as the “first Islamist murder in Germany.” For West Germans, Kesim’s death signaled that religious and political developments in the Middle East were now “all too near,” as Der Tagesspiegel put it. For West Germans, Kesim’s death signaled that the global “wave of re-Islamization,” of which the Iranian Revolution was the most dramatic symptom, had reached the Federal Republic. Before 1980, problems perceived to arise from Turkish Islamic practice in West Germany had been attributed by policymakers to class, party politics, or rural backwardness particular to Turkey or the culture of the Anatolian village. After 1980, Germans increasingly invoked Islam in and of itself in explaining problems of integration. Islam became a cause, and not a consequence, of other problems. Turkish Islam was analogized with Islam elsewhere and connections between Muslim groups in West Germany and the wider world were more frequently drawn. As Islam became a matter of greater policy concern, West Germans lamented that, to quote a 1979 federal report, “we know so little about Islam.” To address this deficit, German policymakers turned to small group of experts on the Middle East, most prominently the journalist Peter Scholl-Latour. The knowledge these experts offered about Iran or Afghanistan was taken to be applicable not only in those countries but also to the Muslim minority in West Germany. In this paper, I examine how knowledge provided by these experts about Islam in the Middle East shaped policies and debates on Islam in West Germany. Informed by these new understandings, policymakers saw Islam was an essential, inherent, and potentially revolutionary aspect of Turkishness that required state intervention to manage. This in turn informed policies as varied as the failed attempts to introduce Islamic religious lessons in German schools in the 1980s or the decision to issue entry visas only to imams sent by the Turkish state. This new knowledge discourse contributed to the flattening of differences and compression of imagined space between West Germany and the Middle East. It enlivened and institutionalized the notion Cemil Ayd?n refers to as “the idea of Muslim world” with implications for policies and popular attitudes that persevere to the present.