The Dutch inside the 'Moslima' and the 'Moslima' inside the Dutch: Processing the Religious Experience of Muslim Women in The Netherlands (original) (raw)
Related papers
Nieuwe Moslima's: Gender discourse, Identity, and Conversion in the Netherlands
ISP Collection, 2006
My research looks at the discourses on gender in Islam and in Dutch culture as developed by female converts to Islam in the Netherlands. The goal of this research is to view the issue of conversion to Islam from the perspective of Dutch Muslim women, and to include them within the field of feminist research. In five informal interviews conducted with female converts, four Dutch and one Welsh, I discussed gender issues in Islam and in the Netherlands. I approached the data from two perspectives: Foucauldian postmodern theory and realist feminist theory on identity. I found that female converts critique Dutch society and cultural Islamic practices when speaking about issues of gender. My conclusion is that since the converts are both insiders and outsiders in Dutch society and in Muslim communities, they are in distinct position to make a critique that exposes the inconsistencies between theory and practice. They do this by appropriating the discursive tools that are meant to oppress them, and using them to empower themselves. The discourse on gender also serves to redefine the convert's identity as a Dutch/Western Muslim woman.
Contemporary Islam 15, 1: 35-55, 2021
Drawing on long term research-including topical life stories, interviews and participant observation-we analyze how women converts to Islam in the Netherlands signify and experience making hijra. Our interlocutors, all observant Muslims, had left the Netherlands between the late 1990s and the mid 2010s. In the course of the last 5 years many have again returned to the Netherlands. Their life courses indicate that physical and existential mobility are interconnected in their everyday lives as well as in their migration trajectories. Whereas they considered conversion to Islam as moving forward, the majority society did not share this perspective. They were sharply aware of how they were no longer seen as self-evidently part of the Dutch nation. This produced feelings of stuckedness-in an existential and a material sense-for themselves and their children, and hence a desire to move to a Muslim majority country. They differed amongst themselves as to whether and how they signified leaving Europe as making hijra in an Islamic sense. To some, making hijra was a highly desirable religious act. Others did not foreground such religious signification, but nonetheless expected positive effects of living in an environment where Islam would be an integral part of daily life. Their attempts to settle in various Muslim majority countries were, however, often not successful. Material conditions made it difficult to enact their ethical aspirations, that included the moral and material wellbeing of others, especially their children. Moreover, their appreciation of the selfevident presence of Islam in the countries of settlement was tempered, first, by the tension between their quest for a reflexive, deculturalized Islam and the culturalized practices they encountered in their new environment, and second, by their growing awareness of how their sense of self was much more shaped by habitual 'Dutch' conventions than most of them had envisioned beforehand. As a result they were often unable to develop meaningful social relationships in their new environment. Eventually, almost all of them returned to the Netherlands.
This article examines the relationship between Islam and migrant Turkish and Syrian women living in the Netherlands and their patterns of belonging, while also questioning the dynamics of identity. It reveals that religious Muslim migrants tend to exhibit their Islamic identity as a salient identity with self-representation of being Muslims. This is seen through the new ummah concept and their demands for a Sharia Council. This new definition of the ummah is discussed in terms of the sense of belonging it brings, asserting that religion cannot always function as a means of resistance, in that the religiosity of Muslims in the Netherlands is not an attempt to exclude themselves from the system, but rather a means by which they can be part of it. The article reveals that the new definition of the ummah is highly driven by migrant religious women in the Netherlands, who resist both the traditionalist and institutional understanding of Islam, while also rejecting their national ties. They aspire to create an Islamic space (dar'al Islam) for themselves within the ummah and seek to achieve this legally through a Sharia Council.
Since the mid-2000s, the complex relationship between migration and religion (Islam) at the axis of identity politics in Western Europe has received an increasing academic attention. is article, based on the rst-hand data gathered through semi-structured in-depth interviews with 30 headscarf-wearing Dutch students of Turkish origins in Amsterdam, aims to explore the quest for the recognition of new Muslim woman identity with the headscarf in the Dutch context in the aftermath of 9/11 and the murder of the lm director eo van Gogh in 2004 by disassociating Islam and Turkish culture and themselves as “conscious and active believers” from traditional rst- generation Turkish women. The contention is that in the process of ethnicization of Islam in the Netherlands, the headscarf is the main statement through which newly emerging identity politics of the headscarved Muslim Dutch students of Turkish origin in Amsterdam is expressed.
Fashion and Faith 2 Islamic dress and Identity in the Netherlands
Religions, 2019
This paper focuses on the relationship between clothing and identity: specifically, on 9 Islamic dress as shaping the identity of Dutch Muslim women. How do these Dutch Muslim women 10 shape their identity in a way that it is both Dutch and Muslim? Do they mix Dutch parameters in 11 their Muslim identity, while at the same time inter-splicing Islamic principles in their Dutch sense 12 of self? This study is based on two ethnographies conducted in the city of Amsterdam, the first 13 14 combines insights taken from in-depth interviews with Dutch Muslim women and observations in 15 gatherings from Quranic and Religious studies, social gatherings and one-time events, as well as 16 observations in stores for Islamic fashion and museums in Amsterdam. This study takes as its 17 theme clothing and identity, and how Islamic clothing can be mobilized by Dutch Muslim women 18 in service of identity formation. The study takes place in a context, the Netherlands, where Islam is 19 largely considered by the populous as a religion oppressive and discriminatory to women. This 20 paper argues that in the context of being Dutch and Muslim, through choice of clothing, these 21 women express their agency: their ability to choose and act in social action, thus pushing the limits 22 of archetypal Dutch identity while simultaneously stretching the meaning of Islam to craft their own 23 identity, one that is influenced by themes of immigration, belongingness, ethnicity, religious 24 knowledge and gender. 25
How should I live as a 'true' Muslim: Regimes of living among Dutch Muslims in the Salafi Movement
2014
In this article I focus on the self-understanding and related moral reasonings at the intersection of religious and national belonging of Dutch Salafi Muslims; these relate to the question: how should one live as a ‘true’ Muslim in contemporary Dutch society? To explore this issue I draw on my own research on Dutch Salafis as well as the theoretical perspectives on ‘regimes of living’ (Lakoff and Collier 2004). This latter term is used to explore the different ethical formations of Salafi Muslims in the Netherlands that provide an answer to the question 'How should I live as a 'true' Muslim?'. In so doing, I argue that, despite the strong Manichean rhetoric coming from different sides, the self-understanding and the related moral reasoning of Dutch Salafi Muslims can best be explained as the result of three distinct, mutually constitutive, but highly ambivalent, relationalities: ‘true’ Muslim versus infidel, loyalty to Dutch society versus global umma and Muslim versus Dutch society.
I first entered a mosque in the spring of 2010. It was in Romania, in Cluj-Napoca, and it was hosted by an Islamic centre, situated in the vicinity of the university campus. Mainly frequented by Maghreb students and Romanian female converts, it was otherwise a generally invisible presence or hardly noticeable in public contexts. Talking to a 21-year-old woman about her motivation of entering Islam and particularly about what she stressed to represent the privileges she enjoyed as a Muslim woman and wife, and also watching her interact with other Romanian converts were the first elements that triggered my interest in the topic of women's conversion to Islam.