Domesticating Islam: exploring academic knowledge production on Islam and Muslims in European societies

Abstract

The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 and subsequent events not only ignited a ‘war on terror’, but also marked a crucial change in the policies on integration of migrants of Islamic background in Europe. Most countries departed from integration policies based on some sort of recognition of cultural diversity and emphasized national culture as the only legitimate format for citizenship. The result is a strengthening of a frame of governance with the aim to regulate Islamic practices and to mould outlooks, institutional settings and legal arrangements into the nation-state format. This has been referred to as the ‘domestication of Islam’. One of the consequences is the narrowing down of research agendas and academic knowledge production. In this article I explore this process and address important fields of study that tend to be neglected in the study of Islam in Europe.

Keywords:

• Islam in Europe
• governance of Islam
• Islamic youth
• local Islam
• research on Islam
• Islamic leadership and authority

Notes

1. The domestication of Islam indeed includes a very explicit body of politics, for example when dealing with radicalization among young Muslims. In many countries of Western Europe there are training programmes to ‘detect’ radical conduct through bodily features. The so-called ‘deradicalization’ programmes that we can find in many countries are pedagogical rather than suppressive.

2. There is an abundance of studies that take the national political context as a point of departure to analyse the instutionalization of Islam and to show the differences between different countries (see e.g. Landman 1992; Lewis and Schnapper 1994; Nonneman and Niblock 1996; Rath et al. 1996; Vertovec and Peach 1997; Seufert and Waardenburg 1999; Haddad 2002; Hunter 2002; Marechal et al. 2003; Nielsen 2004; Klausen 2005).

3. A bibliographical search in online libraries reveals a gradual increase of publications on Islam, modernity and European civilization towards the end of the 1990s. In the course of the 2000s the number of publications that dealt with security issues rose quickly. A more general internet search shows a sharp increase of publications with an alarmist undertone.

4. It should be emphasized that money can play a decisive role. Governments or private parties that fund research can influence research agendas either by commissioning certain projects, or by selectively subsidizing research proposals.

5. For a discussion on culturalism, see Dirlik (1990), Vermeulen (1992), Freeman (2000), Elsadda (2004) and Duyvendak and Scholten (2012).

6. It is impossible to give a complete overview of this field of research. The following references rather explicitly refer to governance of Islam: Fetzer and Soper (2005), Buijs, Demant and Hamdy (2006) and Maussen, Bader and Moors (2011).

7. Methodological nationalism ‘is the all-pervasive assumption that the nation-state is the natural and necessary form of society in modernity; the nation-state is taken as the organizing principle of modernity’ (Chernilo 2006, p. 6; see also Beck 2000, 2002).

8. De Certeau's (1984, p. xv) ‘theory of practice’ aims ‘to bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of “discipline”.’ Space, according to de Certeau (1984, p. 117), is ‘practiced place’ with which he refers to the continuous human activity that transforms geographical locality into places of living.

9. As Meyer and Moors (2006, p. 9) argue, new forms of mediation not only create ‘new styles of self-representation, but also pinpoints new forms of religious experience that cast believers as spectators, spectacles as miracles, and God's blessing as prosperity.’

10. Vertovec (2007, p. 1025) argues that the present conditions of increasing complexity and diversity in countries such as the UK can best be depicted as ‘super diverse’. Traditional institutional dividing lines and networks have been superseded by new forms of community building and belonging.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Thijl Sunier

THIJL SUNIER is Full Professor of Anthropology of Religion in the Department of Anthropology at VU University Amsterdam.