Everyday embodied othering experiences of young Muslims in the Netherlands

ABSTRACT

The Muslim Other stands outside the somatic norms of white Dutch society. Thinking through the body as a phenomenal lived body, we explore the ways through which the Muslim Other is (re)constructed through embodied encounters and intersections of sensoriality, corporeality, and affectivity in the urban Dutch. We identify how (1) the Muslim Other is (re)produced through a set of multisensorial encounters based on the look, hearing, and touch; (2) Othering is intercorporeally practised; (3) Othering affectively charges the atmospheres of everyday life to the point that even the objects that Muslims carry cause anxiety. We further outline how this Othering trilogy provides avenues of possibility whereby the imposed anger and ‘dis-orientation’ can potentially be transformed into hope and ‘re-orientation’.

KEYWORDS:

• The Muslim Other
• othering
• embodiment
• encounter
• the Netherlands

1. Introduction

The Netherlands has a long history with Islam and Muslims. Not only for many centuries it ruled Indonesia, the largest Muslim nation in the world, but also nowadays roughly five per cent of its inhabitants (∼855,000 people) is Muslim. As FORUM (2010 also Creighton 2020) has documented, there are three stages of Muslim immigration to the Netherlands. Starting in the 1950s, the first wave consists of (post)colonial migration from Indonesia and Suriname either independent or via family reunification. During the early 1970s, guest workers largely from Morocco and Turkey have constituted the majority of Muslims in the Netherlands up until now. In the third wave gaining momentum in the 1980s, Muslims have been refugees and asylum seekers from the Middle East and parts of Africa.

Responding to these waves of immigration, Dutch society has experienced different political approaches. In the 1980s and 90s, political debates revolved around the integration of newcomers into society by learning the language, norms, and values to participate in society, profession, and education (Gazzah 2010). However, some events in the early 2000s in the US and Europe, particularly in the Netherlands (the murder of film director Theo van Gogh and Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn who was one of the first to run a political campaign against Islam and Muslims as a threat to western liberal values), shifted the public opinion about Muslims (Creighton 2020; Cesari 2009). Political debates have focused on the position of Islam and Muslims in the Netherlands regarding whether Islam and Islamic lifestyles are compatible with Dutch society (Pertwee 2017; De Koning 2013).

Muslims, therefore, are regularly (re)produced as strangers, stigmatised as Others who do not belong (Koefoed and Simonsen 2012). The Muslim Other is usually based on three interrelating arguments. On the one hand, it has been argued that Islam, Muslims, and their religio-cultural demands often contradict the central values of Western liberal-democracies. Muslims are often framed as problematic, refusers of modernity, secularism, and freedom of speech (Ramírez 2015; Hamzeh 2011). On the other hand, there have been cases of fundamentalism, terrorism, and violence which turn Muslims into suspect citizens, more than often criminalised, always already a threat to the (inter)national security which was manifested in Trump’s ‘Muslim Ban’ (Ali 2020; Gokariksel 2017; Selod 2018). Furthermore, in times of the multicultural backlash, spreading white nationalism, and strong populist xenophobia, media and political discourses represent Muslims not only as the religio-cultural Other or the dangerous Other but also the ethno-national Other who do not belong/integrate into the Netherlands. They are often depicted as either former invaders, thus the historical external Other, or backward foreigners, unwanted immigrants, part of a ‘bad diversity’, and the internal Other (Račius 2019; Frisina and Hawthorne 2018; Haque 2010).

Over the past decades, there has been a significant debate on the Muslim Other in the Netherlands within academia and beyond, covering a broad range of topics. Van der Valk (2012), Van Liere (2014), Boender (2019), and De Koning (2008), amongst others, show how Muslims in the Netherlands are regarded as ‘not integrated’ and argue about the so-called shift in Dutch society from multiculturalism towards assimilation. Van den Brandt (2019) criticizes ‘the Muslim question’ and argues that the term refers to Muslims’ integration and political subjectivity, as well as the construction of Islam and Muslims as ontologically ‘different’ from the West. In their edited work, Essed and Hoving (2014) study the complex, paradoxical, and contested phenomenon of Dutch racism. They trace it back into the Netherlands’ legacy of the (former) colonies and examine how Dutch racism operates in and beyond the national borders, is formed by European and world impacts, and intersects with other control systems (see also Wekker 2016). Relatedly, De Koning (2016) looks into the racialisation of Dutch Muslims as an unacceptable ‘Other’ and explains how culture, norms, descent, and liberal values have, to some extent, changed the biological notions of race. Hoekstra and Verkuyten (2015) investigate the gendered aspect of Islamophobia and argue how the headscarf is viewed by the public as a symbol of women’s oppression, patriarchy, and rejection of gender equality, women’s liberation, and sexual emancipation in the Netherlands (Koyuncu Lorasdaği 2009; Pool 2022). Welten and Abbas (2021) explore the surveillance and securitisation of Dutch Muslims before and after the 2004 assassination of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh. There are also some studies that tap into the de-stigmatisation strategies and the ways through which the Muslim Other critically talks back to the mechanisms of marginalisation (De Jong and Duyvendak 2021; Geurts and van Klingeren 2021).

These studies indeed constitute an important point of focus for policymakers and academics alike who seek to improve the lives of Dutch Muslims. There remains, however, an insufficient understanding of the role of the body and embodiment as the sites for experiencing and negotiating (ascribed) cultural differences. In this light, contextualised in the debates about race, ethnicity, and religion and the heavily politically charged field of Islam and Muslim in the Netherlands, this paper critically investigates embodied aspects of Othering and the (micro-)geographies, spatio-temopralities, politics, and tensions associated with the everyday urban living of young Dutch Muslims. The emphasis here is put on the body and everydayness because Otherness is something that is experienced by bodily encounters and encounters with Othered bodies (Simonsen 2010) and understood through young Muslims’ routine lived and felt realities. Othering within Muslim youth’s everyday life, however, may not be always visible or present; it touches upon them in different ways and with varying intensities. The body is a starting point for the study of difference, domination, and subversion for understanding socio-spatial relations in contemporary urban Dutch.

2. Constructing the Muslim other

The concept of and theories on Othering date back to Hegel (master-slave dialectic read as a theory of self and Other in which the juxtaposition towards the other constitutes the self), De Beauvoir (in relation to women and how identities are set up in an unequal gender relationship; 1976 [1949]), Lacan (psychoanalysis and differentiating self from others; 1977), Said (Orientalism and the representations of race and ethnicity in European literature and culture in relation to an imaginary geography that is reductionistic, distancing, and pathologising; 1978), and Spivak (in relation to the vertical differentiation and the definition of the colonialised Other; 1985). However, the current general usage of the terms signifies ‘classed’, ‘raced’, and ‘gendered’ processes through which a dominant group assigns negative properties to a subordinate group making that minority pathological, morally inferior, and threatening. Othering is a process through which difference is translated into inferiority drawing a line between ‘us’ and ‘them’ based on a particular self and body. As Campbell (2001, 44) argues, Othering is ‘a network of beliefs, processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human’.

The body, therefore, constitutes the central resource in the drama of socio-cultural interactions within everyday urban space, where (in)civility inscribes itself onto the body in distinguishing normal from pathologic, proximity from distance, familiar from stranger (Sanders 2006). These embodied Othering encounters, however, involve multiple practices that are sensorially felt, corporeally performed, affectively charged, historico-geographically mediated, and agentically responded (Ahmed 2000; Simonsen 2013; Koefoed, Christensen, and Simonsen 2017). Encounter as a meeting that involves surprise (Ahmed 2000; Wilson 2017) is played out through intercorporeal meetings in everyday life whilst sensorially registering traces of familiarity and strange(r)ness. Imbued with emotion and affect, moreover, encounters have temporal and spatial roots in particular historical and geographical contexts of power relations between and within social groups (Matejskova and Leitner 2011). They include and incorporate images embedded in other direct or mediated encounters in other spaces and in other times within the spatio-temporal ambivalences between the near and the distanced.

Processes of Othering are experienced within everyday urban spaces through which the Muslim Other is reproduced with ongoing negotiation over space, proximity, and distance involving a series of embodied (i.e. sensorial, corporeal, and affective) registers and processes of inclusion and exclusion, likeness and difference. In this context, urban space functions as the site of encounter, whereby people of different socio-economic, ethno-racial, religious and cultural backgrounds come into contact with one another. These socio-spatial temporalities become sites of the reconstruction and re-enactment of multicultural (in)civility. Othering thus impacts the everyday urban life in ways that are embodied and structural.

Through sensorial perceptions, corporeal practices, and affective atmospheres dichotomous borders are redrawn and enacted between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Otherness is, in turn, lived and agency practised through sensoriality, corporeality, affects of anxiety and discomfort, spatio-temporality, and materiality. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception (1962), we conceptualise Othering as (1) a sensorial encounter through which the Other is perceived based on a particular configuration of haptic, auditory, and visual; (2) an intercorporeal process, whereby Dutch Muslims are socio-spatially Otherized concerning their intersecting identities, the visible markers of these identities such as skin colour and clothing, and essentialisation and stereotyping based on these markers; and (3) an affective encounter within (im)mobile urban spaces whereby Muslim bodies are entangled with different histories, affects, emotions, and feelings. These sensorial, corporeal, and affective categories are intertwined. Sometimes a look at one’s hijab could be three of them altogether. This classification, however, has both theoretical and empirical benefits. Theoretically, such a trilogy complicates Othering as a set of intertwined multidimensional embodied (micro-)practices. Empirically, these categories shed a distinct light on the complexities of anti-Muslim racism and how Othering towards Muslims is played out within everyday (im)mobile urban spaces.

Approaching Othering through the three-dimensional lens of sensoriality, corporeality, and affectivity further encourages us to think through the socio-spatial conditions of urban spaces that influence individual experiences and the dynamics of the intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, and religion that challenges us on what a body of a Muslim person looks like, what such a body can do, and how it interacts with other bodies, human and nonhuman, in the assembling of socio-spatial life. These (micro-)social conditions of aggression, silencing, insecurity, and tension show what it means to be Muslim and/or religious in the Netherlands nowadays. Muslim communities are defined by their bodies/embodiments and in juxtaposition to the somatic norms of dominant society labelled as loathsome, fearful, dangerous, (intellectually/morally) inferior, and deviant. Relatedly, the Othering of Muslims takes different forms such as racialisation, discrimination, exclusion, and structural oppression. A racialised form of Othering, as Modood and Thompson (2021) argue, derives from distinctive bodily features which impute negatively and stereotypically imagine to Muslims. On the other hand, Islamophobia, as a form of racism that shifts the prejudice from biological to cultural aspects of racism, racialises Islam, translates it as inferior, and renders (perceived) Muslims as the Other framing them as those who do not fit into white Dutch majority culture (Essed and Hoving 2014; De Koning 2016).

As Anne Norton (2013) in argues, post-Enlightenment secularism in the West could not fulfil its neutrality, impartiality, and rationality. The failure of the promise of liberal modernity to create a neutral space for all of us to meet each other as individuals with certain universal rights has created a fixed imaginary figure of the Other, in this case Muslims. The Muslim Other thus reveals the power of whiteness in the multicultural urban West. The negotiations of difference and sameness, the politics of whiteness, are invented, enforced, and sustained in many everyday mundane albeit significant practices, for example through family and neighbourhood allegiances, habitual engagement and familiarity, sub-cultural style, education, recreation, consumption, and employment, religious adherence, shared public spaces, law, law enforcement, and policing practices, institutions, administrative bureaucracy, (social) media, the film industry, television entertainment programmes, and computer games (Swanton 2010; Clayton 2009; Mirrlees and Ibaid 2021). Through these banal ways particular bodies (e.g. black and brown bodies, racialised bodies), things (e.g. clothing, backpacks), and spaces (e.g. mosques, Muslim majority neighbourhoods) have turned into sites of fear and anxiety.

3. Methodology

We have focused on young Dutch Muslims to investigate how they sense, feel, experience, and live different modes of embodied Othering encounters. Young Muslims are important actors in debates about the geopolitics of Islamophobia where they are often seen as victims, villains, agitators who cause troubles. Framed as susceptible to indoctrination or radicalisation, media often projects young Muslims as the security issue in Europe (Bayat and Herrera 2010). Next to being depicted as the source of conflicts between Islam and the West, their occupation of space, social cohesion, integration, and identity are questioned (Hopkins, Botterill, and Sanghera 2018). For Bayat and Herrera (2010), the feeling of Otherness amongst young Muslims is strong; they are seen as immigrants, outsiders and tolerated by the nation.

Informants were recruited through several strategies: contacting the gatekeepers at mosques, universities, and educational institutions; distributing flyers and business cards in everyday micro-social spaces such as libraries, community centres, corner shops, local sports clubs, and public transport stations; and snowball sampling. Informants were diverse in terms of gender (eight women and ten men), socio-economic status (from working class to upper-middle class), occupation, education (from high school to PhD), Islamic branches (Sunni and Shia), religious involvement (from orthodoxy to liberal), age (19 and 32), generation (native, first, and second), and national origin (Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Morocco, the Netherlands, Somalia, Egypt, Bangladesh, and Cameroon).

The investigation was carried out between January and October 2019. Lasting to a maximum of 180 minutes, 34 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with participants were recorded. The questions were about their narratives concerning the different forms of encounters experienced within different everyday urban spaces. Next to the extreme experiences of verbal or physical violence, they were asked to recollect any incident that made their experience unusual, worth remembering, the feeling these encounters generated, and the ways they reacted to such Othering practices. There were questions about any gesture, e.g. smile, nod, whisper, sigh, silence, that would reveal how ethnic/religious minorities are made to feel ‘out of place’, rendered Othered. Paying attention to the importance of sensory perceptions of Othering, the questions included memories of seeing and listening to what is happening as well as noticing the haptic sensations. To catch the affective registers such as awe, wonder, and the sublime, special attention was paid to the role and use of language and words charged with emotion, affect, and feeling, such as hate, disgust, fear, anger, danger, shock, frustration, indifference, awkwardness, weirdness and judgment.

All interviews were transcribed and coded to draw out important themes, patterns, and resemblances regarding the various sensorial, corporeal, and affective ways through which the Muslim Other is (re)constructed. The empirical data was coded deductively based on a priori conceptual categories and inductively according to unanticipated categories that emerged from detailed and repeated readings of the texts. Before the fieldwork, the ethics committee of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences of the University of Groningen approved the investigation. Covering the ethical issues, all participants were informed about the study, their role in the research process, how the material would be used and disseminated, and verbal/written consent was obtained from them. For anonymity and interviewee protection, informants have been given pseudonyms and age bands.

4. Embodied encounters with the Muslim Other

Informants narrated a collection of stories related to the embodied encounters with the religio-cultural/dangerous/ethno-national Muslim Other: feelings such as discomfort, fear, and disgust; symbolic violence and harassment in forms of gesture, whisper, and ‘bitter’ looks; shunning techniques including standing, sitting, or moving away; verbal abuse and physical aggression; anxieties around particular objects that they carry. We have categorised such embodied Othering experiences into sensorial, corporeal, and affective. Sensorial aspects refer to the phenomenological and lived body experience of sight, hearing, and touch through which Othering is sensed. Corporeal Otherings are those representational socio-spatial practices of exclusion, the lived moments that are tangible to bodies. Affective Othering, however, points at micro, subtle, and nonrepresentational experiences, those short-lived feelings that cause tension.

4.1. Gaze

The most repeated sensed Othering by participants is the weird, lengthy, bitter, judgemental looks. The interviewees stated that they have to deal with the Othering gaze, the frequent and long looks which resonate feelings such as being judged or unwelcome. As Sara, mid-20s, said ‘I’m very conscious of my surroundings and I notice if and how people look at me or not or if they try to avoid me or not’. Similarly, Hafez, early 30s, argued that ‘at first, I was like why are they looking at me? Did I do something wrong? … I also heard from my sister-in-law that she also sensed looks but she is already used to it’. This taps into Du Bois’ (1903, 14) concept of double consciousness which is ‘this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others’. Through the interaction with their surroundings, Muslims, to some extent, internalise Otherness or oppressive body images, an enculturation of the body that may lead to experiencing one’s body from inside and outside alike (Simonsen 2007). Du Bois and later Fanon (1986) show how one’s perception of self is shaped by the experiential reflection to the dominant group. In the white world, the Othered encounters difficulties in the development of bodily schema since the Othered bodies are surrounded by an atmosphere of certain uncertainty. For Du Bois, Fanon, and many interviewees, such awareness is made not out of habit but out of implicit knowledge. Sociologically, these micro-behavioural looks can be read as informal negative sanctions, attempts to regulate the perceived deviant behaviours of ‘outsiders’ (Becker 1997). These looks expect conformity and perform as a method of surveillance and control. However, with this surveillance comes a surveillance of the self.

4.2. Hearing

The visual, yet, cannot be separated from how space sounds. Sound plays a critical role in the navigation of space and experiencing Othering. The use of language in the everyday spaces of encounter is one of the central Othering processes between wider (white) society and informants. Ahmad, early 20s, says that ‘if I’m at work and only Dutch people are around, if I speak Arabic, everyone is looking like what he is saying, he is going to kill me. Then I switch to Dutch just for their own sake because I feel they’re afraid’. The response of white Dutch-speaking people to hearing foreign languages, mostly related to non-Western/non-European languages, plays a regular role in Othering. Linguistic profiling works similarly to visual racial-ethnic profiling where language and how one speaks tells ‘us’ something about ‘them’ (Joyce 2018). Thus, listening to what is said, next to the panoptical white Othering gaze, is another method of surveillance towards the racially marked bodies.

4.3. Shunning

Encounters include a haptic experience and bodily contact. Bodily distance, for instance, can make a body ‘us’ or ‘them’. Sara previously mentioned how people try to avoid her. Fatima, early 20s, similarly stated that ‘if you will be standing in a row to pay for your shopping, there will be a longer row on the other side’. For Hadi, mid-20s, public transport is an obvious site for shunning: ‘In Amsterdam people sit next to me but if you’re in a village then it [avoiding] happens more’. When ethno-racial boundaries are accentuated, avoidance and active disengagement become more visible. Here Othering is enacted through a variety of avoidance techniques. Othering involves particular practices, decisions, and interactions based on particular feelings and affects that resonate between bodies. Bodies are read and judged based on likeness and difference produced through embodied encounters. Certain bodies, however, are subject to extra caution, provoke certain emotions such as disgust and fear which dictate modification of interactions and behaviours. The difference for participants was synonymous with the anxiety derived from their racialised bodies that renders them as the dangerous Other.

4.4. Verbal abuse

All informants, one way or another, have been subjected to verbal Othering. Sentences like ‘Jesus is going to burn you in hell’, ‘crappy foreigners,’ ‘go back to your country’, ‘get the fuck out’, or ‘Muslims are terrorists’ have been heard by both male and female informants in a wide variety of spaces and situations. These Othering practices by reproducing the religious Other, the ethnonational Other, and the dangerous Other respectively, demarcate boundaries and redefine the bodies of young Muslims as a body out of place. Katz (2007) would call these verbal Otherings as ‘banal terrorism’, a nationalist claim to solidify the nation which based on the fear for terror frames Muslim(-looking) communities as part of an international terror regime threatening Western idea(l)s. For Pain and Smith (2008), these are intimate geopolitics of fear to connect the themes of geopolitical and everyday in different contexts. Charged with fear for the Other, these corporeal encounters connect the global to the local, where geopolitical conflicts and global fears continually become entangled, compressed, and materialised into the intimacies of everyday life.

4.5. Physical violence

Rooted in the dangerous Other, sometimes the threshold of tolerance is even further crossed and Othering is practised as physical aggression. Yusuf, mid-20s, narrated a situation where someone approached him: ‘He knew I am a Muslim and was like ‘you Muslims, you, ruined the world’. You could really see he was attacking me, he even touched me. I think that was the most annoying experience I’ve ever encountered’. Yusuf has experienced an abject encounter (Wilson 2017), an encounter beyond the scope of tolerance. Here the body of Muslims reopens some histories and cause anger, mistrust, and anxiety which has the capacity to not only transform Muslims into an Other but also into an object of hate which can be escalated into physical violence (Ahmed 2004). Therefore, through radical Othering, Muslims are constructed as a rival, enemy, abject-Other. Othering, thus, is not just an attitude, a dislike, or fear of foreigners; it is an activity, a (violent) practice that causes bodily harm and damage. Muslims are dehumanised, blamed, scapegoated for insecurity, terrorism, and even global economic inequality due to their bodily traits and religio-cultural practices. Yusuf’s lived Othering experience is another example of how international/global and everyday/intimate/local are tightly interwoven and how such relations function in different settings.

4.6. Projected feelings

Affective atmospheres are central to everyday Othering encounters within which exclusion and anti-Muslim racism occur. These atmospheres facilitate and/or confine particular practices and evoke particular feelings. Myriam, mid-20s, explained that ‘you get the feeling that people are not just so nice to you because of something but you can’t point your finger at it but your instincts tell that’. Here as another example of double consciousness and a method of self-surveillance, affect emerges through the combination of specific objects, bodies, and practices at a particular time in a particular space. This is the moment in which Othering surfaces from the background, is registered in the sensing bodies making Myriam ‘feel’ Othered. Within these affective encounters, as Ahmed (2004, 33) argues, particular histories are reopened and ‘some bodies are already read as more hateful than other(s)’. Bodies, therefore, are affectively judged through race, ethnicity, dress, gender, and language and a whole series of emotional registers of a deeper affective transition (Massumi 2002; Pile 2010) comes to the fore which has the capacity to (re)produce the Other. Within these affective -equivocal, fragile, contextual, and fleeting-moments of tension, the Other is constructed via emotionally charged socio-spatial negotiations over the normative standards of who is culturally capable of sustaining a common representation of the body.

4.7. Objects

Not only the human body but also the non-human body can generate affective responses. It turned out that objects that Muslims, particularly men, carry within the everyday spaces of encounter, e.g. public transport, alter affective composition of the situation. As Fouad, mid-20s, stated ‘I always feel awkward when I’m in public transport with my backpack maybe I think people think I’m a terrorist … I don’t know their intention but maybe they don’t like sitting next to someone with a bag or something’. As Fouad implied, the fear is grounded in a racialised discourse and media representation of a single affective idea that Muslim men are a security threat and the objects they carry are potentially risky. His bearded racialised body and the backpack he carries within atmospheres of suspicion and mistrust have affected him, turning him into a terrorist, an object of fear and anxiety, a dangerous Other. It shows that a brown body of a Muslim man is never far removed from the image of a terrorist or as Hooks (2008) avers, it is a fantasy of whiteness that the threatening Other is always a terrorist. In addition, this account emphasises not only on the face-to-face interactions but also pays attention to the material and non-human aspects of Othering (Wilson 2017). Therefore, materials are significant to the assembling of multicultural which highlights how Othering occurs through encountering materialities.

4.8. Beyond Muslimness

For many informants, urban life is full of intersecting discriminations. For Farah, early 30s, ‘[discriminations] happen [when I’m] with my sister because my sister is oriental looking. She’s also big so there are fat-phobia and body image; but my sister is visibly queer, she’s gender nonconforming’. Taking Farah’s experiences into account, Othering touches upon different aspects of social identities. The construction of the Muslim Other goes beyond religion; it is also based on the consolidation of race, ethnicity, sexuality, language, accent, and size. Based on intersectionality, everyday life is lived in different ways based on the embodied subjectivities. Embodied Othering encounters cannot be separated from multiple interlocking dimensions of identity. Everyday meetings between ‘we’ and ‘they’ are performed through the body, within the intersections of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, language, clothing, and socio-economic status that force people to think in us/them dichotomies. These intersecting aspects of identity blend together not only reinforce a hierarchy between the majority society and minority groups but also shape how the Othered people access space.

5. Avenues of possibility

In the former section, we outlined a three-dimensional lens of sensoriality, corporeality, and affectivity through which Othering is (re)produced. In what follows, we would like to underline what this approach can do for us as Othered bodies, by identifying avenues of possibility whereby this process of imposed ‘dis-orientation’ can potentially be transformed into a process of ‘re-orientation’. Two prominent contributions to this line of inquiry within the field of sociology are Du Bois’s notion of ‘double consciousness’ (1903) and Gloria Anzaldúa’s ‘la facultad’ (1987). Each notion represents distinct but interconnected forms of ‘oppositional culture’ (Mitchell and Feagin, 1995) or ‘oppositional consciousness’ (Martinez 2002), developed among subordinated groups in the face of oppressive conditions. According to Du Bois (1903, 14), the Black American, as a result of a centuries-long struggle with intertwining systems of racism and classism has formed a ‘double-consciousness’, which is the ‘peculiar sensation […] of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity’. For Du Bois, double consciousness is both a burden and an opportunity. On one hand, it signifies an internal divide between the two selves; on the other, it necessitates a consciousness of one’s systemic humiliation within the matrix of domination, thereby harbouring opportunities for resistance (Du Bois 1903; see also Martinez 2002). For Anzaldúa (1987, 38), ‘la facultad’ (the ability/faculty) is born out of lived experience with interlocking systems of oppression, of being ‘pushed out of the tribe for being different’. ‘La facultad’ is thus the borne fruit of resisting oppressive structures, a unique set of abilities for navigating the world as an Othered body. Both theories are immensely useful in understanding oppression not as a system that produces hopeless victims, but an oppositional space rife with opportunities. Therefore, understanding the everyday Othering experiences of young Dutch Muslims allows us to identify ways in which ‘everyday racism’ can be countered by ‘everyday anti-racism’ (Dunn and Kamp 2009), a process which can both fuel ‘anger’ and generate ‘hope’. As Harcourt (2009) avers, by analysing how bodies are constructed as the Other, we can then challenge Othering discourses and practices and understand how to transform and change oppressive conditions. De Koning (2016) similarly contends that anti-Islamophobia activism in the Netherlands simultaneously challenges and is informed by racialisation. Exposing the nature and processes of racialisation and Othering are therefore perquisite to (re)claiming the ‘Muslim voice’ (171). We argue that there are potential grounds for hopeful possibilities, transgressions, and radical interventions in various aspects of everyday life that challenge assumptions and assertions made about Muslims in the West, particularly in the Netherlands.

5.1 Angry dis-orientations and hopeful re-orientations

Here, we find it important to clarify our own positionality as ‘Othered’ scholars in the Netherlands responding to racist and Islamophobic discrimination. In exposing the intricate, entangled, and ‘benevolent’ ways in which Othering manifests itself in our daily lived experiences, our responses are two-fold: we are both angry and hopeful. Admittedly, our initial response is one of anger. The pervasiveness of racism and the intimacy with which we recognise our informants’ lived accounts of racist Othering leave us ‘passionately’ angry. With this anger comes fear, fear of our analysis being dismissed as ‘ideological’ not ‘scholarly’, of our ‘anger’ being read as the origin and motivation behind our analysis, not the rightful ‘response’ to what our analysis lays bare (see also Lorde 1997).

Without this anger, however, hope is but a ‘feel-good’ sentiment. It becomes what Ahmed (2009) calls a ‘happy word’. The Othered body, as Ahmed posits, is already marked as the origin of bad feelings, encountered as negative, as getting in the way of the good feeling of others. Complying with a ‘politics of feeling good’ (Ahmed 2009; 2013), thus may render us less threatening, less bitter, less angry. On the contrary, by talking about the ‘soreness’ of racism, we, ‘our bodies’, become the origin of this soreness. Soreness enters the room as we enter. But responding to Othering and instances of everyday injustice by catering to feel-good politics is in and of itself an orientation: one that obscures inequality, ‘like the obscuring of a rotten core behind a shiny surface’ (Ahmed 2009, 44). At best, it does little for us in our process of re-orientation, and at worst it dis-orients us even further. Understanding, problematising, and contextualising our initial disorientation, exposing the ‘soreness’, is thus a perquisite to our re-orientation towards socio-spatial justice.

It is in this context of anger and dis-orientation that the potential of ‘hope’ for re-orientation surfaces. Hope is action-oriented. It is a way of embodying a future different from the present, a celebration of the possible, or existing possibilities, that depends upon the intellect and will (Anderson 2002; 2006). Hope not only presents the future as open to change but also reminds us that the here and now is ‘uncentered, dispersed, plural and partial’ (Gibson-Graham 1996, 259). It indicates that we recognise and act on a tendency existing in the present reality (dis-orientation) that has the capacity to change which leads us towards a potential future (re-orientation) (Anderson and Holden 2008; Anderson and Fenton 2008). Hope, however, is not utopian but directed by action and a temporal vector that points from the present into the future from a specific location with a specific direction and force (Anderson 2002; Ben Asher et al. 2021). In this regard, Appadurai (2013) has called for ‘politics of hope’, a politics of possibilities to come. It is not about the assumption that things will develop in a desirable direction. The politics of hope is an active relation to real tendencies necessary for achieving better social changes. Therefore, in what follows we would like to propose some social and policy recommendations for a ‘less hopeless’, if not more hopeful, urban research agenda, a research practice of hope that seeks to formulate different ways of challenging the dismal urban future regarding (young) Muslims and other dis-oriented and Othered bodies (Coutard and Guy 2007; Pow 2015).

5.2 Hopeful embodied encounters

Whether through the political discourses, the rhetoric of newspaper editors, or the representation of different social groups on TV, magazines, or social media, the prevailing picture is that the West and Islam are not compatible and are often in conflict with each other. As scholars (Phillips 2009; Hopkins 2009) have previously argued, perhaps the prominent obstacle in tackling Othering is binary thinking. Crude binaries are highly problematic: Muslims and non-Muslims, East and West, black and white, core and periphery, self and Other, us and them; these echo colonial discourses of divide and rule. By identifying Muslims who think and act like the dominant group as ‘us’, those who think and act differently are inadvertently turned into potential Others, if not enemies. The most fundamental step towards creating a more hopeful and equal society is to ‘unmask and combat hegemonic representations’ of Muslims in Western societies which are key to the (re)production of ‘narratives of hate’ (Law et al. 2019, 352, 358). Countering Islamophobia is thus a call for scholars, activists, policy-makers, and others to challenge, problematise, and break down these binaries.

Othering is a socio-spatial practice since the construction of the Other involves the authoritative struggle over the representation of the desired idea(l)s of whiteness in urban space. Consequently, in a political climate where xenophobia and white nationalism are rising across Western liberal democracies, the construction of certain bodies as the Other and the heightened anxiety around particular religions and the bodies associated with them in urban space point to the need for these societies to encourage a ‘transgressive’ conversation with difference. By transgressive here we mean a conversation that goes beyond the feel-good notion of pluralist diversity, by explicitly naming and problematising the historically-rooted structures of power and domination that shape our dialogues in particular and our societies at large. Only then can such a dialogue acknowledge difference without reproducing good vs. evil and us vs. them binaries. This public dialogue also requires revisiting discourses around the body of the Other. Sitting with difference should be placed at different scales. In the (supra)national contexts, serious conversations should take place within the larger context of European fears around migration and the concepts of race and culture (Stam 2019; Modood 2019). Within everyday contexts, the potentials of hope in the urban encounter should be grasped.

However, the mere attempt of bringing conflicting groups together, to reduce anxiety or enhance tolerance, can exacerbate inter-group tensions if the conditions that breed socio-spatial inequality remain intact. In this respect, Gordon Allport (1954) in his classical writings on social psychology has conceptualised the optimum conditions for breaking the prejudice: equal status, cooperation, opportunities for personal acquaintance, and institutional support. However, in a society where labelling, grouping, categorising, and Othering have become part and parcel of everyday social reality, Allport’s conditions rarely happen. Therefore, to establish transgressive dialogue, spaces of encounter should be created and promoted. Everyday (third) urban spaces such as various digital and media platforms, as well as avenues of activism, storytelling, workshops, and other forms of repetitive visiting across worlds, should be opened up where stories are not ignored, voices stuttered, memories forgotten. Gholami (2021), for example, argues that storytelling is a powerful method for building solidarity based on empathy, reflection, and mutual understanding and has the capacity to empower the Other to share and come to terms with their Othering experiences, and to claim a public space to speak back. It is, however, important to emphasise that the burden of dialogue, should not fall solely on the shoulders of the Othered bodies. Often multi-cultural exchange happens at the expense of the racialised Other, since the dialogue continues to centre whiteness or cater to ‘fragile’ white feelings. Emphasising a shift in locations in dialogue, Spivak (1990, 121) urges the ‘holders of hegemonic discourse’ to ‘de-hegemonise their position’ and ‘learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, ‘O.K., sorry, we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the [other]’’. When positionality is problematised, hopeful possibilities can surface.

In many of our conversations throughout this research, informants actively avoided associating racism with white Dutch people and their practices even when they had been explicitly racist. Though such an approach can be a self-preservation technique in the face of intense discomfort (Hooks 2008) or even trauma, it is problematic because it maintains what Wekker (2016) aptly identifies as ‘White Innocence’, the mainstream white Dutch feelings of innocence and regarding racism as something that does not exist in the Netherlands. Goldberg (2014, 411) similarly asserts that ‘those made minorities in turn either often ignore the humiliations so as not to extend by confronting the pain they cause or avoid situations, environments, and places where the humiliations are likely to manifest or be experienced’. This practice of ‘avoidance and evasion’ (Essed and Hoving 2014) is thus reinforced both by the Dutch society at large and those who themselves are subjected to racism. Consequently, evading and avoiding ‘calling out’ racism perpetuates it. Therefore, to efficiently tackle Othering and racist structures, it is paramount for not only Muslims to be more assertive but also white Dutch people to face their ‘discomfort’ around the issue of race and take responsibility for their thoughts, words, and actions (Stam 2019). After all, it is easier to imagine that racism does not exist if no one admits responsibility for it.

Promoting hopeful encounters involves difficult negotiations of difference. However, it is emotions and affects that open up the potential of making connections. Recent scholarship has shown that affective rather than simple cognitive processes are far more influential in establishing nuanced relationships through which dualisms are destabilised and meaningful encounters emerge in fragile yet hopeful ways (Askins 2016; Matejskova and Leitner 2011). At the affective level of living with cultural diversity, hopeful attitudes and emotions can be generated in encounters occurring around transcultural relations performed in everyday situations. Further, moments of dis-orientation not only have the potential to destabilise and undermine the existing prejudices but can also be seen as productive moments leading to new hopes and new directions (Simonsen 2013). With the help of social movements, youth workers, teachers, academics, and activists, spaces of encounter should encourage individuals and communities to imagine and enact alternative futures and harness potentials of hopeful – yet radical – interventions towards achieving socio-spatial justice.

6. Towards an intersectional praxis

Othering and anti-Muslim racism, as we have established throughout this article, are complex issues that touch upon a wide range of disadvantages and discriminations in institutions and environments, from schools, the labour market, and the housing sector to transport and public spaces. De-Othering would thus entail a radical rethinking of the place of Muslims in Europe and particularly in Dutch society, together with challenging the assumptions about segregation and parallel society as well as radically changing the nature of media coverage. This, in turn, calls for an intersectional approach that focuses on the processes and structures that (re)produce differentiation and domination, instead of identities and social categories of difference. This change in focus ‘shifts the gaze from the Othered identity and category of Otherness to a critique of the social production and organisation of relations of Othering and normalisation' (Dhamoon 2011, 235). Othering does not take place in a socio-historical vacuum. Rather, social relations of power organised around intersecting variables such as gender, class, race, ethnicity, language, size, sexuality, and ability impact how individuals experience Othering. Understanding Othering requires revisiting the very category of ‘identity’ as relational and rooted in the historically (re)produced social facts and facets which constitute our social locations (Alexander and Mohanty 2013).

Scholarship on Islamophobia in the Netherlands rarely deals, in an in-depth manner, with the ways in which (intra)group variations can result in hierarchies of power within and without Muslim and migrant communities. Whilst the issue of hijab often puts gendered variations on the spotlight (the paternalistic nature of much of this debate, which reinforces an essentialised representation of Muslim women as helpless and in need of white saviorism notwithstanding), research has rarely looked at the ways in which class positionality (or performativity) impacts experiences of Islamophobic Othering. A class informed analysis, or in the words of Bannerji (2020, 546), a ‘radical political economy perspective’ emphasising historically rooted trajectories of exploitation, dispossession, and survival, takes the issues of Dutch ‘tolerance’ and ‘diversity’ ‘beyond questions of conscious identity such as culture and ideology, or of a paradigm of homogeneity and heterogeneity, or of ethical imperatives with respect to the “other”’.

Whilst intersectionality seems to have recently seeped into the political vocabulary of anti-racist scholarship and organising in the Netherlands, much of the work addressing Islamophobia remains masculinist and hetero-patriarchal, with dissident points of view, especially queer and trans voices, largely absent. In this vein, Bannerji’s important work on Multiculturalism in Canada documents how the essentialised notion of ‘culture’ became the new and only playing field for ‘Others’ in the decades following the Canadian Multiculturalism policy. By leaving out problems of class and patriarchy, this new cultural politics ‘appealed to the conservative elements in the immigrant population since religion could be made to overdetermine these uncomfortable actualities, and concentrated on the so-called culture and morality of the community’ (2000, 553). It also empowered leaders and spokespersons, more often than not men, to act as patriarchs of the politically constructed homogenised communities, with their increasingly fundamentalist boundaries of cultures, traditions, and religions.

Drawing on the lessons from Canada, we argue that a uni-dimensional approach towards combating Islamophobia in the Netherlands can, at best, carve out space within the current political and social realm for accommodating Islam as an essentialised and culturalised pillar. In doing so, however, it will reduce our political identities (as well as struggles) to a reified and racialised cultural construct by emptying them out of actual forms of power and social relations around class, gender, gender identity, sexuality, and citizenship. Importantly, it further suppresses the voices of women and queer and trans individuals so as to maintain the collective cultural essence that constitutes the homogenic category of ‘Muslim’ in the Netherlands. Tackling Islamophobia thus requires a truly intersectional praxis; one that goes beyond succumbing to relativist essentialisation to address the complexity and intertwinedness of axes of power in how Othering is reproduced, practised, and bodily experienced.

7. Concluding remarks

‘Theory, in fine, is won as the result of a process that begins when consciousness first experiences its own terrible ossification in the general reification of all things under capitalism; then when consciousness generalises (or classes) itself as something opposed to other objects, and feels itself as contradiction to (or crisis within) objectification, there emerges a consciousness of change in the status quo; finally, moving toward freedom and fulfilment, consciousness looks ahead to complete self-realisation, which is of course the revolutionary process stretching forward in time, perceivable now only as theory or projection’. (Said 1983)

Building upon an ethnographic study on the everyday embodied urbanism(s) of young Dutch Muslims, the present article explored what it means to be the Muslim Other in an urban society where one’s sense of belonging and citizenship are daily questioned and antagonised. We have shown how through multicultural encounters and intersections of sensoriality (visual, auditory, and haptic), corporeality (bodies, beards, veils), spatio-temporality, affectivity, materiality, and the objects that Muslims carry within everyday urban spaces of encounter the difference of young Muslims is assembled and Otherness is lived.

Changing socio-political semiotics in Western liberal democracies, growing nationalism and right-wing populism, the (re)construction of some bodies as the Other, heightened anxieties around certain religions, increased security, and the spreading fear across almost all domains of everyday life: these are all factors which, in one way or another, contribute to the (re)production of contested citizenship and belonging. This article has provided ethnographic insights into how Othering is played out within everyday Dutch (im)mobile urban spaces to open up spaces of hope because by raising awareness on how Othering is encountered and oppressive systems operate, more can be done to challenge and end them. De-Othering of Muslims, therefore, demands a radical rethinking of the assumptions about the religious Other, the dangerous Other, and the ethnonational Other. Possibilities of hope within everyday spaces of encounter can propose alternative futures and harness transformative potentials towards achieving socio-spatial justice.

The antidote to Othering is to recognise the Other within all of us: ‘[She] is the hidden face of our identity, the space that wrecks our abode, the time in which understanding and affinity founder. By recognising her within ourselves, we are spared detesting her in herself’ (Kristeva 1991, 1). In order to ‘make hope possible rather than despair convincing’ (Williams 1989, 118), we at first step should know how Othering and all forms of racism and discrimination affect our everyday lives. Challenging Othering is not only the responsibility of those of us whose bodies are marked as the racialised Other. To end all forms of racism effectively, we must build solidarity across race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, age, and nationality in order to name, challenge, and overturn the intersecting systems of oppression that subjugate us, render our bodies out of place, and our collective struggles obsolete.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).