Murat Es
"Dutch Mosques: Construction of Transnational Spaces and Islam in Europe"
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Abstract
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European politics of immigration is currently undergoing a shift from multiculturalist policies towards assimilationism, especially in terms of the treatment of Muslim immigrants. Heated debates about the compatibility of Islamic principles, beliefs and practices with European norms and values have become commonplace. Muslim immigrants have been accused of invariably reproducing their religious traditions while rejecting to adapt to the legal, cultural, and political circumstances of their host countries. My dissertation is premised on a critique of such primordial and static Muslim identity, which finds its spatial expression in mosques. I aim to study mosque construction in Europe beyond the paradigm of ‘Islamization of urban space’ that takes the Muslim identities and mosques as given. I look at the emergence, use, and the transformation of mosques established by Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands in order explore the mutual, dynamic, and constant construction of religious space and identities in Europe. Rather than merely studying the impact of the particular dynamics of the Dutch context on the politics of Islamic space in the Netherlands, I focus on the transnational connections between the sending and receiving countries. To explore the role of transnational immigrant networks -that involve dynamic flows of people, ideas and resources- in the construction of transnational Islamic spaces such as mosques in the Netherlands, I will design a multisited research project that focuses on both Turkey and the Netherlands in terms of the relationships between their specific histories, public discourses, institutional contexts, and political structures.
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