Space-making and religious transformation: Mosque building in the Netherlands

The realization of mosques and other religious buildings in the Netherlands has been described and analyzed predominantly as a history of integration and emancipation of Muslims into Dutch society. The first post-war wave of labour migrants used temporal makeshift accommodations to serve as mosques. In subsequent decades they further developed and extended the religious infrastructure. The next step was to realize purpose built mosques with various designs. Most of the literature on mosque building focuses on governance, political process and the politics of identity, i.e. on how negotiations about the establishment of religious accommodation evolve, what actors participate and which positions they take in these negotiations. Although such historical accounts are informative as far as the integration trajectories of Muslims are concerned, they often pay hardly any attention to the conceptions and visions that undergird these negotiations. The development of an Islamic religious infrastructure, including all institutional arrangements, is part of the larger process of the rooting of Islam under changing circumstances. This process, which I call ‘Islamic space-making’, is partly the result indeed of negotiation processes, but it is also the result of a process of religious transformation in which local, national and transnational dimensions intersect. In this article I focus on this transformation process by analyzing a number of cases of the construction of mosques. I argue that these cases indicate that religious transformation and reflections on how Islam evolves are often much more important than just ‘identity politics and space-making’. I also argue that this process of religious transformation has historical dimensions that reveal intriguing perceptions with regard to how Muslims position themselves in a religious-historical context. 

CJNS33-2_34-1pp59-82Sunier.pdf