In the House of War RELIGION AND GLOBAL POLITICS SERIES Series Editor John L. Esposito University Professor and Director Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding Georgetown University ISLAMIC LEVIATHAN Islam and the Making of State Power Seyyed Vali Reza Nasr RACHID GHANNOUCHI A Democrat Within Islamism Azzam S. Tamimi BALKAN IDOLS Religion and Nationalism in Yugoslav States Vjekoslav Perica ISLAMIC POLITICAL IDENTITY IN TURKEY M. Hakan Yavuz RELIGION AND POLITICS IN POST-COMMUNIST ROMANIA Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu PIETY AND POLITICS Islamism in Contemporary Malaysia Joseph Chinyong Liow TERROR IN THE LAND OF THE HOLY SPIRIT Guatemala under General Efrain Rios Montt, 1982–1983 Virginia Garrard-Burnett IN THE HOUSE OF WAR Dutch Islam Observed Sam Cherribi In the House of War Dutch Islam Observed S AM C HERRIBI 2010 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offi ces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cherribi, Sam, 1959– In the house of war : Dutch Islam observed / Sam Cherribi. p. cm.—(Religion and global politics series) ISBN 978-0-19-973411-5 1. Islam—Netherlands. 2. Muslims—Netherlands. 3. Islam—Europe. 4. Muslims—Europe. 5. Netherlands—Ethnic relations. 6. Europe—Ethnic relations. I. Title. BP65.N4C44 2010 297.09492—dc22 2009034600 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper For my mother, Aicha, and my daughters This page intentionally left blank Acknowledgments This book owes much to many people. The fi rst to whom I am in debt is the eminent philosopher and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who was my mentor beginning in the 1980s. This book is my tribute to him and his vast store of knowledge and experience. If I have found a way to analyze and better understand any group of people, it is because Bourdieu showed me the great breadth and depth of humanity. The world, to me, it seems, is a slightly less magnifi cent place since his death in 2002. I also wish to acknowledge the kindness, patience, sharp insights, and brilliant advice of my mentors and friends in Europe, the United States, and Africa. I am extremely grateful to be able to stand on the shoulders of such giants as Mohamed Arkoun, Abram de Swaan, and Johan Goudsblom. I also am thankful for the help of Holli Semetko, Doris Graber, Kevin Barnhurst, Roberto Franzosi Ivan Karp, Cory Kratz, Loic Wacquant, Aaron Sicourel, Gayatri Spivak, John Boli, Frank Lechner, Robert Agnew, Karen Hegtvedt, Gordon Newby, Kees Schuyt, Hans Sonneveld, Jose Komen, Dale Eickelman, Willy Jansen, Thierry Flamant, Michel Laguerre, Amitai Etzioni, Jonathan Gitlen, Michael Rohdes, Saji Girvan, Chef Rafi h Benjelloun, Samir and Ouail Mahir, Nicolaas van Vliet, Mohamed Boudoudou, Driss Boujoufi , Mohamed Charouti, Mattias Duyves, Abdou Mnebhi, Fouad Laroui, Chazia Mourali, Anil Ramdas, Abdelhak Bouargane, Adelhak Filali, Nadia Bouras, Bouchaib Dihaj, Omar and Abdellatif Mdibeh, Simohamed, viii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Fatiha, Leila, Ab, and Adil Cherribi, Omar Radi, Stephan Sanders, Brieuc-Yves Cadat, Karim Traida, Teun van Dijk, David Theo Goldberg, Philomena Essed, Dick Herwig, Joke Madsen, Katinka Bijlsma-Frankema, Michael Peletz, Khedija Ghadoum, Juan Diez Nicolas, Marijke Jansen, Aaron Collett, Christophe de Voogd, Whitney Easton, Geet Bhatt, Edward Asscher, and Frits Bolkestein. I would also like to thank Dean Robert Paul of Emory College for his support and generosity. This book would have been impossible without the superb editing skills of Stephanie Francienne Ramage, a journalist in Atlanta, Georgia, whose atten- tion to detail and sense of tone and nuance are apparent on every page. Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my mother, Aicha Filali Cherribi, and to the future of my beloved daughters. My mother gave me the thing most precious to her: a loving, peaceful Muslim heritage. My daughters turned my attention to the world in which they would have to live and awakened in me a keen anxiety that prompted me to write this book. I want them to be safe. I want them to be proud of being women, to be proud of their Moroccan lineage, and to nurture the seeds of tolerance I hope their European and American upbringing has instilled in them. Contents Introduction: Confessions: The Composite Relationship of the Secular and the Religious, 3 1. The Established Outsiders of the European Integration?, 23 2. Immigration without Integration, 57 3. How Europe’s Secularism Became Contentious: Mosques, Imams, and Issues, 83 4. Prisoners of the Mosque, 105 5. Pim Fortuyn versus Islam: Muslims, Gays, and the Media’s Reliance on Confl ict, 133 6. The Public Intellectual versus Islam: A Year of Sex and Rhetoric, 155 7. Riding Pim’s Wave: Islam, Women, the Sacred, and the Naked, 187 Conclusion: The Vanishing Muslim Individual , 217 Notes, 233 Bibliography, 257 Index, 269 This page intentionally left blank In the House of War This page intentionally left blank Introduction: Confessions The Composite Relationship of the Secular and the Religious How it was I quote before Pim with Pim after Pim how it is three parts I say it as I hear it —Samuel Beckett, How It Is Before Pim For much of its history, the Netherlands has set the bar for social progress in Europe. For centuries, its neighbors have looked upon it with a mixture of horror and awe, and sometimes puzzlement. “Only the Dutch,” they’ve said, and the Dutch have echoed with a note of pride, “Yes, only the Dutch.” And so the events at the beginning of the twenty-fi rst century in that most progressive country have been particularly troubling. For while the Netherlands has been swept by the same forces of change that have swept the rest of Europe— consolidation of the European Union (EU), a massive infl ux of Muslim immigrants, and the rising voice of Islamic fundamentalism— this small country has amplifi ed those forces, allowing an observer to view the whole of Europe through a Dutch lens. But understanding how to use that lens is crucial, not only for those of us who have participated in this chapter of Dutch history but also and especially for those who must learn from it as a secondhand account. 4 I N THE H OUSE OF W AR How, then, do we tell the history of what happened in Europe, and particu- larly in the Netherlands, to our children without allowing emotions to distort 1 the story? What we are studying, after all, is part of the world we live in. It’s not something kept in a petri dish in a sterile lab. I hear the voice of Pierre Bour- dieu telling me that if you’re not going to draw on your own experience in a real, personal way right from the beginning when talking about something so close to you, your own social world where you have been an actor and have also been acted upon, then you have nothing new to offer in terms of insight. This book draws on many sources, one of which is my own experience. And since I know personally most of the players in the fi eld discussed here, even Pim For- tuyn and Theo van Gogh, as well as Geert Wilders and Hirsi Ali and all those who have written about them, from politicians to journalists, I must confess as to my role in all of this, however insignifi cant. It’s not easy to write a fi rsthand account of my life as a Moroccan, a Dutchman, and now a permanent resident of the United States. However, a way to gain distance from the people and events discussed in this book, a way to fi nd perspective, is through scholarship, and it is this approach that I attempt to use, as a sociologist and an immigrant, in navigating a deeply personal nar- rative in the pages that follow. The Trifecta of Coercion The academic purpose of this book is to explore the historical, geographical, political, cultural, and sociological contexts sometimes missing from observa- tions of tensions surrounding the Islamic community in Europe, and in the Netherlands in particular. Within those contexts, I have observed three major developments since the 1960s: (1) the movement of rhetoric from inside to outside the mosque, as well as the emergence of more persistent claims of Muslims to European society; (2) the crisis of models of integration and incor- poration in Europe, complicated by Europe’s own integration within an enlarged EU confi guration (the EU, after all, has challenged individual national iden- tities); and (3) the globalization of Europe’s Muslim “problem.” All three devel- opments—greatly facilitated by the media—laid the foundation of the present renaissance of fundamentalist Islam. It is this renaissance, coupled with my own unique history and the inquiries of my young students into that renaissance and that history, that has led me to write this book.