Nadia Fadil1

1 Muslim Populations

While the first reports indicating the presence of Muslims in Belgium date from the 19th century,2 their presence only becomes an issue in the second half of the 20th century.3 Most Muslims in Belgium are primarily descendants of migrant workers who came from the Mediterranean basin from the 1960s. In 1970, some 65,000 Muslim immigrant workers and their families lived in Belgium, and by 1985 this number had risen to 200,000. The exact number of people of Muslim culture or Islamic faith living in Belgium today is difficult to determine, as there is no official registration of the population’s ethnic and religious ties. Until a few years ago, citizen- ship figures yielded a satisfactory approximation, since the overwhelming

1 Nadia Fadil is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Fund of Scientific Research (FWO) at the Centre for Sociological Research at the KU Leuven. She is grateful to the previous authors of this section, Ural Manço and Meryem Kanmaz, for permission to use some of their material. 2 In 1828, the Turkish Consul of Antwerp Ismaël Hakki Bey Tevfik reports the presence of 5751 Muslims, half of them of Algerian background and the other half of Asian back- ground; see Panafit, Lionel, Quand le droit écrit l’Islam. L’intégration juridique de l’Islam en Belgique (When law writes Islam. The Juridical integration of Islam in Belgium) (Bruxelles: Bruylant, 1999), p. 15. 3 Contrary to its neighbouring countries France and the Netherlands, little contact existed between Belgian officials and Muslims during the colonial era as only few Congo- lese were of Muslim confession. An often forgotten aspect in this Belgian colonial history is, however, that negative representations of the ‘Arab elites’ did exist at the beginning of the 20th century, this as a consequence of their role as slave traders in and presence in valuable mining areas in East Congo. Especially the latter turned into important source of tension with Belgian officials, which resulted into a war at the end of the 19th century preceding the appropriation of the Congo by the Belgian King Leopold II (Congo Free State). The idea that the Belgian colony was installed in order to liberate Congolese from Arab slave traders figured as an important—yet often forgotten—legitimising discourse of the colonial enterprise in monuments and schoolbooks throughout the first half of the 20th century. For an analysis of this discourse in schoolbooks, see De Baets, Antoon, “Gedaantewisseling van een heldendicht: Congo in de Geschiedenisboeken” (Transforma- tions of a hero’s poet: Congo in the History Books) in Jacquemin, J. P. (ed.) Racisme, donker continent: clichés, stereotiepen en fantasiebeelden over zwarten in het Koninkrijk België (Racism, a dark continent: clichés, stereotypes and fantasies about blacks in the Kingdom of Belgium) (: NCOS, 1991), pp. 45–56. 70 nadia fadil majority of the country’s Muslims were foreign nationals. Between 1990 and 2002, however, a series of legal reforms liberalised the acquisition of Belgium citizenship. As a result, more than two-thirds of Belgium’s Muslim population now have Belgian citizenship. The latest generally accepted estimates put the Muslim population at between 410,000 and 450,000, which amounts to at least 4% of the country’s population.4 Today, Moroccan and Turkish ethnic groups account for 80% of the country’s Muslim population. The remaining 20% are other immigrants (and their descendants) from Algeria and Tunisia and more recent arrivals, such as refugees and immigrants from the Balkans (Kosovo and Albania), South Asia (Pakistanis, Indians, Afghans, and Iranians), and Sub-Saharan Africa (i.e. Senegal and Mali). The overwhelming majority of these Muslims are Sunnis. The Shi’is are very much in the minority, but there are indications that some Moroccan Sunnis have been converting to Shi’ism since the beginning of the 1980’s.5 With regard to the Sunnis, those from Morocco belong to the Maliki rite, whereas the Turkish Muslims are Hanafis (although some Kurds follow the Shafi’i school). There are also some Alevi Turks and Kurds. The geographic distribution of the country’s Muslim population is very uneven. More than 40% of Belgium’s Muslims live in the Brussels-Capital Region, where they are concentrated in six central boroughs (City of Brus- sels, /Schaarbeek, Molenbeek, Anderlecht, Saint-Josse/Sint Jos, and Saint-Gilles/Sint Gillis). It should be noted that Muslim residents account for 17% of the Brussels Region’s population.6 This makes Brussels

4 These are the generally accepted estimates used by the Executive of Muslims in Bel- gium and various scholars on the basis of data from the National Institute of Statistics (foreign population from countries with a Muslim majority) and the Centre for Equal Opportunities and Against Racism (official data of naturalisations by country of origin). In November 2010, the Francophone Daily Le Soir reported that Sociologist Jan Hertogen estimated the number of Muslims in Belgium at 623.000 on the basis of a demographic survey and German estimates on the number of practising Muslims. The latter method has however been subjected to critique, and is reason for some scholars to dismiss Hertogen’s estimates, see Le Soir, 14 November 2010. 5 There exist no exact figures but only estimates which vary from a minimum of one thousand (estimates of the Belgian security services in 2001) to a maximum of eight to ten thousand (estimates by the imam of the main Shi’i mosque of Brussels). I am grateful to Imane Lechkar (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven) for these figures. For a further anthropo- logical account on the reality of Moroccan Sunni converts to Shi’ism see Lechkar, Imane, “Quelles sont les modalities d’authentification parmi les chiites belgo-marocains?” (How to understand Sunni Moroccan Belgians becoming Shi’i) in Maréchal, B. & El Asri, F. (eds), Islam Belge (Presses Universitaires de Louvain, forthcoming). 6 Although the recent estimates by Jan Hertogen assess it at 21%, see www.npdata.be.