Belonging through Everyday-Life Practices: The Dutch Case
In: Multiculturalism: Critical and Inter-Disciplinary PerspectivesSearch for other papers by Edip Asaf Bekaroğlu in
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This chapter argues that the reasons of this tension can be best identified not by looking at the thick issues, which can strictly be regulated with law or a constitution (e.g. Islamic schools, mosques, the issue of wearing headscarves), but by looking at the thin issues, which are related more to the everyday life practices of Muslims. They are hard or impossible to regulate by law, but the host society’s perceptions about them may cause serious outcomes for Muslims as community and individuals. The most prominent thin issues in the Netherlands are handshaking and gender and sexual issues. Thin issues are more clearly the fields where assessments about ideal models of integrated Muslim subjectivity are articulated. They first reassure the difference between the Dutch and the un-Dutch, and fill the meaning of Dutchness in a globalizing world of uncertainties. Secondly, by marking not shaking hands or having different understandings of gender roles and sexuality as something belonging to the immigrants’ past from their countries of origin and Islam’s outdated doctrine, such everyday life practices also show the directions for the candidates of the semi-Dutch, or in other words, describing the roadmap of integration.