Doctoral Dissertation Research: Turkish-Dutch Mosques and the Construction of Transnational Spaces in Europe

清真寺的位置和建立往往是关于穆斯林一体化和欧洲国家归属的辩论的前沿。这些辩论通常将清真寺建设置于城市空间伊斯兰化和穆斯林公众能见度的框架内。然而，清真寺作为穆斯林宗教场所的意义和用途的变化仍未得到充分研究。本研究旨在通过考察荷兰土耳其移民对清真寺空间的象征、材料和认知生产来填补这一空白。尽管通常被视为统一的地方，但土耳其-荷兰清真寺实际上是按政治、种族、地区、性别和教派界线区分的。由于土耳其和荷兰之间的跨国联系为清真寺的想象、建造和制度化提供了信息，因此该项目还将调查清真寺项目与土耳其和荷兰的民族归属之间的历史轨迹和影响。这项研究将通过在荷兰城市阿姆斯特丹、哈勒姆和海牙以及土耳其城市伊斯坦布尔和安卡拉进行的多地点人种学研究进行。研究数据将通过参与观察、半结构化访谈、政策和媒体文件话语分析、焦点小组等方式收集。这项研究的结果可能会证明背景差异和竞争角色在土耳其-荷兰清真寺的想象、建设和争论中的重要性。基于空间不仅是身份的容器，而且是社会建构和社会关系的构成要素这一信念，本研究还将阐明清真寺在土耳其和荷兰之间的跨国空间中培养种族、国家和宗教模式的归属和主体地位方面所起的作用。最近，关于伊斯兰原则、信仰和做法是否符合欧洲规范和价值观的激烈辩论已变得司空见惯。穆斯林移民经常受到批评，因为他们在复制自己的宗教传统的同时，拒绝接受东道国的法律、文化和政治环境。这个项目将把接近清真寺作为荷兰穆斯林身份的原始和静态地点提出问题。相反，它将展示多种有争议的观点、参与者和过程，这些观点、参与者和过程将进入独特而多样化的清真寺空间和穆斯林社区的生产。在这样做的过程中，这项研究将纠正将清真寺主要视为抵抗融合的场所和荷兰原教旨主义滋生地的说法。与将穆斯林及其在欧洲的公共场所外化的观点相反，该项目将展示伊斯兰教的信仰、习俗和空间是如何被其特定背景所定义的。作为博士论文研究进步奖，该奖项还将提供支持，使有前途的学生建立一个独立的研究生涯。

The location and establishment of mosques is often at the forefront of debates on Muslim integration and national belonging in Europe. These debates typically treat mosque construction within a framework of the Islamicization of cityspaces and of Muslim public visibility. The changing meaning and use of mosques as religious spaces by Muslims, however, remain understudied. This research aims to fill this gap by examining the symbolic, material, and cognitive production of mosque spaces by Turkish immigrants in the Netherlands. Even though often approached as uniform places, Turkish-Dutch mosques in fact are differentiated along political, ethnic, regional, gender, and denominational lines. Since the transnational connections between the Turkey and the Netherlands inform the ways in which mosques are imagined, built and institutionalized, this project also will investigate the historical trajectories of, and influences between, mosque projects and national belonging in Turkey and the Netherlands. The research will be conducted through a multi-sited ethnography that will take place in the Dutch cities of Amsterdam, Haarlem and The Hague and in the Turkish cities of Istanbul and Ankara. The research data will be collected by means of participant observation, semi-structured interviews, discourse analysis of policy and media documents, and focus groups. The findings of this research likely will demonstrate the importance of the contextual differences and competing actors in the imagination, construction and contestation of Turkish-Dutch mosques. Based on the conviction that space is not just the container of identities but is socially constructed and constitutive of social relations, this research will also explicate the role mosques play in the cultivation of ethnic, national and religious modes of belonging and subject positions within the transnational space between Turkey and the Netherlands. Intense debates about the compatibility of Islamic principles, beliefs and practices with European norms and values have recently become commonplace. Muslim immigrants are often criticized for reproducing their religious traditions while rejecting the legal, cultural, and political circumstances of their host countries. This project will problematize approaching mosques as primordial and static locations of Muslim identity in the Netherlands. Instead it will show multiple and contested views, actors and processes that go into the production of distinct and diverse mosque spaces and Muslim communities. In so doing, this research will offer a corrective to the representation of mosques mainly as sites of resistance to integration and as breeding grounds of fundamentalism in the Netherlands. In contrast to views that externalize both Muslims and their communal sites in Europe, this project will demonstrate how Islamic beliefs, practices, and spaces are defined by their specific context. As a Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement award, this award also will provide support to enable a promising student to establish an independent research career.