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

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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.