thesis
Purification and Resistance: Glocal Meanings of Islamic Fundamentalism in the Netherlands
- Publication date
- 13 January 2012
- Publisher
- What else can we do? You can wear a belt and take two people into death,
if it doesn’t go wrong. (…) Eventually we are prepared to do anything, in
a broad sense, anything. (…) Mohammad B. said it right: ‘the 2nd of
November Allah sent his soldier’. - Nidal
It is good, finally they feel it. (…) It is true that they are suppressing more
Muslims now, but they know now that we offer resistance and that scares
them. They can’t distinguish the terrorists from non-terrorists. (…) There
is a hadith that says that if the end of the world is coming near, a war will
take place between believers and unbelievers. The believers will win. -
Yelda
It is these kinds of statements and violent actions that have aroused fear of
Islamic fundamentalism in the Netherlands since 9/11. Nidal’s and Yelda’s words
express a conviction of the ultimate truth and a dualist vision of the world. From
this conviction they derive a sense of superiority and that violence is legitimate
against their enemies. Viewpoints like theirs have, moreover, promoted the clash
of civilization thesis that presents (fundamentalist) Muslims as diametrically
opposed to Dutch non-Muslims. But how ‘other’ are fundamentalist Muslims in
the Netherlands? What are their beliefs and practices? How do their beliefs and
practices develop over time? And what attracts Dutch Muslims to
fundamentalism? These questions form the principal focus of this book.
The introduction will, on the one hand, clarify the context in which
these questions have emerged and, on the other hand, elaborate on the approach
to find answers to them. First it will consider how Dutch society has come to see
the threat of Islamic fundamentalism. Thereafter it reflects on the limitat