Islamitische waarden en normen: mogelijkheden en limieten in een westerse context

Abstract

While Islam in Belgium is rearticulating itself in different ways, Sunnis becoming Shiites, nominal Muslims discovering Salafism, Salafist Muslims adhering to Tariq Ramadan’s understanding of Islam, secular Belgian converting to Islam, etc., the events of 9/11, the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bombings, the double 2015 Paris and 2016 Brussels attacks, wash away these different layers of Islam and reduce it to an ideology that is anachronistic, inherently violent and contradicts European values and norms. Already at the end of the twentieth century and particularly after 9/11, multiculturalism and particularly, the Muslim presence in Belgium goes hand in hand with mechanisms of othering, whereby Western values are presented as fundamentally different than Muslim values. The events of 9/11 resulted in a polarising debate that reduces complex international and national contexts to a civilizational matter in which Islam is presented as the cause of all social and political malaise. In this introductory presentations I will look into the possibilities and the limist of Islamic sources to deal with contemporary issues such as radicalism, long Ramadan days, homosexuality, etc.status: publishe