Thijl Sunier

Bio: Thijl Sunier is an academic researcher from VU University Amsterdam. The author has contributed to research in topics: Islam & Turkish. The author has an hindex of 5, co-authored 12 publications receiving 108 citations.

Domesticating Islam: exploring academic knowledge production on Islam and Muslims in European societies

Abstract: The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 and subsequent events not only ignited a ‘war on terror’, but also marked a crucial change in the policies on integration of migrants of Islamic background in Europe. Most countries departed from integration policies based on some sort of recognition of cultural diversity and emphasized national culture as the only legitimate format for citizenship. The result is a strengthening of a frame of governance with the aim to regulate Islamic practices and to mould outlooks, institutional settings and legal arrangements into the nation-state format. This has been referred to as the ‘domestication of Islam’. One of the consequences is the narrowing down of research agendas and academic knowledge production. In this article I explore this process and address important fields of study that tend to be neglected in the study of Islam in Europe.

Beyond the domestication of Islam in Europe: A reflection on past and future research on Islam in European societies

Abstract: Within two decades Islam in European societies has developed from an issue of minor academic interest into one of the fastest growing research fields. The main reason for this is no doubt the emergence of new regimes of governmentality in most countries in Europe that emanate from the complex relationship between integration, and political priorities of security and national identity, the ‘domestication of Islam’. The narrowing down of research foci in the field of Islam in Europe has caused a serious academic neglect particularly where it concerns the entanglement of Islamic practices with everyday life, the religious engagements, expressions and experiences among young people, and the transformation and reconfiguration of Islamic authority. These three fields are of course closely connected, but also have their specific features and dynamics. The article explores these fields of research beyond the domestication paradigm.

The long arm of the state? Transnationalism, Islam, and nation-building: the case of Turkey and Morocco

Abstract: From the moment the first Turkish and Moroccan workers migrated to Europe in the early 1960s, the Turkish and Moroccan states have been concerned with how to bind emigrated citizens to their country of origin. In this article, we focus on Islam as a multi-dimensional binding mechanism. Religion is a broad register that links emotion, affect, and senses of belonging and binds individuals to political and cultural projects of collective actors and states. As we will demonstrate, it is a field in which both states and migrants have developed a variety of activities and initiatives, but it is difficult to single out what pertains to the state and what not. We argue that although state involvement in these two cases differs markedly, there are some intriguing parallels when we concentrate on religion. In both cases, religious affiliation is a very complex source of binding and of fission. State-monitored transnational networks have been tools of binding, but the same networks have engendered processes of disengagement from the state.

Islam, locality and trust: making Muslim spaces in the Netherlands

Abstract: The development of an Islamic infrastructure by Muslims with a migrant background in European contexts has hardly been addressed as expressing a sign of putting down local roots, but rather as an a...

Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject

Abstract: WOMEN Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, by Saba Mahmood Princeton, NJ and Oxford, UK: Princeton University Press, 2004 xvi + 199 pages Gloss, to p 203 Refs to p 223 Index to p 233 $55 cloth; $1795 paper This book explores "the conceptual challenges that women's involvement in the Islamist movement poses to feminist theory in particular and to secular-liberal thought in general through an ethnographic account of the urban women's mosque movement that is part of the Islamic Revival in Cairo, Egypt" (p 2) However, Saba Mahmood promises more than an ethnography based on two years of fieldwork (1995-1997) She embarks on an intellectual journey of selfreflection in which she has come "to believe that a certain amount of self-scrutiny and skepticism is essential regarding the certainty of my own political commitments, when trying to understand the lives of others who do not necessarily share these commitments" (p xi) By refusing to take her own political stance as the necessary lens through which the analysis proceeds, the author opens up the possibility that "my analysis may come to complicate the vision of human flourishing that I hold most dear and which has provided the bedrock of my personal existence" (p xii) It is necessary, the author cautions as she embarks upon her inquiry, not to assume that the political position we uphold will necessarily be vindicated or provide the ground for our theoretical analysis As readers, we are invited to join her in "parochializing our assumptions, about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, resistance and agency, self and authority - that inform most feminist judgments from across a broad range of the political spectrum about non-liberal movements such as the women's mosque movement" (p 38) It is within that spirit that I have critiqued this book The five chapters are a running argument with and against key analytic concepts in liberal thought as these concepts have come to inform various strands of feminist theory through which non-liberal movements, such as the women's mosque movement, are analyzed Through each chapter Mahmood makes her ethnographic talk back to the normative liberal assumptions about human nature against which such a movement is held accountable "The Subject of Freedom" illustrates the different ways in which the activism of the mosque movement challenges the liberal conception of politics Mahmood analyzes the conception of self, moral agency, and politics that undergird the practices of this non-liberal movement in order to come to an understanding of the historical projects that animate it The pious subjects of the mosque movement occupy an uncomfortable place in feminist scholarship because they pursue practices and ideals embedded in a tradition that has historically accorded women a subordinate status "Topography of the Piety Movement" provides a brief sketch of the historical development against which the contemporary mosque movement has emerged and critically engages with themes within scholarship of Islamic modernism regarding such movements We sense the broad-based character of the women's mosque movement through the author's description and analysis of three of six mosques where she concentrated her fieldwork Despite the differences among the mosque groups - ranging from the poorest to the upper-middle income neighborhoods of Cairo - they all shared a concern for the increased secularization of Egyptian society and illustrate the increasing respect accorded to the da 'iya preacher/religious teacher (who undertakes da'waliterally call, summons or appeal that in the 20th century came to be associated with proselytization activity) "Women and the Da'wa" (pp 64-72) is particularly insightful, as the author juxtaposes the emergence of secular liberalism with the da'wa movement and concludes that "the modernist project of the regulation of religious sensibilities, undertaken by a range of postcolonial states (and not simply Muslim states), has elicited in its wake a variety of resistances, responses and challenges …

Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany

Abstract: Muslims and the State in Britain, France, and Germany. By Joel S. Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 224p. $60.00 cloth, $14.99 paper. The central question of Joel Fetzer and J. Christopher Soper's well-written and highly accessible book—how to explain the disparate political responses to the religious concerns of Muslims in Britain, France, and Germany—is clearly important. Indeed, while the question was pertinent before the tragedy of September 11 in 2001 and the American invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, it has become exponentially more urgent since. Although the difficulties of incorporating Muslim populations into the countries receiving them were neither a cause of nor directly connected to the aforementioned events, the negative chain reaction they subsequently precipitated within and outside of the diverse Muslim community within Western Europe nevertheless exposed serious tensions between many of the community's religious practices and the dominant cultural, social, and political mores of the host societies. In short, the answer to the book's organizing question very much matters for Western Europe's political, religious, and social tranquility.