Queer Muslims in Europe

Sexuality, Religion and Migration in Belgium

Wim Peumans

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781788310789
• eBook ISBN: 9781786723062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

Belgium was the second country in the world to introduce same-sex marriage. It has an elaborate legal system for protecting the rights of LGBT individuals in general and LGBT asylum seekers in particular. At the same time, since 2015 the country has become known as the `jihadi centre of Europe' and criticized for its `homonationalism' where some queer subjects - such as ethnic, racial and religious minorities, or those with a migrant background - are excluded from the dominant discourse on LGBT rights.
Queer Muslims living in the country exist in this complex context and their identities are often disregarded as implausible. This book foregrounds the lived experiences of queer Muslims who migrated to Belgium because of their sexuality and queer Muslims who are the children of economic migrants. Based on extensive fieldwork, Wim Peumans examines how these Muslims negotiate silence and disclosure around their sexuality and understand their religious beliefs. He also explores how the sexual identity of queer Muslims changes within a context of transnational migration. In focusing on people with different migration histories and ethnic backgrounds, this book challenges the heteronormativity of Migration Studies and reveals the interrelated issues involved in migration, sexuality and religion. The research will be valuable for those working on immigration, refugees, LGBT issues, public policy and contemporary Muslim studies.

1

Belgium: The Heart of a Europe in Crisis

Nearly a decade ago – around the same time I did a first project on sexual migration which was a precursor to the study documented in this book – the 2007–8 Great Recession affected the European Union in ways previously unseen in the course of its history. Several economies, notably those of Mediterranean countries, were hit severely by what has been referred to as the Eurozone crisis or European debt crisis. This caused many European leaders, in coordination with the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, to implement a politics of austerity, under the argument that there was no alternative. Waves of nationalism and populism swept across Europe. The continent has never been so divided. The extreme-right French Front National (FN) and German Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) achieved progress in national elections, while the Polish Law and Justice Party seized power and Hungary’s Victor Orban reigned autocratically with the EU turning a blind eye. Podemos became the third-largest party in Spain, turning the country from a bi- into a multi-party system. The victory of the Greek Coalition of the Radical Left (Syriza) ushered Alexis Tsipras into office. Scotland voted ‘NO’ to its separation from the United Kingdom and gave left-wing nationalists a landslide victory in Scotland. Britain voted to leave the EU, making the gap with Scotland and Northern Ireland even wider. In post-Brexit Britain there was a huge increase in Islamophobic and racist attacks and incidences. Anti-migration, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiments were only heightened when another series of events captured and continue to capture the political and public imagination: the Mediterranean migration ‘crisis’. In 2015 over 1 million people (irregularly) entered Europe by sea and land (International Organization for Migration 2015). During the crossing of the sea 3,770 persons have gone missing or have died. Twenty-five per cent of the arrivals were children and in South-Eastern Europe this was even one in three (UNICEF 2016). The top refugee-producing countries include war-torn Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Eritrea and Somalia. To cope with the flow of migrants, countries such as Hungary or Croatia and in the Balkans have closed borders and countries such as Germany have started border controls. The response of the European Union has led to a political, humanitarian and solidarity crisis which threatens the idea of ‘Europe’ itself.

Belgium 101

Squeezed between the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg is Belgium, one of the three nation states known as the Low Countries. Founded in 1831, Belgium is a constitutional sovereign liberal monarchy. Historically known as the ‘battlefield of Europe’, it remains the heart of Europe, as it is home to both European (e.g., European Commission, Council of Europe and European Parliament) and intergovernmental institutions (NATO).

The country has three official languages: Dutch, spoken in the Flemish North and to a lesser extent in Brussels; French, spoken in the Wallonian South and Brussels; and German, spoken in a small part in the East. The main other (non-official) spoken languages include Spanish, Italian, Arabic, Polish and Turkish (TNS Opinion and Social 2006).

Despite its small size (30.528km²), Belgium’s political institutions are of great complexity. Political power is distributed along the following lines. The country is home to (by law) six parliaments: the Federal parliament, the Brussels Capital Region parliament, the Flemish parliament (uniting the Community and Region parliament), the Francophone community Parliament, the Walloon Region parliament and the parliament of the German community. The federal parliament is responsible for matters relating to for example public finances, the army, the judicial system, social security, foreign affairs, monetary policy, prices and incomes policy, nuclear energy, state-owned companies, as well as substantial parts of public health and home affairs (including asylum and migration). The communities (Flemish-speaking community, French-speaking community and German-speaking community) are responsible for all affairs relating to language and culture (education, social welfare, aid to families, immigrant assistance services, to name but a few), while the Regions (Flemish Region, the Brussels Capital Region and the Walloon Region) have powers over economic matters (the economy, agriculture, energy and employment, amongst others).

During my fieldwork, Belgium was going through one of its biggest political crises, with world record-breaking coalition talks for the federal government taking up to 541 days. The political landscape changed drastically due to landslide victories for the Flemish Nationalists, N-VA, in the Flemish North.

Belgium was the first country on the European continent to become industrialized. Until the 1960s, Wallonia was an economic powerhouse, when the industries, notably steel, began to lose their competitiveness in a globalized world economy. Economic power gradually shifted to Flanders, home to the port of Antwerp, the second-largest port in Europe. Since the 1980s the country’s economy has been moving at dual speed, with unemployment rates in Wallonia (12.0 per cent) more than twice and Brussels (18.5 per cent) more than three times as high as Flanders (5.1 per cent) (FOD Economie – Algemene Directie Statistiek 2015). A 2012 study showed the job market position of Belgians of foreign origin in Flanders tended to be precarious. Of those born outside the EU, 14.9 per cent are unemployed, compared to 4.9 per cent of those with Belgian roots (VDAB Studiedienst 2012: 12)¹. From 2000 to 2012 the ten-year average of youth unemployment in Belgium (19.8 per cent) was higher than the EU average (18.9 per cent), with remarkable differences between the regions: Flanders (13.5 per cent), Wallonia (29.6 per cent) and Brussels (35.0 per cent) (Cockx 2014). Looking at Moroccan and Turkish Belgians, unemployment figures in general stay high, although the socio-economic capital of these groups has risen over the past years (Torrekens and Adam 2015). The socio-economic position of women with a migration background remains highly precarious (Terlien et al. 2016).

Numbers on the religious denomination of the Belgian population are hard to come by, as the Belgian government is not allowed to ask about this in its census. Traditionally, Flanders has been more Catholic than freethinking Wallonia. For example, in 2007, 57 per cent of newborn children in Flanders were baptized, compared to 51.8 per cent in Wallonia and merely 14.8 per cent in Brussels (Botterman and Hooghe 2008). Belgium has six officially recognized religions: Catholicism, Islam, Judaism, Orthodoxism, Anglicanism and Protestantism. Non-recognized religions include Jehovah’s Witnesses, Buddhism, Hinduism and Jainism. When a religion is recognized, it is allowed to organize its own education or offer its own religion as an elective course in regular schools. Priests, rabbis or imams can receive a state-funded wage and pension.

Historically, the Catholic Church has been most influential in moral debates and has always been a fierce opposition to any progress related to matters of sexuality, gender and especially same-sex sexuality. Yet the Church’s influence has been on the wane since the 1960s. During my fieldwork the Catholic Church went through one of its most severe crises in decades. In April 2010 it was brought to public attention that former bishop Roger Vangeluwhe had abused his nephew. A wave of hundreds of children’s abuse stories surfaced in the wake of the Vangeluwhe case. An independent Commission for the Treatment of Complaints of Sexual Abuse in a Pastoral Relationship was set up under guidance of Prof. Dr. Peter Adriaenssens (KULeuven). The lack of a decisive response on the issue by the Catholic Church both in Belgium and Rome was very harmful to its public image. What did not help either was the attitude and views of the conservative Belgian Archbishop André-Joseph Leonard, who, later in 2010, posited ‘AIDS is a form of immanent justice’ and that ‘homosexuality is a wrongly understood form of sexuality’ (Anonymous 2010). The events of 2010 led to a record number of over 6,000 disaffiliations from the Catholic Church (Belga 2015).

Having established some of the structural characteristics of the context in which my research is set, it is time we delve deeper into the Belgian psyche, if there is such a thing at all. It should be kept in mind that as I am Belgian myself I am speaking from a particular location and I do not wish to make grand sweeping statements about ‘what Belgium is’ and ‘who Belgians are’.

Van den Braembussche phrases the Belgian sentiment eloquently by stating that ‘there is some kind of uneasiness that comes with being Belgian’ (Van den Braembussche 2002: 35). The unease and ambiguity of being Belgian has a two-fold explanation according to the author. First, the country is an artificial construct. It is divided along linguistic and cultural lines, as the border between Germanic and Roman Europe runs right through it (Van den Braembussche 2002). Second, internationally it has a dubious reputation: while it attracts tourists for its medieval cities and migrants in pursuit of an exceptionally high standard of living and one of the best health care systems in the world, the country’s image has been plagued throughout the past two decades. When the Dutroux affair (about the abuse, kidnapping and murder of several teenage girls) was at its height in the mid-1990s, the international press dubbed Belgium as ‘one of the most corrupt countries in Europe’ (Van den Braembussche 2002). Its reputation of a country in a constant politically precarious balance was not helped by the recent world record-breaking federal coalition talks mentioned above (the previous world record was held by Iraq). After the 15 November 2015 Paris and 22 March 2016 Brussels terrorist attacks, the capital of Europe gained the dubious honour of being the jihadi centre of Europe. The international press just could not believe Brussels was divided into 19 communities, each with its own police force, making an adequate and uniform response hardly possible. What did not help either was that a disproportionate number of youngsters had left the country to fight for ISIS and other groups in Syria and Iraq (The Soufan Group 2015).

In Belgium’s national memory there are few major blindspots and silences which, in my view, are important to understand the country’s contemporary social and political context. The most important one in light of this book is Belgium’s colonial history and its involvement and responsibility for what has been named the ‘Congolese Holocaust’, the systematic killing of millions of Congolese people under the rule of King Leopold II and the Belgian nation-state (Van den Braembussche 2002). Canadian political scientist David Rayside once remarked to me that the incidence of racism and discrimination is so high in Belgium, and especially Flanders, because the former colonizer has never come to terms with its own dubious and neglected colonial history. When the 50th anniversary of Congolese independence was celebrated in 2010, the federal government did not take this opportunity to draft an official apology. Actively engaged in a politics of forgetting and collective amnesia, Belgians and Belgium look back at this chapter of its history through a form of colonial nostalgia, whereby the Belgian Congo is seen as a ‘model colony’ when it was left behind by Belgians in 1960 (Van den Braembussche 2002). One telling example of this nostalgia is the eight-part TV documentary Nonkel Pater (Uncle Priest) on the Flemish public TV-channel Canvas, where retired colonial priests related with sentimentality about their experiences in the Congo. Not a single course on Belgian colonial history is given at university level, nor is the subject adequately taken on in high school.

To be able to grasp white Belgian self-image, we can partly draw from Gloria Wekker’s (2016) lucid analysis of race and colonialism in the Netherlands. To a large extent one of Dutch culture’s central paradoxes applies to Belgium as well, that is: on the one hand there is a politics of historical amnesia concerning colonialism combined with a contemporary ideology of colour blindness and on the other hand racism and xenophobia are structurally embedded in everyday life.

Race, it should first be noted, is a social category, whose boundaries and meanings change over time and from society to society. I think it is of the utmost importance to use the concept as distinct from ‘ethnicity’. Often it is argued that race is something ‘Anglo Saxon’ or ‘for Americans’. I agree with Jennifer Petzen (2012: 291) who states that the ways ‘in which whiteness has been said to retain its power in post-racial times is by making itself invisible’. The relationship to race in Belgium and more broadly in North-Western Europe is probably most astutely and forcefully summarized by El-Tayeb (2011) and therefore I wish to quote her at length:

to reference race as native to contemporary European thought, however, violates the powerful narrative of Europe as a colorblind continent, largely untouched by the devastating ideology it exported all over the world. This narrative, framing the continent as a space free of ‘race’ (and by implication, racism), is not only central to the way Europeans perceive themselves, but has also gained near-global acceptance. Despite the geographical and intellectual origin of the very concept of race in Europe, not to mention the explicitly race-based policies that characterized both its fascist regimes and its colonial empires, the continent often is marginal at best in discourses on race or racism, in particular with regard to contemporary configurations that are often closely identified with the United States as a centre of both explicit race discourse and of resistance to it.

While during the guest worker-period, migrants were seen as ‘docile, courageous and honest’, over the past three decades they have become the scapegoats of Belgian social problems (De Raedt 2004: 19). From the end of the 1980s, xenophobic and anti-immigration sentiments were, at least in Flanders, incited by the extreme-right party Vlaams Belang, which made immigration and, later, Islam key issues in their electoral campaigns and party programme. Since 9/11, Islamophobic and racist attitudes are on the rise and according to European research on negative attitudes towards ethnic and racial minorities, Flanders, the Flemish-speaking North of the country, ranks among the highest (Billiet and Swyngedouw 2009). Many people I interviewed had countless experiences of interpersonal and structural racism in everyday-life encounters. For example, Jamila² said how she would walk across the street in Antwerp and out of the blue someone would tell her to ‘go back to her own country’. ‘Can you believe this?’ she asked me incredulously, ‘I was born here, you know!’ The rise in Islamophobia and cultural racism has also made some of the LGB Muslims I met even warier to publicly declare, show or even acknowledge their religious affiliation. The questions and comments one receives in the LGBT scene can range from benignly ignorant to openly hostile. For example, a white Belgian gay man who converted to Islam told me that people start bashing Islam and basically call him a traitor and a bastard (Peumans and Stallaert 2012).³

From Guest Workers to Belgian Citizens

There are intimate connections between Belgium’s history of industrialization and postcolonial migration. In the 1960’s Belgium signed bilateral agreements with Morocco, Turkey, Algeria and Tunisia to regulate and sustain the flow of ‘guest workers’ (‘gastarbeiders’ or ‘travailleurs étrangers’) from these countries, who were primarily recruited for the mining industry (and other industries in the secondary sector), the driving forces of Belgium’s postwar economy. One such example is the parents of Hajar, who identified as a lesbian in her twenties: ‘my dad was born in 1923 in Morocco and immigrated to Belgium in the 1950s. Back then he was married to another woman with whom he had several children. After they divorced he met my mother in Morocco and they had a couple of children, including me.’ Both the host societies and the migrants thought their stay would only be temporary. This was the case for the parents of Altan, who is in his thirties and identifies himself as gay: ‘my parents go back to Turkey several times a year. They were often having doubts about selling their house here in Belgium and definitely returning to Turkey’.

Islam was recognized as an official religion by the Belgian state in 1974. According to the latest estimates, 6 per cent of the Belgian population is Muslim (Hertogen 2008). More than one-fifth of the inhabitants of Brussels are of Muslim background, while in Flanders and Wallonia they account for 4 per cent of the population (Debeer et al. 2011: 11). Morocco and Turkey are the most important countries of origin for migrants in Belgium. Those of Moroccan origin overwhelmingly migrated from North Morocco, either the Rif or Tangie...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Belgium: The Heart of a Europe in Crisis
• Part I. Unlocking the Closet: Towards an Understanding of Silence and Disclosure
• Part II. Hardships of the Heart: Same-Sex Sexualities and Transnational Migration
• Part III. Between Piety and Pleasure: Ambivalence and the Moral Self
• Conclusion
• Appendix 1. Tables of Participants
• Appendix 2. List of Organizations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• eCopyright