Former Muslims in Europe

Between Secularity and Belonging

Maria Vliek

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367698591
• eBook ISBN: 9781000409130
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Ateismo

Within contemporary Western European academic, media, and socio-political spheres, Muslims are predominantly seen through the lens of increased religiosity. This religiosity is often seen as problematic, especially in the context of securitised discourses of Islamist terrorism. Yet, there are clear indications that a growing number of people who grew up in Muslim families no longer subscribe to Islam or call themselves religious at all.

Drawing on fieldwork in the UK and the Netherlands, this study examines the experiences of people moving out of Islam. It rigorously questions the antagonistic nature of the debate between 'the religious' and 'the secular', or who is in and who is out, and argues for recognition of the ambiguity that most of us live in. Revealing many complex forms of moving out, this study adds much-needed nuance to understandings of secularity and Muslim identities in Europe.

1 Religion, secularism, and the production of discourse

DOI: 10.4324/9781003143574-2

It has been widely observed that the position of religion in Europe has become increasingly contested over the last few decades. Religion, and Islam in particular, seems to have become the contested ‘other’ for the secular subject as well as the secular state. In the dominant Euro-American societal discourse, political secularism is perceived as a pillar of modernity. This chapter outlines the discursive production of socio-political public debate with regards to ‘Islam in Europe’ in both the Netherlands and the UK. By moving out of Islam, study interlocutors had to navigate these religious and secular spheres, crossing over the alleged divide on a daily basis. Such secularist contexts also provided some so-called ‘ex-Muslims’ a platform from which to voice their motivations, opinions, experiences, and, often, victimhood. Their specific (political) positionality will be partially elaborated in this chapter and discussed more extensively in Chapter 2.

Previously, the secular was conceived of as merely that which remains when religion is stripped from public and private life altogether. In recent years, the function of ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ in private and public life has become increasingly contested. Any supposedly binary opposition or clear distinction between the two has been called into question. As Graig Calhoun, Mark Juergensmeyer, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen so aptly state in their critique of secularism: ‘The very use of the term “secular” signifies that we are buying into a secular/religious distinction that in some way defines not only the secular sphere itself but also the realm of the religious’ (Calhoun et al., 2011, p. 5). Furthermore, the celebrated ‘secularisation theory’, which claimed that modernisation inherently implies secularisation and the disappearance of religion altogether, has been refuted. For example, the Islamic Revival in the contemporary Middle East (and beyond), the expansion of New Age religion in the Euro-American context, and the increasing prominence of religion (and most notably Islam) in public debate have started to invalidate the claimed universality and inevitability of the theory (e.g., Von Stuckrad, 2013). Many contemporary scholars have pleaded for a ‘one cannot do without the other’ approach: religion and secularism are intrinsically interwoven and interdependent. This line of thought calls for careful scrutiny of secularism: rather than defining it negatively as ‘what is left after religion’, it ‘is something, and is therefore in need of elaboration and understanding’ (Calhoun et al., 2011, p. 5, emphasis in original).

Whilst an extensive discussion of an anthropology or genealogy of either the secular or religion (Asad, 1993, 2003) is beyond the scope of this chapter, it is worth noting their mutual dependence and production. For now, suffice it to say that I follow Saba Mahmood (2016) in that the secular ‘is not the natural bedrock from which religion emerges, nor is it what remains when religion is taken away. Instead, it is itself a historical product with specific epistemological, political, and moral entailments’ (p. 3). For the sake of clarity, the term ‘secularisation’ refers to the ‘process of differentiation’, which includes the decline of religious belief and participation as well as the dwindling mutual influences of the social and the religious (Asad, 2003; Casanova, 2009). When I use the term ‘secularism’, I refer to ideological content expressed as political secularism, which encompasses the ways the state governs and regulates religion (and thereby itself) (i.a., Berg-Sørensen, 2013; Cady & Shakman-Hurd, 2010; Soper & Fetzer, 2007). The term refers to the ideological program that strives to completely separate the religious and secular domains as well as their co-constitution. Secularists, then, are its advocates. Secularism is often conflated with the social practices and institutions that abide by these ideologies. In Chapter 2, I distinguish the two by explicitly looking at ‘secularity’ – a concept which includes the analysis of the institutional forms as well as the social and cultural arrangements, such as public debate, that contest and regulate such ideological demarcations. In this first chapter, however, I turn mostly to societal contestations over what is deemed appropriately religious, how images of the secular self and the religious other have been foregrounded, as well as the specific sexual politics that often underline them.

Saba Mahmood (2016), in discussing religious minorities in contemporary Egypt, argued that the modern state produces religious minorities, playing a pivotal role in the polarisation and transformation of pre-existing religious differences, ‘and mak[ing] religion more rather than less salient to minority and majority identities alike’ (Mahmood, 2016, p. 2). She pointed out that if religion and secularism indeed condition one another in the modern period, ‘then the question is not so much how modern society can expunge religion from social life […] but how to account for its ongoing power and productivity in material and discursive terms’ (p. 15). Furthermore, she argued that two paradoxical notions underlie ‘secular political rationality’. First, the modern state, which claims religious neutrality, has become extensively involved in the regulation and management of religious life and praxis, ‘thereby embroiling the state in substantive issues of religious doctrine and practice’ (p. 2). Second, modern secular governance explicitly transforms interfaith inequalities by allowing them to freely develop in society and allowing ‘religion to striate national identity and public norms’ (p. 2). Mahmood questioned how such paradoxes helped to produce the particular shape and form of interfaith relations in modern Egypt. Although it focuses on geographically different discourses, this chapter pursues this line of thought by asking questions regarding how and in what manner secular discourses produce religious minorities. How is religion, and in particular Islam, discussed by politicians, activists, the public, and the media?¹ Furthermore, it is worth acknowledging that, in addition to producing religious minority discourse, the secular, through its definition of religious space, also defines and produces majority, secular, ‘default’ discourses and spaces (Amir-Moazami, 2013, 2016). This chapter also discusses the sphere in and by which religious practices and their place in society are chiefly discussed. The production of these discourses illuminated through discussions of political and historical events, the influence of the media, and specific gendered issues provides insight into the interlocutors’ relative places and presences in the different socio-political realities of the Netherlands and Britain.²

Whilst Mahmood was primarily concerned with political secularism and its sovereign power to reorganise substantive features of religion and religious practices, I focus on secularist discourse, which is produced by political secularism. I refer to the products of the discursive operation of power, i.e., the public, private, political, and religious spheres, their boundaries and contents, as well as what its inhabitants consider a natural environment. This chapter expounds differences and similarities between the production of both secular and religious practices in the UK and the Netherlands. While much contemporary scholarship seeks to overcome the perceived secular-religious binary, I focus on the characteristics and nature of the binary’s production, especially since social debate and confrontation often seem to centre around it.

In Chapter 2, I will turn to the histories of secularity in the Netherlands and the UK from a comparative perspective. I use the concept of ‘multiple secularities’ in order to explain the relative presence of certain ‘secularist ex-Muslim voices’ in British debates regarding Islam and freedom of expression. The next chapter will touch on similar themes of secular governance, multiculturalism, free speech, and other contestations over the ‘appropriate’ position of religion in the secular (public) sphere. To lay the groundwork for Chapter 2, this current chapter discusses how Islam and religion have been delineated by and featured in public life and debate in recent decades. It stays closer to home, so to speak, in that it extensively describes the workings and contestations of ‘Islam’ and the ‘Muslim other’ in the public sphere. Chapter 2 also touches on these matters, but it places an emphasis on the particularities of national secularisms, i.e., histories of the governance of religious life and praxis through law and state policy. Here I contemplate the academic and public debates that unfolded during the decades when my interlocutors lived in and moved out of Islam in order to explicate the religious and secular boundaries and contexts that they crossed on a daily basis.

First, I interrogate the two national discourses on the ‘Islam debate’ in Europe: the Netherlands and the UK. Initially, I explore historic and political developments, influential global and local events, prominent participants in the debates, and media representations beginning around the late 1980s, which is when the ‘multicultural debates’ emerged in many Western European countries, such as the Rushdie affair or the veil debates in France. Sarah Bracke (2013) noted that 1989 marked ‘the fall of the communist bloc and the subsequent emergence of a new hegemonic geopolitical power, i.e., the “clash of civilizations”’ (p. 211). Whilst I consider such events and the ‘new’ visibility of Islam symptoms rather than causes of a ‘new era’, for the purposes of this chapter I limit myself to describing the debates and formation of discourse (i.e., the public body of knowledge and understanding considered accessible and true) since the late 1980s. Further elaboration upon the larger constitutive formations of (secular) governmentality in each country will follow in Chapter 2, where the distinct histories of secularity and the particulars of national political secularism are elaborated from the mid-sixteenth century. The current chapter’s descriptive investigation is mainly based on secondary literature concerning the interpretation and analysis of certain events, prominent figures, and their relevance for the production of secularity.³

Second, the chapter explores the comparative and intersecting roles of sexuality, gender, and the media in these discourses in both the UK and the Netherlands. They are referenced by interlocutors moving out of Islam, both as public discourses to relate to and as factors that affect the personal negotiation of embodiment and belonging. Initially, however, the following paragraphs outline general European trends and phenomena in recent decades, particularly the dominant discourses, new realism, and the postracial in contemporary politics.

Some notes on discourse

When discussing and outlining a ‘public debate’ or ‘public discourse’, it is worth considering the implications and meanings of the terms. First of all, Sipco Vellenga (2008b), a sociologist of religion and leading scholar on Dutch political debates regarding immigration and Islam in the Netherlands, noted the impossibility of Jürgen Habermas’s definition of a discussion or public debate, which states that debate is always rational, open to all, and free from power.⁴ Instead, Vellenga reckoned that such an ideal situation simply does not exist in the world. A public debate – specifically the debate on Islam – is never free from power or influence. Therefore, according to Vellenga (2008b), ‘debate needs to be analysed as a forum of power struggles on issues of representation and identity in a multicultural and multi-religious setting’ (p. 23). Furthermore, he states that, despite having a separate focus, public and political debate are thoroughly interwoven and interrelated, and they influence one another. Politicians participate in the public debate, and the content of the public debate partially determines political agendas.

In both the Netherlands and the UK, the Islam/immigration debate has been dominated, on the one hand, by pro-multiculturalist or pluralistic discourse and, on the other, by pro-assimilation discourse (Jansen, 2013; Vellenga, 2008b).⁵ Very broadly speaking, multiculturalism as a political theory was conceptualised in response to modern or liberal conceptions of equal citizenship, the same conceptions upon wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Religion, secularism, and the production of discourse
• 2. ‘We are the tsunami that is coming’
• 3. ‘When I finally heard my own voice’
• 4. ‘It’s not just about faith’
• 5. ‘Oh no! I can’t eat that!’
• 6. ‘Speaking out would be a step beyond just not believing’
• Conclusion
• Index