Islam impacts political, social, and cultural issues in Europe. In Belgium, most Muslims are of migrant backgrounds from Morocco or Turkey. It is difficult to pinpoint the exact date when Turkish immigration began in the country, though the fiftieth anniversary of the first immigration wave was celebrated in 2014. Despite frequent mentions of 1963 and 1964 as the start of this process, some immigrants arrived a few years earlier. This research does not deal with immigration, but rather religion in the Turkish community in Belgium. Though religious fact exists sometimes within the context of immigration, it is a different research matter.1
Historically, Muslim populations in Europe were not formed exclusively through economic immigration as we know it today. Muslim Berbers and Arabs settled in Europe during the Andalusian conquest from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered part of the European continent, namely the Balkans up to the surroundings of Vienna. The presence of these two empires was the outcome of Islamic dynastiesā territorial conquests. During the twentieth century, Muslim Africans and Maghrebians settled in Europe following French, British, and Dutch colonization. Thus, these contexts of immigration represent a kind of physical conflict. Turkish immigration did not result from a process of confrontation; it was based on an immigration agreement between the Belgian Kingdom and the Turkish Republic signed in 1964.
First-generation immigrants were men from central Anatolia. They were escaping poverty to settle in rich industrial regions that offered the possibility of work in Belgium. These individuals tended to be culturally conservative and religiously pious. Their intentions were primarily economic: paying their debts, buying real estate, and gaining prestige and social status. They hoped to eliminate their Anatolian villages of poverty. Most immigrants realized these desires. Nevertheless, the idea of returning, almost universal in the early days of immigration, rarely manifested in actual migration back to Turkey. The fate of these men and women was influenced by several factors and conditions, rather than the simple desire to return to their homeland. Consequently, most of these immigrants did not return to Turkey.2 This book will examine the interplay between religion and other aspects of immigrantsā lives. They founded associations and mosques, and organized cultural and religious activities in Belgium, showing the importance of religion among the Turkish population in the country.3
Scope of Research: Questions, Issues, and Contexts
This research specifically examines Islam in the Turkish community in Belgium. This is a vast domain, as the religious field is entangled with the fields of economy, culture, politics, and education. The organizations examined herein are those with primary or secondary religious goals, which overtly engage either in Islamic activities or activities with strong religious overtones. In Belgium, Islamic movements are organized as nonprofit associations (association sans but lucrative, French abbreviation ASBL; vereniging zonder winstoogmerk, Dutch abbreviation VZW; association without lucrative purpose in English). Each mosque has an ASBL or VZW, but every association is not necessarily equipped with a mosque. Thus, this research concerns the associative space that intersects most of the time with religious, social, and cultural space.
The research is inscribed within a temporal framework, as it seeks to study the past, present, and future that characterize every human practice. The notion of future refers not only to the relationship between present and future, which is essential to understanding any action, but at the same time to the projections of individuals in the past toward their futures. For example, the desire to return to Turkey of the immigrant mine workers4 who settled in Belgium in the 1970s and 1980s represents a relationship to the future in the past. Henceforth, ātemporalityā will be used to indicate the complex relationship between people and the various times in which collective actions occur. This concept has been referenced by Sartre as men and womenās āreal relations to the past, and the future,ā5 and by Bourdieu as āthe inexorable passage of time and [ā¦.] axiomatic trait of practice.ā6 Indeed, time orientates peopleās behaviors by imposing limitations and resources.7 It defines the frame and rhythm of Islamic action, interaction, and mobilization.
This study has two aims. First, to assess Turkish Muslim organizations from a historical and geographic perspective in order to understand the implications of their networks and activities. Second, to construct a thesis based on a set of common transversal themes within these organizations.
This field of study seeks to provide balanced analysis among the micro, meso, and macro levels of the following question: Why do (immigrant) men and women engage in religious activities? As the study progresses, similar questions will be asked to understand different interdependent factors, such as: What is the organizational structure of Islamic movements? How are they related to each other and what are the outcomes of collective Islamic actions? As shown later, the reasons, freedoms, and constraints of religious people can be explained only in a complex configuration of interrelated networks.
While the topic and question of this research deal with a plural context, the study itself was conducted in a specific and difficult context. In Belgium, there is a particular relationship between religious organizations and the federal government.8 The federal government recognized the Muslim faith in 1974. The state adopted a law to nominate imams and has begun recognizing mosques as valid institutions within associations since 2005. The Muslim Executive of Belgium (ExƩcutif des musulmans de Belgique, EMB),9 an institution developed by the government in 1994, plays an intermediary role in this process of recognition. Indeed, the federal government acknowledges and pays imams upon the proposition of the Executive, which prepares a file of recognition including information on the status of the ASBL, the record of worshippers (at least 200 worshippers required), a financial assessment, and the assignment of the building as a place of prayer.10 As such, federal validation of the imam or mosque happens in an interactive context between the Muslim organizations, the EMB, and the Belgian state. This context is extremely fluid, and involves different processes of inclusion, exclusion, conflict, and cooperation which give rise to new issues, like the question of imam training in Belgium.
There are other topical contexts that complicate field work on Islam in Europe. Although this research is not exclusively based on topical issues, these contexts, at times, made it difficult to conduct the research. My field work began in December 2015, just after the November 13 attacks in Paris, and continued through the March 22, 2016 attacks in Brussels. This was also a period where Turkey and the Muslim world went through bloody conflicts such as the Kurdish and Palestinian insurgencies and the civil wars in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen. Though this study does not concern political radicalism and violence, these events contributed to the subjective experience of the people observed or interviewed, and resulted in anxieties around participants expressing themselves.
Nonetheless, the difficulty of this sort of research does not solely lie in fragile and delicate topical issues. Conducting a field study on Islam or any religion is delicate work. It is challenging to initiate vulnerable and genuine conversation around experiences, thoughts, and religious feelings. Indeed, religion is both a personal and intimate matter and a collective one. All of these factors can affect the quality of results, but the researcher has successfully carried out a consistent study, as the following research methodology shows.
Research Methodology
This study combines two methods of qualitative investigation. The principal method consisted of an ethnographic research project consisting of hundreds of hours of interviews and observations which lasted two years, and the secondary method was documentation research.
Archival Research
The documentation research was a study via the Belgian Monitor.11 This archival research allowed for a global perspective on the geographic situation in Belgium. There are two types of major problems when a study is founded merely on this sort of documentation. The first problem comes from identification: such research does not allow the identification of the association and the mosque according to which ethnic groups or network affiliations they belong to. Islamic terms are commonly used in some organizations, but when these terms are transcribed into Western languages, it is difficult to find the ethnic origins of the founders of the association. Moreover, the terms related to ethnicity and religion sometimes do not appear in the name of the association. For example, the word āDiyanetā is not necessarily included in the name of an associationās affiliated with the Diyanet.12 Then, it is possible to access a large number of associations, but the list would not be complete with only the Belgian Monitor. In order to identify an association or mosque, one usually needs to know the full name of the ASBL, which is the same as saying that a study via the Belgian Monitor should not be the point of departure, because certain information is prerequisite to use it correctly. Finally, there is one last point: every mosque has a number of ASBLs, whereas not every ASBL is affiliated with a mosque. How then can one establish an exhaustive list of mosques? From a general point of view, there is not a single physical or virtual place to find Muslim organizations. It is thus necessary to use multiple techniques of collecting information to assemble correct and more or less complete documentation, which combines the data from the Belgian Monitor with the findings of the field work.
In addition to these difficulties, the most serious problem when researching within the Belgian Monitor results is the fact that one does not obtain sufficient empirical knowledge to construct a text. Even when the researcher obtains a complete list which can enable a sociography of Muslim organizations, it would not be possible to develop an analytical idea, since the nature of the information is not adequate. There is no available historical information. It is not possible to go back a few years earlier, because either this information is not available or the name of the association has changed. To illustrate this point, one can provide examples. Take the Fedactio (a federation linked with the GĆ¼len Movement),13 about which the Be...
