On 31 March 2010, the Dutch writer Benno Barnard gave a lecture at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), entitled âThe Islam Debate: Long Live God, Down with Allah!â He began the lecture by pointing out that the title was intended to be âa jokeâ.1 There was an immediate reaction from among the audience: âA joke?!â One audience member stormed to the front and was quickly followed by others. This brought the lecture to an end. The disruption was caused by militant activists from the circle of Sharia4Belgiumâa network2 of young Belgian Muslims that had recently been set up. Its spokesman was Abu Imran, who claimed to be striving for the implementation of Islamic law in place of democracy. The groupâs aim in causing the disturbance was to put an end to the âpublic humiliation of Allah and his disciplesâ. The activists adopted a paradoxical position: on the one hand, they wanted to be left in peace untroubled by provocations and insults, but on the other hand, they attempted to incite exactly these through clamorous protests. Two and half years later, in the fall of 2012, the main leader of the network, Abu Imran, was sentenced to jail, Sharia4Belgium was dissolved by the other leaders and most of its participants left Belgium to join Jabhat al-Nusra3 in an increasingly escalating war in Syria.
In recent years, the issue of young European Muslims going to Syria to join the violent struggles against the government of Bashar al-Assad, the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham (ISIS âlater on Islamic StateâIS ), its subsequent supposed collapse and the question of how to deal with the fighters who want to return to Europe have dominated debates in academia, media and politics. These debates focus usually on imminent threats to security and appear to neglect what happened in peopleâs lives in Europe prior to their departure to Syria and in the initial phases of the war in Syria. The point of departure for this book is the daily realities of networks of European Muslim militant activists in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany at a crucial but underexposed period in their existence: the years prior to their departure to Syria.
The disruption of the debate in 2010 by Sharia4Belgium drew a lot of attention and helped to increase public awareness of Sharia4Belgium, both within and outside the country. The notoriety and charisma of Abu Imran attracted new members and served as a stimulus for the foundation of Sharia4Holland in the Netherlands shortly after. Both Sharia4Belgium and Sharia4Holland were only small groups, but they presented the authorities with a problem: how can their emergence be explained? Are they indeed âidiotsâ, as stated many times in the media, or are they more than that: dangerous âjihadistsâ as they were called from 2013 onwards when many activists were leaving for Syria to join the war against the al-Assad government?
Two other networks came into being at around the same time as Sharia4Belgium: one in Germany (Millatu Ibrahim) and one in the Netherlands (Team Free Saddik/Behind Bars/Street Dawah).4 The German network was set up in 2011 after a number of fierce, violent confrontations with the German police and German right-wing radical groups. In the Netherlands, Team Free Saddik/Behind Bars (to a large extent overlapping with Street Dawah) was already in existence at that time and mainly engaged in shows of solidarity with, from their perspective, political prisoners. These networks were linked not only by the fact that most of the men knew each other and shared more or less the same ideology, often referred to by authorities as Salafi Jihadi, but also by the fact that they shared the same style of action, which we summarise under the term âactivist daĘżwaâ.5 Whereas Muslim preachers usually carry out their daĘżwa in mosques, these groups communicated their message in the public arena. They are not unique in this respect, but, as in the case of the Netherlands and Belgium, such initiatives were usually limited to a number of public events (such as Queenâs Day, now known as Kingâs Day) or, as in Germany, were introduced only recently by other networks (e.g., Einladung zum Paradies).
Two events taking place in the Netherlands and Germany respectively demonstrate the range of variety of the activistsâ repertoire. On 25 September 2012, a demonstration was held only 200 metres from the US Consulate at Museumplein in Amsterdam. The demonstrators were protesting against the film Innocence of Muslims, in which Muhammad is portrayed as a bloodthirsty, foolish misogynist. The demonstration soon turned into a protest against Americaâs role in the so-called war on terror, with slogans such as: âObama, Obama, we are all Osama [a reference to Osama Bin Laden]â. One of the spokespersons said: âYou [the West, America] are pushing the boundaries and that is probably an important insight for you [the researcher], so we are too.â He claimed that: âyou [the West, America] already have our natural resources, our countries, our women, but you will keep your hands off our prophet.â The demonstrators were reacting to something (the film and the âwar on terrorâ, both seen as part of a âwar against Islamâ), while claiming their own safe space (their faith). The statements were political because they made claims about prevailing international policy and the latest expression of anti-Muslim sentiments. However, the activists also performed as âtrueâ Muslims and showed how a Muslim should, according to their views, behave: steadfast, strong, standing up for Islam and Muslims. This performative aspect of militant activism is crucial, as we will see in this book, for understanding the dynamics of the networks which are the focus of this study. This demonstration was the last public campaign by Sharia4Belgium, Sharia4Holland and Behind Bars. Sharia4Belgium was dissolved shortly afterwards, and the group ceased its activities. A few months later, it became apparent that a large number of the activists had left for Syria to join the fight against the government of Bashar al-Assad. In the wake of all these events, these networks attracted an enormous amount of media and parliamentary attention. They were the subject of Q&A sessions in parliament. The threat level of terrorism was increased, and the activists were put under close monitoring by the intelligence and security services.
In the summer of 2014, barbecues took place in Germany organised by activist networks. The barbecues were reported by the German media, which estimated that around 40â50 people participated. In the reports and subsequent debates, these events were regarded as aggressive tactics to occupy German public space. Activities such as these (and, as we shall see, football in the Dutch case) are analysed here as attempts by activists to secure their own public space, to be left alone by the stateâs and mediaâs security gaze and yet, paradoxically, to become visible as undaunted and steadfast âfightersâ. One of our German interlocutors called the barbecues and football matches âan island in a sea of kufr [unbelief]â. This phrase symbolically catches what the male activists of the networks try to achieve and how their subjectivity is produced through relating to the outside world, in their view a world of kufr.
Some groups such as Behind Bars en Street Dawah operated without using any form of physical violence, but the same cannot be said of Sharia4Belgium, Sharia4Holland and the German group Millatu Ibrahim (later Tauhid Germany), which hold similar views. They disrupted debates in an aggressive manner, and the Belgian and German groups were involved in riots. Various individuals from these networks advocated the implementation of Islamic law in the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany. They disseminated the ideas of significant ideologues of military jihad such as Anwar al-Awlaki and Abu Muhammad Al Maqdisi, and they identified with Al Qaeda (and later with Jahbat al-Nusra and/or ISIS). Furthermore, they did not hesitate to excommunicate other Muslims (takfir ) who took a different stance. The actions of these networks and the media attention they attracted were in 2012 reasons for us, as researchers, to take a closer look at the followers of Sharia4Belgium and other similar networks in Germany and the Netherlands. What did they aim to achieve through their activism and the spectacles they created? Who were the members, and why did they become part of these networks? How did they react to actions taken by and reactions from the authorities and the media? While most academic work on Muslim militant activism or radicalisation in Europe is heavily centred on the English-speaking world, this study redirects attention to a European region from where a relatively high number of Muslims left for Syria in order to fight and which is partly strongly interconnected.
Though being aware of the pejorative meaning of the term âmilitantâ, especially in the German and Belgian contexts, we decided to use the modifier in order to name the specific type of activism we encountered in the field. The networks that stood at the centre of our attention employed a disruptive, confrontational and mobilising repertoire in the public sphere that was largely deemed illegitimate and unacceptable in the respective societies. The militant activists did not stick to the written and, more importantly, unwritten rules of legitimate forms of resistance. They disrupted the order of public spaces in such a way as to produce scandals and spectacles circulating through the media.
Research into these groups is usually conducted from the perspective of radicalisation, and seeks to explain potential violence. In this book, we depart from the dominating radicalisation perspective (for a critical perspective on radicalisation, see Fadil et al. 2019) and attempt to address other issues from the perspective of activism in order to think through the dynamics of power and resistance and its salient place within three European societies. We approach Muslim militant activism therefore as a relational phenomenon embedded in the respective societies and closely intertwined with struggles over integration, counter-radicalisation anti-Muslim racism and nationalism. From this perspective, these networks are nodes in a web of multiple relations between actors, policies, materialities and discourses.
In the remainder of this introductory chapter, we will first introduce our relational approach to militant activism as an alternative for approaches operationalising the concept of radicalisation. We then draw attention to the main hegemonic discourses that shape Muslim militant activism in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany: securitisation, secularism and integration. In the third section, we discuss resistance and our key concept, counter-conduct, in relation to the activism of the militant daâwa networks. Ethical questions that have deeply shaped our fieldwork and that emerge from fieldwork with ârepugnant cultural othersâ in politicised environments...
