Under the leadership of a broad range of politicians, Holland has been obsessively trying to develop a model Dutch citizen, using these attacks to legitimize these attempts. The media and the academic world have done too little to correct perceptions. Santing, who considers the right to be different - within legality - as an inalienable Dutch value, found that it had been discarded, at a time when larger groups of Muslim migrants had in fact succeeded in establishing a position in Dutch society without following the ‘blueprint’ of the ‘white’ majority.

Santing decided not to remain a mere observer. This essay “Against the ‘zeitgeist’” is her personal response.

It seems that in the eyes of the ‘white majority’, migrants from a Muslim background have a single identity, that of Muslims. No attempt is made to look at them through a prism other than that of their religion. This is the reason why Holland Ltd. is stagnating. This narrow orientation acts as an anchor weighing the country down, keeping it in its place and preventing it from connecting properly with global developments.

For the majority of believers, religion – Islam included – is more about actions than about knowledge. The content of the beliefs and the Holy Book occupy a less central place than religious practices and ethics. The reality is that the growing emphasis on their Muslim identity that we have seen in Holland among second generation migrants with a Muslim background, as a reaction to the global and national environment, goes hand in hand with a trend of growing individuality among the better educated, who are getting more numerous. In parallel, we can also see another reality: among first-generation migrants of Muslim origin, 4 percent no longer identify themselves with Islam. Among second-generation migrants, this ratio rises to 12 percent.

So far, it has been almost impossible to map out the new and multiform developments of a changing religiosity among migrants with a Muslim background. To untangle all the elements that influence these developments – and to spot the new factors that form their basis – is no easy task. It is a major challenge for the media and for politicians, and even for academic researchers, who also tend to look at new developments through “old” and self-centred eyes.

It is however crucial to change these perceptions. As long as we cannot correct the outdated and limited picture that we have of migrants of Muslim origin, a cold wind will continue to blow on Dutch society, and the country will remain inward-looking and unhappy with itself.

In this essay, I analyze the Holland of the 21^st century, from which I felt more and more alienated, through the prism of my years as a journalist in Turkey, as the wife of a Turkish husband and the mother of a Dutch-Turkish daughter. The rise of so-called political Islam in Turkey, since the early 1990s, forced me to look at the role of religion in a modern society from a different perspective. I eventually came to understand that the secularization thesis I had grown up with, which viewed religious people as backward – and was similar to Atatürk’s thinking when he rejected the idea of being guided by heaven or an unworldly power – was outdated. How then do you define the concept of modernity in multicultural societies, not only in Europe but also in countries like Turkey? Throughout the book, I apply my Turkish experience to the Dutch society of the 21^st century, going back and forth between the two cultures, to find new answers.

Publisher:
De Geus in Breda
Date of publication: February 2012-
Editor in charge: Sander van Vlerken, s.v.vlerken@degeus.nl