No abstract

Shahab Ahmed’s What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic (2016) challenges anthropologists, Islamic Studies scholars, art historians and museum practitioners to question the theological assumptions underlying conceptions of Islamic art and material culture. This article analyses three object types key to Ahmed’s analysis – Islamic figural painting, musical instruments and wine bowls – from the vantage point of the collection of the Dutch National Museum of World Cultures. Based on the author’s experience as Assistant Curator for West Asia and North Africa in 2015–2016 and on exhibition developments up until 2019, Ahmed’s framework is demonstrated as a guide for critical interpretations of exhibitions of Islamic art and material culture. This perspective lays bare a tension that contemporary museums struggle with in response to nationalist pressures to integrate Muslim citizens in Western Europe: between a diverse Islamic heritage, on the one hand, and orthodox desires to materially purify the very idea of Islam, on the other.

This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the ‘Islam debate’, itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of local governance about the meaning of secularism. Whereas the public and political debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a ‘culturalist’ or ‘nativist’ form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a ‘constitutional secularism’ that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Thus, in its practical application, constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the genealogical study and the deconstructivist critique of secularism by such authors as Talal Asad and Wendy Brown, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoiding monolithic text-based understandings of the secular as inherently dominating the religious.

In Western Europe, Muslims are increasingly demanding the right to amplify the Islamic call to prayer, the azan. Local resistance to the azan has prompted a search for technologized alternatives, of which architectural proposal to use light signals instead of loudspeakers is the only public alternative. By describing the light-azan proposal in the Netherlands, followed by an analysis of the extent to which it has been actually adopted, its association with spirituality is investigated from the perspective of mosque aesthetics negotiations. Aesthetic technologies of ordering physical spaces, in this case a transduction of sound into light, but also the use of glass in mosque architecture, can regulate the extent and quality of Muslims' presence in European cities. Whether the medium of light can faithfully convey the human voice, however, is bound with questions of religious authority.

This article engages with the emergent ethnographical study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage the Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. We argue that what started as the 'Islam debate' , itself provoked by growing populist articulations of the fear of Islam, has gradually developed into a conflict in the practice of local governance about the meaning of secularism. Whereas the public and political debate about mosque issues is often dominated by what we call a 'culturalist' or 'nativist' form of secularism, in practice bureaucrats are often led by a 'constitutional secularism' that protects the constitutional rights of Dutch Muslims. Thus, in its practical application, constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the genealogical study and the deconstructivist critique of secularism by such authors as Talal Asad and Wendy Brown, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoiding monolithic text-based understandings of the secular as inherently dominating the religious.