Islamic primary education in the netherlands: Negotiating religious and national values in an era of societal tensions

The large-scale movement of people across national borders in an increasingly globalized and transnational world represents one of the most significant challenges of our modern societies. Over the past decades, European countries, such as the Netherlands, have experienced a great influx of Muslim migrants. This has severely impacted both migrant communities and host societies. Muslim migrants have had to deal with the socio-psychological effects of migration, such as exclusion, marginalization and alienation, while host societies have witnessed a rise of xenophobia, Islamophobia and new rightist populism. In this era of societal tension, Muslim migrants have sometimes struggled to preserve their Islamic religious heritage in societies that are culturally dominated by secular-liberalism. This has initiated an inter-generational process in which Muslim migrants attempt to negotiate religious and national values that, at least at surface level, seem to be diametrically opposed. One of the primary domains were this process of negotiation takes place is education. The Netherlands has a long history of institutionalized Islamic education through laws that support the right to religious freedom. These Islamic schools however operate in a largely secular liberal environment and are legally bound to national secular curricula. In the current social context, the schools are heavily monitored and more often than not accused of being sites for radicalization and anti-integration tendencies. Scholarly research on Islamic education in the Netherlands, which is fairly meager, maintains several far-reaching claims such as lack of engagement and agency on behalf of Muslim parents and a prevalent rejection of Dutch cultural values and norms. It also tends to merely focus on quantitative studies of the educational achievements of first-generation Muslim migrants, which makes the current state-of-the art both limited and outdated. This thesis aims to go beyond mere statistics on educational achievements and focuses instead on the lived experiences of Muslims and the complex process of value negotiation. Based on qualitative-empirical research amongst the newly emerging second-generation of Muslim migrants the author offers new insights into the case of Islamic education in the Netherlands. Contrary to earlier scholarly and popular representations, the Dutch second-generation migrant community emerges as vibrant, well-educated, informed, highly demanding and accommodating of Dutch national values. The Dutch Islamic school, rather than a site of radicalization and anti-integration tendencies, functions as an open and safe space where Muslim students, parents, teachers and school leadership negotiate questions of identity, religious values, and integration into the host society.