Managing Mosques in the Netherlands: Constitutional versus Culturalist Secularism

This chapter engages with the emergent ethnographic study of secular practice by focusing on how local bureaucracies manage Muslim public presence in the Netherlands, particularly the construction of new mosques and the amplifying of the Muslim call to prayer. Whereas the public 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. Constitutional secularism is one way of tackling Islamophobia and protecting the rights of religious minorities in general. Moving beyond the critique of secularism, we show that the ethnographic study of actual secular practice remains crucially important to avoid monolithic text-based understandings of the secular.