The project consisted of four work packages: an analysis of the Dutch public debate about the need for Muslims to denounce violent extremism (WP1), an analysis of the Norwegian public debate (WP2), cases studies of public initiatives taken by Muslims in the Netherlands (WP3), and case studies of public initiatives in Norway (WP4). For WP1 and WP2, Critical Discourse Analysis was applied to a selection of more than 1000 newspaper articles per country, dating from 11 September 2001 until 11 September 2016. Relevant newspaper articles were collected through the online databases LexisNexis (the Netherlands) and Atekst Retriever (Norway). WP3 and WP4 consist of eight case studies of public initiatives taken by Muslims (five for the Netherlands and three for Norway), through which they explicitly condemned terrorist attacks and/or criticised the demand on Muslims to denounce terrorism. The included initiatives vary from a poster campaign against violent extremism by Moroccan-Dutch youth in Amsterdam after the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004, to a protest demonstration against ISIS organised by Muslims in Oslo in August 2014. The research for WP3 and WP4 was based on archival material and qualitative, semi-structured interviews with Dutch, respectively Norwegian Muslims who played a key role in these initiatives.
The research results show how these initiatives serve as a multi-layered critique, where Muslims not only ‘talk back’ to extremists who commit violence in the name of Islam, but also to stereotypical representations in Western societies of Islam as a violent religion. Often, Muslims who openly condemn violent extremism simultaneously criticise the fact that they are being held accountable for crimes they have not committed. Furthermore, the results show that Muslims in Norway have faced somewhat less pressure from the government and from the dominant majority to denounce violent extremism than Dutch Muslims, and that recent initiatives taken by Norwegian Muslims against violent extremism have drawn greater numbers of participants and gained considerably more media coverage and societal recognition than similar initiatives in the Netherlands. This can in part be explained by the fact that the terrorist attacks in Oslo and Utøya by the right-wing extremist Anders Behring Breivik on 22 July 2011 have indirectly resulted in a greater awareness among Muslims and non-Muslim Norwegians of the need to ‘stand together’. In the Netherlands, the overall lack of acknowledgement for statements made by Muslims against violent extremism has made Dutch Muslims more and more sceptical of the positive effects of such statements.
The four work packages have each resulted in a short research report. A peer-reviewed article based on this research project has already been published (Open Access) in the Journal of Muslims in Europe. More articles in high-ranking academic journals are in preparation, as well as a special issue of the journal Religion and a proposal for a monograph. From 11 to 13 October 2017, the international and interdisciplinary research conference ‘Religious Minorities’ Self-Representations: Claims of Difference and Sameness in the Politics of Belonging’ was organised at Utrecht University as part of this research project. The conference has resulted in a series of blog posts by different conference participants on the website www.religiousmatters.nl which is hosted by the Project Manager, Professor Birgit Meyer. On 25 May 2018,a Dutch-Nordic research symposium titled ‘Religious Diversity, Gender and Belonging’ was organised at Utrecht University. Furthermore, the research project has resulted in a number of critical interventions in public debate in the Netherlands and Norway, in the form of opinion pieces and blog posts, public lectures, and interviews in newspapers and popular-science television programmes. Last but not least, on 19 April 2018, a panel debate was organised in Theater Kikker in Utrecht, in collaboration with a number of Dutch Muslim youth organisations. Four panellists discussed how their struggle against Islamophobia intersects with different struggles against sexism, anti-black racism and sectarianism among Muslims.
