Woman mosque leader seeks new Muslim in Europe
Experts say it’s part of a European trend: many young Muslims on the continent are staying away from traditional mosques and meeting in more casual settings for prayer and study groups.
Fitting into European society while remaining rooted in Islam is no easy task among native populations that often resent the growing number of Muslims, and — many Muslims feel — discriminate against them in jobs and education.
Across Europe, conservative politicians are pushing to limit further immigration or to compel Muslims to abandon foreign ways.
In the Netherlands, where Muslims comprise 6 percent of the country’s 16.5 million people, an anti-Islam party has become the country’s fastest growing political movement. Its leader, Geert Wilders, complains that Muslims reject European liberalism, that they deny women equal rights and that they are intolerant of alternative lifestyles like homosexuality.
Wilders’ popularity is partly a reaction to a spate of Islamic radical violence that sent shudders through the nation a few years ago. In 2004, a young Muslim from the Slotervaart neighborhood murdered Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had produced a short film portraying alleged oppression of Muslim women. Police have broken up other alleged radical networks, and the Dutch secret service has warned that Holland remains a potential target for homegrown terrorism.
The Polder Mosque tries to find middle ground between Islamic radicalism and rightwing xenophobia. And it may be at the forefront of the effort to find, if not a European style of Islam, at least grounds for coexistence with European norms.
El Ksaihi seeks to make Islam more accessible to young Muslims born in a secular nation and make Muslims more acceptable to their neighbors. She wants congregants to embrace the religion and culture while extracting it from the homeland of their immigrant parents.
“We choose Dutch as the main language because we focus on the young people. Most of them can only speak Dutch,” she said. “If non-Muslims enter the mosque, they will hear what we are discussing. There is nothing scary about what we do.”
As administrator, El Ksaihi is in charge of finances and hires the imams who lead the prayers and deliver sermons. She says she finds imams that reflect the diversity of the Amsterdam Muslim community, including preachers from Malaysia and Indonesia as well as from Morocco and Turkey where most Dutch Muslims come from.
The mosque is a cultural center as much as a house of worship. “This is a traditional model of Islam. It’s not new,” she said. “We are going back to the roots. There is only one Islam.”
Mona Siddiqui, a professor of Islamic Studies at the University of Glasgow, says the Amsterdam mosque is part of wider movement that is just beginning to be felt in Europe.
“The mosque does stand for something — namely that Muslims in Europe are carving out new ways of addressing their own communities away from traditional and sometimes oppressive structures,” she said in an e-mail.
“That is a good thing in my opinion, but I am not sure that it is a defining moment. There are a huge variety of different Muslim communities in Europe and women have been making and continue to make their voices heard in all kinds of ways, even if this journey is a struggle sometimes,” she wrote.
Europe has an estimated 20 million Muslims, making Islam the continent’s second largest religion.
“Many young people have moved away from traditional mosque settings and organized their own ways of conducting worship,” said Siddiqui. That “bears witness to the changing pattern of worship in Europe.”
