By Thijl Sunier – Those who were in the Netherlands between 6-8 November could not possibly have missed it. Riots broke out around a football match between the Israeli Maccabi Tel Aviv team and Ajax, which took place in Amsterdam’s main football station Amsterdam Arena. The clashes were between the supporters of Maccabi and purportedly Dutch-Moroccan youngsters. In the night the city became the scene of a grim confrontation between several groups and the police.
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With the increasing social and political interest in Islam, social science research on Muslims has grown exponentially in recent decades. Yet, the very subject matter of this field is characterized by a degree of ambiguity: we study Muslims, but what does it actually mean to say that someone is a ‘Muslim’? Is there a coherent, universal ‘Muslim identity’ that we may find when we compare, say, Indonesian villagers to Moroccan-Dutch people in the suburbs of Amsterdam? To what extent should we see religion as a defining feature of the everyday lives of Muslims? These are difficult questions, which have become only more pertinent in the light of the heated public and political debates about Islam.
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