Islam, locality and trust: making Muslim spaces in the Netherlands

The development of an Islamic infrastructure by Muslims with a migrant background in European contexts has hardly been addressed as expressing a sign of putting down local roots, but rather as an activity that contradicts such a process. However, the various ways in which Muslim migrants have built up local Muslim spaces, both now and in the past, are ordinary modalities of locality production. This is a contentious, complex, and multi-faceted dynamic. By unpacking a historical and a contemporary case, I shall address three broad questions: (1) What are the conditions for Muslim space-making? (2) What are the evolving and contested notions of space and locality that are being produced over time, and what are the religious underpinnings of this process? (3) Who are the main actors and what are the power configurations in which this process unfolds?