Good Muslims, good citizens? An intersectional approach to Muslims’ everyday (hidden) resistance tactics in Belgium

ABSTRACT

This paper explores Muslim participants’ political endeavours, aiming to tackle their marginalization in a secular racialized environment. Drawing on critical race scholarship (Du Bois), resistance studies (de Certeau, Scott) and lived experiences captured by in-depth interviews with Muslims in Belgium, I focus on everyday hidden resistance tactics enacted by my research subjects to challenge the status quo. I find my research participants aiming to counter racialization through everyday (hidden) practices such as reversing the Muslim gaze, modelling their religious behaviour as a form of da’wa and building up a counterpower to achieve recognition as citizen. Second, this study shows the salience of Du Bois’ notion of double consciousness – or Muslim participants seeing themselves through the eyes of the dominant group – shaping subordinate forms of political resistance.

KEYWORDS:

• Double consciousness
• hidden resistance tactics
• Muslims
• intersectionality
• political participation

Acknowledgement

The author gratefully acknowledges the support and valuable feedback provided by Nadia Fadil on previous versions of the manuscript. I thank the reviewers for their constructive and helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. There are no official statistiscs available regarding the percentage of Muslims in Belgium. I therefore rely on the Pew Research Center data

2. Permission was granted by the Ethical Commission of the university to which the author is affiliated.

3. This study aims to gain insights in Muslims’resistance strategies, without these findings being generalizable to the whole Belgian Muslim community.

4. When both or one of the parents/grandparents were born in a non-EU country, the participants are coded as respectively second and third generation.