Between the Binary: Becoming Muslim in White Holland
As a newly converted Muslim, I didn’t think everything would be easy. I expected mixed reactions from my family — but not from every other white Dutch person I encountered on the streets.
Five minutes after touching down in my passport country of the Netherlands, I receive my first stare. It’s the usual culprit, a middle aged white man, looking at me for far too long and with far too much intensity. Stares like these are something I have gotten used to by now, but I cannot say that they are something for which I was prepared.
I knew that converting to Islam from a white middle class background would mean certain difficulties for me, my family and my friends, but I didn’t expect to have to deal with the reactions of people on the street — namely the disdain I receive from my fellow ‘citizens.’
Before I continue, it’s important to say that becoming Muslim — especially becoming visibly Muslim — led me to experience discrimination that is only a fraction of what people of colour, immigrants, and other Muslims have been facing in the Netherlands for centuries. Though my experience as a white convert is undoubtedly an experience of Islamophobia, given the stereotypes and specific contempt that come from being a convert, my whiteness nonetheless gives me more privilege and ease within public spaces than the vast majority of Muslims in the Netherlands.
The convert’s experience of Islamophobia in the Netherlands is a manifestation of falling between the cracks of an imagined binary between Muslim and Westerner, oppressed and free, backwards and progressive. To choose to be Muslim is to choose something that is inherently against the national ethos. It is to be a mistake, something that should not exist — both Muslim and Dutch, as to be Dutch is to be white.
In a news documentary about converts, a convert spoke of how upon leaving a mosque in Amsterdam he was attacked by a white Dutch man who accused him of being a ‘traitor’ and specifically a ‘traitor to the nation.’ The backlash to immigration spearheaded by Geert Wilders and his far-right Party for Freedom has only emboldened Islamophobic and nationalistic violence such as that convert encountered.
Alhamdulillah (praise be to God), I have not experienced any direct physical or verbal violence since becoming Muslim. Peoples’ stares, however, carry a violence of their own, a powerful rejection of my presence and my choices, of my existence as a white convert.
“What affects me is the reaction of people on the street to my family and I, that we do not make sense together.”
The false binary between ‘Muslim’ and ‘Western’ or ‘Dutch’ is what lies behind the perplexed looks of those who do a double take when they see me. They see me and they have to look again because they cannot reconcile the fact that I am white with the fact that I am wearing hijab. My mom summed up this confusion perfectly when we were discussing how my grandparents would react to my conversion: the dominant, yet unspoken, view is that wearing hijab is not something Western — i.e. white — women do.
It’s easy for it to feel like it’s all in your head. It was only after a phone call with another Dutch convert who shared my experience of being constantly stared at while wearing hijab that I stopped feeling crazy. When a man on the tram chose to ask me directly about ‘that thing on my head,’ it revealed for me that I had not imagined the stares, nor the reasons behind them. He proceeded to tell me it always confuses him to see women who have light eyes and who also wear a headscarf. The binary between ‘Muslim’ and ‘Dutch,’ it seems, extends as far as eye colour.
I’ve stopped wearing hijab in Holland in a distinctively Muslim way: I’ve opted instead to wear it in a turban-style. A part of me feels that this is a cop out, but in reality, it is an exercise in self care. It became too overwhelming constantly dealing with the way people stared at me, where a simple outing with my family became a spectacle for others. My three tall brothers, my dad, my mother in a summer dress, and then me, ‘veiled.’ Surprising as it may seem, the simple act of covering my hair in turban style means that I can pass as a hipster —and be read again as white — and escape people’s stares.
While visiting home, my mom quit her job. Our celebration meant, in typical Dutch fashion, first going for drinks at a bar and then for dinner. Once we had sat down, my mom’s friend remarked that literally everyone in the bar had turned to look at me when we walked in. I began to realise how widespread the cultural segregation of Muslims and non-Muslims is in the Netherlands. I, as a Muslim, end up in spaces — because of my whiteness — which other Muslims typically do not. I only noticed the absence of other Muslims from such public spaces from the moment I donned a marker that set me visibly apart from other white Dutch people.
I visited a museum exhibit with my grandma and great aunt and, to my knowledge, I was the only Muslim there. I don’t believe that the Muslims in the Netherlands should aspire to be at bars or in Eurocentric spaces like museums: I’d sooner say white Holland should aspire to be in the mosque. However, I do think it points to an almost complete segregation between white Holland and ‘everyone else’ — a rift that has led to misunderstandings about Islam and about Muslims that I cannot even begin to describe.
The standard prejudices — being immediately asked about my opinion on ISIS and everyone assuming that I converted to marry a Muslim man — do not affect me deeply. What does, however, is the way people look at me, with a mixture of fear and shock. What affects me is the reaction of people on the street to my family and I, that we do not make sense together.
All I can hope for is that my visibility as a convert to Islam unsettles the binary, shakes people’s preconceptions and leads to new understandings: that indeed people choose to be Muslim and that to be Muslim is a wonderful thing.
