ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to provide a modest contribution to a highly politicised debate on the integration of Muslims in the Netherlands. As an emotive topic, social integration of migrants features in the daily political discussions on Dutch identity, national policies on education and social security, and even in parliamentary debates. In The ‘Dutch experiment’: integration of Muslims in the Netherlands, authors argue that the Dutch media reporting has, over the past decade, tended to provide an oversimplified and easily exaggerated impression of the ‘problems’ associated with the integration of Dutch Muslims. Furthermore, the mainstream media has also tended to present political or social local opposition to Muslim migrants and mosque building in predominantly one-sided terms, labelling any such opposition, often erroneously, as ‘right-wing extremism’. Authors argue that a deeper understanding of the diversity of viewpoints when reporting on Dutch Muslim issues is often missing in the study of social, political and economic integration of various Muslim communities in the Netherlands. They form, as a collective, the largest religious minority group in the Dutch system of constitutional monarchy and parliamentary democracy. As the Netherlands is one the most populated countries in the world per capita, demographic pressures associated with social spaces where various ethnic, religious and linguistic groups co-exist should also find their place in the integration studies. Anti-Muslim sentiment and social tensions associated with migrants from Muslim countries seems to be more pronounced in the urban setting, where larger Muslim communities tend to be concentrated.
