IDENTITY IN TRANSITION. CONNECTING ONLINE AND OFFLINE INTERNET PRACTICES OF MOROCCAN-DUTCH MUSLIM YOUTH

Abstract

The internet has become the principal platform for the dissemination and mediation of the ideology of Islamic movements, ranging from
purist (non-violent) to politically engaged movements to Jihadi networks. Certainly in intelligence and security circles the Internet is considered the single most important venue for the radicalization of Muslim youth. On the other hand the Internet is seen as a means for people to transcend ethnic and religious divisions that are pervasive
in other spheres of life. In this paper I will argue that both premises seem to result from a lack of understanding of the relationship between online and offline realities and still more from the difficulty of ascertaining the extent to which websites influence wider audiences and users. In order to understand the reception of Internet messages the local context and the way global narratives are appropriated in the
local context, should be taken into account. My argument will be based on my empirical study of the practices of Dutch Muslim youth with regard to the Internet; I will explore how they act simultaneously as performers and observers in these virtual spaces.

Full text

ISET WORKING PAPER 9
IDENTITY IN TRANSITION. CONNECTING ONLINE AND OFFLINE INTERNET
PRACTICES OF MOROCCAN-DUTCH MUSLIM YOUTH
Martijn de Koningi
International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM)
Leiden
the Netherlands
May 2008
The views expressed in this paper are those of the author, and do not represent the
collective view of ISET.
Institute for the Study of European Transformations (ISET)
166-220 Holloway Road, London N7 8DB
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7133 2927
Email: iset@londonmet.ac.uk
www.londonmet.ac.uk/iset

2
ABSTRACT
In the last 5 years the Internet has become the principal platform for the
dissemination and mediation of the ideology of Islamic movements, ranging from
purist (non-violent) to politically engaged movements to Jihadi networks. Certainly in
intelligence and security circles the Internet is considered the single most important
venue for the radicalization of Muslim youth. On the other hand the Internet is seen
as a means for people to transcend ethnic and religious divisions that are pervasive
in other spheres of life. In this paper I will argue that both premises seem to result
from a lack of understanding of the relationship between online and offline realities
and still more from the difficulty of ascertaining the extent to which websites influence
wider audiences and users. In order to understand the reception of Internet
messages the local context and the way global narratives are appropriated in the
local context, should be taken into account. My argument will be based on my
empirical study of the practices of Muslim youth with regard to the Internet; I will
explore how they act simultaneously as performers and observers in these virtual
spaces.
KEY WORDS
Internet, Muslim Youth, Identity, Radicalization, Liminality

3
INTRODUCTIONii
In the Netherlands the practices of Muslim youth in cyberspace gained significant
attention after film director and writer Theo van Gogh was murdered on 2 November
2004. The perpetrator Mohammed Bouyeri killed him because, according to him,
Theo van Gogh had insulted the prophet Muhammad in his writings and in the movie
Submission I he made with politician Ayaan Hirsi Ali. It was soon discovered that
Bouyeri and his friends (also known as the Hofstadnetwork) had been very active on
the Internet disseminating their own texts on several discussion forum, MSN groups
(‘the true Muslims’) and chatrooms (Lion of Tawhid on Paltalk). The Dutch General
Intelligence and Security Service (AIVD) mentioned in a report that a few of the
members of the Hofstadnetwork were influenced by radical texts on the Internet and
that they copy-paste their own Islam. According to the AIVD the freedom people have
to create their own Islam on the Internet, gives way to radicalisation (AIVD 2006: 27
and 42). The Dutch coordinator for counterterrorism (NCTb 2006: 33 and 45) has
more or less argued in the same way and also Meijer (2006) in her research on
Islamic schools warns for the potential dangers of the Internet that brings young
people in contact with ‘radical Quran texts’.iii
At the same time other researchers have argued that new media expand the public
domain and create new platforms on which people can express their interpretation of
Islam. Eickelman and Anderson (2003: 16) state the new relations emerge between
Muslims all over the world and that modern media create potential for new identities.
Mandeville (2001: 170) writes that Internet enables Muslims to construct their own
Islam and a new kind of imagined community. Although not necessarily contradictive,
I will show in this paper that the first approach is too negative while the second is too
optimistic. This is mainly caused by their lack of analysis about the relationship
between offline and online and the possibilities and restrictions individual users meet
on the Internet. In particular the radicalization thesis is flawed when it comes down to
analyze the relationship between offline and online and especially with regard to the
user of the Internet. The basic assumption seems to be that on the one hand the
individual user on the Internet is completely free to construct his or her own Islam

4
(which leaves the possibility that the Internet has its own structures of inequality and
exclusion and inclusion unaccounted for) while on the other hand the Internet seems
so powerful that it must lead to radicalization (thereby seeing the Internet user as a
passive and powerless observer). In this paper I argue that in order to fully
understand the online and offline identity politics of Muslim youth we must view the
online practices in a more dynamic way. The paper is based on a 6-year
anthropological fieldwork study carried out in a Moroccan-Dutch mosque and in the
mosque’s homework assistance program in Gouda, a small town of 70,000 people, in
the western part of Holland. The research into the websites started in 2004 as a part
of the author’s anthropological research into the meaning of religion for Moroccan-
Dutch youth.iv I focus on the process of the consumption and production of Islamic
knowledge and how Muslim youth acquire their sense of what Islam is.vIn this
process going online is not a medial state or a static presence but a state of transition
wherein online and offline stand into a dialogical relationship with each other, wherein
the offline world is asserted by users who act as performers and observers and
wherein online experiences becoming meaningful against the background of offline
experiences
Moroccan-Dutch Muslim youth in the Netherlands
Many of the discussions in the Netherlands focus on Muslim youth and in particular
Muslim youth of Moroccan descent. Given the fact that in the age category ten to
nineteen they represent twenty per cent of the Moroccan migrant population and in
the category twenty to thirty again twenty per cent, it is clear that youth constitute an
important part of the Moroccan community in the Netherlands (Van den
Maagdenberg. 2004: 13-14) Most studies pay little attention to the way people are
religious and to the question as to how they construct their religious identity. In my
Ph.D research I tried to fill that gap and I will summarize the most important points
here (De Koning 2008a, 2008b). The way young people construct their religious
identity can best be described as a quest for a true or pure Islam. This is a particular
way of interpreting and organizing the available cultural repertoires of beliefs,
practices and experiences that are seen as Islamic by themselves or others, in which
the idea of “one’s true self” is combined with the idea of an authentic core of Islam

5
that is neither ‘Moroccan’ nor ‘Dutch’.vi The ideas of purity and truth are constantly
negotiated with non-Muslims in different contexts. With regard to the Dutch
population Moroccan-Dutch youth increasingly are confronted by the native Dutch
tendency to categorize them as Muslims. During the last decade both the native
Dutch, as well as Moroccan-Dutch youth, interpret perceived differences between
them in religious terms. The search for a Muslim identity means, in relation to native
Dutch people, an attempt to transcend the perceived dichotomy between ‘Moroccan’
and ‘Dutch’, while at the same time trying to maintain a certain distance towards
Dutch society.
According to Moroccan-Dutch youth the native Dutch usually categorize them
negatively; Islam is portrayed as suspicious, related to terrorism, intolerance, and the
oppression of women. In particular ‘9-11’ and the murder of Van Gogh by
Mohammed Bouyeri in November 2004 serve as the exemplary events in the public
debate that are used to explain what is wrong with Islam, or, conversely, what is
wrong with the host countries of Muslim migrants. In the Netherlands, Muslims and
non-Muslims recognize that since ‘9-11’ criticizing Islam and Muslims is no longer
taboo and in some cases it is almost customary to do this in the strongest way
possible: the critique of Islam has sometimes been expressed in the harshest and the
bluntest terms.
Conversely, non-Muslims are just as much part of the process of identity
construction by Moroccan-Dutch youth as part of the Muslim community. Parents
frame the behavior of their children in terms of halal (permissible) and haram
(forbidden), they tell stories about the life of the prophet Muhammad, who serves as
a role model, and they teach the children how to pray. For the parents, Morocco
remains important as a continued frame of reference for their presence in Dutch
society and also for their religious beliefs and practices. This is not the case for
second generation Moroccan-Dutch youth. Partly this is a normal process during
which the new generation tries to adapt an existing religious tradition to the
challenges of modernity. Because of the inevitable changes that come with this re-
interpretation, many older people often experience these developments with regret
and nostalgia. Sometimes this may lead to conflicts over the question of who
interprets Islam the right way and who represents ‘the truth’.

6
In order for young people to structure the available repertoires of knowledge they
have to gather knowledge about Islam. The Internet has become one of the most
important tools that young people use when looking for authoritative sources and
persons. Although most of them tend to look for information on ‘Moroccan’ sites, the
sites of the Salafi movementsvii in the Netherlands stand out for their user-friendliness
and huge amount of texts and answers to the specific questions the younger
generations have. In almost all discussions, therefore, texts from these sites are used
to answer questions of other people or convince them of the validity of their own
opinions. At the same time however these Salafi movements have become the main
culprit in the counter radicalizations policies that came about after ‘9-11’ and in
particular after the murder of Van Gogh on 2 November 2004. They are linked to
intolerance against ‘infidels’ and inciting hatred against politicians and other opinion
leaders (De Koning 2008c). In combination with their dominance on the Internet, this
has triggered debates about the radicalization of Muslim youth by copy pasting their
own Islam on the Internet.
THE INTERNET AS A LIMINOID SPACE
Liminal and the liminoid
Wilson and Peterson (2002) make clear that in many studies concerning new media
lack an nuanced and sophisticated understanding of cultural practices and processes
leading to a focus on dichotomy between resistance and accommodation, production
and reception, online and offline and so on. Individuals and groups are continuously
redefining, renegotiating and reproducing multiple identities within particular political,
cultural and economical contexts. Several studies have tried to transcend the online-
offline dichotomy such as Awan (2007) and Wheeler’s (2001) of Kuwaiti women using
the Internet for political action or Corrells (1995) study of an online lesbian café that
shows how offline social roles and existing ideologies are played in online
communication (Wilson and Peterson 2001: 456).
In order to ‘draw cyberspace back into offline processes and practices’ Wilson and
Peterson (2001: 455) propose to use Appadurai’s concept of ‘mediascapes’ to

7
account for the fluidness and irregularities of new media, the trajectories and
modalities of media technology, its dissemination and the images that are produced
by these media (cf. Appadurai: 1990: 9). Others such as Wakeford (2003) see the
Internet (or, in particular, cyber cafés) as an example of ‘scapes of computing’.
Although these ideas might certainly be very useful, here I would like to explore a
much older idea in anthropology that has particular relevance for understanding the
Internet and the practices of Internet users.
Based upon observations in Internet cafes and mosques where young people have
access to the Internet and observations in chatrooms, two things immediately stand
out. First of all many people seem to be completely unaware of the physical place
they are in. Sometimes they talk out loud as a reaction to something they see on the
screen, many of them are so concentrated on what happens on the screen that it is
difficult to talk to them. Second, mainly based upon observations in chatrooms,
people are often not completely aware of the time they are active on the Internet.
Many visitors in chat rooms suddenly discover (when someone else makes a remark
about the time for example) that are already spending hours in that chat room and
that they should have gone to sleep since they have to get to work or school very
early.
During the time of my research I met Samira a very shy and modest girl. After a while
I found out that she was active on one of the largest Moroccan-Dutch communities on
the Internet: Marokko.nl. On this forum her performance was everything but shy and
modest. She insulted almost everyone she was discussing with, using harsh and foul
language and did not shy away from publishing personal details of journalists who
contacted her for an interview about her online practices. According to her it was just
a way to get rid of her daily frustrations and anger, something she found difficult in
every day offline life. This reminds us to anthropologist Victor Turners (Turner 1969:
167) ideas about liminality: “if liminality is regarded as a time and place of withdrawal
from normal modes of social action, it can be seen as potentially a period of
scrutinization of the central values or axioms of the culture in which it occurs”
Samiras status “becomes ambiguous, neither here nor there, betwixt and between all
fixed points of classification” (Turner 1969: 232), and therefore she escapes everyday
controls in which her behavior could have lead to serious negative consequences.

8
Turner has used the concept of liminality to describe and analyze the position of
subjects during ritual performances of the Ndembu tribe. According to him, the young
people experience during the rituals of transition that they are “a community or comity
of comrades and not a structure of hierarchically arrayed positions” (Turner 1967:
100). In this liminal phase in a transition ritual the individual is separated from his/her
previous position in society by symbolic acts. After the separation the individual is
reincorporated and takes up a new position in society (Turner 1969: 95) The
experience of equality, betwixt and between where structures (as in statuses,
hierarchy) do not apply, were conceptualized later on as communitas (Turner 1969).
Turner (1969: 129) perceived society as being involved in a dialectic process
between communitas and structure in a cyclic way: “Maximization of communitas
provokes maximization of structure, which in turn produces revolutionary strivings for
renewed communitas”. According to Turner communitas and liminality were
qualitatively different in industrialized societies compared to the Ndembu tribe. He
therefore introduced the term liminoid signifying the quasi-liminal character of cultural
performances such as theatre plays and leisure activities. Deflem (1991: 18)
describes that liminoid performances originate outside the boundaries of the
economic, political and structural process, they are voluntary, they are the product of
individual or specific group efforts and can be generated continuously. The
expressions of the liminoid often challenge the wider social structure by critiquing or
offer alternatives for transforming the dominant social order. Lövheim (2005) has
shown that, with regard to the Internet, websites and online interactions are distinct
from conditions and standards that structure offline lives of people in terms of time,
space, rules and positions in social interaction. Internet allows people to experiment
with social identities because of the ambiguity of online conditions and standards.
Online structures and hierarchies
The lack of parental control with regard to youth, the possibilities to combine different
repertoires of knowledge, means that the Internet as a liminoid space has a huge
potential for people to engage with and re-enact their daily lives and their (religious)
experiences and beliefs. The technical characteristics, the lack of supervision,
anonymity, the greater knowledge of youth about Internet (compared to their parents)

9
seem to make Internet the ideal place for youth creating a religion that is fully
detached from culture. Internet then contributes to the ideal of having a community
(or as Turner would have it: communitas) based solely on religion and where it does
not matter who people are (Dawson 2004: 80-81).
There are however important qualifications to be made with regard to Turner’s ideas
of the liminal and the liminoid and therefore also with regard to the Internet as a
liminoid space wherein communitas is generated. Most of these criticisms pertain to
the relationship between the liminal and the social structures outside the liminal and
therefore in terms of the Internet, the relationship between online and offline. Deflem
(1991: 18-19) shows that Turner has been criticized for overestimating the potential
of the liminal and the liminoid to challenge the social structures and neglecting the
ways in which the social structures respond to these challenges (with regard to the
Internet, think for example of the ways states try to reduce the privacy of people by
forcing Internet providers to release personal information of the their clients or by
forcing website providers to close racist, extremist sites). Deflem refers to Gluckman
who effectively argues that Turner did not take the dialogical natureof structure and
the liminal far enough by treating them as completely separate and different and by
arguing that communitas is significant only “within an established structure which is
asserted again afterwards, and which indeed is asserted during the liminal period
itself by inversion” (Gluckman and Gluckman 1977: 242 in Deflem 1991: 19). Another
important point of critique that Deflem mentions is Goffmans (Goffman 1961: in
Deflem 1991: 19) assertion that some marginal phenomena of the liminoid and
liminal are not at all contesting the social structure and do not lead to communitas but
instead bring about mechanisms by which the whole personality of the individual
stripped off (for example in prison or in gaming) or should be seen as outlets for the
social order.
Looking at how young people use the Internet as one of the major resources for to
look for authoritative sources and persons makes clear how this criticism also
pertains to the Internet. A quick search at sites such as Google.com or
Askjeeves.com with the word ‘Islam’, provides us with a huge amount of websites
ranging from discussion sites, to sites of scholars, to personal blogs of Muslims and
so on. This means on one the hand that the Internet offers a range of possibilities for
people to shape their identities; on the other hand, the overwhelming amount of sites

10
may also overpower them. People therefore have to discern ‘good’ knowledge from
‘bad’ knowledge or in the words of some of the young Muslims in my research to
discern ‘truth’ from ‘falseness’ (cf. McMillan and Morrison 2006: 91). One of the ways
we can analyze this process is looking at changes in religious knowledge and
religious authorities as a result of the Internet. In my research there are various
examples of this. Take for example the discussion on one of the MSN-communities
about using the pill for birth control. One man asked if it was halal (permissible) in
Islam for his wife to take the pill. Other participants contributed answering his
question by using statements from several scholars derived from Islam-qa, Al-
Islaam.com but also by using information from their GP and their own personal
experiences with the pill. Mandaville (2006) shows that this pluralization of
authorititative texts and people leads to the pluralization of coexisting discourses that
authorize or normatively orient social behavior. Important is who gave the answers
and what evidence from which sources did he or she used. Texts from pietist Salafis
have little authority among some of the youths who use texts from ‘political salafis or
‘jihadi’ salafists. Others however are not very interested in these quarrels and use
texts from different groups.
The reception of the texts and messages seems to be a largely individual process.
Most people read them online, download and print them but don’t discuss it with
others. A few others however discuss texts from different scholars with each others in
chatrooms and on online discussion groups (and sometimes also in offline networks).
This can lead to heated debates when people who follow different scholars clash with
each others and accusing each other of being a kafir (infidel), committing shirk
(idolatry) occurs frequently albeit that most of the participants try to refrain from that.
These clashes may lead to people breaking away from the established online
community and create a new community for themselves and others. New media
therefore not only signal a new type of distribution and consumption of religious
knowledge but also a new form of cognitive power and leadership with it’s own
structures and identity politics (Allievi 2003: 314; Bach 2004). This means that these
new structures and identity politics do not by definition lead to ‘communitas’ but
rather to a fragmentation into several communities.
These new structures are also visible in the websites themselves. These structures
do not only pertain to power relations between different online groups, but also to the

11
characteristics of the Internet. White (2006a) shows how the technological, visual
aspects and contents of websites instruct people how to follow particular rules, how
to define themselves and how people can engage these sites. The rules and
standards of Internet discipline the users. In particular forums avatars of jihadi
warriors are forbidden while in others they seem to be the rule. In other forums the
possibility of people exchanging private messages is severely restricted (certainly in
case of exchanges between men and women). In some of the registration forms
people have to fill in their gender but also their religion and in many cases
atheist/secular worldviews but also Hindu and Buddhist are not possible choices.
Often people can use several avatars but these avatars themselves often reproduce
stereotypical images of Muslims, Muslim women, skin colour, bodily aspects of men
and women (cf. White 2006b: 346).
USERS AS PERFORMERS AND OBSERVERS
Reconstituting and translating identity
We can see the Internet as a liminoid space with new forms of distributing
knowledge, hierarchies, structures and identity politics. What does this mean for the
users? Valentine and Holloway (2002) show how the Internet enables teens to re-
configure their social relationships and identities in online spaces. These
relationships and identities are usually situated upon, and representations of, their
offline identities and activities. In this process offline relationships and inequalities are
reproduced. In order to understand such processes we have to ask then what
happens when a person goes online and enters the cyberspace of Islamic sites,
blogs, and chat rooms and so on. From a physical person this man or woman is
transformed into a person that is both digital (the online identity) and physical (the
spectator). When online, people are no more then digital codes without any meaning.
People therefore have to find ways to make their presence on the Internet
meaningful. We can see this on the Internet in different ways. For example people
choosing their own avatars (signs) on fora, chatrooms and in particular in Second Life
where the avatars are not merely abstract signs or faces but complete digital bodies.
While Islamic dress in offline realities is seen as statement (Moors 2004) for example

12
emphasizing personal choice (Bartels 2005), a girl using an avatar of a girl like figure
with a headscarf can also be seen as a visual statement. Other ways of doing this is
choosing particular names as nicknames such as ‘Umm Osama’, ‘Islamlove’ and
‘Talib al Ilm’. Creating your own websites, blogs and chatrooms is also a way of
making your presence known and meaningful, the same as spreading your own texts
and movies. Choosing your own nickname and making your presence known is very
important also when people are engaging with others online. Consider for example
Amina’s account of her chat activities:
I always introduce myself as Moroccan. Look, I usually chat on a Moroccan channel,
so I expect everyone there to be Moroccan. First thing you hear then is, are you
Berber or Arabic? When you are Berber and the other one is Arabic, they often leave
you because they want to talk with an Arab person.
Amina like many other boys and girls in my research look for people of whom they
expect of having the same backgrounds and (therefore) the same interests. Given
the fact that Internet is mostly a textual medium, people like Amina often use
stereotypical images and texts in order to present themselves and to assess other
users. This is done to make identification with others faster and easier (cf. Dawson
2004: 77-78; De Koning 2008b).
Given the disciplinary aspects of the Internet as a liminoid space I mentioned in the
former paragraph, the process of translating and reconstituting ones identities has to
be accomplished according to the conventions of the medium (cf. Waskul 2005: 54-
57). As stated on some sites it is not allowed to use jihadi avatars while on other sites
it seems to be the rule. The deliberative and disciplinary aspects of these sites are in
fact mutually constitutive. The disciplinary aspects make it possible for users to
perform their acts of reconstructing the self and society. Being active on a Jihadi site
or instead on a website that spreads messages against jihad is a performative act in
itself. Also publicly declaring you do not want to receive messages from ‘brothers’ or
‘sisters’ is a way of expressing ones faith. In their performances users at the same
contribute to these rules and standards as for example happens in the chatrooms
where people who do not want to finish their debates while the Quran is being played
are called to order by the other participants.

13
Observing and performing
During the process of translating and reconstituting ones identity, the Internet user is
both observer and performer. Let us take a look at one of the messages that were
spread by one of the members of the Hofstadnetwork:viii
Dear brothers and sisters in Islam, I would like to remind you again to the importance
of your contribution (‘in the fight between light and dark/good and evil’ MdK). At this
moment the Internet is one of the few means to our disposal. We should make use of
it as good as we can, and reach out to as many brothers and sisters as possible. You
could for example forward this message to other brothers and sisters. May Allah
reward you with Al-Firdous (paradise, MdK).
This was part of a message about, according to the writer, the deplorable state the
Muslim ummah is in because of the lack of faith among Muslims. Muslims should be
mobilized to fight against disbelief. The message can be regarded as a means to
incite people to protest and even violence, but for the writer it was also a means to
make his presence on the Internet meaningful, to recreate and relive his rebirth as a
Muslim (since in the years before he did ‘not really practice the faith’). It is clear that
the writer is not just a passive observer, but should be seen as an Internet activist.
The user as both observer and performer also pertains to people who only read
online texts or only engage in a minor way with others online. Interesting is that one
of the messages of Mohammed Bouyeri (‘To catch a wolf’) on a small forum such as
Islam.startkabel.nl. is the most popular topic with 91 reactions and 2256 viewings but
before 2 November 2004 (the day on which Bouyeri killed Van Gogh) there were only
20 reactions; the rest was posted after 5 November. Huks (2005) account of a photo
exhibition about 9/11 in which he refers to Nietzsche and Barthes is very useful to
comprehend what is happening when people view films, photos or in this case
Bouyeri’s texts. According to Barthes the medium and the image collide and the
result of this collision can only be experienced in a secondary act of reflection. What
has happened on the Internet forum is that the observers on the Internet project
meaning onto the text even before reading it. The text has gained new meanings
because of the murder on Van Gogh which is shown by the fact that the visitors after

14
5 November did not post reactions about the text but about the murder on Van Gogh
and/or about the fact that it was written by Bouyeri. Viewing the text also means that
the viewer is consuming the textual experience among other things based upon his
knowledge of the writer’s identity.
Here we also see that the process of translating and reconstituting the self online
takes place against developments offline. Offline events, in this case the murder of
Van Gogh, influence the way people consume texts online. Another example of this
is the case of Samira mentioned above. In her discussions on the Internet she
focused on the ‘macho behaviour’ of Moroccan-Dutch boys and the ‘racist attitude’ of
Dutch people towards Muslim youth. Her strong feelings were brought about by the
debates in the Netherlands about ‘lover boys’ (young men who seduce young women
and girls and force them into prostitution), crime rate among Moroccan-Dutch boys
and Islam. Her online practice therefore shows how her offline experiences are
expressed online and that her online practices should be understood against the
background of her daily offline experiences. Rather than seeing the Internet as
completely separate from the offline world we should see the Internet as a liminoid
space that stands into a dialogical relationship with the offline world wherein the
offline world is asserted and wherein online experiences becoming meaningful
against the background of offline experiences (that can be influenced by prior online
experiences). Being online is therefore not a medial state but given the dialogical
character of the online and offline we should see the presence in cyberspace as a
transition, as Turnbull (1990: 77-78) makes clear. While online the self and is
continuously re-negotiated between online and offline realities and experiences and
the online performer creates his or her own online existence and is regulated by the
standards of the medium. The nature of this transition is different for each person
since people play different roles online and there differences in, for example,
authoritative status.

15
THE RECEPTION OF ONLINE ISLAM
Distance and proximity
Having explained how the Internet can be seen as a liminoid space wherein
individual users acts as observers and performers, we can now move to an account
of the process of reception of online Islam by individual users. The relationship
between religion and media has only recently become a topic of research (Hoover &
Lundby 1997). The increasing mass mediatisation of the public sphere, the
increasing public character of religion and the proliferation of electronic media and
the crisis of the nation-state make a more profound understanding of religion being
mediated by the Internet necessary (Meyer & Moors 2006: 2-3). In this paragraph I
will analyze the process of consuming Islam online by focusing on four aspects that
are important for the constant re-negotiating between online and offline realities:
distance, the creation of an imaginary ummah, agenda- and frame-setting and going
virtual as part of every day religious experience.
The way young people deal with religious texts and authoritative texts points to an
interesting aspect of cyberspace: distance. On the one hand people seek out
religious authorities ranging from Yusuf Qaradawi (a renowned orthodox mufti) to
Amr Khaled (preaching a conservative ‘light’ version of Islam) and Abdullah Faisal (a
radical jihadi preacher), who are far away. On the other hand themes that seem
important far away such as the war in Iraq and the Palestinian case come closer into
people’s every day life. Mandeville (2007: 107-108) calls this process spatial
pluralization: changes with regard to how far away and in what kinds of spaces one
seeks authority and authorization. These changes do not only expand the range of
authoritative texts and voices but they also mean that the local authoritative
discourse is influenced by or constructed in relation to themes, texts, persons and
debates at a considerable distance. An example of this in my research is when a few
young Muslims contacted a mufti in Jemen, via a Dutch salafi website that had his
mobile number on the site, to ask him for advice about the rulings of an imam in their
home city The Hague and later on confronted this imam during his Friday sermon
with this piece of advice. The issue on which these young Muslims sought advice
was the criticism of this imam of the speeches and interviews of Hirsi Ali.ix In this

16
case a Dutch local issue is made global by the actions of these youngsters (first
online and then by mobile phone) and in return debates in the transnational salafi
movements, of which both the boys, the Jemeni mufti and the imam in the Hague are
part of, influence this local issue. This also shows again that the relationship between
online and offline is mutually constitutive (Valentine and Holloway 2002: 307).
Bunt (2000) makes clear how different the practice of Muslim youth looking for
authoritative persons and texts is, compared to the practice of their. Most of the
parents here would go to a local imam they know with their questions. They know
what kind of education the imam had and usually have a reasonable indication of the
viewpoints of the imam who also knows them. On the Internet this isusually not the
case. Asking questions to a scholar of Islam far away gives people the advantage
that there is no control by that scholar of how people interpret and practice his
rulings. It allows them, to a certain extent, to create their own Islam also because
religious knowledge is no longer the monopoly of certain specialized individuals. By
storing certain texts on the Internet, people can use these texts by spreading them
and copy-paste them into new texts.
The influence of far away conflicts among Moroccan-Dutch Muslim youth, and of the
religious authorities in the Middle East, broadens the perspective of these young
people in ways that are sometimes seen as detrimental to the process of their
integration into Dutch societies. The feeling that Muslims do not acknowledge the
Dutch nation-state as their moral community but instead look for strong moral
benchmarks in a globalized Islam, triggers to a certain extent the same distrust as in
the case of foreign imams whose influence is also seen as hindering integration and
at odds with a possible emergence of a ‘Dutch’ Islam (Boender 2007, Vink 2007). For
most of the Moroccan-Dutch Muslim youth, however, such a perspective does not
fully take into account the ways in which they construct their Muslim identities. On the
one hand young people are seeking strong moral benchmarks but, on the other
hand, are looking for a way to manage their loyalties towards Dutch society, their
parents, their peers and so on, all of which inevitably leads to compromises. Their
search for a ‘true’ Islam that is neither ‘Dutch’ nor ‘Moroccan’ does not mean a break
with Dutch society or with the Moroccan (first generation) migrants but represents a
merging of the idea of the authentic self with the idea of a pure Islam as revealed by
Allah (Roy 2004: 23, Jacobsen 2005: 160). It reflects a transformation in society that

17
enhances self-fulfilment, individual choice and assertiveness (Van den Brink 2002,
Pels 2003). Combining the idea of one’s true self with the search for the true Islam
forces people to study Islam themselves and to ask the question ‘what Islam really
says’ (De Koning 2008b). While combining the search for a ‘true’ self with the search
for a ‘true’ Islam in their identity politics, they have to negotiate with others and
account for their choices. This means that also the ideas they receive from the
Internet are re-negotiated with others.
Online and offline should therefore not be equated. There are ‘filters’ between
authorities and ‘lay’ people. Notwithstanding the enormous presence of modern
media, it is still impossible to reach everyone. This enormous presence also makes it
impossible for recipients to acquire all of the information that is spread. With regard to
this, in my research it is clear that Muslim youth use religious authority to discard or
approve certain messages before they even read them as a means to establish some
order in the huge pile of information they receive. Also recipients of the same
message can interpret this in distinct ways. Publics therefore can use religious
authority and media for their own ends and purposes.
Re-creating the ummah
There is one area in which the Internet seems to be very successful in creating new
ties between people: international politics. The situation in Iraq, Afghanistan,
Chechnya, Palestinian areas is brought into the daily lives of people by stories of
martyrs, films, photos and so on. The idea of a unified and worldwide Muslim
community, Ummah, is very strong partly because of the Internet and other mass
media. Images of destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian area’s that are
spread easily and very fast and on a large scale, are combined with antagonistic
feelings about being Muslim in Dutch society. This contributes to the idea that Islam
is under threat.
For many users the discourse of a global Muslim ummah enables them to understand
themselves and the world around them as part of a larger struggle between good and
evil, between Islam and the West and gives them a framework to engage in debates
about local and global politics. Important I think in understanding the relationship

18
between media, geopolitics, contemporary religion and religious authority is the use
of visual messages. Much of what people know and say is visually coded information
and how people give meaning to these images is part of their identity (Hoover 2001:
158-159, White 2004: 206). Video sites such as Youtube and IslamTube will most
likely mean that also on the Internet visual messages will become more and more
important. It makes clear why so many of the debates about for example preacher
Amr Khaled pertains to the way he dresses and for example the many video
testaments of martyrs provided an example for one of the members of the
Hofstadnetwork (Samir Azzouz) in making his own videotestament. Certainly in the
case of so called Jihadi websites it is in particular these kinds of written and
videotaped messages that are feared by the larger public and security services.
Although in the case of the Hofstadnetwork there is a link with radicalization, in most
cases the identification with the global Ummah (and injustice) and Jihad is not only a
political incentive but also a spiritual one in the sense that fighting the violent Jihad is
the highest form of following God’s will (and therefore the true Islam). Spreading
Jihadi messages or engaging in discussions can be seen as an an act of spreading
the call, da‘wa, but also as an ongoing process of asserting one’s own place in the
world as a person who tries to be a devout Muslim. Many of the Moroccan-Dutch
Muslim youth go through several phases of increased attention on Islam after periods
of neglecting their faith. The Internet can contribute to that, but these online activities
can also be a result of their ‘waking up’ as Muslims, as I have shown elsewhere (De
Koning 2008d). Their online activities are a way to recall and relive their ‘rebirth’ as a
Muslim (cf. Coleman. 2003). For most of them it just gives a feeling of empowerment
and moral virtue and it is not necessary an incentive for action (Werbner 2004: 455).
Being active on these sites or on other forums discussing about global politics and
jihad gave them a sense of being involved in the well being of Muslims worldwide or
even as a cybermujahideen (a virtual fighter of the jihad).
Alternative media, agenda-setting and frame-setting
In his research on Jihadi websites Awan (2007: 400) states that there is ample
evidence for Internet radicalization in the existing cases of terrorism and that it is
difficult to assess to what degree these sites influence wider audiences albeit that in

19
the case of recruitment Internet does seem to play an important role. In my research
many young people visited so called radical or Jihadi sites but for a number of
reasons. One of the most important reasons was that they saw these sites as an
alternative to ‘Western’ and/or ‘Dutch’ media they deemed as not objective and in
favour of the US. In other cases young people wanted to know more about the violent
Jihad. This corresponds with the findings of Awan (2007: 396-397) who gives several
functions of Jihadi websites one of them being sites for expression of their political
activism (without resorting to violence) and an outlet for people to express their
frustration and anger. Important is this regard is also that, based upon my
observations in chatrooms and interviews, that sites which pay attention to the
position of the global ummah (within a Jihadi framework or another) contribute to
agenda setting. Agenda setting refers to the idea that mass media have a strong
influence on the importance people attribute to particular issues (e.g., the conflict
between the Israelis and the Palestinians) (McCombs & Shaw, 1972). This is related
to the opinion of many of the people in my research group that Islamic websites form
an alternative to Western news sources. With regard to this the influence of the
websites pertains to the topics people deem important and on which they establish
and express their own opinions. An important example in my research was the case
of Muhammad Al-Durra. In 2000 the images of this young Palestinian boy in Netzarim
in the Gaza Strip being killed went all over the world but were particularly apparent on
several Islamic websites and the debates about it were very emotional. Pictures and
parts of the film where one can see how he is protected by his father before being
killed, were spread rapidly via websites and email groups. During the 2005/2006
Ethnobarometerxresearch on the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims
this event was used as an example by Moroccan-Dutch Muslims to explain to non-
Muslims their identification with the Palestinians. The non-Muslim participants
however did not seem to remember the issue at all. Media therefore can decide upon
the topics people think about and the way they think about it. Being active on the
Internet liminoid people therefore can generate some sense of connectedness with
other Muslims, freely outside other (offline) social structures. The fact however that
Moroccan-Dutch youth express their relation with Palestinians in terms of ‘Muslim
brothers’ and ‘Our land, Muslim land’ means that there is more then just agenda
setting (De Koning 2008b). What matters on these sites is not only what kind of
issues are displayed and discussed, but also how. This can be seen as a particular

20
kind of agenda setting, but is more often (and more adequate) conceptualized as a
different kind of theory: framing (Scheufele 1999, Scheufele and Tewksbury 2007).
According to Goffman (1974) individuals have difficulties to understand the world fully
and are struggling to give meaning to their lives and the social realities around them.
In order to process new information in an efficient and effective manner Goffman
(1974) makes clear that individuals apply interpretive schemas ‘primary frameworks’
to categorize information and give meaning to it. Framing does not dictate how
people exactly think about a certain topic but it does influence the salience and
relevance attributed to it (Scheufele 1999). By referring to Israel and the Palestinian
areas as ‘our land’ Moroccan-Dutch youth attach a particular ‘Islamic’ repertoire to it
that articulates ‘injustice’ and some of them see the struggles of the Palestinians as a
part of a larger war against Islam by infidels.
Internet as a liminoid space transcends the boundaries and social structures of offline
daily lives. This almost by definition means that it also challenges the offline social
structures for example because people can obtain different kind of knowledge by
looking at alternative news sites. In particular, gruesome pictures and videos of
victims of the Israëli soldiers or of the US occupation of Iraq (often not shown in
Dutch news programs) play an important role in that. Another important aspect is the
dominance on the Dutch part of the Muslim cyberspace of salafist websites (De
Koning and Bartels 2006, De Koning 2008a). The salafist groups do not only
challenge some of the values that are highly valued in Dutch society(such as
toleration of homosexuality, the importance of democracy and freedom of speech)
but also the traditional existing umbrella organizations of Muslims (De Koning 2008c).
It is in particular the salafi groups who are very successful in creating new ties among
Muslims based upon the idea of the global ummah. These Salafi groups (in particular
those supporting the global jihad) try to frame the suffering of people in Chechnya,
the Palestinian areas, Iraq and Afghanistan or particular incidents such as the
Cartoon affair and the film Submission I (of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Theo van Gogh) as
part of the war against Islam. In this way the try to create what Bayat (2005: : 904)
has called ‘imagined solidarities’: forged spontaneously among different actors who
come to a consensus by imagining, subjectively constructing, common interests and
shared values between themselves.

21
Experiencing Islam
For Moroccan-Dutch youth being active on the Internet, gathering information,
discussing about Islam is a way of being and becoming Muslim in itself. Given the
above mentioned reconstituting of identities, this kind of experience is
understandable. The fact that the self and society has to be redefined by the Internet
user means that people have to reflect about themselves and their identities.
Consuming texts, video messages and photos is therefore to be understood as new
way of actively engaging with Islam. Two aspects that are not mentioned yet are of
particular importance in the shaping of religious subjects: all kinds of stories, pictures
that show the greatness of Islam and the benevolence of God, and reading and
listening to the Quran on the Internet.
One aspect of experiencing Islam, that stands out in my research is the appearance
of what I call Islamic legends (cf. Burger 2006). These legends are usually stories but
they can also be PowerPoint presentations, films, photos and combinations of these.
There are stories for example of girls who get trapped in the hands of ‘lover boys’ and
become rescued by a pious Muslim man, stories about non-Muslims who suddenly
experience the presence of God because a Muslims recites the Quran after which the
non-Muslims breaks out in tears and subsequently becomes Muslim. It is difficult to
assess whether these stories are true or not, but they usually are connected to every
day realities of people (such as the ‘lover boys’) and the are experienced as true and
told to others as if one was present at the events and/or familiar with the people in
the stories (Meder 2003, Burger 2006). The kind of legend that was viewed and
downloaded often were photos with Islamic miracles such as the name of God in the
clouds, a tree in Australia bending as if it was praying into the direction of Mecca, and
so on. These stories, pictures can be understood as sensational forms. According to
Meyer (2006: 9) sensational forms are “[…]relatively fixed, authorized modes of
invoking, and organizing access to the transcendental, thereby creating and
sustaining links between religious practitioners in the context of particular religious
organizations. Sensational forms are transmitted and shared, they involve religious
practitioners in particular practices of worship and play a central role in forming
religious subjects.”

22
The Islamic legend is a complex of images and/or texts by which ideas about the
benevolence and power of God are mediated. In some of the emails containing these
messages one can read: ‘Makes you think or does it not?’ In the discussions I had
with young Muslims they refer to their ideas about God, the kind of God he is and
what his characteristics are. The legends evoke therefore the relationship with the
transcendental. The idea of God is manifested in concrete pictures and stories and
the experience of God’s presence and benevolence expresses itself by emotions
such as awe and astonishment. The astonishment of youth is for example shown by
the fact that they find it hard to make their idea of the transcendent concrete. The
images evoke this astonishment and speechlessness, but at the same time challenge
people to find an interpretation. Many of them refer back to the image in order to
explain the greatness of God by saying: see? Where God is for them eternal,
omnipresent and powerful and therefore hard to grasp for believers, these
sensational forms open up the idea of God so as to give meaning to that idea without
loosing the idea that God is in fact above human imagination (cf. Meyer 2006: 10-11).
The second aspect of experiencing Islam that is important can also be seen as
sensational form: the Quran online. The Quran can be read on numerous websites
and many of them also offer the possibility of listening to Quran recitals. This does
not replace the more traditional forms of reciting and memorizing the Quran and both
the new and old forms contribute to produce a disciplined personality and creates
communal ties with others (Turner 2007). Muslim youth listen to recorded recitals for
relaxation and to improve their moral and ethical discipline. Hirschkind (2001, 2006)
has shown how the consumption of cassette tapes with Quran recitals strengthens
the willpower among believers and stimulates their capacity to resist everyday
temptations and follow the path of God. This capacity is mainly trained by repeatedly
listening to the tapes. When listening to the tapes young people already have formed
their opinions and thoughts about Islam and listening to it means that their existing
repertoire of beliefs is questioned. Listening to the tapes is therefore a kind of
dialogue between them and God. Understanding the recitals is important but not
necessary. Most of the Moroccan-Dutch Muslim youth do not speak and/or
understand the Arab language but still respond to Quran recitals. An example of this
is when a group in a youth centre was drinking alcohol and smoking cigarettes and
joints. When one of them put a cassette tape on with a Quran recital, all of them put

23
away the drinks and the cigarettes. This shows that Muslim youth who have only a
minor religious orientation respond to it. The same can be said for Quran recitals on
the Internet. Muslim youth use the recitals on the Internet to listen tothem while
surfing, for downloading on iPods or mobile phones. This is done for pleasure and
relaxation for example before an important event in schools but also when they are
very angry or frustrated. In chat rooms Quran recitals are often used to end a heated
debate in which emotions run very high. In most chat rooms it isnot allowed to speak
or write texts during when the Quran recital is on. Although most of the time the
debate does not immediately end, in most cases the atmosphere does become
friendlier during and after the recital.
The pictures, videos and the Quran recitals contribute to an auditory, visual and
textual construction of cyberspace. In his research on cassette tapes Hirschkind
(2006: 125) calls this construction a sensory environment the subject has to engage
and from which he draws his attitude and experiences. The practices of Muslim youth
with regard to online Quran recitals and the Islam legends show that also in the case
of the Internet this environment nurtures and stimulates the affection of individuals for
a particular kind of moral orientation and activates particular religious repertoires
(Hirschkind 2006: 124-125).
CONCLUSION
In this paper I focus on process of the consumption and production of Islamic
knowledge and how Muslim youth acquire their sense of what Islam is by using the
Internet. Going online is to be seen as a transition in which in individual users act as
performers who are re-defining and reconstituting their identities constantly
renegotiating between online and offline realities and experience in order to make
their presence in the virtual world meaningful according to the procedures and
standards of the medium. In order to make his presence online possible, known and
meaningful the person has to engage with and subject himself to a sensory
environment with its own visual, textual, auditory and technological structures. In this
process of engaging and subjecting oneself, the Internet user is both performer and

24
observer. As an observer he sees texts, photos and films, but in order to understand
them he projects online and offline experiences onto the Internet content and
similarly consumes the new virtual experience.
The online experiences cannot be equated with people’s experiences in their offline
daily lives but they do have consequences for every day offline life. The pluralization
of Islamic knowledge is one of the most important transformative developments that
occur within the liminoid space. New themes emerge, people seek out religious
authorities that are at a distance and at the same time distant themes are
incorporated into the daily lives of people. Within this process people tend to look for
like minded people which may lead to a new sense of communitas but at the same
time also leads to new processes of inclusion and exclusion. People can use the
liminoid space as a space for experimenting outside the other offline structures but
are confronted with new structures and hierarchies in the liminoid space with which
they have to engage and that provide the framework within they can express their
online presence.
What is often defined as online radicalization is therefore first and foremost the result
of the process of reconstituting the self and society online. The different reasons
people have for visiting so-called radical sites, make clear that it is too simple to
equate every visitor of these sites as radical. Nevertheless the transformative
potential of the Internet is very clear in particular because the so-called radical salafi
sites are very successful in forging new bonds and create such sensory
environments that make people aware of involved with the fight against ‘injustice
against Muslims worldwide’. Deeming them as radical as is done by for example the
AIVD is therefore not just a neutral line of policy but an attempt to react against the
features of online performances and structures that potentially challenge the existing
status quo in society.
The framework of the Internet as a liminoid space where users are both observers
and performers within the technological, visual and auditory environments that are
produced, is useful in analyzing how people acquire their sense of what Islam is
without reducing them to passive consumers or powerful individuals who can copy-
paste their own Islam without any restrictions. It also provides us with important
questions that cannot be fully answered yet on the basis of my research. More

25
research needs to be done for example about how people mediate their presence
online by avatars and how they reproduce stereotypical representations of identities.
Other questions pertain to issues such as how people experience the differences and
similarities of offline and online daily lives? Given the dominance of the salafi sites on
the Internet also important questions have to be asked. Did these movements
understand the transformative potential earlier then other movements? What is the
relationship between their dominant position and certain technological and content
standards on the Internet (such as the clear preference for short texts and
increasingly also video and audio material)? Taking these questions seriously will
lead us to a better understanding of online experiences within the broader framework
of social, economic, political and cultural politics without treating websites and their
visitors as inherently dangerous or deviant.

26
REFERENCES
AIVD 2006. Jaarverslag 2005. Den Haag: Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken.
Allievi, S. 2003. 'The Media', in B. Maréchal, S. Allievi, F. Dassetto and J. S. Nielsen
(eds.), Muslims in the enlarged Europe, pp. 289-330. Leiden: Brill.
Appadurai, A. 1990. 'Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy',
Public Culture, 2(2): 1-24.
Awan, A.N. 2007. 'Virtual jihadist media. Function, legitimacy and radicalizing
efficacy', European Journal of Cultural Studies, 10(3): 389-408.
Bach, A. 2004. Religion, politics, media in the broadband era. Sheffield: Sheffield
Phoenix Press.
Bartels, E. 2005. 'Wearing a headscarf is my personal choice', Journal of Islam and
Christian-Muslim Relations, 16(1): 15-29.
Bayat, A. 2005. 'Islamism and Social Movement Theory', Third World Quarterly,
26(6): 891-908.
Boender, W. 2007. Imam in Nederland. Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
Bunt, G. 2000. Virtually Islamic. Computer-mediated communication and cyber
Islamic environments. Cardiff: University of Wales Press.
Burger, P. 2006. De dankbare terrorist. En andere sagen en geruchten van deze tijd.
Amsterdam: Bert Bakker.
Coleman, S. 2003. ‘Continuous Conversion? The Rhetoric, Practice and Rhetorical
Practice of Charismatic Protestant Conversion’, in A. Buckser and S.D. Glazier
(eds.), The Anthropology of Religious Conversion, Lanham, MD: Rowman and
Littlefield. pp. 15-28. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield.
Correll, S. 1995. 'The ethnography of an electronic bar', Journal of Contemporary
Ethnography, 24(3): 270-298.
Dawson, L.L. 2004. 'Religion and the Quest for Virtual Community', in L. L. Dawson
and D. E. Cowan (eds.), Religion Online: finding faith on the internet, pp. 75-92. New
York, London: Routledge.
De Koning, M. 2008a. ''You Follow the Path Of the Shaitan: we try to follow the
righteous path.' Negotiating Evil in the Identity Construction of Young Moroccan-
Dutch Muslims', in L. Minnema and N. Van Doorn-Harder (eds.), Coping with Evil in
Religion and Culture: Case Studies, pp. 137-148. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi.
De Koning, M. 2008b. Zoeken naar een ‘zuivere’ islam. Geloofsbeleving en
identiteitsvorming van jonge Marokkaans-Nederlandse moslims. Amsterdam: Bert
Bakker.
De Koning, M. 2008c, ‘The “other” political Islam. Understanding Salafi politics’, in
Amel Boubekeur and Olivier Roy (eds.), Whatever Happened to the Islamists?
Salafis, Heavy Metal Muslims, and the Lure of Consumerist Islam,
Hurst/Columbia,forthcoming
De Koning, M. 2008d. 'Changing Worldviews and Friendship. An Exploration of the
Life Stories of Two Female Salafists in the Netherlands', in R. Meijer (ed.), Global
Salafism, London: Hurst. Forthcoming.

27
De Koning, M. and Bartels, E. 2006. 'For Allah and myself. Religion and Moroccan
Youth in The Netherlands. ' in P. H. F. Bos and W. Fritschy (eds.), Morocco and The
Netherlands. Society, Economy, Culture. , pp. 146-156. Amsterdam: VU Publishers.
Deflem, M. 1991. 'Ritual, Anti-Structure, and Religion: A Discussion of Victor Turner's
Processual Symbolic Analysis', Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 30(1): 1-
25.
Droogers, A. 2003. 'The power dimensions of the christian community: an
anthropological model.' Religion, 33(3): 263–280.
Eickelman, D.F. and Anderson, J. 2003. 'Redefining Muslim Publics', in D. Eickelman
and J. Anderson (eds.), New Media in the Muslim World. The Emerging Public
Sphere, pp. 1-18. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Gluckman, M. and Gluckman, M. 1977. 'On drama and games and athletic contests',
in S.F. Moore and B. Myerhof (eds.), Secular ritual, pp. 227-243. Assen: Van
Gorcum.
Goffman, E. 1961. Asylums: Essays on the social conditions of mental patients and
other inmates. Hammondsworth: Penguin.
Goffman, E. 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. New
York: Harper & Row.
Hirschkind, C. 2001. 'The ethics of listening: cassette-sermon audition in
contemporary Egypt', American Ethnologist, 28(3): 623-649.
Hirschkind, C. 2006. The ethical soundscape: cassette sermons and counterpublics.
New York: Columbia University Press.
Hoover, S.M. and Lundby, K. 1997. 'Introduction: Setting the agenda', in S.M. Hoover
and K. Lundby (eds.), Rethinking media, religion, and culture, pp. 3-14. Thousand
Oaks: Sage Publications.
Huk, P. 2005. 'Monological Discourse and the Creation of Villains: a staging of
witnesses after 9/11', Third Wold Quarterly, 26(3): 543-550.
Jacobsen, C. 2005. 'The Quest for Authenticity: Islamization Amongst Muslim Youth
in Norway', in J. Cesari and S. McLoughlin (eds.), European Muslims and the secular
state, pp. 155-168. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Limited.
Lövheim, M. (2005) ‘Young People and the Use of the Internet as Transitional
Space’, Online - Heidelberg Journal for Religions on the Internet, 1(1): 1-22.
Mandaville, P. 2001. 'Reimagining Islam in diapora', Gazette, 63(2-3): 169-186.
Mandaville, P. 2007. 'Globalization and the Politics of Religious Knowledge.
Pluralizing Authority in the Muslim World.' Theory, Culture & Society, 24(2): 101-115.
McCombs, M. E. and Shaw, D. L. 1972. 'The agenda-setting function of mass media',
Public Opinion Quarterly, 36(2): 176-187.
McMillan, S.J. and Morrison, M. 2006. 'Coming of age with the internet: A qualitative
exploration of how the internet has become an integral part of young people's lives',
New Media & Society, 8(1): 73-95.
Meder, T. 2003. 'Levensechte leugens? Over moslimvrees en allochtonenangst in de
media.' Meertens Instituut.

28
Meijer, W.A. J. 2006. 'Traditie en toekomst van het islamitisch onderwijs', pp.
Amsterdam: Bulaaq.
Meyer, B. 2006. Religious Sensations. Why Media, Aesthetics and Power Matter in
the Study of Contemporary Religion. Amsterdam: Vrije Universiteit.
Meyer, B. and Moors, A. 2006. 'Introduction', in B. Meyer and A. Moors (eds.),
Religion, media and the public sphere, pp. 1-29. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press.
Moors, A. 2004. 'Muslim cultural politics'. What's Islam got to do with it? Amsterdam:
Vossiuspers UvA.
NCTb 2006. De gewelddadige jihad in Nederland. Actuele trends in islamistisch-
terroristische dreiging. Den Haag: Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken en
Koninkrijksrelaties.
Pels, T. 2003, ‘Respect van twee kanten: Over socialisatie en lastig gedrag van
Marokkaanse jongens.’ Migrantenstudies, 19 (4), pp. 228-239.
Roy, O. 2004. Globalised Islam. The search for a new ummah. London: Hurst.
Scheufele, D.A. 1999. 'Framing as a Theory of Media Effects', Journal of
Communication, 49(1): 103-122.
Scheufele, D.A. and Tewksbury, D. 2007. 'Framing, Agenda Setting, and Priming:
The Evolution of Three Media Affects', Journal of Communication, 57(1): 9-20.
Turnbull, C. 1990. 'Liminality: a synthesis of subjective and objective experience', in
R. Schechner and W. Appel (eds.), By means of performance, pp. 50-81. Cambridge:
University Press.
Turner, B.S. 2007. 'Religious Authority and the New Media', Theory, Culture &
Society, 24(2): 117-134.
Turner, V. 1967. The forest of symbols: aspects of Ndembu ritual. New York: Cornell
University Press.
Turner, V. 1969. The ritual process: Structure and Anti-Structure. New York: Aldine
de Gruyter.
Valentine, G. and Holloway, S.L. 2002. 'Cyberkids? Exploring Children's Identities
and Social Networks in On-Line and Off-Line Worlds', Annals of the Association of
American Geographers, 92(2): 302-319.
Van den Brink, G. Geweld als uitdaging. De betekenis van agressief gedrag bij
jongeren. Utrecht: NIZW, 2002.
Van den Maagdenberg, V. 2004. Jaarrapport Integratie. Instituut voor Sociologisch-
Economisch Onderzoek (ISEO). Rotterdam: Erasmus Universiteit
Vink, M. P. 2007. 'Dutch 'Multiculturalism' Beyond the Pillarisation Myth', Political
Studies Review, 5: 337-350.
Wakeford, N. 2003. 'The Embedding of Local Culture in Global Communication:
Independent Internet Cafés in London', New Media & Society, 5(3): 379-399.
Waskul, D.D. 2005. 'Ekstasis and the internet: liminality and computer-mediated
communication', New Media & Society, 7(1): 47-63.

29
Werbner, P. 2004. 'The predicament of diaspora and millenial Islam. Reflections on
September 11, 2001', Ethnicities, 4(4): 451-476.
Wheeler, D. 2001. 'New Technologies, old culture', in C. Ess (ed.), Culture,
Technology, Communication, pp. 187-212. Albany: State University New York.
White, M. 2006a. The Body and the Screen. Theories of Internet Spectatorship.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
White, M. 2006b. 'Television and Internet: Differences by Design. Rendering
Liveness, Presence, and Lived Space', Convergence: The International Journal of
Research into New Media Technologies, 12(3): 341-355.
Wilson, S. M. and Peterson, L. C. 2002. 'The Anthropology of Online Communities',
Annual Review of Anthropology, 31(1): 449-467.
iMartijn de Koning is a postdoctoral fellow within the ISIM/Radboud University project
'Salafism: Production, Distribution, Consumption and Transformation of a Transnational
Ideology in the Middle East and Europe', funded by the NWO. In his project he focuses on
the demand side of religious knowledge by looking at how young Muslims actively engage
with the writings of major religious leaders of the different Salafi currents in the Middle
East and their representatives in the Netherlands. In April 2008 he defended his Ph.D
thesis ‘Searching for a 'Pure' Islam. Religious Belief and Identity Construction among
Moroccan-Dutch Youth’ (Dutch) An English summary can be found on his weblog Closer:
http://religionresearch.org/martijn.
ii I would like to thank Edien Bartels (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), Carmen Becker
(ISIM), the participants of the ‘Radicals’ meeting group of the Vrije Universiteit
Amsterdam, and the participants of the Colloquium Other Europes of the Institute for the
Study of European Transformations (where this paper was presented, London, 1 February
2008) for their critical and stimulating comments on earlier versions of this paper.
iii In an interview with Reformatorisch Dagblad 14-09-2006
iv The research focused on Moroccan Muslim youth aged between 10 and 20. In the 6
years, about 200 boys and girls were monitored almost every day in the mosque and on
the streets and sometimes in their homes and schools. The paper is based upon
observation of their internet practices, content and an analysis of the websites they
visited. The observation of their internet practices mainly took place in the mosque and
sometimes at their schools and homes. During the final year, interviews were held with
20 boys and 20 girls who were monitored on a daily basis for two years. The selection of
the websites is based on the choices made by young Muslims in Gouda. At the sites and
discussion groups (On MSN and Yahoo) they visited other sites are linked and/or used.
They have been analyzed as well. In total, this involved about 80 websites and MSN and
Yahoo groups.
vI leave out other processes of gathering information, for example for school
assignments, figuring out train schedules and so on.

30
vi Based upon Droogers (2003). Repertoires exist at a macro-, meso and micro level and
have three important characteristics. People’s knowledge of how to behave correctly in a
particular context is not always activated, depending upon the relevance in that specific
context. The beliefs, practices and experiences that make up a certain repertoire can
change by adding, leaving out, and reshaping. The constituting elements of cultural
repertoires contain contain inconsistencies and contradictions, given its use in varied
contexts (Droogers 2003: 267).
vii The Salafi movements constitute a strict and puritanical branch of Islam trying to
‘purify’ the Islamic creed and its method of application of all forms of historical and
cultural influences and other influences that are deemed unislamic. In their attempt to
‘purify’ Islam they try to follow the example of the Prophet Muhammad and the first
generation of Muslims (al-salaf al-salih). The current Salafi movements have their
foundation in the 18th century Saudi Wahhabi reform movement (but should not be
equated with it). In the 1980s and 1990s several Salafi leaders (in particular those who
have mixed Salafi ideologies with the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood) came to
Europe after being prosecuted in for example Syria, Saudi Arabia and Egypt (De Koning
2008b).
viii The Hofstad network is the network of jihadi Salafists such as Mohammed Bouyeri (the
murderer of film director and writer Theo Van Gogh who made the film Submission I
together with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Before this he was one of the main disseminators of jihad
texts on the internet sometimes mixed with his own viewpoints. During the trial he stated
he killed Theo van Gogh because, according to him based upon texts from ulama, he had
to kill the person who insulted the prophet. Samir Azzouz first came into the picture after
he tried to reach Chechnya in order to fight with the jihadis against the Russians. Later,
in 2004, he was arrested for having plans for an attack at Schiphol Airport; an accusation
from which he was acquitted at first but later (recently) convicted to 6 years. In 2006 he
was sentenced to eight years imprisonment again for planning a terrorist attack (the so
called Piranha-case).
ix Hirsi Ali is a member of the VVD, a conservative-liberal party, and one of the most
vocal critics of Islam and (radical) Muslims stating that Islam is incompatible with
democracy and renowned for her accusation that the prophet Muhammad is a
‘paedophile’ according to ‘contemporary Western standards’. Together with film director
Van Gogh, she has made the movie Submission I. Hirsi Ali was threatened numerous
times with an attack on her life and lived in hiding several weeks after the murder of Van
Gogh. Currently she works in the U.S. for the conservative think tank American
Enterprise Institute.
xEthnobarometer is a programme of social scientists providing independent and
research-based reports on levels of racism, xenophobia
and ethnic conflict in selected countries of Europe and coordinated by the director
of Ethnobarometer, Alessandro Silj. The latest Ethnobarometer project, Europe’s
Muslim communities – Security and Integration post-11 September, is operational
in six countries: Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and the UK. The
International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World (ISIM) is

31
responsible for the Dutch part of this Ethnobarometer project, the objective of
which was to assess the consequences of the various responses to 11 September and
the murder of Van Gogh in November 2004 for both the Muslim communities and
European societies at large and, in particular, the relations between Muslim
communities and the rest of the population.