Narratives of being and belonging from the perspectives of young Dutch-Muslims in The Netherlands

This chapter looks at the ways Dutch-Muslim youth that come from families with migrant backgrounds give meaning to and position themselves within Dutch society. Originally written as an autoethnographic account for my master’s research paper, this chapter weaves together research participants’ life stories with my own experiences as an Indonesian Muslim woman, who at the time was a student that had been living in the Netherlands for 13 months, from August 2014 to September 2015. Through my research, I explore places that my participants identified as essential to their experiences growing up in the Netherlands. These explorations are unpacked through narratives of whiteness, neighbourhoods, and the complexity of religious identities. They offer a response to dominant integration discourses in the Netherlands, which, blended with security discourse, often depict young Dutch-Muslims with migrant backgrounds as a problem – a challenge to security and social integration – that needs to be solved. These depictions are gendered, reproducing orientalist notions of aggressive Muslim men and passive Muslim women. I argue that these narratives are integral, not external, to our understanding of Dutch society and represent a challenge to elite discourses that often generalise and misrepresent the plural identities of young Allochtoon Dutch-Muslims.