Secularization and Religious Governance in the Burial Domain; A Comparative Study of France, the
Netherlands and Norway
Rosemary van den Breemer, PhD Candidate New School for Social Research
In contemporary scholarship on Muslims in Western Europe, there is an increasing focus
on the religious dimension of Muslim’s integration patterns. Scholars highlight the
religious dimension of Muslim’s claims for recognition and focus on the accommodation
of religious needs specifically, instead of economic incorporation or citizenship rights.
Second, scholars emphasize the relevance of national institutional structures of religious
government to describe and explain a certain pattern of integration. While many
acknowledge that this historical path dependent argument carries an important weight, a
range of work, has recently complicated this understanding of religious government and
the national paradigm of social order, which underlies it. Much in line with similar
developments in the citizenship literature, where a shift from ideas of national citizenship
to ‘post national’ citizenship is proposed, scholars point to both ‘transnational influences’
as well as multicultural and local influences on national paradigms of religious
governance.
In light of this discussion, this paper inquires into the institutional accommodation of
Muslims in the burial domain. It asks whether a historical institutional state church
pattern can explain variation in outcome in the Netherlands, France, and Norway in
regards the availability of Muslim cemeteries or Islamic parcels on a public cemetery.
Relying on fieldwork and a total of 40 interviews in three countries from Nov 2008- May
2009, it finds that when compared at the legislative level, merely, the differences between
these three states and the way the give institutional form to religion in this domain is
astonishing; revealing very different patterns of secularization and solutions for
containing conflict. However, when explored through a set of case studies and
negotiations around Muslim cemeteries and parcels in practice, these differences appear
much smaller. Consequently, it supports an historical institutional state church pattern as
a good, yet partial, explanation for variation, while emphasizing a different effect of this
historical institutional legacy when des-aggregating the legal sphere from the every day
practice in civil society.