Ислам в Нидерландах: История и современность

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Islam is the second largest religion in the Netherlands, after Christianity, and is practised by 5% of the population according to 2018 estimates. The majority of Muslims in the Netherlands belong to the Sunni denomination. Many reside in the country's four major cities: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. The early history of Islam in the Netherlands can be traced back to the 16th century, when a small number of Ottoman merchants began settling in the nation's port cities. As a result, improvised mosques were first built in Amsterdam in the early 17th century. In the ensuing centuries, the Netherlands experienced sporadic Muslim immigration from the Dutch East Indies, during their long history as part of the Dutch overseas possessions. From the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War until the independence of Indonesia, the Dutch East Indies contained the world's second largest Muslim population, after British India. However, the number of Muslims in the European territory of the Kingdom of the Netherlands was very low, accounting for less than 0.1% of the population. The Netherlands' economic resurgence in the years between 1960 and 1973 motivated the Dutch government to recruit foreign skilled laborers, chiefly from Morocco and Turkey – both majority Muslim countries. Later waves of Muslim immigrants arrived through family reunification and asylum seeking. Small but notable minorities of Muslims also immigrated from the former colonies of Indonesia and Suriname.

The first traces of Islam in the Netherlands date back to the 16th century. Ottoman and Persian traders settled in many Dutch and Flemish trading towns, and were allowed to practice their faith, although most of them belonged to the Jewish or Greek Orthodox community under the Sultan. The English traveler Andrew Marvell referred to the Netherlands as "the place for Turk, Christian, heathen, Jew; staple place for sects and schisms" due to the religious freedom and the large number of different religious groups there. References to the Ottoman state and Islamic symbolism were also frequently used within 16th century Dutch society itself, most notably in Protestant speeches called hagenpreken, and in the crescent shaped medals of the Geuzen, bearing the inscription "Rather Turkish than Papists". When Dutch forces broke through the Spanish siege of Leiden in 1574, they carried with them Turkish flags into the city. During the Siege of Sluis in Zeeland in 1604, 1400 Turkish slaves were freed by Maurice of Orange from captivity by the Spanish army. The Turks were declared free people and the Dutch state paid for their repatriation. To honor the resistance of the Turkish slaves to their Spanish masters, Prince Maurice named a local embankment "Turkeye". Around this time the Netherlands also housed a small group of Muslim refugees from the Iberian peninsula, called Moriscos, who would eventually settle in Constantinople. Diplomat Cornelius Haga gained trading privileges from Constantinople for the Dutch Republic in 1612, some 40 years before any other nation recognized Dutch independence. Two years later the Ottomans sent their emissary Ömer Aga to the Netherlands to intensify the relations between the two states with a common enemy. In the 17th century dozens of Dutch, Zeelandic and Frisian sailors converted to Islam and joined the Barbary Pirates in the ports of North Africa, where some of them even became admirals in the Ottoman Navy. Many sailors converted to escape slavery after being taken captive, while others "went Turk" of their own volition. Some of the converted Dutchmen returned home to the Netherlands. However, this was deemed problematic, not so much due to their conversion, but due to their disloyalty to the Dutch Republic and its navy.

In 1602, Aceh Sultanate sent several envoys to the Netherlands. This was the first diplomatic mission of a Southeast Asian polity to Europe. The Acehnese delegation to the United Republic constituted an ambassador, an admiral and a cousin of the sultan, accompanied by their servants. In his letter to stadtholder Prince Maurice dated 24 August 1601 Alau'd din enumerated the gifts he sent for the prince. These were 'a small jewel and a ring with four big stones and some smaller stones, a dagger with a gold and copper sheath wrapped in a silver cloth, a golden cup and saucer and a gold plated silver pot and two Malay speaking parrots with silver chains. The envoys were treated with due respect and given a grand tour of the provinces where they visited important towns and met with local authorities; they were received by the States General and by Prince Maurice. The States General invited European monarchs to send their representatives to meet the Acehnese visitors. It was a successful strategy to give publicity to their warm relations with an important Asian ruler and trading partner at a time when Spain was still a menace in Europe. The eldest of the envoys, Abdul Hamid, died three months after arrival and was buried in a church in the town of Middelburg in the province of Zeeland, in the presence of important dignitaries. The other envoys, Sri Muhammad and Mir Hassan, returned to Aceh in 1604 with the fleet of Admiral Steven Verhaegen.

In the early 17th century a delegation from the Dutch Republic visited Morocco to discuss a common alliance against Spain and the Barbary pirates. Sultan Zidan Abu Maali appointed Samuel Pallache as his envoy, and in 1608 Pallache met with stadholder Maurice of Nassau and the States General in The Hague.

In the 19th century the Netherlands administered the archipelago that would become Indonesia, a majority Muslim country with the largest Muslim population in the world. The 19th century is also the century in which the first Muslim burial site appeared in the Netherlands, namely the tomb of Lepejou, in which a former slave from the Dutch East Indies was buried near Zwolle in 1828. In the first half of the 20th century hundreds of Indonesian students, sailors, baboes and domestic workers lived in the Netherlands, thus constituting the first sizable Muslim community. In 1932, Indonesian workers established the Perkoempoelan Islam (Islamic Association), which was a self help organization that lobbied for the establishment of a Muslim cemetery and a mosque in the Netherlands. Both were realized in 1933. After the bloody war of Independence from 1945 to 1949 this community grew.

After Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in the 1940s, a number of Soviet Central Asians, who were mostly from Samarqand in what is now the Muslim majority Republic of Uzbekistan, left their homes for the area of Smolensk, to fight the invaders. There, the Nazis managed to take captives, including Hatam Kadirov and Zair Muratov, and transported them to areas like that of Amersfoort concentration camp, where they reportedly persecuted or executed them. The victims' cemetery is that of Rusthof, near Amersfoort. Amongst those who studied their case is Uzbek resident Bahodir Uzakov.

In the early 1970s, Muslims represented less than one percent of the population which grew to about six percent in the late 2010s. During the same period, large parts of the Dutch population lost their faith and the Netherlands transformed from a religious society that was segregated along the lines of Protestant, Catholic and socialist lines into a secular society which was characterised by progressive values. During the 1960s and early 1970s the Netherlands needed a larger low skilled work force for the labour intense economic sectors. These sectors were short of workers because of swift industrial growth, combined with higher educational levels of the native Dutch who increasingly turned to the service oriented economy. The Netherlands concluded recruitment agreements with countries like Turkey (1965) and Morocco (1969), allowing people from these countries to stay in the Netherlands (much smaller numbers of Muslim immigrants in this time came from Tunisia and Algeria). State recruitment of immigrant labour ended in 1973, but the number of Moroccans and Turks increased due to family reunification arrangements. In the 1980s and especially since the 1990s, Muslims came to the Netherlands as refugees and asylum seekers, mainly from Bosnia, Somalia, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iraq. Apart from asylum seekers, currently most Muslim immigration takes place through marriage migration and family reunification. Most Moroccan and Turkish 1st and 2nd generation immigrants married people from their home countries. In 2004, the Netherlands passed immigration laws which force future immigrants and their prospective Dutch partners to abide by very strict requirements. Immigrants must pass tests in their home countries, showing a sufficient knowledge of the Dutch language and culture. The Dutch partner must be at least 21 years old and prove an income of at least 120% of the minimum wage. These strict laws have caused some Dutch interested in marrying people from other countries to move to Belgium for a temporary period, in what has been called "The Belgian Route". Because of increasingly restrictive legislation on family formation and reunification, and the economic development of their home countries, the number of immigrants from Turkey and Morocco has decreased sharply since 2003. Immigrants from Turkey decreased from 6,703 in 2003 to 3,175 in 2006, and immigrants from Morocco decreased from 4,894 to 2,085. Net immigration has slumped to a few hundred a year, and has even been negative in some years. According to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research ("Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau" / SCP) 2005 Annual Report on [societal] Integration, both half of the Dutch population, as well as half of the Moroccan and Turkish minorities stated that the Western lifestyle cannot be reconciled with that of Muslims. On August 1, 2019, a ban on face coverings was implemented, making a full veil illegal on public transport and in schools, hospitals and government buildings. This followed similar bans in France, Germany, Belgium, Austria and Denmark. It does not apply to public streets.

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In the early 1970s, Muslims represented less than one percent of the population. According to Statistics Netherlands (CBS), a Dutch governmental institution, about 5% of the total population are Muslims (24 October 2007). Earlier statistics presented by the CBS showed a larger number of Muslims, but this information was solely based on ethnicity and not on religious belief. Since 2007 a reduction of around 50,000 Muslims was measured by the CBS, but this is not seen as a significant drop; it is seen as a result of improved research parameters. Secularisation of the second generation has nonetheless been observed, mostly amongst citizens of Iranian and Turkish background. Between 2006 and 2018, according to surveys the percentage of non Muslims has increased amongst the Turkish Dutch as 93% identified as Muslim in 2006 while 86% did so in 2018; amongst the Moroccan Dutch citizens these percentages were 95% and 94% respectively. However, those remaining Muslim became more orthodox in their religious views. Various studies from 2006 to 2010 have observed that ethnic differences between groups are gradually being replaced with a single "Muslim" identity. Like most non Western immigrants, many Muslims live in the four major cities of the country: Amsterdam, Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht. An estimated 140,000 Muslims reside in the capital where they form around 17 percent of the population. Half of these Muslims are predominantly Arabic and Berber speaking communities from the Maghreb region, Egypt and the Middle East. Turks make up 25 percent of the Muslim population in Amsterdam. There are also relatively many Turks in Enschede, Arnhem and Zaanstad. There were 850,000 residents who professed Islam in 2006. Of these 38% were ethnic Turkish, 31% were Moroccan, 26% were other Asian/African, 4% were European (Non Dutch) and 1% (12,000 people) were native Dutch. Excluding Turkish and Moroccan, the largest group of Muslims were ethnically Surinamese numbering 34,000, followed by 31,000 who were Afghan, 27,000 who were Iraqi and 20,000 who were Somali. Those who were Indonesian (the early Muslim settlers in the country) numbered 7,000. At the end of 2012 the Dutch Central Bureau of Statistics estimated the number of Muslims in December 2010 to be around 4% of the total population.

There are about 400 mosques in the Netherlands, with about 200 Turkish mosques, 140 Moroccan mosques and 50 Surinamese.

The Contact Body for Muslims and Government (CMO), representing approximately 80 percent of the Muslim community, discusses the community's interests with the Government. Broken down by ethnic group, Turks have more organisations than Moroccans and networks between these organisations are closer.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was organized in 1947. There are approximately 1,500 Ahmadi Muslims in the Netherlands and Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Netherlands is the main umbrella organization. Mobarak Mosque in The Hague was inaugurated by Sir Muhammad Zafrulla Khan, who was serving as the President and Head Judge of the International Court of Justice at The Hague.

Non sectarian Muslims who reject the authority of hadith, known as Quranists, Quraniyoon, or Ahl al Quran, are also present in the Netherlands.