Volume 55 Number 1

January 2012

ARTICLE

Engaging Islam: Working with Muslim Communities in a Multicultural Society MIRJAM SHATANAWI

Abstract Recent global political events have pushed Islam to the center stage in European and American museums. Since 9 ⁄ 11 there has been a substantial increase in exhibitions featuring Islamic art, the Muslim world, and the Middle East (Flood 2007; Winegar 2008; Ryan 2009; Shatanawi 2012). For museums in Western Europe, the presentation of Islam-related topics is closely related to the domestic issues of migration and multiculturalism. The new millennium has seen a vigorous debate about multiculturalism in Western Europe; several European leaders have declared multiculturalism a failed policy. This paper presents a case study, based in Amsterdam’s Tropenmuseum (one of Europe’s best-known ethnographic museums), that investigates the complex relationships between audiences and communities in the context of the public debate on Islam. It critically discusses the relevance of a community-based approach for museums that intend to reflect the cultural diversity of European societies.

MUSEUMS AND COMMUNITIES IN A MULTICULTURAL SOCIETY

The representation of themes related to current affairs can be placed in the context of a new museology and its call to museums to take up social responsibility by representing diversity and pluralism (Cameron 2010, 2). Since most museums in Europe are largely funded publicly and therefore have public responsibilities, local and national governments have put pressure on museums to become more representative of today’s societies, and to open up to disenfranchised communities. This is especially the case with museums that cater to a largely domestic audience. To this end, community collaboration has been promoted in Western European museums as a means to achieve two goals: reaching new audiences and rethinking modes of representation in order to re-establish the role of museums in contemporary society (Merriman

and Poovaya-Smith 1996; Crooke 2006, 183). The question of representation is particularly relevant in the context of the ethnographic museum, an institution that struggles with the burden of its colonial past and the post-colonial critiques of ethnographic methods of representing other cultures. ‘‘Multiculturalism has brought the natives homes in the post-imperial countries,’’ evoking profound changes in museum cultures (Nederveen Pieterse 1997, 124). In the past years, ethnographic museums in Europe have been experimenting with new modes of representation in an attempt to represent today’s multicultural societies. Through the inclusion of ‘‘native voices,’’ these museums deliberately intend to weaken the singular authority of the Western museum in an attempt to shift the balance of power. Community

Mirjam Shatanawi ([email protected]) is Curator of the Middle East and North Africa at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam.

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involvement, usually focusing on a particular ethnic or religious group, is often a key element in such processes. Working with migrant communities is often linked to the democratization of museums and—as the many reports about communitybased projects show—these kinds of projects can result in museums becoming more accessible, valued, and relevant to the targeted communities (Crooke 2006, 183). Approaching social relevance through the model of community involvement is attractive for museums because it provides them with a ready-made concept and a seemingly clearly defined target group. When the public is regarded as an assortment of individuals, there are myriad ways of proceeding. Collective identity seems to reduce this diversity by providing a shared characteristic—such as ethnic origin or religious affiliation—on which a museum can focus. Furthermore, there are practical advantages, since communities have leaders and representatives who can be identified, and organizations through which they can be approached. For these reasons, the concept of ‘‘community’’ gives museums something to hold on to when entering the unknown terrain of cultural diversity. Yet the well-intentioned attempts of museums to become more inclusive tend to overlook the profound complexities of identity politics in a multicultural society. Community engagement can also result in exclusion, especially when museums ignore the fact that a community is by definition ‘‘constructed.’’ As Elisabeth Crooke notes, when communities are constructed around a particular history or experience, the process inevitably involves inclusion and exclusion. Those who do not share that history are at risk of being excluded. The representation of shared experiences is potentially divisive. Therefore, the end results of community involvement should be just as critically approached as any

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museum presentation, since ‘‘new voices will often be just as partial as the old’’ (Crooke 2006, 177 and 184). Here I discuss the making of the exhibition Urban Islam, which I co-curated with Deniz ¨ nsal for the Tropenmuseum in 2003. This U exhibition was an experiment with community engagement in the highly politicized context of the Dutch debate on Islam. As public institutions, European museums presenting Islamrelated topics are constantly negotiating between public and curatorial notions of Islam and between a diverse range of stakeholders, both Muslim and non-Muslim. Here, Urban Islam is taken as a starting point to interrogate notions of ‘‘community’’ that arise when museums address today’s multicultural societies and engage with culturally diverse audiences. WORKING WITH MUSLIM ‘‘COMMUNITIES’’: THE URBAN ISLAM EXHIBITION

The Netherlands became a multicultural society after the arrival of guest workers, mainly from Southern Europe, Morocco, and Turkey, in the late 1960s and 1970s. A wave of post-colonial migration followed after the independence of Surinam in 1975. From the late 1980s onwards, the Netherlands gave shelter to substantial numbers of asylum seekers, especially those coming from war-torn countries in the Middle East, former Yugoslavia, and East Africa. As a result of these successive histories of migration, the proportion of the population with an Islamic background increased. In 2006, 12 percent of all Dutch citizens had non-Western origins, while Muslims counted for approximately 5 percent of the Dutch population (47 percent of the nonWestern population group). Among them, those with a Turkish (38 percent) or

Article: Engaging Islam: Working with Muslim Communities in a Multicultural Society

Photo 1. The dramatic setting of the exhibition Urban Islam. Photos in this article take place in the installation, housed in this central structure. All photos courtesy of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.

Moroccan background (31 percent) constituted the largest ethnic groups, followed by Surinamese, Afghans, Iraqis and Somalis.1 The Tropenmuseum went through various phases in its response to the increasing cultural diversity of Dutch society. Founded in the late nineteenth century as a colonial museum with a focus on the arts and crafts of Indonesia, it transformed into an ethnographic museum after Indonesia gained formal independence in 1949. In this period, the museum presented expert knowledge of other cultures to an indigenous Dutch audience. From the 1980s onwards, when school children from migrant backgrounds started to visit the museum, the contents of the exhibitions were adapted to reflect their cultural heritage (Shatanawi 2009, 66–67). However, the outsider perspective in which experts held the knowledge was retained. Urban Islam was

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the first project at the Tropenmuseum in which insider perspectives played a major role in the process leading up to the exhibition as well as the exhibition resulting from it. Urban Islam was developed and shown at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam in 2003, and the Museum der Kulturen in Basel, Switzerland in 2006. The objective of the exhibition was twofold. The Tropenmuseum wanted to reach audiences with a Muslim background, especially those in the age group 18–35, as well as to enter into current public debates about Muslim immigrants in Dutch society. The Tropenmuseum, like many museums in the Netherlands, hardly had any Dutch visitors from non-Western ethnic backgrounds. In 2003 these populations counted for less than 1 percent (school children excluded), while comprising 33 percent of the population of Amsterdam. Meanwhile, the

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Islamic faith had become one of the most debated topics in the Netherlands. To engage in current debates, the exhibition set out to explore contemporary Islam in different parts of the world. It presented the personal stories of young adult Muslims living in five cities around the globe and their highly individual search for an Islamic identity in a rapidly globalizing world. Through the deployment of interactive tools, the museum attempted to make the exhibition serve as an arena for debate. At the same time, the content of the exhibition was to a large extent derived from and a response to the Dutch debate on Islam. The Urban Islam exhibition was formed amid a vehement debate on Islam and a heightening of the tensions in Dutch society, which put considerable pressure on the project. Since the late 1990s, the Netherlands, like many Western European countries, has developed an intense preoccupation with Islam and Muslim cultures. Media studies show that, from 1998 to 2004, Islam grew more important in the Dutch media, and religious issues dominated reporting (Ter Wal 2004; D’Haenens and Bink 2006). Islam has often been associated with terrorism, religious fundamentalism, the repression of women, and violence. In the media, the dominant discourse after 2001 framed Islam as a threat to Dutch values and society at large. Yet the political realm showed more diversity, with some forces actively contesting the prevailing views (Roggeband and Vliegenthart 2007). Furthermore, there was a growing discrepancy between Dutch academic experts on Islam, who largely departed from a notion of continuously shifting and contextbound Islamic experiences, and the essentialist view of a monolithic religion that dominated public discourse, even among those who spoke about Islam and Muslims in positive terms (Buskens 2010).

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In the 1990s, the debate on Islam in the Netherlands became closely intertwined with the question of integrating immigrants. Migrant culture was equated with Islam, although Muslims only counted for less than 50 percent of the migrants from non-Western countries and their descendants. The term ‘‘Muslim community’’ began to appear frequently in the media and political debate. Yet the community to which the debate referred was largely a fictitious construction, which was embedded in the Dutch historical practice of dividing society into different religious groups, each with its own social institutions (Tayob 2006). In Dutch government policies and population statistics, Muslims were set apart as a distinct group. Until 2005, the Statistics Authority counted the number of Muslims in the Netherlands by counting citizens whose countries of origin held a majority Muslim population. This definition became widely accepted when Islam came to dominate the public debate on multiculturalism. As a result, the term ‘‘Muslim’’ applied to a diverse group, including Iranian and Afghan refugees who had escaped from religious extremism, selfdeclared atheists, and even Christians of Middle Eastern origin. Adherents of widely divergent Islamic movements—such as Sunnis, Shi’ites, Ahmadis, and Alevites—were grouped together. Among the so-called Muslims themselves, however, faith was seldom a unifying factor. Research showed that while many identified with the Muslim faith (and others did not), they did not necessarily feel part of a single Dutch Muslim community (Phalet and Ter Wal 2004). THE CHALLENGE OF REPRESENTATION: BACKGROUND RESEARCH

The repercussions of the public debate on Islam were felt when the Tropenmuseum conducted four focus group discussions with Dutch

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Photo 2. A discussion in the exhibition’s forum area.

Muslims of different backgrounds to better understand their expectations for the forthcoming exhibition. Some of the invited respondents refused to take part in the evaluation because they considered Islam to be a flawed rubric for the exhibition. They argued that the Tropenmuseum reinforced stereotypes by addressing them as Muslims. Of those who did participate, all but one gave answers that revealed what Amartya Sen has called ‘‘a reactive self-perception of identity’’ (Sen 2006). The participants severely criticized how the media, as well as some cultural institutions, portrayed Islam. A 23-year-old

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male university student of Turkish background said, ‘‘Dutch people have little knowledge of Islam, that’s why they are prejudiced against it. The problem is that the media and cultural manifestations all promote a Dutch and stereotypical perspective on Islam. This exhibition should be different, presenting a positive image of Islam that should be based on the many similarities between Dutch culture and Islam.’’ A school girl of Moroccan origin explained, ‘‘I want the exhibition to show that Islam is fun and beauty. And that Islam is not oppressive but, quite the opposite, it has a positive influence on one’s life.’’ All participants in the focus groups emphasized the need for a more balanced, diverse and ‘‘truthful’’ view of Islam. Yet they held completely different views on what the contents of the exhibition should be. The main disagreement centered on ‘‘culture’’ versus ‘‘religion.’’ Many participants in the focus group discussions made a strict division between religion, perceived as a pure and unchangeable set of rules, and culture, loosely described as the actions of Muslims. Yet participants varied widely in their positions on the definitions of these categories as well as the desirability of presenting them to a non-Muslim audience. The division seemed to coincide with the degree of religiosity of the respondents. Those who identified themselves as devout Muslims insisted that the exhibition should only show ‘‘pure’’ Islam, for instance by displaying copies of its sacred books, and avoid the representation of (fallible) human interpretations. Those with a more secular outlook maintained that a focus on lived Islam could help to dispel common misconceptions. Both groups, however, considered it important to correct the public image of Muslims, and frequently mentioned the focus in the Dutch media on negative issues, such as violence and crime, which the media often explained by referring to the Islamic religion. Therefore, it was not surprising that

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the request most frequently made to the museum was to explain the distinction between culture and religion. As a 22-year-old university student of Turkish background clarified, ‘‘Oppression, forced marriages and female circumcision are all part of culture and have no relationship whatsoever to Islam.’’ Critical remarks were also made about the apparent confusion of these categories in regular museum practice. As a young girl remarked, ‘‘I saw a display of a Moroccan wedding in your museum, but a wedding has nothing to do with Islam.’’ Although perceptions of Islam differed, interviewees held one thought in common: the reductive media representations of Islam. Some asked us to show the modernity of Islam, represented by themes like science and education or Islamic fashion (the veil as a fashion item). Others suggested demonstrating Islam’s track record of tolerance by highlighting the multicultural Ottoman Empire or Andalusia’s golden age. Some proposed not to show religion at all, which they considered backward, but rather to focus on secular life styles. Asked about their expectations of the forthcoming exhibition, the respondents primarily perceived the exhibition as a vehicle to counter the images of Islam presented by the Dutch media. Yet the alternatives they put forward were still situated within the dualistic model of Dutch discourse and its notions of modernity versus tradition, inclusion and exclusion. Their own needs as visitors to the exhibition—for information on issues concerning Islamic faith, or a desire to enjoy Islamic art, for instance—played a lesser part in the discussions. The focus group research thus showed a divergence between the museum’s objectives and the expectations of one of its main target groups. The Tropenmuseum aimed to reach Muslim audiences with the exhibition, but the Muslim participants seemed to be first and foremost concerned with problems of representation. Very

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Photos 3 and 4. Part of a display in the Marrakech section.

few of the participants saw themselves as potential visitors to Urban Islam. In their eyes, the exhibition was a unique opportunity to communicate a different perspective on Islam to a nonMuslim audience. This finding—that Muslims did not see themselves as potential visitors—is related to the fact that the Tropenmuseum chose the theme of Islam for the exhibition prior to con-

Article: Engaging Islam: Working with Muslim Communities in a Multicultural Society

sulting with Muslim visitor groups. Dutch preoccupation with Islam in society, which prompted the museum to make this exhibition, was not necessarily endorsed by Muslims themselves. The focus group discussions indicated that if Muslims had been consulted in an earlier stage of decision making, many of them would have chosen a different topic for the show. The results of the research among Muslim target groups were then compared with those of a survey conducted among regular visitors of the Tropenmuseum, most of them with a non-Muslim background (Van Minden 2003). 2 As part of the survey, respondents could list the themes they wanted the exhibition to cover. Interestingly, the expectations of participants in this group contrasted with those of their Muslim counterparts. Themes they mentioned most

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often coincided with topics prominently featured in the media, such as the integration of Muslim minorities into Dutch society (20 percent), religious tenets (18 percent), or the position of Muslim women (17 percent). In many cases, they related Islam to issues in Dutch society. Their questions concerned the position of Muslims in the Netherlands, and to a lesser extent, international politics. A typical response combined these elements. A woman of Dutch background, visiting the Tropenmuseum, asked: ‘‘What does the Qur’an say about freedom of religion? Do all Muslims have to oblige? I’m just asking because of all the terrorist attacks these days and because of what I heard some imams say on TV.’’ A comparison of the two research groups shows that potential visitors of non-Muslim and

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Muslim backgrounds held completely opposite expectations of the exhibition. Non-Muslim respondents wanted the museum to give more information on familiar issues—the Islam they felt they knew—while their Muslim counterparts hoped the exhibition would break away from stereotypes and present Islam from a new perspective. Both groups departed from the notion that the museum should construct a ‘‘true’’ Islam—by which each group, however, meant something completely different. The comments of participants in the background research also revealed a difference in perception of the museum institution. It was quite clear that most Muslims saw the Tropenmuseum as a stronghold of mainstream discourse and wanted it to wield its authoritative power to put forward alternative readings of Islam. NonMuslim visitors also saw the museum as a stronghold of mainstream discourse, but precisely for that reason, wanted it to give them information within the existing framework of mainstream public debate. The research thus exposed the paradox with which today’s museums struggle: the tension between having to cater to wellestablished tastes and worldviews to attract large audiences, and at the same time having to challenge stereotypes to fulfill its social mission. MAKING REPRESENTATION

The background research for the Urban Islam exhibition shows how the conflicting demands of different interests might affect museum practice. If taken literally, the expectations of target groups left the Tropenmuseum with little space to maneuver. Each group wanted to instrumentalize the museum for its own goals. We—the curatorial team—felt uncomfortable with the somewhat outmoded suggestions of our non-Muslim respondents, but we felt equally uncomfortable with the alter-

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native idea of a ‘‘pure’’ and ‘‘perfect’’ Islam proposed by many of the Muslim participants. 3 We decided to address this issue head-on in the exhibition by focusing on one of the dichotomies frequently mentioned during the survey: the distinction between ‘‘culture’’ and ‘‘religion.’’ In the center of the exhibition floor we erected a white tower 12 meters (13 yards) high, resembling mosque architecture. Inside the tower were a series of enclosed glass cases containing objects from the museum’s vast collection illustrating the history of Islam. The conventionally laid-out displays included a tenth-century page from a Qur’an in Kufic script and eighteenth-century Iranian miniatures of Qur’anic stories. The stark presentation of these objects symbolized an approach to religion that favors religious dogma, in its alleged static and universal manifestations, to present a picture of historical as well as contemporary Islam. Such an approach—omnipresent in Dutch public discourse—sees Islam not as the product of Muslim believers, but rather as a fixed set of theological dogmas determining the behavior of Muslims (Peters 2006). Remarkably enough, this view was shared by many Muslim participants in the focus group discussions, who made a strict division between ‘‘religion,’’ perceived as pure and unchangeable, and ‘‘culture,’’ described as secular and religious. We curators of the exhibition, with our academic backgrounds in cultural anthropology, considered such a dualistic model to be a limited approach to reality. We argued that religion and culture were intertwined: While all religion is culture, not all culture is religion. We felt a need to challenge visitors’ assumptions. Pavilions containing the personal stories of young adult Muslims living in Dakar, Marrakech, Istanbul, and Paramaribo were placed around the tower. The lively, colorful spaces in the pavilions—where these stories were told in

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brief videotapes supplemented with objects and images from daily life—contrasted sharply with the quiet, lifeless presentation in the tower. Often the opinions expressed in the pavilions contradicted each other, allowing visitors to note the complexities of Islamic discourse and practice. Through the multiple viewpoints on display, the Dutch public debate on Islam was contested. The debate was taken one step further in the section of the exhibition representing the city of Amsterdam. Here, in a multimedia platform, the visitors themselves became the protagonists. On a large screen, 16 Muslim and non-Muslim inhabitants of Amsterdam gave their opinions on hot topics such as Islamic terrorism, the veil, and the integration of Muslims in a secular society. Visitors were challenged to share a glimpse of their own views by selecting one of the opinions expressed on the screen and comparing their choice with other visitors to the exhibition. In this way visitors encountered diverging ideas about Islam while forming their own ideas by participating in a virtual discussion. As curators of the exhibition, we considered Urban Islam to be our curatorial statement about Islam and Muslims in the West, and the Netherlands in particular. In our analysis, there was a general absence of Muslim voices in the Dutch public debate on Islam, in the sense that Muslim experiences and opinions only served as illustrations to an ideological agenda set for them, not by them. Although, in the public arena, the spotlight was continuously on Islam and Muslims, there were too many of the same cliche´d images around and too few alternative representations. We wanted to use our position as curators to give a platform to Muslim experiences. By framing them as valid information, we could reinsert them into the public arena. Yet the position of the Tropenmuseum as a mediator between these experiences and its

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Dutch audiences resulted in a situation in which the museum became enmeshed in conflicting models of representation. To counter the silencing of Muslim voices in Dutch debate, Urban Islam brought individual opinions to the fore. In short documentary films, the young adults in the four cities introduced their personal perspectives on the place of Islam in their lives and the society they live in. This was followed by a museological display of the story of each protagonist, now expressed in images, text quotes, and symbolic objects. The selection of the protagonists was based on their ability to present a broader social theme grounded in background research in the four cities. For instance, secondary school teacher Ferhat Duc¸e from Istanbul explained the aspirations of secularism in Turkey and how deeply they have influenced his lifestyle. While he identified himself as a real Kemalist, a secular Muslim and a westernized Turk, his section in the exhibition displayed fragments of daily newspapers that pointed to the ongoing discussions in Turkey on the meanings of westernization, modernity, and the place of Islam in public life. The newspaper headlines reflected the major divisions in Turkish society with respect to the hijab or headscarf, and the confinement of religious identity to the private sphere (versus expressing it in a public space). The choice of Ferhat as a protagonist was controversial from the outset. In the community focus groups, religious respondents of Turkish background had strongly advised against introducing a Dutch audience to Kemalist ideology, since it might strengthen widespread ideas that perceive Islam to be an obstacle to modernity or incompatible with Western culture. Faced with the choice between filtering out everything that could confirm

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prejudices in order to construct a single ‘‘true’’ Islam, or showing a more complex reality with all its subtle twists, varieties and contradictions, we chose the latter. Either choice would antagonize segments of our audience and no alternative would convince all. REVISITING THE COMMUNITY APPROACH

In the Netherlands, the struggle to build a society that accommodates Muslims and other minorities has repercussions on museums that aspire to reflect cultural diversity. Ethnographic museums are in the forefront of this arena, because they are concerned with presenting narratives about the ‘‘self’’ and the ‘‘other’’ (Nederveen Pieterse 1997). The cultural diversity of Dutch society today prompts ethnographic museums like the Tropenmuseum to re-evaluate their traditional role as inter-

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preters of non-Western cultures. Peoples and cultures that used to be far away are now part of Dutch society. This development incites ethnographic museums to change their focus. Stories about ‘‘foreign cultures’’ need to find a new relevance in the context of domestic social issues. Likewise, the potential audience of the ethnographic museum has changed. When visitors of diverse backgrounds frequent the museum, they bring with them different ways of experiencing the content of exhibitions. To accommodate diverse audiences, exhibitions are increasingly made multi-interpretable. Urban Islam made use of the constructivist model, which allows the visitor to make his or her own connections with the material and encourages diverse interpretations (Hein 1995). The museum thus becomes a forum, as D. F. Cameron’s classical essay envisaged (Cameron 1971), encouraging dialogue and

Article: Engaging Islam: Working with Muslim Communities in a Multicultural Society

engaging visitors in contemporary debates about culture, politics and society (Cameron and Kelly 2010). In doing so, the ethnographic museum can take up a new role and develop from an information center about the nonWestern world into a critical platform for discussions about difference and intercultural exchange. The Urban Islam exhibition was successful in terms of community representation and audience development, yet it also revealed the difficulties in dealing with a range of stakeholders. The study conducted after the exhibition opened showed that during the time of the survey (May 2004) 60 percent of the audience consisted of first-time visitors (compared to an average of 30 percent in other years). Most were in the 15–30 age group, while Muslims counted for 11 percent of the total. Younger visitors, and Muslims in particular, showed more appreciation for the

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exhibition than visitors in other age groups. This finding was endorsed by encounters with the public on the exhibition floor. Muslim visitors commonly expressed satisfaction with the alternative image of Islam the museum purveyed, while non-Muslim visitors were more critical and expressed a need for more information on topics like Islamic fundamentalism and the integration of Muslims in the Netherlands. Nonetheless, 72 percent of the audience said it had gained new knowledge about the Islamic religion. On the other hand, only 14 percent felt the exhibition had changed their perception of Islam. It might be that Urban Islam was mostly visited by those who already had a favorable attitude towards Islam. In fact, these results point to the limited agency of the museum to promote cross-cultural understanding. People visiting museums tend to seek affirmation of their tastes and worldviews, rather than have them

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challenged. Therefore, those who would benefit most from cross-cultural dialogue—the 51 percent of Dutch citizens4 who stated in a 2003 poll that they felt threatened by the growing number of Muslims in the country, for instance—rarely visit exhibitions like Urban Islam. Despite its success, Urban Islam did not lead to structural changes in exhibition development at the Tropenmuseum. Nor did it result in the long-term engagement of a Muslim audience. The exhibitions that followed Urban Islam alternated between presenting outsider expert knowledge, such as Dealing with the Gods: Rituals in Hinduism (2005), and insider community perspectives, such as Art of Survival (2009), about the Maroon cultures in Surinam. Both exhibitions, however, succeeded in reaching new audiences of Dutch Hindu and Surinamese origin respectively. Yet with the exception of these temporary community-oriented exhibitions, the visitor profile of the Tropenmuseum remained dominated by the educated white middle class, which now has become a minority of the Amsterdam population. Most of the museum’s exhibitions and projects continued to be addressed to this group of long-time visitors. This situation is not unique. It’s common to represent cultural diversity in European museums by organizing temporary exhibitions and projects targeting specific minority groups (Merriman and Poovaya-Smith 1996). Research shows that unless cultural diversity is embedded in institutional policy on different levels—including programming, research, collection building, staff, and board members—such projects are not sustainable (Arts Council England 2006, 99– 103). There are further grounds to be critical of the community-based approach. Museums prefer to work with a culturally diverse audience at the community level rather than on an individual basis. As a result, cultural diversity projects com-

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monly approach migrants as part of a collective. It can be argued that this approach confirms rather than subverts inequality. Since such projects often focus on the representation of group identity in exhibitions or collections, migrants are singled out as a special group—even if exhibitions present the contribution of these groups within narratives of mainstream history and society. As Merriman and Poovaya-Smith remark: ‘‘While exhibitions focusing on the history and culture of particular communities can be valuable in redressing their previous neglect, treating communities in isolation can also run the risk of institutionalizing their marginalization as ‘the other’’’ (1996, 183). Although the community-based approach intends to enhance inclusion, it contributes to the exclusion of migrant groups from mainstream society. As Elizabeth Crooke notes, there seems to be a certain lack of awareness in the museum sector of the fact that any community is a constructed entity. The process of creating collective identities can be exploited—by community members or outsiders—or politically manipulated. As she remarks, ‘‘If heritage and museums are legitimized as a means to identify and build community, it is essential to ask what sort of community is being forged’’ (2006, 183). Such caution is especially justified when community identity is not grown organically, but is merely an outside construction, as is the case of the ‘‘Muslim community’’ in the Netherlands. Was the Tropenmuseum accurate in dividing the stakeholders of the exhibition into a Muslim and non-Muslim group? Or were these communities created by the museum itself? Elsewhere I have argued that Urban Islam, and other Islamrelated exhibitions, fail to circumvent the political paradigms they intend to critique; in fact, they reinforce the ‘‘us-and-them’’ scheme that informs much of global politics. When current Dutch debates on migrants depart from a singu-

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lar notion of identity, reducing it to an Islamic core and essentializing this reduced identity, the choice of ‘‘Islam’’ as a rubric for the show replicates existing tropes (Shatanawi 2012). Many have written about how museums can account for the diversity within communities (Peers and Brown 2003; Watson 2007; Crooke 2008). Less attention is given to an even more fundamental question: Why do we address migrants as part of communities? The answer is partly to be found in the institutional culture of individual museums. Museums of national and local history were originally created to define the ‘‘self’’ and ethnographic museums to categorize the ‘‘other.’’ Both types of museum have to redefine their mission in the context of recent processes of globalization and migration. The notion of ‘‘community’’ gives museums a tool to work with, without having to profoundly change their institutional practice and outlook on the world. Communities can be treated as discrete entities, apart from the regular museum audience and subject matter. For that reason, the community-based approach discourages structural change on the organizational level. Therefore, the representation of cultural diversity by means of ‘‘communities’’ reinforces a focus on difference—that which distinguishes migrant visitors from a regular museum public—rather than communalities. Moreover, museums may suffer from an identity crisis when their own institutional identity is called into question. In the case of the Tropenmuseum, its identity is firmly based on being a museum for liberal-minded indigenous Dutch people who want to learn about cultures far removed from their own. The institutional structure of the ethnographic museum involves looking at the world through the lens of ethnicity and religious identity. Classifying migrants as part of religious and ethnic communities follows this fixation on ‘‘other’’ identities. To cope

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with the realities of the present, the museum has to break with a history of 150 years of making exhibitions. To make this transition requires going deeper than merely having the museum’s authority questioned by the specific knowledge and emotional attachments of new stakeholders. Addressing cultural diversity as something that concerns all individual members of the public will mean that a single perspective on the collections will give way to an unlimited number of perspectives. To deal with this plurality of perspectives, a profound change of institutional culture is needed. As the example of Urban Islam demonstrates, the museum’s constituents—whether migrants or not—can be consistently made part of decision making and exhibition development. Since it opened in 2004, the Museum of World Culture in Go¨tenburg, Sweden has made significant changes to its organization in order to turn in this direction and become a dynamic ‘‘arena for discussion and reflection in which many and different voices will be heard,’’ as its mission statement asserts. Such an approach means breaking away from the notion that the museum presents the only possible truth, and allowing for different viewpoints and experiences— which might be conflicting, competing, or even irreconcilable—to enter the exhibition space. Consequently, ethnographic museums will have to take on a more complex conception of identity politics, understanding that visitor identities are continuously shifting and cannot be restricted to a single fixed category of collective attachment. Adopting an approach to cultural diversity that is not about ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’— instead, giving members of the public the opportunity to connect to heritage in multiple, less predetermined ways—can be made possible by multilayered exhibitions. In this matter, many ethnographic museums in Europe still have to change from being multicultural in their

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subject matter to being multileveled in their visEND itor approach.

NOTES 1. Website Statistics Netherlands, accessed Aug. 1, 2011 at http://www.cbs.nl/nl-NL/menu/ themas/bevolking/ publicaties ⁄ artikelen ⁄ archief ⁄ 2007 ⁄ 2007-2278-wm.htm. 2. Questionnaire consisting of both open ended and multiple choice questions, filled in by 100 Tropenmuseum visitors of different age groups; 98 percent of the respondents were non-Muslims. 3. The curatorial team of the Urban Islam ¨ nsal and exhibition consisted of Deniz U Mirjam Shatanawi, curators, and Marijke Besselink, exhibition maker. 4. NIPO-poll 2003. REFERENCES

Arts Council England. 2006. Navigating difference: Cultural diversity and audience development. Accessed Oct. 2011 at http:// www.artscouncil.org.uk/publication_archive/ navigating-difference-cultural-diversity-andaudience-development/. Buskens, L. 2010. Islamonderzoek in de publieke sfeer. Zemzem 6(1): 25–32. Cameron, D. F. 1971. The museum, a temple or the forum. Curator: The Museum Journal 14(1): 11–24. Cameron, F. 2010. Introduction. In Hot Topics, Public Culture and Museums, F. Cameron and L. Kelly, eds. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Cameron, F., and L. Kelly, eds. 2010. Hot Topics, Public Culture and Museums. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars. Crooke, E. 2006. Museums and community. In A Companion to Museum Studies, S. MacDonald, ed., 170–185. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. ———. 2008. Museums and Community. Ideas, Issues and Challenges. London: Routledge.

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Article: Engaging Islam: Working with Muslim Communities in a Multicultural Society

Volume 55 Number 1

January 2012

Tayob, A. 2006. Muslim responses to integration demands in the Netherlands since 9 ⁄ 11. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-knowledge 5(1): 73–90. Ter Wal, J. 2004. Moslim in Nederland. De Publieke Discussie Over de Islam in Nederland: Een Analyse van Artikelen in de Volkskrant 1998–2002. The Hague: Social and Cultural Planning Office. Van Minden, R. 2003. Vragen Over Islam. Een Onderzoek Naar de Vragen Over Islam die Leven Bij de Doelgroepen van Het KIT Tropenmuseum (Asking About Islam: Survey of the Questions About Islam of the Target Audiences of the KIT Tropenmuseum). unpublished report. Watson, S., ed. 2007. Museums and their Communities. London: Routledge.

Mirjam Shatanawi

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