Dutch Converts to Islam and the Construction of Mosques in the Interwar Netherlands

During the 1920s Muslim communities in London, Paris and Berlin were institutionalizing Islam, and constructing the first mosques, just as many Muslim religious leaders from Poland and Hungary traveled to the Middle East and India in order to raise money for construction of mosques in their capital cities. It is well known that the first mosque in the Netherlands, however, the Moebarak Mosque in the Hague, was not built until 1955. Little research has been done on the attempt to establish mosques and their proponents in the Netherlands prior to the Second World War. This paper provides an unknown chapter in the history of Muslims in Europe in general and the Netherlands in particular by analyzing the public debate on the construction of the first mosque in the Hague in the 1920s and 1930s, led by Dutch convert to Islam Charles Muhammad Ali Beetem (d. 1938), who played a leading role in the Indonesian Muslim community in the Dutch capital.

This paper thus concerns not only the building of a mosque in a European city, but the early history of the Muslim community in the Netherlands in the interwar period and the role played in it by Dutch converts. Although the Muslim community in the Netherlands before World War II was small and did not have a prominent social status, this debate played a major role as a pioneering case study in the shaping of the history of Islam in the Netherlands. Connected to the mosque debate, the paper also focuses on a formative picture of a Muslim public space in the Dutch interwar history, and how the circle of Van Beetem was connected to the wider Muslim transnational network around inter-war Muslim politician Shakīb ʾArslān (d. 1946).