Secular-religious self-improvement: Muslim women's kickboxing in the Netherlands

Abstract

In the Netherlands young Muslim women have increasingly begun to join women-only kickboxing gyms. Dutch public discourse has taken notice, treating this phenomenon as a surprising development. The general assumption, in the Netherlands and in western Europe more broadly, is that women's sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment; Muslim women's participation thus exemplifies the incongruence of Islam with the modern, secular nation-state. Contesting this view, I show that young Muslim women who kickbox establish agentive selves by playing with gender norms, challenging expectations, and living out their religious subjectivities. Moreover, they disrupt western European parameters of secularity and religiosity. Their cloistered athletic activity is liberating, but not as expected and understood by mainstream public opinion. They approach their sport not as a quest for cultural integration or emancipation from their Muslim communities, but as a way of intertwining religious and secular forms of self-improvement. [sport, embodiment, gender grouping, secularism, Islam, the Netherlands].