“They have no taste in Morocco.” Home furnishing, belonging, and notions of religious (im)perfection among white Dutch and Flemish converts in Morocco

Abstract

This article focuses on furnishing practices in the domestic space of the homes of white Flemish and Dutch Muslim female converts to Islam who made hijra (Islamic migration) to Morocco. Fed up with European Islamophobia and longing for a place that supports and strengthens their faith, they decided to emigrate to a Muslim country. However, remarkably, once settled in Morocco, many experience discontent with regard to a perceived “lack of true Islam” in the country. To gain insight into the positions and experiences of these women, I look at how they create a sense of belonging through furnishing practices in the domestic space of their new homes. I am interested in how various senses of belonging are expressed and come together in relation to their construction of religious belonging and place, and are renegotiated through domestic decoration practices. Building on literature on home, transnational migration, conversion, and material religion, I demonstrate that mechanisms of distinction and notions of religious (im)perfection intersect in the organization of the domestic space. Based on ethnographic accounts, I argue that my interlocutors bring a “culturalized” West-European Islam to Morocco, with tastes and sensibilities that jostle uneasily against local Moroccan religious practices but also allows them to repair some of the privileges they lost upon their conversion in their homeland. Lastly, this article shows that it is through the engagement with mundane material forms, but also with absence and empty spaces, that Islam becomes present in their domestic spaces, enhancing the cultivation of their ethical selves.