Being a Marxist and a Muslim in Belgium: A Case Study

Lionel Remy-Hendrick interrogates the continuities and tensions between Islam and Marxism in Europe through an ethnographic study of Nasser and his double affiliation: member of a Belgian Marxist Party on the one hand, religious Muslim on the other. Considering Islam and Marxism as identity markers, as discursive traditions and as subjectivations of the subaltern status of the European Muslim, Remy-Hendrick proposes that a series of traditional oppositions – Materialism and Idealism, religious faith and political activism, Muslim and European – should be understood as spaces of negotiation allowing for new political actors to emerge.