Institutional bias and Islamic burial space in France and the Netherlands

In both France and the Netherlands, the issue of Islamic burial has presented itself within a broader context of growing cultural and religious diversity resulting from immigration. This article investigates how institutional biases shape the ability of Muslim communities to have their burial needs met. It contributes by introducing a conceptualization and typology of institutional bias, offering a framework for understanding the skewed patterns of formal and informal structuration that affect groups and individuals based on markers of social identity, including ethnicity and religion. To better capture how biases operate, the article identifies three types of institutional bias: regulative, symbolic, and material. Against the backdrop of prevailing institutional frameworks governing burials, it examines how these biases shape opportunities for Muslim communities. The findings suggest that the Dutch context is more accommodating, as various collective solutions (such as confessional cemeteries and designated parcels) exist, and the burial domain is less burdened by symbolic bias in the form of secularist values and political imageries. In France, by contrast, the Republican principle that cemeteries are municipally owned and administered creates a regulative and symbolic bias in the form of structural obstacles to the establishment of Muslim cemeteries and the formal recognition of Islamic burial parcels. Nevertheless, pragmatic accommodations occur, often through reinterpretations of existing material biases, the bending of formal rules, or the de-symbolization of spatial arrangements that mark religious boundaries.