Wilders weaponized Taqiyya to argue all Muslims deserve suspicion

Evidence

As leader of this party Geert Wilders has made a big issue of the dual citizenship of Dutch Moroccans and Turks in the Netherlands, and proposed that they should not hold government office because their loyalty is not to be trusted. He also introduced the concept of Taqiyya into Dutch public debate, a not very commonly known Islamic notion commanding Muslims to hide their faith in the face of persecution. To Wilders, this notion entails that some Muslims behave in a liberal way, while in their heart they think differently. He concludes from the existence of this notion that it is impossible to know which Muslims actually are ‘committing Taqiyya’. This obviously implies that all Muslims need to be suspected. — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1669

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the book’s earlier chapters on how colonial-era tropes about Muslim duplicity were repurposed by modern right-wing populists.
• SEED: Article angle: the migration of Taqiyya from niche Islamic jurisprudence lexicon into European far-right electoral rhetoric — a case study in how obscure theological terms become political weapons.