Muslims as the Internal and External Enemy

Abstract

The study of national symbolic boundaries addresses the ways citizens engage in the exclusion of some groups from the national community.1 National community is embedded in institutions and practices that are concerned with the “moral regulation of social life.”2 As such, it includes in traditions, rituals, texts, discourses, and collective memories that reinforce and construct symbolic boundaries around the national community.3 Symbolic codes are the underlying common constituents of these cultural practices that divide the world into those who are “citizens” or “friends” and those who are “enemies.”4 Symbolic boundaries are thereby constructed around the “national community” both internationally and intra-nationally. For example, enemies do not only reside outside of the territorial confines of the nation-state but may also lie within, reflecting the “internal structure of social divisions,” as well as particular national myths, narratives, and traditions.5 It is therefore possible to create a two-dimensional typology of symbolic boundaries within the national community: friends/enemies and internal/external. Through boundary-maintaining processes, social agents are located in one of four cells, which are internal friends, internal enemies, external friends, and external enemies (figure I.I).6