Negative ecodomy in Romanian politics and religion : anti-Muslim attitudes in the Bucharest Mosque scandal during the summer of 2015

Abstract

This paper focuses on a chronology of events presented by the Romanian media, especially newspapers with national coverage and impact like Gândul and Adevărul, between the first week of June to the first week of September 2015, when the issue of having a mosque erected in Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, was intensely debated by intellectuals, politicians, and religious professionals. The debates were intensely heated from the onset of these events and most of them revealed that most of the participants were driven by anti-Muslim attitudes, xenophobia, and assertive nationalism, a complex of feelings that I called “negative ecodomy”. The concept of “negative ecodomy” presupposes an attempt to built a safe environment, in this case for Romanians in their own country, but the adjective “negative” was added to the the positive idea of “ecodomy” because these efforts to offer a safe context for Romanians were accompanied by the negativity of anti-Muslim, xenophobic, and nationalistic activities. This array of negative ecodomic attitudes were displayed by Romanians not only in online media but also in the street through protests and other similar actions in a country which has been a member of the European Union for almost a decade and was supposed to adhere to the European Union’s basic principles of multiculturalism and the free circulation of persons. The totality of these events show that Romanians are still rather far from accepting the European Union’s fundamental philosophy or perhaps these principles themselves should be reconsidered and reinterpreted in the context of the massive Middle Eastern and African immigration and the constant, if not increasing threat of Islamic terrorism.