The central question of this contribution is whether slavery was considered in the Netherlands at the time as something normal, an argument which is often heard in debates about this phenomenon today. This paper shows that during the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, slavery was indeed something that happened far away from home, however, all the time voices could be heard in this country opposing at least the cruelties of the slave system, or even the basic incompatability of slavery and christianity. It even turned out to be a public problem with the hundreds of enslaved people who came over time with their owners from Suriname or the Dutch Antilles to this country, and after a while became free citizens, because in the Netherlands itself slavery was not allowed.
During the second part of the eighteenth century in literary and political Dutch circles the individual voices against (the cruelties of) slavery turned more or less into a choir. These opponents of the system were obviously influenced by and often fervent supporters of the Enlightenment and its ideals for mankind of freedom, equality and brotherhood. Eventually, however, in 1797 the revolutionary Dutch National Assembly in its first constitution voted against an article meant to abolish slave trade and slavery in the near future. It took more than two generations to finally settle this question in 1863.

In 2005 and 2006 three state-funded Islam- and imam training programs started at Amsterdam Free University, Leiden University and Hogeschool Inholland, after more than two decades of political and public debate. These confessional programs were to educate a Dutch ‘polder imam’. Recently however, the closure of two programs was announced.
This article places the establishment as well as the closure of these programs in a historical perspective. It explores two striking parallels between the motivations in favor of an imam training and the ways the Dutch state has dealt with the institutionalization of religious plurality in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.