This paper interfaces a specific theory of socialisation, derived from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann’s influential book The Social Construction of Reality, with the empirical story of Muslim settlement in Britain. It makes a key distinction between the primary socialisation experiences of immigrants, which unfolded in their countries of origin, and that of their diaspora-born...
Reformist British South Asian Twelver Shia Muslims emphasise practising Shia Islam in daily life beyond the month of Muharram by living a piety-led life; they encourage their followers to ‘become’ a Shia Muslim rather than just ‘being’ one. The reformist British South Asian Shia ulama, mostly trained in Shia seminaries based in Qom and Najaf, advocate the adoption of an Islamic...
Republic of Daghestan is the most multiethnic and troublesome region in the Russian Federation. The social, religious and political landscape of this republic has radically changed over the last two decades. Daghestan appears in academic and analytical papers mostly in relation to terrorism or security issues. The everyday religiosity is, for the most part, out of the picture...
Research on the Shia in Scotland and of their spaces of worship and gathering continues to be under-represented in the research field of Muslims in Britain. According to the 2011 census, there are just under 77,000 Muslims in Scotland, with Edinburgh, its capital, home to about 12,400. This article aims to fill in some of these gaps by focusing on a Muharram procession emerging...
Academic scholarship on Shia Muslim minorities in the West has described them as ‘a minority within a minority’ (Sachedina 1994: 3) or as ‘the other within the other’ (Takim 2009: 143), referring to a certain sense of double-marginalization of Shia Muslims in non-Muslim societal contexts. They need to undertake particular efforts to maintain both an Islamic as well as particular...
The growing visibility of Islam in the public spaces of Western societies is often interpreted in the media as a sign of Muslim radicalisation. This article questions this postulate by examining the flourishing Muslim marriage industry in the UK. It argues that these ‘halal’ services, increasingly popular among the young generation of British Muslims, reflect the semantic...
“Traditional Islam” has emerged in the post-Soviet Republic of Tatarstan (Russian Federation) as a powerful if contentious discursive trope. In this paper, I look at traditional Islam and its conceptual twin, “non-traditional Islam”, as normative governmental tools aimed at defining acceptable or unwelcome form of religious commitment in an environment in which the rapid success...
During the last decade, black metal bands have recorded anti-Islamic music in Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Black metal is renowned for being anti-authoritarian and especially against organized religion. As such, black metal music is a strong expression of protest against, and repudiation of, society, manifesting social pressure, and contrasting with the discursively normal. Using the...
The conceptions sources have of journalists influence whether and in what ways those sources engage with the news media. In this paper, I consider the contribution of Muslim sources to news in a context of perceived negativity. Scholarship on the content of British news stories about Muslims has found a consistently negative tone; my study examines the impressions of sources as...
Sufi mystical experiences and practices are populated with objects. Objects exist among masters as well as disciples and followers regardless of the meanings and significations that practices impose on them. The life of these objects begins before they are enacted into sociocultural and religious relationships, as they are crafted or traded before they take on the overwhelming...
This article locates imaginative aspects of human subjectivity as a feminist issue by reviewing the concept of agency in the genealogy of Muslim and Middle Eastern women in anthropological and ethnographic literature. It suggests that, if feminist scholarship of the Middle East would continue approaching to Muslim women’s agency -as it has been doing for decades-, it should do so...
This book by experienced journalist and metal fan Orlando Crowcroft is a must read for anyone curious about counter-culture in the Middle East. It contains six country studies (Lebanon, Egypt, Israel/Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Syria) in which Crowcroft’s interviews with musicians are the key elements. With the knowledge of a music connoisseur, he guides the reader in the...
The Shi’a Imami Nizari Isma’ili Muslims have often been considered the “poster child” for pluralistic integration (Cayo 2008). This ethos has been inculcated within members of the community, with its adherents seeing themselves as a diverse and multi-ethnic collective. Nevertheless, despite this purported pluralism, social research on the Isma’ilis has primarily focused on the...
This article explores the relationships between female converts to Islam in Britain and their close friends and family. It pays attention to the perspectives of converts but focuses on the reactions of their intimates to the conversion. We argue that converts become ‘intimate strangers’ through conversion—estranged on the level of understanding and belief but intimate on the...
This article analyses the role of religious leaders in collective violence in Kano, the major urban centre in northern Nigeria. It compares two episodes of collective action in the city—the violent ‘Plateau riots’ in 2004 and the non-violent ‘cartoon protests’ in 2006—to explore the role of religious leaders in the variation in violence between the two events. The core argument...
This introductory essay provides the context for the articles in this Themed Section. Despite the diversity in locations, historical backgrounds and contemporary processes of change, all contributors to this Themed Section focus on the struggle of Muslim groups over access to an emergent Muslim public sphere. They highlight the contestations of and shifts in the notions of agency...
This paper discusses the changing socio-cultural landscape at Cheikh Anta Diop University of Dakar (UCAD), Senegal. It shows how the growing influence of the religious phenomenon since the late 1970s has encouraged young students to develop an Islamic activism that tends to replace the revolutionary and secular traditions that had dominated the space since the founding of this...
This paper explores the securitisation of British Muslims within a global context in which tensions are reignited by the threat that Islamist terrorism, and Islam more generally, are considered to pose to the West. While Western involvement in Muslim-majority countries continues to fuel the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’, domestic responses to terrorism and extremism take...
From the moment the first Turkish and Moroccan workers migrated to Europe in the early 1960s, the Turkish and Moroccan states have been concerned with how to bind emigrated citizens to their country of origin. In this article, we focus on Islam as a multi-dimensional binding mechanism. Religion is a broad register that links emotion, affect, and senses of belonging and binds...