Cultural Diversity and Religious Conformity: Dimensions of Social Change Among Second-generation Muslim Women

Abstract

The arrival of New Commonwealth migrants into postwar Britain initiated public disputes and media debates about the future of these ‘minority groups’, and the extent to which they were likely to become assimilated into British society. By the late 1960s the assimilation model was becoming increasingly questioned. Evidently not all migrants were shedding their cultural allegiances in favour of British norms and values, as some had predicted or expected. There was a conscious desire on the part of some migrants and their descendants to retain many elements of their ‘original’ cultures, modifying them only marginally, and sometimes emphasizing them even more actively with the passage of time. It became evident, therefore, that cultural allegiances warranted special attention. Some research examined the distinguishing cultural features of selected groups of New Commonwealth migrants, charting the ways in which these groups differed in such things as language, religion, core values and social attitudes, kinship patterns, diet and routine life styles. This research fed a growing concern with ethnicity, as opposed to ‘race relations’.