Diaspora Diversity: Bangladeshi Muslims in Britain and the United States

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of the multifaceted dimensions of generation in the Bangladeshi Muslim diaspora communities of Britain and the United States. Studies of Muslim immigrant communities in North America and Western Europe have noted a growing social, cultural, and political chasm between the immigrant foreign-born and their non-immigrant second-generation progeny. At the heart of this “Muslim generation gap” are the intensified engagements and identifications of youth with pan-national Muslim institutions in host societies, coupled with their distancing from the ethnonational ones that anchor the immigrant generation. In the case of the Bangladeshi-origin communities in Britain and the United States the gap has emerged quite differently, in ways that reflect the differential influence of the “1971 generation”—a political generation formed in relation to Bangladesh—in the two settings.