Muslims in Britain: Race, Place and Identities * Edited by PETER HOPKINS and RICHARD GALE.

Abstract

This volume uses the concept of place to challenge the public perception of British Muslims as homogeneous and the associated perception that there is a uniform British Muslim political identity. ‘Place’ denotes a focus on the spatial or geographic aspects of people’s lives, including their economic, historical and political locations. As such, it provides a thread that links the different contributions, resulting in a volume that has greater intellectual coherence than some of the other recent collections of writing on the identity and identity politics of Muslims in Britain. The contributions are organized in three parts, after a review by the editors—a geographer and a sociologist—of the history and demography of Muslims in Britain and an introduction to the theme of place. Part I contains UK-based chapters on British Muslims as individuals at work, in education and at home. More accurately, these five chapters are about people of South Asian heritage, who constitute the majority (68%) of British Muslims. Deborah Philips examines the extent to which UK-raised Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi women in Oldham, Rochdale and Bradford have created a home physically apart from their in-laws and rejected the norms of marriage and motherhood of their parents’ generation. Sophie Bowlby and Sally Lloyd-Evans examine the workplace experiences of Pakistanis in Reading and Slough and ask if the relative socio-economic disadvantage of British Muslims as a whole arises from being Muslim or for other reasons. Claire Dwyer and Bindi Shah consider the extent to which Pakistani women in Slough are taking up new opportunities by participating in higher and further education. Louise Archer turns to Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims boys in a town in northern England and, using some striking interview extracts, examines the links between the rhetoric of Muslim identity and local assertions of masculinity.