‘Our doors are open, there's nothing to hide: Muslim Transparency in Securitized Britain’

Abstract

A wide range of scholarship has noted the prevalence of discourses that construct British Muslims as suspicious, unfathomable threats – an “enemy within” the national body politic. This essay, based on ethnographic research among mosques in the United Kingdom, argues that Muslims volunteering at open days and other public outreach events respond to this suspicion through enacting vulnerability and openness to scrutiny. Through public performances of transparency, they presented themselves as unguarded and open to external examination. This essay explores how these performances of transparency take place, drawing on interviews with individuals involved in public events, participant observation and media discourse analysis. I argue these performances foreground the visibly Muslim body as unthreatening, searchable and with “nothing to hide”. Performers express their sense that these acts of openness offer the ability to present an alternative discourse about British Muslims. However, Muslim performances of transparency may do more to reify ideological categories of “good” and “bad” Muslims than they do to destabilize constructions of Muslims as threatening.