Abstract
British converts to Islam can be hard to locate in relation to the majority and born Muslim minority in society and can experience rejection from both sides. Based on an ethnic lens and framework, they are conceptualised as ‘in-between’ the two, neither fully one nor the other. This article argues that by foregrounding religious rather than ethnic identity, a different pattern of how converts position themselves in society emerges. To do so, it draws on a study of converts’ narratives and investigates the dynamics of how a divide between religion and culture emerges from these narratives. To discuss these dynamics, it draws on Simmel’s influential essay The Stranger in order to develop an analytical reorientation that centralises the religious aspect in order to gain a new relational understanding of converts’ belonging as well as the social aspects of the conversion process itself.
Highlights
Recent debates around Muslims and Islam in Western European polities have struggled over the idea of belonging
Muslims themselves report a strong sense of belonging to Britain (Ipsos Mori, 2018) and that there is no necessary clash between their religious and British identity (Karlsen and Nazroo, 2015), something found in other Western European countries (Duderija, 2007)
Studies focussed on young Muslims in Britain return similar findings while highlighting a discursive religion–culture divide (DeHanas, 2016; Jacobson, 1997); for many their religious identity is stressed against both a secular society in which religion, and Islam in particular, has become increasingly seen as a problem, as well as against family and peers whose interpretation of Islam is seen to be ‘cultural’ and not able to speak to their lives as young people in Britain
Summary
Recent debates around Muslims and Islam in Western European polities have struggled over the idea of belonging. In order to register the aspects of nearness and distance constitutive of stranger relations and the religion–culture divide through which these emerge, the following discussion adopts an analytical frame of how senses of religious nearness in relation to Islam, religious distance in relation to the faith (or none) they were brought up in, cultural nearness in relation to Britain, and cultural distance in relation to many born Muslims are established through the narratives.
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