British Muslim Research Articles

Anglophone Islam: A New Conceptual Category

The field of ‘Islamic Studies’, like ‘Religious Studies’, is a broad-church. It includes a number of epistemological and ontological positions associated with a range of disciplines. The diversity inherent in a category such as ‘Islamic Studies’ is challenged by a bifurcation of two predominant approaches found within the field, the textual and the sociological. In this paper, I seek to propose a new concept for contemporary Islamic studies, that of Anglophone Islam, which will allow a broader range of scholarship to be contextualised in relation to each other. The concept also opens a new set of questions to be explored by scholars of Islamic studies. It will be of particular interest to scholars involved in contemporary Islamic studies in fields such as American Muslim studies, British Muslim studies and European Muslim studies, but will also have utility to theological, historical and philosophical scholars of Islam working in the English language.

Brits and British Muslims and their perceptions of cultured meat: How big is their willingness to purchase?

AbstractConsumer preferences regarding food in general, livestock meat and cultured meat among Muslim populations remains largely unknown, especially in a United Kingdom context. This is a significant gap in our understanding since foods that meet halal requirements have a major economical share of both the British and the global food market. The aim of this study is threefold: (1) gain insight into the perceptions of the broader British community and the Muslim demographic within it regarding food choice determinants, livestock meat, and cultured meat; (2) investigating similarities and differences within and between the two groups; and (3) model the willingness to purchase (WTPu) cultured meat for both populations. The British Muslim and the British non‐Muslim population are very similar in their considerations about food in general, livestock meat and cultured meat. With regard to the willingness to purchase cultured meat, further product development and marketing strategies should focus on the same factor for both populations: the healthiness, safety, and nutritional characteristics of cultured meat.

Visibility as Muslim, Perceived Discrimination and Psychological Distress among Muslim Students in the UK

Perceived discrimination, a subjective appraisal of disadvantageous treatment on the grounds of identity, is negatively associated with wellbeing. We explored this association among British Muslim students, sampled online, by questions about perceived and experienced discrimination, visibility as a Muslim, symptoms of depression and anxiety, and positivity. Results from 457 respondents showed greater discrimination was experienced by those with more visible signs of Muslim faith, with a small but statistically significant positive correlation between perceived discrimination and psychological distress. Many participants gave examples of discrimination experienced. Implications for educational institutes, policy makers, clinicians, and the wider Muslim community are discussed.

Intersectionality as personal: the science identity of two young immigrant Muslim women

ABSTRACT This paper studies intersectional multiplicity by encompassing the ways individuals shape relationships between social structures and their science identity. We discuss the science lives of two sixteen-year-old British South-Asian Muslim women studying in a single-sex independent school in London, both of whom aspire to science careers. Adapting McCall’s ‘intracategorical complexity’ in favouring a case study approach, we present the multiplicity of our participants’ relationships with exclusion and inequality, discrimination and privilege within their lived social settings, and how these relationships shape their identities and ambitions to become scientists. Our findings reveal that despite their similarities in their societally ascribed intersectional makeup, Ayesha and Hanya differ in viewing their intersections as challenges and/or opportunities. They both portray agentic control towards ‘going against the grain’ as future women scientists by negotiating their intersections as they develop their science identity.

The political inclusion of British Muslims: From multiculturalism to muscular liberalism

The political inclusion of British Muslims: From multiculturalism to muscular liberalism

Case Study of Repeat Offender with Jinn Possession

A case study on a male British Muslim repeat offender was presented. He had been involved in violent crimes since he was a teenager and had served several prison sentences. He had no recollection of committing the crimes and only knew of his violent actions from others. He was later diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was under medication. His condition improved briefly but relapsed soon after. His parents brought him to a jinn possession expert, where he was diagnosed with jinn possession using a newly developed jinn possession scale. The subject agreed to engage in therapy for jinn possession. He became aggressive with threatening behaviour during the third therapy session, confirming the case for jinn possession. A multi-psyche model explains how jinn possession can affect behavioural changes and the connection between jinn possession and mental disorders. Modern medication can be complemented with therapy for jinn possession to bring better therapeutic benefits.

Be]Longings: Exploring Emotional Territories of Home, Desire and Identity in Shamsie's Home Fire

The present article is an exploration of Shamsie’s Home Fire (2017). Contextualized in the theoretical narratives of Islamophobia and postcolonial studies, the present paper is based on a qualitative analysis of the selected textual lines to reveal the struggles inherent in the minds and hearts of second and third-generation colonial subjects. The characters desire to be heard, to belong to a nation, a culture, a family, a loved one, an ideology and a home.However, their life trajectories reveal the inherent difficulties embedded in trying to be 'British' as well as 'Muslims', the two identities that seem to be at conflicting ends owing to a surge in Islamophobia. By drawing attention to the complexity of 'belonging' and 'home', this article tries to reveal the ensuing identity crisis experienced by British Muslims in the wake of post-9/11Islamophobia.

Islamophobic and counter-Islamophobic YouTube representations of the British Muslim Communities

Based on David Gauntlett’s Web 2.0 approach of media audiences, this article argues that while Islamophobic discourses may be hegemonic in the British media in general, and the online media in particular, counter-Islamophobic ones have real potentials to subvert the anti-Muslims hegemony in contemporary Britain. Online media users, both as producers and consumers of mass-mediated representations, are empowered to blur the boundaries between the real and the virtual spaces in the construction of different conceptions of their own identities as well as of those of the others. To this end, comparatively, the comments of the users of two YouTube videos are analyzed and critically appraised to identify how they prosumed the different representations of Muslim communities of/in Britain. It is suggested that YouTube users contribute, from their respective subject positions, to the construction of diverse conceptualizations of their own identities and those of others as well. Their prosumed representations both entrench and defy a hierarchy of Islamophobic and Islamophallic images of Islam and Muslims in contemporary multicultural Britain.

Listening to Muslim Students’ Voices on the Prevent Duty in British Universities: A Qualitative Study

The Prevent Duty requires universities in the United Kingdom to identify and report students who might be seen as ‘vulnerable’ to radicalisation. Since its introduction in 2015, the duty has been subject to increasing empirical research in the education sector. However, there has been limited research that specifically explores Muslim students’ perceptions of Prevent in British universities. This paper directly addresses this gap in research by drawing upon the qualitative experiences of 25 university students who self-identified as ‘British Muslims’. Individual, semi-structured interviews were transcribed and analysed using Thematic Analysis. The findings demonstrate the securitisation of higher education and ‘policing’ of Muslim students. The paper draws on Pantazis and Pemberton’s use of the ‘new suspect community’ thesis in order to examine participants’ views and experiences. When analysing the data, three particular themes are especially prominent: as a tool of ‘surveillance’, Prevent hampers freedom of speech, threatens student activism and forces Muslim students to hide their Muslim identity to avoid being labelled as ‘radical’ or ‘vulnerable’ to terrorism. It will be concluded that the ‘surveillance’ function of Prevent is problematic on the grounds that it renders universities ‘modern-day panopticons’.

Review: A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire, ed. by Claire Chambers, Nafhesa Ali and Richard Phillips; Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love, by Richard Phillips, Claire Chambers, Nafhesa Ali, Kristina Diprose and Indrani Karmakar

Review: A Match Made in Heaven: British Muslim Women Write About Love and Desire, ed. by Claire Chambers, Nafhesa Ali and Richard Phillips; Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love, by Richard Phillips, Claire Chambers, Nafhesa Ali, Kristina Diprose and Indrani Karmakar

The Media's Portrayal of Radical Islam

This same impact of social internet on bigotry is modern society is an attractive research area. It deals with news prejudice, so it's crucial to look at where the television promotes to discrimination in specific ways. Because White persons controlled contemporary gaming industry and chose the images of Black individuals to convey throughout the beginning stages of tv and film, African Americans battled to express your own stories, beliefs, views, even selves. Our study incorporated comprehensive understanding of Bandura's Observational Learning in order to know how advertisements affect our beliefs and values. This study looked for when resources are available to mass media viewers, as well as how the relevant organization our attitudes, sentiments, and behaviors towards everyone else. In particular, as it relates to racial inequities, biases, racial implicit bias, and African American men's perspectives. Occasions and evidence on perceived discrimination, as well as their impact on press attention, have been discovered in major findings. The representation of Muhammad and Muslims as in British press is examined in this article. It suggests that British Muslims are frequently portrayed as an "alien other." It claims that this misperception is linked to that same emergence of something like a 'racist,' particularly Xenophobia, which has its roots in social portrayals of the 'everyone else.' To support this claim, the article provides a synopsis of just how racial groups have really been depicted there in British newspaper, arguing that portrayals of British Muslims in Religion are based on comparable ideas of 'deviations' and 'Notre.'

Materializing grief: The reclamation of loss in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire

ABSTRACT Over recent decades, Sophocles’ Antigone has become widely adapted within postcolonial contexts, the tragedy’s collapsing of the boundaries between the home, nation, and law positioning it as a useful text for offering counter-discourses to a state’s ideas of justice. Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire is one such adaptation that explores the themes of Antigone through the experiences of one British Muslim family. Drawing from Judith Butler’s scholarship on grievability and Sara Ahmed’s work on the politics of emotion, this article examines how Muslim lives are made abject by Britain’s post-9/11 Islamophobic politics and media. It then examines how Home Fire’s characters resist this abjection and use the materiality of mourning to reclaim subjectivity and human dignity for themselves and those they have lost. Finally, this article employs affect theory to examine how the materiality of mourning speaks across difference and reclaims grievability for those precarious lives in conflict with their nation.

Politics of Haya: Embodied Materiality of Piety as Everyday Resistance among British Muslim Women in Ayisha Malik's Fiction

Abstract This article explores how an ethical practice of modesty, represented in Ayisha Malik’s novels Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged (2015), and The Other Half of Happiness (2017), serves as an act of everyday resistance in the context of the issue of gender inequality in postcolonial South Asian Britain. It attempts to understand how religious modalities of agency, shown in the form of wearing hijab, operate against the dominant structures of power. However, drawing on Saba Mahmood’s theorisation of women’s agency in Politics of Piety (2004) as an embodied modality of action rather than simply a synonym for resistance to social norms, this article further argues that the female body in this fiction reshapes the understanding of religious experience through the conception of an embodied materiality of everyday resistance.

Isolation, Community and Spirituality: British Muslim Experiences of Ramadan in Lockdown

Ramadan, the Islamic month of fasting, is typically a time associated with individual worship and communal gatherings as Muslims meet, eat and pray together. In 2020 especially, COVID-19 had a significant impact on the observation of the holy month. With lockdown measures in place, mosques were closed and there were prohibitions on visiting family and friends, making the month an unusual occasion. This paper draws upon qualitative PhD research on Ramadan 2020 in Britain comprising more than 50 Ramadan photo diaries from diverse Muslim participants and follow-up interviews. The findings highlight how participants experienced the benefits of isolation by being able to reflect and connect more with God and via the establishment of “Ramadan corners” in homes, while at the same time missing the mosque and the Muslim community. I further highlight how communal aspects of the holy month were maintained and transformed to suit lockdown conditions, including the use of online activities, praying in congregation at home and sharing food. Emerging from these two facets of Ramadan, I explore ideas of socially dependent spirituality and how participants negotiated communal and individual elements of their spiritual lives. Through the diverse examples discussed, I argue that material, embodied, aesthetic and emotive practices were emphasised in 2020 to recreate a ‘feeling’ of Ramadan when typical expressions of the month were unavailable.

Romance and Reception: Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged and the Limits of Self-Representation of British Muslim Women

Romance and Reception: Ayisha Malik’s Sofia Khan Is Not Obliged and the Limits of Self-Representation of British Muslim Women

Exotic Representation of the East in the Native West: A Re-Orientalist Analysis of Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire

This study analyzes Kamila Shamsie's Home  Fire (2017) from the re-orientalist perspective through Liza Lau's theoretical lens (2009). Re-orientalism deals with the issues of representation and seeks how far the representation is authentic. Analyzing the techniques of re-orientalism in the select novel, the current study takes into account the ways in which the author makes her novel appear an autobiographical account that in Meenakshi Mukerjee's view creates the problem of authenticity. The study also investigates the problem of generalization with “truth claims" to address the needs of larger Western communities. In practicing re-orientalism, South Asian writers either omit the presence of South Asian culture or reflect on it with stereotypes and sensational materials. The novel seems to critique South Asian shallow educated folks, who blindly admire or practice Western cultures. The commons and subalterns either have no identity and representation or have homogenous representation in such Diaspora writings, leading to the misrepresentation of the common masses. The study employs qualitative, interpretive, and textual analytical methods to codify and interpret the primary and secondary data. Besides addressing the concerned research community and educational needs, the broader impact of the study addresses the UN's SDG No. 04 (Quality Education) and SDG No. 10 (Reduce Inequality). References Aamer Shaheen, S. Q. (2018). Obsessive ‘Westoxification’ versus the Albatross of Fundamentalism and Love as Collateral Damage in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Journal of Research (Humanities), 150-167. Afridi, A. (2018). The Cult of Authenticity and the Exotic East: A Re-Orientalist Reading of Jamil Ahmad’s The Wandering Falcon and Uzma Aslam Khan’s Trespassing . Islamabad: National University of Modern Languages. Ahmad, R. (2020). Towards an Ethics of Reading Muslims:Encountering Difference in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. Textual Practice, 1-17. Al-Hafizh, N. M. (2019). Deception Toward British Muslims In Novel Home Fire (2017) BY Kamila Shamsie. E-Journal of English Language &, 103-115. Banerjee, D. (2020). From Cheap Labor to Overlooked Citizens: Looking for British Muslim Identities in Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. South Asian Review. Dwivedi, L. L. (2014). Re-Orientalism and Indian Writing in English. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Franco, J. (1996). Outside in the Teaching Machine by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Review). boundary 2, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Duke University Press), 177-184. Hotep, D. U. (2011). FROM RBG BLAKADEMICS DIGITAL LIBRARY. Retrieved January 9, 2020, from www.scribd.com: https://www.scribd.com/dr_imhotep Lau, L. (2009). Re-Orientalism: The Perpetration and Development of Orientalism by Orientals. Modern Asian Studies, 571-590. Mendes, L. L. (2011). Re-Orientalism and South Asian Identity Politics : The Oriental other within. Newyork: Routledge. Mukherjee, M. (1993). The Anxiety of Indianness: Our Novels in English. Economic and Political Weekly, Vol. 28, No. 48, 2607-2611. shamsie, K. (2017). Hoe Fire. New York: Riverhead books. Shivani, A. (2006). Indo-Anglian fifiction: the new Orientalism. Race & Class Sage Publications, 1-25. Wikipedia :The Free Encyclopedia. (2019, November 11). Retrieved January 7, 2020, from Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_Fire_(novel)

Multi-Directionality and Universality: Global Feminisms and International Law in the Twenty-First Century

Advancing the goals of feminist international law in the twenty-first century requires renewed commitment to universality, and a deft multi-directionality. The iconic 1989 demonstration organized by British Asian women in support of the writer Salman Rushdie, condemned to death by a fatwa from Ayatollah Khomeini, provides a helpful metaphor. Campaigners from Southall Black Sisters and Women Against Fundamentalism led the protest carrying signs proclaiming: “A Women's Place Is in the World,” and “Our Tradition Is Struggle, Not Submission.”1 The women stood between two groups of men: a phalanx of British Muslim fundamentalist demonstrators denouncing Rushdie and calling for blasphemy laws, and white far right National Front protestors who opposed those fundamentalists with racist rhetoric. The women human rights defenders (WHRDs) challenged both groups of men, were threatened by both. Though encircled, they were determined to create their own space for multi-directional resistance.

Pushed to the edge: the consequences of the ‘Prevent Duty’ in de-radicalising pre-crime thought among British Muslim university students

ABSTRACT This article reports on the results of a mixed-methods survey of 152 self-selecting Muslim university students sampled across a range of higher education institutions across the UK in late 2019. The study explores perceptions of the impact of the new Prevent Duty among UK Muslim students, especially concerning questions of self-censorship and self-silencing for fear of referral to Channel (a multi-agency board tasked with early-state support). Beyond clear evidence of self-censorship and self-silencing in response to Prevent, this study also highlights the damage done to the staff-student relationship and the mental health of individuals targeted by Prevent.

Cultural Relations in a New Century

This essay examines Ziauddin Sardar’s ideas on Cultural Relations, and specifically his relationship with the British Council, primarily through two pieces of his writing, his 2004 British Council 70th Anniversary Lecture and an essay of the same year about being a British Muslim. It reflects on his concepts of “transmodernism” and “mutually assured dialogue” both as theoretical and as practical tools in Cultural Relations.

Double Consciousness in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album

This article throws light on the issue of identity and Double Consciousness which creates traumatic effects on the psyche, identity and culture of Shahid, the representative of South Asian Immigrants depicted in Hanif Kureishi’s The Black Album in Britain. In The Black Album, Shahid is depicted as a South Asian British Muslim who looks at himself from the eyes of the White British and he finds two-ness in himself, which is similar to W. E. B. Du Bois’ theory of Double Consciousness that “is the sense of always looking at one’s self from the eyes of others” (2). So, the article reveals the double consciousness of Shahid, the protagonist who carries hybrid identity for having British White mother and Pakistani Muslim father. Because of being a South Asian Muslim immigrant living under the hegemony of White Supremacy in Britain, he experiences Double Consciousness, which causes his inferiority complex, lack of self-esteem, rootlessness, in-betweenness and fragmentation of identity. Thus, the article deals with the Double Consciousness within the binary opposition between the East and West, Islamic Fundamentalist and Western Liberalism, and Pakistani Identity and British Identity. According to the theorists Homi Bhabha, Edward Said and Frantz Fanon, the colonized people who become immigrants in the postcolonial era suffer from identity crisis and double consciousness as they face segregation, racism, discrimination and various other forms of Othering.