INTRODUCTION

Particular themes have dominated research and writing about Muslims in Britain in the past three decades. These themes include youth, migration, education, gender, mosques and religious leadership. This book has discussed these important aspects of Muslim life in Britain, and has examined some of the results of inquiry into them. However, it is evident that the way in which these topics have been considered, both in academic writing and more particularly in public and media discourse, has occasionally created a somewhat pathologized, two-dimensional impression of British Muslims. There is a sense in which Muslims have, in some studies and reports, been reduced to a function of their religion, and other dimensions of identity and experience have been ignored. Since 9/11 and 7/7 in particular, there has been relatively little interest in the everday experience of ‘ordinary’ British Muslims. A new stigmatizing discourse fuelled by an ‘anti-Muslim political culture’ (Kundnani 2007a: 126) and the politics of the ‘Preventing Violent Extremism’ agenda has come to focus upon the apparent otherness of Muslims in Britain, which is assumed to be closely connected to the nature of Islam itself. As a consequence of such a distracting and distorting characterization, other important narratives have become obscured.

This chapter therefore aims to reveal some of the significant but rarely examined ways in which British Muslims are integral to British civil society today. These spheres have received less academic attention and, by their very nature, they have been subject to less media speculation or political commentary.