As a child in the early 2000s, Bollywood films, soap operas, and music as forms of entertainment were a common staple within the British Pakistani community. Popular songs from the 1990s elaborated on women’s gorah (white) skin tone, a trend that remains true with Bollywood produced music today. Actresses on screen were always light-skinned, while male actors’ skin tone seemed irrelevant, since the majority of them confidently performed in tanned or olive-coloured tones just as easily. Certainly, for women, the definition of Indian or south Asian feminine beauty centred on whiteness. In my teenage years Zee TV (see also Kalra 2009: 113–114) and the Star Plus TV channel, which originated in India, aired a dizzying array of dramas and soaps that presented weekly – if not daily – episodes, widely viewed within Asian and Muslim households across the United Kingdom. These programmes featured fair-skinned lead actresses, further entrenching the idea of whiteness in south Asian and Muslim cultures in a postcolonial context that was simultaneously a growing post-migrant, diaspora community in the Global North. Fair skin and public portrayals of whiteness have long been emulated by mainstream beauty products to be visible as the aspirational ‘standard’. In recent years hegemonic standards of White beauty have been called to account, as witnessed, for example, during the Black Lives Matter movement and protests of 2022. Actresses such as Priyanka Chopra were criticised for modelling for skin care brands such as Fair and Lovely, an Indian skin-lightening cosmetic product (more recently rebranded as Glow and Lovely, to ward off criticisms for promoting colourism), widely sold in many parts of south Asia. Public figures, models, and actresses have also been accused of undergoing skin-lightening treatments.

The legacy of colonialism persists through the visibility and dissemination of beauty standards across the world today, with ‘whiteness’ as the aspired-to ideal. The promotion and aspiration of whiteness extend beyond the media–beauty–cosmetic complex, however, and reach into migration and settlement processes, through targeted pressure on individuals and their extended family networks alike. Representations of migration and British citizenship as coveted opportunities can result in established beauty constructs that are ordinarily precursors to ‘making a match’ being waived, circumvented, or modified in order to achieve a marriage migration arrangement. The direction of power at play in this dynamic is crucial: it is well established that British Pakistani and Kashmiri families tend to select fairer brides for their sons. But less talked about is the fact that they often also opt for fairer grooms for their daughters. Many migrant husbands and community member interlocutors told me of the mismatch in perceptions of beauty between transnational couples, with the ability to migrate and gain citizenship often overriding conventional marital norms. In other words, for male migrants and their families, the chance to reach the shores of Great Britain can supersede the cultural requirements of matching with a ‘fair bride’, but it also imposes the racialised criteria that the migrant groom looks ‘White’ in order to be considered a desirable husband-to-be.

Henna, a community interlocutor aged 27, shared with me:

Henna was born in Birmingham and studied nursing at university. She told me of instances when cousins in her family had married men from Pakistan. She also told me of her parents’ marriage, which involved her British Pakistani mother marrying her Pakistan-born father, who then became a migrant husband. Their marriage, she told me, was charred by domestic violence, brokenness, and a great deal of personal and collective pain. She was the second eldest daughter, one of six siblings, and, after witnessing a life of her father sending remittances back home to his family while her mother struggled to persuade him to commit to her and the children, she vowed she would never marry a man from ‘back home’. She told me:

Henna was signalling the transactional dynamics of transnational marriages, where matches between spouses with similar educational backgrounds were more likely to take place. She also spoke to me about the persistence of colourism in the community, which continues to dictate marriage choices both in Britain and in Pakistan and Kashmir. She detailed her personal experience involving a British Pakistani man she dated at university. His family expressed reservations about her skin colour, complaining that she was a medium brown tone and not fair-skinned. They also objected to her lower caste. She told me about her female cousin, who had been able to marry a ‘very handsome and fair-skinned groom’ from Pakistan, while, in her view, her cousin was not considered to be ‘beautiful’. According to Henna, grooms and their families from Pakistan were more likely to compromise conventional beauty ideals when the bride-to-be held British citizenship, indicating the transactional underpinning of such marriages.

Samina, who had moved from Bradford to Birmingham after getting married, told me that her husband’s family wanted a fair-skinned bride for their eldest son. She had reservations about marrying her now husband, but, due to existing kin relations between her family and her now in-laws, her family encouraged her to consider the rishta. After getting to know her husband, she

Based on our conversation, it seemed that ideas of fairness were deeply entrenched in both brides and grooms, as Samina indirectly referred to the skin tone disparity between herself and her husband. Although she decided to proceed with the marriage, it is evident that skin tone was a significant factor during the decision-making process. Specifically, its factoring alongside family support for the marriage is indicative of the importance it can hold. She also told me about a family in Birmingham who were friends with her in-laws. The younger sister in the family felt she could not find a suitable partner in the United Kingdom due to her weight but was able to marry a man in Pakistan who later settled with her in Birmingham. ‘It’s interesting, you know; men from Pakistan will trade off their Bollywood dream girl image for a wife when it comes to a passport,’ she added.

Throughout my fieldwork, migrant husband interlocutors often spoke to me about how skin colour was a factor influencing their marital choice in some way. The connections between ideas of whiteness and marriage and the persistent legacy of colonialism became increasingly glaring. This overlap is further underlined when the type of passport or citizenship held by the prospective bride or groom transacts, and determines the success of the rishta. In many ways, citizenship status demonstrated by the colour of one’s passport has replaced the merit of the colour of one’s skin as a vehicle for social status and mobility. What happens when we consider the intersection of skin colour and passport colour in a transnational context? What can we learn about the intricate workings of gender, race, and colonialism? Does marriage migration in any way draw on this relationship and, if so, what role does this play in constructing multiple masculinities for migrant husbands? In this chapter, I consider the interplay between gender, race, and colonialism to understand the experience of Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslim migrant husbands.

The colour of migration

For many decades male migrants married British brides for employment opportunities to pull their birth families in Pakistan out of poverty, which is also true of my own family, as my maternal grandfather arrived in the country to make a living in the cotton mills of the northern towns (see also Dwyer, Shah, and Sanghera 2008: 119; Kalra 2009: 122). More recently migration and marriage have enabled, in a Bourdieuan sense, the achievement of economic, social, cultural, and symbolic capital (see also Thapar-Bjokert and Sanghera 2010). In previous chapters I traced how the pursuit of symbolic and economic capital forged a type of transnational patriarchal masculine form. In other words, symbolic capital grew out of what was once genuine economic opportunity, lighting the flame for continued migration, generation after generation. The symbolic capital associated with migration to England includes power and notions of a ‘higher self’, no doubt an extension of the lived experience of colonial rule in India, whereby the coupling of power and whiteness conquered not only lands but minds, and where the seeds of Eurocentrism and perceptions of ‘civilised’ ways of life were planted in the imaginations of many among the population. Colonial bureaucratic tools such as the population census and registrars exposed many to ‘better’ ways of conducting governance (Dumont 1980), further reinforcing notions of the ‘higher self’, which was synonymous with ideas of Western civilisation. Such early social perceptions of the English during the colonial era, which have partially been sustained over subsequent generations, serve as the basis for today’s template of the British Pakistani or British Kashmiri masculine self. No doubt, the fact that the colonial rulers were heteronormative males who held high office and rank in the ruling classes, together with their freedom to travel between Great Britain and the Indian subcontinent, is very much reminiscent of the contemporary transnational patriarch model of masculinity, which many migrant husbands continue to aspire to in their own marriage migration journeys.

For many Muslims, migrating to the United Kingdom and many parts of the West has become increasingly difficult in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks. Indeed, many scholars describe the European Union as a gated community (van Houtum and Pijpers 2007). Increased fear of Muslims, and, therefore, their securitisation (Blackwood 2015; Blackwood, Hopkins, and Reicher 2015), have significantly contributed to the racialisation of borders, leading border protection agents to racially profile Muslim passengers, migrants, and travellers (Swiney 2006; Nagra and Maurutto 2016). Muslims are seen as a threat across and within borders, which has resulted in their deployment in historical processes of nation-making and their contemporary iterations. For example, during the snap general election held in the United Kingdom in 2019, the prime minister, Boris Johnson, published an article titled ‘Give me a majority and I’ll keep you safe from terror’, cultivating fear and anxiety among the electorate towards Muslims in a way designed to impact voting behaviour. Another prominent example is the infamous Executive Order 13769 of the former US president, Donald Trump, titled ‘Protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the United States’; commonly dubbed the ‘Muslim ban’, it barred Muslims from gaining entry to the United States in 2017.

Such policies stand in juxtaposition to the United Kingdom’s migration policies in the aftermath of the Second World War. In the 1960s the Foreign and Commonwealth Office put together a propaganda video in Arabic to persuade Muslim migrants to settle in Britain to help rebuild the shattered postwar economy.¹ In more recent memory, the perplexing case of young British men and women being recruited to join the so-called Islamic State in Syria and Iraq renewed frenzied debates around good versus bad citizens, border control, and sovereign power, particularly in relation to the state’s authority to strip a person of citizenship. Shamima Begum’s controversial case helped to (re)position British Muslims within the nation as a potential security threat that require constant surveillance and monitoring. When combined, these various threads inform state migration policy, as the border is conceived as a barrier mechanism to prevent (Muslim) terror attacks. Similar to the containment of the population within geographic bounds during colonial rule in India, British migration policy today can be seen as keeping these very populations it once ruled over outside its geographic borders (see also Bi 2023). The question then arises: did colonial rule ever cease? Or did the parameters of colonial rule merely shift?

The UK government’s position over the last 12 years (at the time of writing) has no doubt adopted a gated approach in constructing a hostile environment. Under Theresa May’s time as home secretary, we saw tens of thousands of international students be deported after they were accused of forging their English language tests, a necessary requirement to approve their student visas. The foundations were also laid for the Windrush Scandal, which saw lifetime residents of the United Kingdom be deported to parts of the Caribbean they had never called home in the first place (Gentleman 2019). Despite public outcry, dozens of people from the Windrush generation were deported, with some lives ending during the scandal before justice could be delivered. Growing up, my mum would tell us stories about her father and their frequent journeys between the Birmingham and their village in Kashmir. One specific detail that stood out in these recollections was the lack of individual passports for my mum and her siblings. My mum explained that, during the 1960s and 1970s, and even through the 1980s, she and her siblings were listed as dependents on their father’s passport. The employment of individual passports is a relatively recent phenomenon regulating those that come in and out of the country. Geopolitics, together with the need for increased surveillance and the rise of technological innovations, position passports at the centre of freedom. Freedom is increasingly racialised, and embedded within colonial frameworks, as geopolitical power plays come into practice, whereby nations in the West, and in particular the United Kingdom, hold greater leverage in the global hierarchy of states (Bi 2023) through the power of passport-giving. It is widely known that to hold an American or a British passport will allow an individual entry with minimum interrogation across many parts of the world today, whereas Pakistani and Iranian passports are among the most undesired, and therefore restrict freedom of movement.

It is within this broader landscape that transnational marriages between British Pakistani and Kashmiri women and Pakistani- and Kashmiri-born men (although men from Azad Kashmir are issued with Pakistani passports) can and should be studied. Apart from these marriages, the migration opportunities for working-class men from Pakistan and Kashmir are limited, with the alternatives being to enter Europe or America, on a student visa, or to migrate to work in the Middle East, where basic labour and human rights conditions have been documented to be limited in some areas, leading to physical deprivations and poor mental health, and, in some cases, suicide (Al-Maskari et al. 2011). This landscape is further complicated by both global and domestic portrayals of Muslim men, who are more than often portrayed as wife beaters, groomers of White girls, gang members, drug dealers, criminals, and terrorists. Pakistani and Kashmiri Muslim migrant husbands are therefore entering extremely hostile terrain when migrating and settling in the United Kingdom. During the aspirational migration phase, however, this usually does not factor into their decision-making. Rather, it is the endless possibilities that they imagine await them once they make it across the border, including greater social capital and upward social mobility, and therefore masculine performance. I did, nonetheless, hear frustrations voiced by migrant husbands towards the UK immigration system, namely that it was more difficult to migrate to Britain in recent times compared to the 1990s and early 2000s. One reason is the introduction of the financial threshold policy, which requires an annual income of £18,500 to sponsor a migrant spouse (now increased to £29,000 in 2024). It is fair to say that masculine performance can be just as much transacted by state immigration policy as it is by the behaviour of wives and in-laws. Immigration policy is a significant tool in the state’s repertoire, barring persons based on countries of origin, which by extension involves their racialised skin colour.

Drawing on the narratives of Henna and Samina contained within the opening of this chapter, it is possible to trace how migrant husbands can in some cases trade conventional beauty standards that centre on fair skin – and, by extension, whiteness – for the chance to migrate to the United Kingdom. Thus, the prospect of obtaining a British passport, sometimes referred to as a ‘red passport’ by my interlocutors and members of the Pakistani and Kashmiri communities, overrides the colourism in conventional beauty ideals. It can also be argued that the direction of migration westwards also signifies travelling towards whiteness (see also El-Tayeb 2011). The question that arises next is: does holding a British passport symbolise whiteness in the context of transnational marriage between British Pakistani or Kashmiri women and Pakistani- or Kashmiri-born men? It could certainly be argued that this set-up of marriage migration can and does behave as adopting whiteness, particularly as the Pakistani passport is considered to be one of the most undesirable to possess in the world. More broadly, concepts such as the American dream might be better understood as the ‘White American dream’ and play a significant role in inspiring migrants to make the trip to the West. As for the concept of freedom, symbolised by the colour of one’s passport, the implications involve consolidating the view that to be free is to be White (see Stovall 2021).

Performing race through citizenship

The recurring centrality of whiteness in the migrant husband’s experience of his marriage migration becomes more visible by reframing it as an iteration of the pursuit of the ‘White American dream’. This, in turn, facilitates a reconceptualisation of the construction of masculinity as experienced by, and in the name of, migrant husbands. Previously, I showed how masculinity is configured for migrant husbands through the consolidation of the transnational patriarch ideal. Three key stumbling blocks (immigration and visas, wives and in-laws, and employment) can disrupt the migrant husbands’ ability to achieve transnational patriarch status, however, as the transactional power of their migrant husband status, and, by extension, their masculinity, is directed away from them to wives, in-laws, and even employers. Although at first glance immigration/visas and employment might be seen as largely state-regulated and therefore somewhat more influential, it is in fact wives and in-laws that gate-keep access to these tokens for migrant husbands. For example, the migrant’s spousal visa can be submitted only by his British Pakistani wife, which shifts agency and autonomy away from the male migrant to his wife and her family. As a result, from the outset of the important rishta talks and transactions, wives and their families wield considerable bargaining privileges, including the signing over of family wealth and land to the bride through the nikaah (Islamic marriage contract) as her agreed dowry. At any point of the immigration application process, the wife and her family can withdraw their formal sponsorship of the applicant groom-to-be or husband.

Throughout my fieldwork, interlocutors recounted stories about marriages that did not get as far as this stage, instead ending abruptly prior to reaching an agreement between the families. Upon migration and settlement in Britain, however, employment for many of my interlocutors was acquired through the networks of the wife’s family, which again indicates their powerful gate-keeping role. In the examples of songs of sorrow mapped out in Chapter 3, the wife is portrayed as being in possession of her migrant husband’s passport and wages, both of which he dutifully places in her hands, as though fulfilling a contractual condition of their marriage, which entitles him residency rights in Britain. Further, even though the initial visa may be granted, new Home Office immigration rules require visa holders to renew their visa after two years of the spouse entering the United Kingdom, and only after ten years have passed, and the couple can show they are still married, is the indefinite leave to remain granted. Since obtaining the required visa, citizenship, and employment are fundamental tenets of the transnational patriarchal ideal, the wife and family’s monopoly over his future often means that the migrant husband’s dream of becoming a transnational patriarch remains merely a dream.

One might ask: why do wives and in-laws – who are in some cases the migrant’s relatives – prevent him from independently working to reach the goal of becoming a successful transnational patriarch? Key to answering this question is the positionality of wives and their families, marked by secure and assured British citizenship, which is juxtaposed against the insecure or precarious citizenship status of the migrant husband. The latter is entirely at the mercy of his wife and in-laws, as the state can consider his application only if it has been submitted on his behalf by his wife. The unidirectional assertion of power is jolting, positioning the migrant husband as an inferior newcomer to both the household and the country, and entirely at the whim of his wife and her relatives. Precarious citizenship status not only shapes the powerlessness of his masculine form but is also indicative of the migrant husband’s race and racial identity. Although such men may have aspired towards whiteness (and the consumerist, capitalist trappings that accompany it) by deciding to marry a British Pakistani woman and migrate to Britain, they often experience whiteness as exclusion and asymmetrical power upon their arrival in this new world. This whiteness, in contrast to their expectations, is embodied as power by the wife and her family through their secure citizenship status, affording them greater transacting power over the migrant husband. Migrant husbands find their agency is stripped away or interrupted as they come to occupy the spaces of conventionally marginalised races, and therefore embody the experiences that, for generations, Black, Asian and ethnic persons have been subjected to through micro-aggressions and structural discrimination. This is also evidenced by the common term ‘freshie’, abbreviated from ‘fresh off the boat’ – a derogatory term used by British-born Pakistanis and Kashmiris to both refer to and insult migrant husbands. Although Butler (1988) argues that gender can be performed, the stories and struggles of the migrant men I encountered show that race – and racialised power – can also be performed through the possession of secure citizenship in a Western state. It is precisely this performance of whiteness by wives and in-laws that produces multiple masculinities for the migrant husband, causing him to perceive himself as weak or worthless, even being subjected to domestic violence. In any circumstance other than the marriage migration context, a recently married Pakistani or Kashmiri Muslim man would seldom be considered inferior to his wife and in-laws. Indeed, we rarely see the inversing of the heteronormative masculine ideal in cases when a married couple are both British Pakistani or Kashmiri, or both Pakistani or Kashmiri nationals.

We might consider the whiteness that is aspired to in and through migration and citizenship for migrant husbands to conflict with the whiteness performed by wives and in-laws prior to marriage and migration, which may perhaps have been demonstrated through actions and words, and, in particular, the demands placed on the migrant husbands and their families prior to confirming the rishta. Why, then, do migrant husbands continue with marriage migration, even when there are early indications of power struggles, controlling behaviour, possibly even violence? The stories of migrant husbands who have been treated this way do travel back to aspiring migrant husbands in Pakistan and Kashmir, but, even so, we see migrant husbands continue to opt to marry British Pakistani women when given the option. The answer to this puzzle lies with the concept of marriage itself, which is highly gendered in the Pakistani and Kashmiri communities. It is the norm for women to be homemakers and men to be the breadwinners, not only in Pakistan and Kashmir but also within the British Pakistani and Kashmiri diaspora. Only recently, perhaps in the last decade or so, have these ideals begun to shift slightly, when, due to the rising cost of living, two incomes are seen as better than one. Shabir, a 34-year-old migrant husband from Jhelum in Pakistan who arrived in Birmingham in 2014, told me: ‘I knew my uncle [mum’s brother] was quite strict, but I thought that marriage, the Islamic nikaah, would give me the rights of a husband, and that this would be respected …’ Upon arriving in the United Kingdom, however, Shabir endured two and a half years of abuse, after which another uncle (father’s brother) helped to arrange his divorce, with the guarantee that his wife would apply for his indefinite leave to remain in the country, thereby granting his citizenship. In some cases, when the abuse the migrant husband has been subjected to becomes public knowledge within the community, this can lead to dishonour and shame for the wife and in-laws. As a result, their leveraging power in deporting the migrant husband is reduced, and interventions from family members, particularly from established male kin who were once migrant husbands themselves, can assist in transacting the terms for citizenship during familial divorce proceedings.

Decolonising Muslim men

Muslim men are predominantly seen through the Western lens, projecting often negative, hurtful, and misinformed images that are highly political and stubbornly persistent. Even in the Global South, portrayals of Muslim men are considerably influenced by those perpetuated in the West, represented as naturally prone to criminality, thuggery, and misogyny. The real-world implications of hateful speech and stereotypes can be life-shattering. For example, India and China have peddled views of the ‘terrorist Muslim man’ to justify some of their abhorrent state-sanctioned security measures against Muslim communities, which international bodies such as Amnesty International have deemed to amount to serious human rights breaches. The case of migrant husbands from Pakistan and Kashmir in Britain upends these negative portrayals in some ways, however, albeit while simultaneously creating new ones. We learn that Muslim men can occupy weakened positions, can be subjected to domestic violence, and can exercise agency and resistance on their own terms, and, by extension, divert from their heteronormative masculinity. In Connell’s (2005) terms, then, they demonstrate multiple masculinities – a concept that is at times extended to Muslim men in the scholarship (see Hopkins 2006: 349–350; Dwyer, Shah, and Sanghera 2008), but rarely within mainstream public discourse. Proof lies in my own personal experience. The lack of funding provided by my university to support my doctoral research meant that I was faced with the possibility of abandoning my project, and therefore my interlocutors, many who had entrusted me with their intimate life stories. Regrettably, I experienced first-hand how Western academic institutions can perpetuate harmful colonial tropes, and, unable to step out from the shadows of their colonial histories and funding bodies, serve as vessels for subjugation and marginalisation even as they vow to oppose it. The ethnography I have presented in this manuscript has undoubtedly been supported by my supervisors and mentors but was structurally almost unfeasible from the outset, which speaks volumes about the priorities and focus areas of some universities, particularly regarding the divisive subject of Muslims. Had my research focused on exploring how migrant husbands are vulnerable targets of radicalisation, or how they pose a national security threat, I believe this would have been more likely to interest research councils and universities to provide me with generous funding.

Another issue to contemplate is how necessary it has become to tirelessly interrogate the binary that is often presented between the ‘Global North’ and the ‘Global South’. My ethnography demonstrates that as an overlooked community from the traditionally conceived ‘Global South’, migrant husbands – counterintuitively, perhaps – experience precarity and vulnerability in the ‘Global North’. Many endure poor living conditions, inadequate labour rights, and a lack of free and accessible support for victims of domestic violence – all ills that are traditionally assigned to life in the Global South, but that are inescapable in the Global North. As a woman of the margins occupying the Global South in the Global North, by researching migrant husbands who are from the rest of the world, the periphery, the other places (the many euphuisms used to designate spaces outside the West), I show that geographic territories and the symbolism attached to them can be irrelevant in shaping our personhood and social experiences. In other words, the Global South is reproduced in the Global North for people who are deemed to be ‘from’ or ‘of’ the former. Put differently, despite residing in the Global North, which is fashioned as a prosperous, developed, and civilised place, the lived reality can be quite the opposite for marginalised and racialised bodies despite birthright. Compounds of colonial rule continue to exist, circulate, and operate, pushing Black and ethnic communities to the margins of society in the United Kingdom. Such postcolonial misrepresentations also form a crucial tool in ongoing practices of nation-making as the beliefs, traditions, and ideas of Muslim communities – unfortunately, also those terrorist activities carried out by minority fringe members – are employed to portray all Muslims as potential threats within the nation. Outside the nation, the narrative that Muslim men are oppressors is crucial to sovereign nation-making, elevating the West, by way of external military invasions and occupations, above allegedly ‘uncivilised’ spaces such as Afghanistan and Iraq, where ‘Muslim women need saving from oppressive Muslim men’ (Abu-Lughod 2013; see also Hopkins 2006: 343).

I anticipate the counter-argument that Muslim Pakistani and Kashmiri migrant husbands are not victims of state transaction and oppression but are, rather, abused by their own co-nationals and co-ethnics, even their own close blood relatives. But family members, I argue, behave as the arm of the state, like the prison officers in Foucault’s all-seeing panopticon (1991), keeping watch over others for the sake of the survivability of the state apparatus. In different ways, the panopticon can be seen as being adopted in our contemporary world to convert the ordinary citizen into a watch tower, such as through the ‘See it, Say it, Sort it’ message broadcast to millions of London Underground commuters every day as they traverse the maze of the city (Bi 2020). It is true that, for many British Pakistani and Kashmiri families, exercising control over other men in the kin system provides the greatest from of izzat (Fischer 1991: 102). For the state, however, such control represents a form of devolution of power to the individual, authorising citizens to regulate the bodies of other citizens on its behalf. In this way, subjugation and violence are carried out from a distance from the state, providing the illusion of the state’s lack of involvement, its culpability. This has a striking resemblance to Dumont’s (1980) argument pertaining to the creation of social divisions through census monitoring by British colonial rulers in India within the population, which primarily led to religious tensions in the Indian subcontinent, eventually resulting in civil war, followed by the Partition of India in 1947.

To bring the discussion back to the complex intersection of colonialism, citizenship, and race (see also Kalra 2009), it is important to recognise how wives and their extended families perform the role of the state by gate-keeping the entry rules for Pakistani grooms. Applying the racial and racialisation framework can help us analytically broaden the scholarship on migration and diaspora studies, revealing the ways in which the migrations journeys and post-settlement experiences of migrant men from the Global South are experienced in racialised and inferiorised terms. The desirability of residency, work opportunities, and eventual British citizenship are seen as markers of whiteness for Pakistani and Kashmiri migrant men, but obtaining these goals means encountering and enduring their own racialisation in Britain.

Race and colonialism are therefore vital frameworks within which the construction of masculinity for migrant husbands takes place. The ivory tower can be another arm of the state, through which such perceptions can be upheld. For example, as an undergraduate at Oxford University, I was taught by a demographer whose publications were inherently Islamophobic, since he openly claimed that, if the state did not intervene to regulate Muslim fertility rates, Muslims would take over the native British population by 2050 (Coleman 2006). His claims were never questioned or called out for what they were by faculty members. Instead, he continued to teach his views to undergraduates – lectures that I painfully sat through. The decolonisation discourse of recent years has made significant strides regarding curriculum content, but still largely omits the need to decolonise institutional structures. A pragmatic example of decolonising structures would, for example, require universities to publish the master’s or doctoral dissertation proposals they have funded. If the projects confirm the ‘Western gaze’ (Said 1978) and promote or condone the marginalisation of communities outside the West, the university’s global and national ranking should be lowered. The task of decolonising Muslim men can be achieved only through genuine research that considers their multiple masculinities (see also Hopkins 2006: 349–350; Dwyer, Shah, and Sanghera 2008), which can then be translated into evolving literature that can be added to the curriculum (see Bi 2021). In the absence of such an approach, it is virtually impossible to conduct ethical research on Muslim communities, particularly exploring the experiences of Muslim men.