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This book is the first comprehensive study of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain across the post-1960s period. It uses the county of Wiltshire as a case study, and assesses both local authority policies and strategies, and Muslim communities’ personal experiences of migration and integration. It draws upon previously unexplored archival material and oral histories, and addresses a range of topics and themes, including entrepreneurship, housing, education, multiculturalism, social cohesion, and religious identities, needs and practices. It challenges the long-held assumption that local authorities in more rural areas have been inactive, and even disinterested, in devising and implementing migration, integration and diversity policies, and it sheds light on small and dispersed Muslim communities that have traditionally been written out of Britain’s immigration history. It reveals what is a clear, and often complex, relationship between rurality and integration, and shows how both local authority policies and Muslim migrants’ experiences have long been rooted in, and shaped by, their rural settings and the prevalence of small ethnic minority communities and Muslim populations in particular. The study’s findings and conclusions build upon research on migration and integration at the rural level, as well as local-level migrant policies, experiences and integration, and uncover what has long been a rural dimension to Muslim integration in Britain.
10 THE (IM)POSSIBLE MUSLIM Yassir Morsi BRANCHES When I was younger, I often visited my local park to pray maghrib. And in the troubled years since, while enduring the racial turbulences shaped by the War on Terror, I would seek solace there. I would take a long walk to ruminate on politics, the world, my rage and the scars they left. But when I went there recently the park felt so different. The same trees and benches, pathways and fences were still there, but they were so unfamiliar, distant and unfair to me. I felt judged as if I was unwelcomed; a stranger to
5 Constructing the ‘Muslim’ other: preventing ‘radicalisation’, ‘violent extremism’ and ‘terrorism’ Introduction This chapter explores the strand of the ‘fight against terrorism’ discourse that connects the threat of terrorism to ‘violent religious extremism’. The chapter focuses specifically on an EU belief that preventing terrorism is best achieved through the development of policies designed to combat the process of ‘radicalisation’. The chapter considers the emergence and evolution of the EU’s counter-radicalisation discourse. It shows how the ‘radicalisation
11 THE RACIALISED ‘GO-TO MUSLIM’ Sadia Habib Dear left-wing White liberal friend, Throughout life I’ve often found myself situated in social contexts where I’m the only Muslim and the only person of colour. In these spaces, I’ve been treated, at times, as a novelty, a foreigner, and an outsider. I’ve learned to exist as an objet de curiosité in spaces where Whiteness dominates. The secondary school I attended was overwhelmingly White in its demographics; students and teachers would turn to me in classroom discussions with seemingly harmless inquisitiveness, and
I begin with the assumption that there exists in both Western Europe and the USA a set of luridly coloured, highly distorted, yet widely held impressions of the Middle East, and of Muslims in general. These stereotypes have almost universal validity in the sense that they are as much accepted by those with personal experience of the area – businessmen, educators
and dissemination. In the UK there exists a lack of interaction based on sustained and mutual engagement with Muslims for non-Muslim people, and as a consequence the media remains a large source of information. During the reading of a text or the viewing of a broadcast, audiences are constituted into a community, and socialised into a group that is bound by the shared experiences of media. 30 As the majority of the media outlets are commercial institutions, it must not be overlooked that their
, and the experiences of, certain segments of Britain’s rural populations, for example women, youth and the homeless. 10 Regarding the academic sphere, whilst much work has been done since Chris Philo’s 1992 claim that Britain was characterised by what he coined ‘neglected rural geographies’, 11 rural space nevertheless remains overlooked in comparison to urban settings across a range of disciplines and areas of research. This chapter places the integration of Muslim migrant communities in post-1960s Wiltshire within this context of rural Britain. It builds upon
Against the backdrop of the hyper-politicisation of migration in Europe and increased levels of Islamophobia in Western society more generally, Muslims are frequently accused of rejecting inclusion in mainstream society choosing instead to socialise within co-religious communities characterised by distinct cultural and religious practices. 1 These perceptions of Muslims as ‘outsiders’ living within European society are extremely problematic for Muslim youth negotiating inclusion and ‘insider status’ in contemporary Ireland. Young
From the beginning of the military conquest of the region, the majority of French observers noted that Algerian Muslims had strictly adhered to the Qur’anic prohibition of alcohol before the advent of the French. 1 This assumption was demonstrably untrue. Alcohol was consumed by Jewish, Christian and Muslim groups in Algeria before the French conquest, as it was in other Muslim regions, such as, for example, the Mughal Empire. 2 The prohibition of alcohol in the Qur’an is clear, yet, as argued by Shahab
The victory of the Narendra Modi-led Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in the 2019 parliamentary election has transformative implications for Muslim politics in India. Until the electoral rise of the BJP during the late 1980s, Muslim politics was safely ensconced within the dominant secular politics of India. Since its inception in 1980, the BJP has sought to craft a strategy that ignored Muslim voters, perpetuating a politics of polarisation in order to forge a Hindu majority by moderating caste divisions with an unambiguous