Comprehensive overview and analysis of the history of Muslims in Britain
Muslims are now a global community, with substantial presences in virtually every country in the world, including every major Western country. Such are the historical and contemporary political contexts of relations between Muslims and Westerners, and the very substantial differences between Muslims and Western attitudes towards many key issues of private and public morality, as well as social organization and public life, that it is inevitable that Muslim communities cannot slot easily into Western societies without considerable adjustment having to be made on both sides. Nor is it surprising that this should prove a bumpy and often painful process, particularly as Western communities and institutions are generally a lot less accustomed to adapting to accommodate Muslims than Muslims have become accustomed to adapting to Western demands and expectations over decades of interaction in which the West has almost invariably held the upper hand.
Despite this, however, the general perception in the West remains not of Muslims as a flexible and adaptable community who have a baseline of principles that they will not betray, but as a conservative, rigid and dogmatic community that refuses to adapt. In this book Humayun Ansari, director of the Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies and Equal Opportunities and senior lecturer at the Department of History at Royal Holloway College, University of London, sets out to counter Western misunderstandings of the position and role of Muslims in Britain by use of a truly amazing amount of information, along with considerable useful analysis of the history of Muslims in Britain. His aim is to demonstrate firstly how Muslims are far from being the homogeneous, unvariegated and
unchanging mass that they are often portrayed as, and secondly to humanise British Muslims by demonstrating how they are facing many of the same issues as other British people, and are often responding to them in similar ways. The underlying message, never explicitly articulated, is that it is not Muslims who have proven to be unadaptable and unable to compromise to cope with the historical and social consequences of
Of all Western countries, and Muslim communities in Western countries, to discuss in this way,
This is something Ansari clearly understands, with almost a third of his book consisting of discussions of the experience of Muslims in
Moving on to the post-war period, Ansari combines a history of the Muslim community with thematic discussions of key issues, beginning with a statistical analysis of the patterns of migration, settlement, housing, employment and education, before moving on to discuss the growing interaction between Muslims collectively and non-Muslim society, and key issues that have arisen in this process. The breadth of material that he synthesises is impressive, and few can seriously take issue with the analysis he provides of it. On controversial issues such as the Rushdie ffair, he manages -- unlike many Muslims who write from within western institutions -- to avoid pandering to liberal prejudices, and his discussion of Dr Kalim Siddiqui’s attempt to establish a “minority political system for Muslims in Britain”, based on the
Muslim Parliament of Great Britain, is much fairer than is found in books written by non-Muslims, who tend to be blinded by Dr Siddiqui’s role in the Rushdie affair. (Ansari’s analysis is based on that of the
All in all, this is likely to prove a very useful book for those looking for information and analysis of the Muslim situation in
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