Religiosity and Recognition: Multiculturalism and British Converts to Islam 3030751260, 9783030751265

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PALGRAVE POLITICS OF IDENTITY AND CITIZENSHIP

Religiosity and Recognition Multiculturalism and British Converts to Islam Thomas Sealy

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series

Series Editors Varun Uberoi, Brunel University London, London, UK Nasar Meer, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK Tariq Modood, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

The politics of identity and citizenship has assumed increasing importance as our polities have become significantly more culturally, ethnically and religiously diverse. Different types of scholars, including philosophers, sociologists, political scientists and historians make contributions to this field and this series showcases a variety of innovative contributions to it. Focusing on a range of different countries, and utilizing the insights of different disciplines, the series helps to illuminate an increasingly controversial area of research and titles in it will be of interest to a number of audiences including scholars, students and other interested individuals.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14670

Thomas Sealy

Religiosity and Recognition Multiculturalism and British Converts to Islam

Thomas Sealy University of Bristol Bristol, UK

Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series ISBN 978-3-030-75126-5 ISBN 978-3-030-75127-2 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2

(eBook)

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Yon Marsh/Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

I am first and foremost indebted to the people who shared their stories, including their joys and struggles, hopes and frustrations. Not only would this book not have happened or been as rich without their interest, willingness and generosity, these stories have also enriched my own perspectives and modes of thought and feeling. For this, I am indebted indeed. I am extremely grateful to Professor Tariq Modood and Professor Therese O’Toole for their support, encouragement, probing, prodding and not least patience as my Ph.D. supervisors when the research that forms the basis of this book was done. I am especially grateful to Tariq Modood, who I have continued to learn a great deal from as a Research Associate during the time I was developing the arguments for and writing this book. I owe a large debt of gratitude to Rashid Ansari, without whose help and generosity this would have been a far more difficult project to get going. I am also indebted to those who let me explain my research to groups they run, put me in touch with people, and disseminated my information, and hope I am forgiven for not naming names in

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the interest of preserving the confidentiality of those who subsequently responded and whose words appear throughout. I am grateful to colleagues who provided a friendly, supportive and enjoyable working environment. Also to those who have in different capacities and ways and at different times read, discussed, grilled me on, or simply listened to the ideas and issues explored in these chapters. In this, I owe special thanks to Magda Mogilnicka, Kieran Flanagan, Jon Fox, Kim Knott, Katya Braginskaia, Zoe Sanderson and Rosie Nelson. Special thanks are also due to Yasmin Soysal and Mike Roper. Without their encouragement and enthusiasm for my ideas at their earliest stage, this may never have happened. Finally, my family, whose support has come in a very different guise, but one just as important. It is grounding and reassuring to have the support of those with whom I don’t have discussions about what I read, write and think and how well the arguments and contents of this book fit and follow, but rather are just interested in how I’m doing. In this vein Sophie, and in his own way George, deserve a special mention.

Contents

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Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion Secular Britain Christian Britain Plural Britain Multiculturalism and Religion Multiculturalism and Secular Sociology Methodology Methodology and Identity The Study Reflexivity References

1 4 6 7 8 10 13 14 18 18 21

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Converts in Multicultural Context Converts to Islam in Britain: Historical Overview The Contemporary Picture Born Muslims in Multifaith Britain Born Muslims and Converts in Contemporary Britain References

27 28 31 36 38 45

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Contents

Multiculturalism and the Multi-Religious Challenge Multiculturalism’s Challenge: Difference and Recognition Multiculturalism Challenged ‘Everyday’ Multicultural Identities Multiculturalism as a Theological Principle Difference: Substantive and Liberative Hospitality Hospitality in Islam Hospitality and Recognition: Common and Uncommon Ground References

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Resituating Religiosity Theological Reflections Religiosity and Religion The Heart of the Matter A Fusion Between Horizons of Past and Present Of Eggs and Atheism Religiosity Past and Future: Being and Becoming Ontological Responsibility References

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Religion, Culture and the Stranger The Religion-Culture Divide: Deculturation: A Problematic Reculturaltion: Assimilation and Exclusion Euro-Islam, European Islam The Stranger The Stranger (Re)considered Simmel’s Stranger References

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Being Made Strange: Dislocated, Functionalised and Refused On Estrangement A Continuum of Estrangement

49 50 53 53 57 58 61 64 66 70 75 79 84 85 88 90 94 96 97 101 102 103 107 116 117 119 121 125 127 130

Contents

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Estrangement and Islamophobia The ‘Immigrant’ Experience From Stranger Functionalised to Stranger Refused References

132 134 139 144

Unusual Multicultural Subjects: On Being British, on Being Muslim The Religiosity of the Stranger Religiosity and Belonging in Britain Religiosity and Born Muslims Religion: Elastic and Tactical References

147 149 151 156 165 167

Islamophobia and Religiosity: Religion, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity Islamophobia and Convert Identities Decategorisation in Relation to Non-Muslims Decategorisation in Relation to Muslims Five tests for Islamophobia References

169 174 178 181 187 190

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Hospitable Multiculturalism When is Recognition not Recognition? Whither Multiculturalism? Hospitality and Recognition: Judgement Hospitality and Recognition: Dialogue Secularity and Pluralism Dialogue and the Challenges of Translation References

195 198 205 207 209 211 214 217

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Conclusion References

221 229

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Index

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1 Introduction: Multiculturalism and Religion

A few years ago I was at a workshop to mark the launch of a secularismreligion study group. Senior academic staff gave presentations and we were all encouraged to think about where we saw overlaps and complementarity between our thinking and that of other participants. Only one presentation took an explicitly religious or theological angle, an exposition of Rowan Williams’s article ‘Beyond Liberalism’ (2001). In this article, Williams sets out a critique of both the politics of liberalism and the politics of identity for being politics that disconnect people from one another through a too heavy emphasis on individualism, in the case of the former, and on groupism, in the case of the latter. Moreover, he suggests that emerging from the impasse created by the two butting heads, ‘the theological question begins to come into focus’ as a way of conceiving of common life (Williams, 2001: 70). For multiculturalists and secularists alike in the room, including those who do not overly subscribe to either position in a strong sense, the presentation was greeted not with any hostility but with the mild indifference of ‘so what?’ ‘Why is it necessary to speak in such terms?’; something, in other words, had been lost in translation. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_1

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In a way, this book is a response to this moment. Despite its fleetingness, it has remained with me and has led to the ‘conversation’ that this book seeks to engage, namely a creative encounter between multiculturalism and political theology. This is the theoretical substance of the book. One reason this instance stuck with me was that it resonated with empirical work I had recently finished and was analysing. I had been interviewing converts to Islam and increasingly discovering that the literature I was reading was inadequate to the task of understanding the stories I was hearing because of a lack of ‘musicality’ when it came to religion. A particular issue in this sense was that religion was often collapsed into culture or ethnicity such that it lost any distinctness, and vitality, of its own. The central theme of this book is thus multiculturalism and religious identities, and a key issue is a tension between the cultural and the religious. Looking in-depth at the case of converts to Islam shines an acute light on these issues. Empirically this stems from a discursive divide between culture and religion in their narratives as they grapple with issues around identity and belonging in relation to ‘majority society’, their family and friends, and born Muslim communities, although such a discursive religion-culture divide is by no means exclusive to converts. Conceptually it stems from relating this to multiculturalism’s core identity conceptualisation of ethno-religious, from which multiculturalism’s other key terms of difference and recognition hinge. The question that arises out of the engagement of these conceptual and empirical positions becomes ‘what is missing?’ Arising from the narratives I was listening to, and present also in the instance I opened this introduction with, the answer, it turned out, was in fact religion and religious faith. To address the question of what is missing, and how and why this is significant, the discussion in the book is principally oriented towards multiculturalism and the multiculturalist thinking of what has been called the ‘Bristol School’ of multiculturalism (Levey, 2019), which has become the dominant theoretical form of multiculturalism in Britain. Multiculturalism in Britain, in this theoretical variant, has been centrally concerned with Muslims in Britain for some three decades, yet consideration of the identities and belonging of converts provokes questions which do not so obviously square with some of its core concepts. One

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of the reasons for this relates to religion, or more specifically what will be referred to throughout this book as religiosity (Chapter 4). One of the central lines of argument pursued in this book is that multiculturalism, despite much talk of religion and a religion-friendly orientation, neglects the religious qua religious and this has important implications for its theorising and conceptual tools. The book, therefore, is principally concerned with analytically foregrounding religion, or more precisely religiosity (as a mode of being) in order to address the issues that begin to arise. To think religiosity ‘into’ multiculturalism is an important endeavour but one that requires serious theoretical engagement—it can’t be added as simply as ‘and that too’. This may sound a strange argument, multiculturalism in Britain has, after all, been centrally concerned with religious and ethnic minorities, most obviously and expansively Islam and Muslims. Yet here, as will be outlined in Chapter 3, religion has served as a proxy for ethnicity and is conflated with it in such a way as to render it analytically subordinate (see also Mitchell, 2006). This book poses the question of what happens if we, not reverse this, for good sociological reasons this would be the wrong way to go about things, but rather foreground religiosity in line with multiculturalism’s own terms of reference. This is not to say that the book rejects many of multiculturalism’s positions as a result; it does not. It is to say that by foregrounding the religious, things look importantly different and that, on its own terms, multiculturalism requires opening up in this regard. This is where political theology comes into the picture. It is, in this sense, an exercise in shifting a multiculturalists’ indifference to the religious towards a form of multicultural listening, to appropriate the basis of Luke Bretherton’s political theology, and who forms the main interlocutor in this regard for the book. This book then is about reading the religious into multiculturalism and draws on the case of converts to Islam in Britain in order to begin this task. This is particularly salient as it appears that numbers of people converting to Islam in a political and social climate that appears unconducive to such a phenomenon are rising. The increasing presence of Muslims and Islam, whether actual (that is, in demographic terms),

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cultural (in terms of significance in the social and cultural life of Britain), or imagined (often with undertones of fear) makes such a phenomenon something of a puzzle. At this stage, it will be an important first step to flesh out some contextual details in order to situate a number of the currents that will move in and out of the chapters that follow and that will lap against each other. The following sections of this introduction present ‘Britain three ways’ and elaborate on three dimensions of the religious landscape of Britain: Britain as secular, as Christian, and as plural (Weller, 2009). In so doing, overlaps between the three will be highlighted, sociological implications raised and the picture of multiculturalism central to the book begin to emerge.

Secular Britain In what ways is Britain secular, and with what implications for the concerns of this book? We can begin an answer to this question along the lines of seeing secularity in two ways: namely, as the decline of religious beliefs and practice in modern societies and as the privatisation of religion (see, for example, Casanova, 1994; Taylor, 2009, who produce distinct but overlapping schemas). The first dimension, the decline of religious beliefs and practices, is a complex and contested area in which the definition of religion, religious and beliefs (amongst others) are contested, but it is fair to say that on a variety of significant measures religious belief and belonging appear to be declining; a British Social Attitudes survey found that as of 2018 52% of people in Britain said they did not belong to a religion and reflected increasingly secularist attitudes (BSA 36, 2019; see also census figures; Brierley, 2017; Bruce, 2013; Davie, 2015; CofE, 2018; for a couple of important examples of the contested concepts, see Heelas & Woodhead, 2005; Lee, 2014; Voas & Bruce, 2007). Religious belief and belonging are then becoming an increasingly minority position in general. Under the privatisation of religion, we can notice two related aspects (Casanova treats these as distinct dimensions). The first is that religious belief and practice is seen as something subjective and personal.

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It is privatised and individualised and increasingly reflects what Charles Taylor has referred to as a post-Durkheimian dispensation, where the idea of adhering to a religious path that does not move or inspire you is seen as increasingly wrong and even absurd (2007a: 489). The second points to how religion is increasingly confined to the private sphere, to the individual, the home, or a religious place of worship. It is, as a result, largely contained in these private spaces and more absent in the public sphere. That is to say, secular authorities and institutions—political, cultural, educational, economic and so on— provide the norms and principles in which we act and interact. This social and political ‘order’ has a profound effect on a further sense of secularity that Charles Taylor refers to as ‘the conditions of belief ’ (Taylor, 2007a: 3), or elsewhere as our ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2007b). Taylor suggests that we live in a ‘secular age’, distinct from previous eras in being characterised by a situation where belief in God, rather than being ‘unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic’ is now but ‘one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace’ (ibid.). Along these lines we might turn again to the British Social Attitudes survey (BSA 36, 2019), which found that attitudes towards public religion are largely and increasingly negative; for example, over a third of people (35%) say they think religious organisations have too much power and almost two-thirds (63%) say they agree that religion brings more conflict than peace. Social hostilities involving religion have also been increasing in recent years.1 Not only then is so-called non-belief, and certainly nonbelonging, increasing but attitudes to religion, at least in a public sense, are largely negative. A further point as a result of these combined privatisation processes of individualisation and differentiation that is relevant for the arguments of this book is that religion becomes depoliticised; that is, religion becomes increasingly shorn of its political content and public political role. When it comes to political secularism, two types are often distinguished. One is a less generous secularism that represents a particular political and ideological programme where the public sphere and 1 http://www.globalreligiousfutures.org/countries/united-kingdom/religious_restrictions#/?region_

name=Europe&restrictions_year=2016.

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even public space more generally are denuded of religion. The other is a more generous secularism, where religion and state are separate but where connections between the state and religious organisations are not precluded. This basic difference in modes of secularism have been variously conceived and rendered but we can find these kinds of ideas in, for example, Williams’ (2006) programmatic secularism and procedural secularism or Modood’s (2010) distinction between radical secularism, of which France provides an example, and moderate secularism, of which Britain provides an example. While Britain’s model of secularism is very much of the moderate kind, in the responses to the BSA survey above there are hints of the other kind in general attitudes towards religion and publicly religious people. Grace Davie has commented of Britain that in a largely secularised society: ‘Taking faith seriously is becoming, increasingly, the exception rather than the norm’ (2015: 63). There is, thus, a way in which religious identities and religiosity in a public sense is an increasingly difficult position to be understood or gain a hearing.

Christian Britain If these ways in which Britain is secular paint a dim picture for Christianity in Britain, and especially for the large churches, in what ways is Britain still Christian? Our lives are in many ways patterned by Christianity: the calendar, holidays and so on. The Church still plays a significant role, even if increasingly symbolic and ‘vicarious’ (Davie, 2015). It has also been argued, more profoundly, that Christianity, even if shorn of religious language and meaning, also provides our moral and ethical frameworks. It has been suggested, for instance, that secularism is but ‘the latest expression of the Christian religion… [it is] Christian ethics shorn of its doctrine’ (Smith, 2008: 2) and remains so even if the churches are emptying and connections largely forgotten (Holland, 2019). In this reading, even as Christianity has declined, culture, morals and values are suffused with a Christian outlook. This dimension of Britain will become important in Chapters 5 to 8, which will explore an argument that converts ‘protestantise’ Islam, and, in so doing, necessarily

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exclude born Muslims, something which points as much to Britain’s colonial past and current racialised society as to its Christian heritage.

Plural Britain As much as Britain might or might not be Christian, it is also plural, multicultural and multireligious. Of course, Britain has always been religiously plural, although historically this has generally referred to plurality within Christianity as well as Jews. The rise of so-called ‘nones’, ‘fresh expressions’ and alternative, ‘unchurched’ spiritualities are contemporary features of this plurality, yet it is perhaps partly because of Christianity becoming to a certain extent ‘invisible’ in the ways just mentioned that it is the plurality of non-Christian faiths that have in recent decades forced debates about religion back onto the agenda, of politicians and scholars alike. Owing to Britain’s former empire, there has been a long history of people of different faiths coming to Britain and more settled communities can be traced back to late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Yet, prior to the Second World War and post-war migration patterns, these religious minorities were largely absent from public awareness. This was to change from the 1950s, since when Britain has seen a growth in extra-Christian religious diversity, notably Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs, with the Muslim population being the largest of these (5%+ of the total UK population). As well as openings and the ease of contact with and learning from born Muslims, Britain as multireligious provides its own contextual challenges for converts (Chapters 2 and 5). Although Hindus, Sikhs, Jews and Christians have all been the subject of notable legal cases and debates about public religion, the accommodation of Muslims has come to be the dominant issue in relation to multiculturalism. The key event here was the Rushdie affair of 1989.2 It has in fact been remarked that multiculturalism in Britain ‘properly

2 We

might also note that coming the same year as the initial l ’affaire du foulard in France, and of course the issue of the inclusion of Muslims and Islam has become a wider European concern.

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t[ook] off with the Rushdie affair’ (Modood, 2016: 483), and, moreover, that this also marked ‘the beginning of the end of [the] illusion of religion’s insignificance’ (Knott, 2012). Groups and controversies previously defined in terms of ‘race’ or foreignness came to be redefined as well as self-define in terms of religion. Whereas Britain’s Muslim population had initially been seen through the lens of ‘race’ in the 1950s and 1960s, this increasingly moved to ‘ethnicity’ in the 1980s and 1990s, and since the turn of the twenty-first century a further discursive and policy shift has gradually come to increasingly define them through ‘religion’ (Grillo, 2010). Multiculturalism then is bound up with the relationship between religion and politics. Furthermore, since the first few years of the twenty-first century, and in particular beginning with the 9/11 New York and 7/7 London terrorist attacks, religion seen as a problem has become highly politicised and emerged through the securitisation of Islam as a result of concerns over violent (and more recently non-violent) extremism. Thus, the politicisation of religion is directly related to its perceived predilection for intolerance and violence, in this case something that is levied at Islam in particular. Historical processes are complex, but this is one related aspect of how we can see the professed need for depoliticised religion as a supposed lesson from history (although see Cavanaugh, 2009; Martin, 2006 [1997]). Against this background of Britain three ways, the convert emerges as a controversial public and political figure, his or her conversion is often portrayed as a kind of cultural or political betrayal (for media representations see Sealy, 2017; Spoliar & van den Brandt, 2020). This can further be seen in issues converts face in acceptance from Muslim communities, where their motivations and identities may also be questioned.

Multiculturalism and Religion If the above sketched something of the broader picture with regard to attitudes to religion and politics, for the more theoretical concerns of this book, we can point to how religion is depoliticised conceptually by multiculturalism. On this, we can draw attention to its basis in a socio-political conception of identity, captured in multiculturalism’s core

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identity concept of ethno-religious. This will be outlined in more detail in Chapter 3, and echo through subsequent chapters, but here we can briefly note that religion in this formulation elides the religious, which becomes something of a proxy for ethnicity. The purpose of this book is not to challenge this as such but rather to point to its effects for religious qua religious identities. This is something that converts to Islam provide a particularly stark example of, and can thus shine an acute light on multiculturalism’s limitations and blind spots in this regard when it comes to public religion and religious minorities. It is this lack of capacity that this book seeks to address. A further aspect of religion’s depoliticisation relates to another of multiculturalism’s core concepts, that of recognition. Again, this will be discussed in further detail in the chapters of the book (beginning in Chapter 3), but we can note here something of this which also expands our contextual sketch begun above. In policy terms, the way in which religion is ‘recognised’ is through partnerships with the state on various aspects of welfare and service provision. Since the 1980s, faith-based organisations have played an increasing role as part of the growing plurality and competition among service providers in the ‘third sector’. This gained prominence in the 2000s under New Labour and then the so-called ‘Big Society’ under the Coalition government. Yet, despite these state-religion connections, questions remain about what is being recognised. Conditions and choices that revolve around such partnerships can dilute anything specifically religious and constrain more critical engagement on religious grounds from the faith group ‘partners’ (a point expanded in Chapter 9). This is not, however, to argue for a ‘religionisation of politics’ (Ivanescu, 2010), as some staunch secularists might fear, but rather to allow for the ‘fullness’ (Taylor, 2007a) of people in political life. This book is concerned with how multiculturalism, despite its religion-friendliness, fails to account for this kind of depoliticisation and how it too limits this ‘fullness’. This book, therefore, takes up multiculturalism’s own secularist lens and concepts in order to ask questions of it: what does it miss? With what effects for understanding identity and social relations? In response to these questions it introduces the notion of

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hospitality from political theology as a way of interrogating multiculturalism’s concepts of ethno-religious, difference and recognition (initially in Chapter 3).

Multiculturalism and Secular Sociology In many ways this secular lens is perhaps unsurprising and reflects something resonant more widely in the literature around multiculturalism and religious minorities, along also with that of religious conversion, and something that permeates through sociology (even it might be noted the sociology of religion): sociology is a thoroughly secular discipline. Religion and religious issues are usually framed as ‘a problem’ in academic as well as political frames (Davie, 2015: 228) and theology is likewise most often ‘mentioned in a pejorative sense’ and set in an oppositional binary to everyday or lived religion (Helmer, 2012: 230), or more commonly is simply ignored by social and political theorists (Billingham & Chaplin, 2020). Linda Woodhead makes the point that ‘the origins of secularisation theory are coterminous with sociology itself ’3 and in the introduction to an edited collection exploring what sociology might have to say about spirituality in the twenty-first century, one of the editors noted that while ‘spirituality signifies an indispensable dimension of what it is to be human …[,] sociology tends to hunt for religion as a dead entity not as a living enterprise’ (Flanagan,4 2007: 1). Moreover, where religion is approached as living, it is as a more purely social phenomenon, where religious identity is seen in material and performative terms, as practice, and where faith or belief are generally eschewed unless they align neatly with practice, an approach common among ‘everyday’ approaches (Day, 2011; McGuire, 2008). The theologian John Milbank (2006 [1990]), in a wide-ranging work engaging theology and

3 See:

https://www.religiousstudiesproject.com/podcast/podcast-linda-woodhead-on-the-secularis ation-thesis/. 4 Flanagan is a rare example of a sociologist bridging with theology throughout his work.

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social theory, has in fact excoriated sociology for its theories about religion, accusing it, not without some justification, of ‘policing the sublime’ and rightly pointing to sociology’s own ideologies. It is perhaps indicative that while making a splash in theological circles, Milbank’s work has been all but ignored in social and political theory. Yet, there are enough clues of something else that warrants attention, and many speak specifically to the themes of this book. Muslims have long been making claims on the basis of a religious identity, not wishing and not able to be circumscribed within the confines of ‘race’ or even ethnicity, and Muslims themselves have thus been at the forefront of this shift as part of a struggle for recognition (Modood, 2007). For Muslims, their religion became increasingly important as they settled in Britain and either brought their families over to join them or started to begin new families, and so Muslim communities began to institute Islam through organisations and mosques and to provide for religious worship and education, and later politics (Nielsen, 2009). In the 1990s two-thirds of claims made by migrants in Britain were based on a religious collective identity, and the vast majority of these came from Muslims5 (Koopmans et al., 2005: 153). For Muslims, earlier conceptualisations of racism and consequently anti-racism were unable to capture forms of discrimination they faced based on their being an ethno-religious minority. Both of these aspects are captured in how in 2001 a religion question was included in the England and Wales census largely as a result of lobbying on the part of British Muslim organisations, ‘concerned that their religious identity should be regarded as a defining characteristic of their self-understanding and a meaningful category of difference affecting their socio-economic situation’ (Gilliat-Ray, 2012: 113; Sherif, 2011). Also, in 2003 legislation was enacted protecting against religious discrimination, in no small part owing to work by the Muslim Council of Britain. While the negative side turns around the issue of Islamophobia, an issue that will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8, the positive side turns on the salience of religious identity. It would be wrong then to assume that the shift 5 Figures

were also high in two other countries analysed, 60% in the Netherlands and over half in France

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towards a definitional basis of religion was simply the instrument of a top-down discourse. While this book addresses this negative side of religious identity (Chapters 6 and 8), perceptions and discrimination against an ‘other’ on cultural and specifically religious grounds, it is primarily concerned with establishing a positive basis for thinking about religious identity qua religious (Chapters 4 and 7)—the engagement with multiculturalism that orients the concerns of the book rests on just this point. A fundamental secularist orientation to understanding social phenomena and people as social, cultural and political creatures stands in contrast to what I was hearing when listening to the narratives of converts to Islam in Britain. This discrepancy in orientations is further captured by Bender’s realisation that when she was investigating ‘daily religious experiences’, she found that the people she was speaking to were in fact emphasising ‘religious experience’ (2007: 203, emphases in original). Studies on young Muslims have frequently found that for many their religious identity is more important than their ethno-cultural identity as a Muslim (DeHanas, 2016; Jacobson, 1997). A similar elevation of religious identity is also found in the narratives of converts to Islam, where a common feature of converts’ narratives is that of a distinction and division between culture and religion. One of the important features of the dynamic of this religion-culture divide is the centralising of the religious in these narratives, and this will form the pivot of the arguments presented in relation to multiculturalism. Chapter 4 takes up the religious identity of converts and its elevation, or we might say underpinning, in relation to other identity aspects. The religion-culture divide then forms the main current that runs through Chapters 5 to 8. This discursive phenomenon hints at parallels between young Muslims’ and converts’ struggles to reconcile their identities as both Muslim and British. So, in a sense, some of the discussion relates to these common findings and debates around them. Yet, in a more specific sense, there are important sociological differences between converts and born Muslims that require these cases to be treated separately. Some of the reasons for this will be the subject of Chapter 2, which sketches the history of converts to Islam in Britain. It draws some parallels but

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also notes important differences between the contemporary context and the context in the Victorian period in the nineteenth century and up to the First World War, when there several notable figures who still resonate today. Thus, while some connections can be made between the religion-culture divide negotiated by born Muslims and converts, there are important differences too, and for this book, converts are taken as a concrete empirical case through which to explore some of the issues that this gives rise to and is a core feature of the discussions around religion/‘race’/ethnicity and processes of racialisation. For converts, the dynamic between religion and culture or ethnicity presents one of the key sites of struggle and negotiation as they find their way, both within themselves as well as in the social world they inhabit. It is this dynamic process that the book is foremost concerned with. Rather than trying to actually distinguish between the two terms ‘religion’ and ‘culture’ and what is one or the other, the focus of the book is looking at how and why this is done in the narratives, under what conditions, and to what effects.

Methodology Stemming from the above, much sociological enquiry has been oriented by methodological atheism (Berger, 1973). As one commentator has critically noted, methodological atheism has been a ‘virtually taken for granted presupposition of the sociological study of religion’ (Porpora, 2006: 57). In relation to religious conversion more directly, it has previously been asserted that the ‘sociologist must leave out the divine half of the equation’ (Bainbridge, 1992: 78). To address the methodological issue for the purposes of the study underpinning this book, an approach characterised by a methodological agnosticism is necessary. A methodological agnosticism is one where the religious is not bracketed off in such a way that it is in effect bracketed away, but rather is one which recognises the uncertainty in studying belief as epistemologically constructive (Bell & Taylor, 2014). Guided by methodological agnosticism, with ‘the principle of the bracket we neither affirm nor deny the existence of the gods’ but recognise God as

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part of the believers’ phenomenological environment (Smart, 1973: 54; also Cantrell, 2016). Rather than what Linda Woodhead has described as ‘baked in’ secularism which necessarily puts the divine off the table,6 from this position the divine can be both explanandum and at the same time explanans (Woodhead, 2012), which can therefore posit an alternative analysis. This approach is based on the position that to not open this epistemological door risks deeply mischaracterising and therefore misrecognising those we are studying. In this sense, it bears on a complaint of converts that they would like to have their conversion read ‘from the inside out rather than from the outside in’ (Suleiman, 2013: 3). While we must attend to both, I address this issue by taking a stance through which ‘pushing sociology into theology permits it to ask questions of those for whom a leap of faith is acceptable for the sense of the ultimate it can realize, when everything else in culture seems senseless’ (Flanagan, 2008: 258). This is not to argue for a normative replacement but rather for a legitimate normative alternative. The significance of a methodological agnosticism lies in its capacity and openness towards religious experience.

Methodology and Identity The study underpinning this book is based on a series of narrative interviews conducted with converts to Islam in the first half of 2017, where interviewees were invited to relate what we might call ‘conversion stories’ or ‘journeys to Islam’. The choice of narrative interviews can be exemplified through a remark Richard made at the end of the interview about how he thought I was the right person to be doing this research. Probing why he said this is revealing. We had had no extended discussion of the issues under consideration and other than the basic information from my pre-interview information sheet and our introductions he knew little about me other than what he had surmised during the course of our two hours together. What this referred to can then be seen in relation to a point he had also made earlier in our conversation about his so 6 In

an interview on The Sacred podcast. Available at https://www.theosthinktank.co.uk/com ment/2019/10/24/the-sacred-51-linda-woodhead.

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often being a story interrupted. I was not the first person to ask him to relate his story, but I was the first to let him tell it. As he commented, most people ask for something they want and then walk away when they either have it or if it seems they are not going to get it. A similar point was also made by Saoirse who said it was good to be able to ‘talk about what’s in [her] heart’. Similarly, towards the end of her interview, Kate was talking about why she hasn’t yet told some friends about her conversion and had been explaining about the lack of understanding and at times explicit hostility she faced when she did so. She remarked: ‘I don’t like telling people that I’ve converted… I just don’t like saying that I’ve converted, getting into that conversation… And I don’t want people to interrogate me. I don’t wanna do that. So that’s why I didn’t say it: I don’t want people to ask me questions’. As much as it might be nice to believe that these comments suggest something glowing about my personality for why they did tell me their stories, the answer is rather more methodological. A narrative interview created a space where they could tell their stories, on the understanding that they would not be ‘interrogated’ nor constantly dragged into the stories and frames of the listener (or questioner). It is the strength of narrative interviews that they create and allow just this space, a space for telling and listening to stories. Yet, this is not all narrative interviewing is, as much as a methodology, that is a practical matter, this approach is also theoretically informed when it comes to thinking about identity. It will, therefore, be instructive to say something more about this aspect of narrative interviews here. The narrative approach used here is not focussed on uncovering or investigating the formal structure of conversion narratives in order to identify something that we can call, and thereby use to identify, a ‘conversion narrative’. This book is interested in how through narrative British converts to Islam develop senses of identity and belonging. On this approach, narrative’s significance lies in the fact that stories abound in all aspects of life. As Barbara Hardy (1975: 4) has eloquently remarked: It is hard to take more than a step without narrating. Before we sleep each night we tell over to ourselves what we may also have told to others, the story of the past day. We mingle truths and falsehoods, not always

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quite knowing where one blends into the other… We begin the day by narrating to ourselves and probably to others our expectations, plans, desires, fantasies and intentions. The action in which the day is passed coexists with a reverie composed of the narrative revision and rehearsals of past and future… We meet our colleagues, family, friends, intimates, acquaintances, strangers, and exchange stories, overtly and covertly… The stories of our days and the stories in our days are joined in that autobiography we are all engaged in making and remaking, as long as we live, which we never complete, though we all know how it is going to end.

From this quotation a number of important aspects emerge: the temporal orientations to the past, present and future; their quasi-historical and quasi-fictive character (Ricoeur,1990); the role of reflection, memory and emotion and how these blend to make the stories we tell each other and ourselves, and by so doing, how we in important ways make ourselves and our contexts. It has been widely argued that narrative is a fundamental form of meaning-making in our lives as we navigate our way between the personal and the social and cultural. Drawing on Hardy, Ken Plummer suggests that ‘for many the telling of a tale comes as a major way of ‘discovering who one really is’. It is a voyage to explore the self ’ (1995: 4) and Mark Freeman argues that ‘owing to the essential openness (the notquiteness or not-yetness) of ongoing life, narrative emerges as a vehicle precisely for putting one’s life – and oneself – in perspective’ (2013: 229). It is through narrative forms, in their variety, that experiences are organised. As such, narrative is at the core of self-formation and understanding human meaning and experience. Freeman suggests that ‘narrative identity emerges in and through the interplay of past, present, and future in the form of remembering, acting, and imagining’ (2013: 223). That is, the meaning of past actions and experiences is attained, and reattained, through reflection and narrative from the perspective of the present. As well as the reconstruction of the past, the future is also reimagined as the ‘developmental teloi’ of who we strive to become (Freeman, 2013: 231; also Brockheimer, 2000). Fundamental for understanding narratives is how what Ricouer (1980) has called emplotment is constructed in relation to narrative time as opposed

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to clock time. Elaborating this point, Mishler argues ‘the act of narrativizing reassigns meaning to events in terms of their consequences, that is, how the story develops and ends, rather than to their temporal place in the sequence of events’ (2006: 38) and thus there is an emotional as well as cognitive logic to the narrative. A personal narrative is then a form of relating oneself to oneself, or to memories or future imaginings of oneself. It is through a process of narrative that people ‘impose order on the flow of experience to make sense of events and actions in their lives’ (Riessman, 1993: 2; also Plummer, 1995, 2001). The process of narrative also allows the negotiation between the personal and the social as part of identity work. A narrative hermeneutics recognises that subjects and their narratives exist in historical time, embedded in a context of ‘cultural webs of narratives [that] affect the way in which we experience things in the first place’ (Meretoja, 2017: 9, italics in original; also Bruner, 1990; Day Sclater, 2003; Riessman, 1993). Therefore, central questions revolve around contextualising narratives, asking how these stories are emerging in contemporary Britain, how they are emerging in public discourse, how are they being interpreted and what those interpretations are doing. As an example of this, a comparative study of converts in Flanders and Andalusia by Leman et al. (2010) found that Andalusian converts were able to develop narratives with a common reference to an Islamic past in a way which Flemish converts were not owing to the different geographical histories. For British converts to Islam this is highly salient as the process of conversion itself necessitates a negotiation of apparently competing social and cultural scripts and consequently, personal, biographical stories can reveal much about the social world they inhabit. This can also challenge the existing restrictions on narrative space and understanding of and for their stories and serve to open up space for emergent subject positions and how subjects relate to, adapt and modify positions they are put into by others can be revealing about social relations.

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The Study Participants were recruited through several networks of convert groups and organisations. Sampling was self-selective with initial contact being made through gatekeepers who disseminated my information through their networks, some more formal and systematic, some less so. People who were interested then contacted me directly via email, phone and text message. The majority of participants replied directly to emails they received through these networks. A few came through New Muslim groups where I attended a meeting to address the group to introduce my research. All names have been anonymised and changed to match in origin the name they use now. In all, the study consisted of narrative interviews with 25 participants, as well as two further interviews, one with a New Muslim group organiser and one with the head of a national organisation for converts. These latter two interviewees reflected on the work of the organisation or group they run, how this has changed over time, and what the main issues are from their perspective. The book also draws on six similar interviews that had been conducted a few years earlier. My sample is broadly reflective of the demographic background sketched in previous studies (Brice, 2010; Zebiri, 2008). Just over half the participants were white British/European, a quarter British Asian, three were Black British and three mixed race; three quarters were female and a quarter male; just under half had previously been practising Catholic, Protestant or Hindu, while the rest were mostly nominally Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Sikh or Christian, with two describing themselves formerly as spiritual and three as atheist. They were aged between 18 and 69 and had been Muslim between 10 months and 24 years at the time of the interview.

Reflexivity Interviews are social events ‘influenced by not only the identity of those who participate in it, but also the social, temporal and historical context in which it takes place’ (Carter, 2004: 353). The social, temporal

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and historical context can be found throughout the chapters, but the interview event itself bears some comments. Brice (2008) has argued that converts distrust researchers, especially those who are not Muslim and Poston (1992) switched to documentary research following recruitment difficulties for his study in the United States. This would seem to suggest a difficulty for ‘outsider’, i.e. nonMuslim, researchers. There were undoubtedly people who chose not to speak to me. In fact, one of my most loquacious participants later told me about how she had spoken to other female converts she knows at a New Muslim circle to ask if anyone else was willing to participate. They were not, however, giving the reason of not being sure how my work could potentially be used, not even necessarily by me but by others. This fear itself reflects aspects of the wider social context in which these individuals are trying to negotiate themselves as new Muslims. However, there are people who do want to tell their stories and are happy to do so to an ‘outsider’. A couple of gatekeepers even expressed to me that they were pleased that non-Muslim voices were addressing the issues and it was not therefore something that was happening only from ‘within’ and contained in a bubble. This raises the need to consider issues surrounding the ideas of what has been referred to as insider and outsider research and researchers, with consideration of this dynamic a central concern when studying religion (Knott, 2010). It is necessary to recognise as a starting point that, ‘the whole value of the insider researcher is not that his [sic] data or insights into the actual social situation are better – but that they are different’ (Delmos Jones, quoted in Twine, 2000: 13, emphasis in original) or as Anderson puts it ‘no less true’ (quoted in Gunaratnam, 2003: 92). In her study of British converts to Islam Kate Zebiri (2008) noted how some themes in the material gathered by her, a non-Muslim, and her research assistant, a young Muslim woman, were different. In this study, I have no such counterpoint, but this points to the relation to the researcher as a presence that in important ways mediates the account; narrators ‘edit’ and are constantly narratively reflective as a result of both the human and material and environmental interactions (Holstein & Gubrium, 2000).

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The insider–outsider dynamics at play in the interviews were complex and intersecting. We can begin by distinguishing between on-paper insider/outsider-ness, and processual in-action insider/outsider-ness; or between commonality and connectivity (see Beoku-Betts, 1994; Edwards,1990; Gunaratnam, 2003). By the first is meant those identity categories around which much social science work orients such as age, class, gender, race, ethnicity, religion. In relation to these my position as a single, white, middle-class, university educated man in his late thirties with no religious affiliation, although it could be said that I have a nominally Christian background, placed me in relation to my participants in various and varying ways. The only one common factor here in relation to all participants is religious affiliation, as I do not affiliate or identify with any religious tradition. This, however, is not quite sufficient or straightforward. Firstly, is the issue that none of these, or even all of these, categories are of themselves ‘enough’ (Beoku-Betts, 1994; Islam, 2000). This leads into in-action insider/outsider-ness, by which I mean that identity in relation to participants is (co)constructed, develops and shifts in the interviews (Kanuha, 2000; Leigh, 2013; Turgo, 2012). Consequently, the very concepts of ‘insider’ and ‘outsider’ are extremely complex and not always readily predictable, cutting across a number of identifications, each subject to historical and contextual conditions that combine and shift to construct knowledge of one another in these circumstances as well as the ‘microsocial interactions’ (Gunaratnam, 2003: 85) in the (social) event of a research process and interview itself. Following this, it is interesting to note, and I have to admit to my own surprise, that many people did not ask me many, if any, questions about my background, even when I explicitly asked them at different points if they had any. What they surmised (rightly or wrongly) about me from my emails, name, voice, appearance I could only guess. In fact, only a few addressed these sorts of questions at any point throughout the process of the interview. This suggests that I was perceived in professional terms as a researcher. In some interviews, this kind of perception certainly seemed to characterise the rapport, while in others a more relaxed rapport developed. This is evident, for example, in how some interviews became more emotive as they developed and as Vidya, for

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instance, became progressively more sweary! This in turn may reflect the methodologically agnostic approach as its own part of the rapport. In terms of the environment, the majority of the interviews took place in coffee shops at various points of the day and surrounded by varying levels of hustle and bustle. Some took place in more private, quiet settings, such as a meeting room in the workplace, mosque or community centre, or at the participant’s home, depending on what was most comfortable and convenient for the interviewee. These settings had a palpable impact on the narrative. It certainly seems no coincidence that in general the more developed and more relaxed (in terms of their more apparent openness rather than the nature of their content) were those in quieter surroundings, although I also caught myself on a number of occasions surprised (pleasantly for the researcher in me) at the openness of some stories when eavesdropping strangers were a higher danger.

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Porpora, D. V. (2006). Methodological atheism, methodological agnosticism and religious experience. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 36 (1), 57–75. Poston, L. (1992). Islamic Da’wah in the West: Muslim missionary activity and the Dynamics of conversion to Islam. Oxford University Press. Ricouer, P. (1980). Narrative time. Critical Inquiry, 7 (1), 169–190. Ricoeur, P. (1990). Time and narrative volume 3. Translated by K. Blamey & D. Pellauer. University of Chicago Press. Riessman, C. K. (1993). Narrative analysis. Sage. Sealy, T. (2017). Making the “other” from “us”: The representation of British converts to Islam in mainstream British newspapers. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 37 (2), 196–210. Sherif, J. (2011). A Census chronicle–reflections on the campaign for a religion question in the 2001 Census for England and Wales. Journal of Beliefs & Values, 32(1), 1–18. Smart, N. (1973). The science of religion and the sociology of knowledge. Princeton University Press. Smith, G. (2008). A short history of secularism. I.B. Tauris. Spoliar, L., & van den Brandt, N. (2020). Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries. European Journal of Women’s Studies. Advance Online Publication. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1350506820920912. Suleiman, Y. (2013). Narratives of conversion to Islam in Britain: Female perspectives. University of Cambridge in association with The New Muslims Project. Taylor, C. (2007a). A secular age. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Taylor, C. (2007b). Modern social imaginaries. Duke University Press. Taylor, C. (2009). The polysemy of the secular. Social Research, 76 (4), 1143– 1166. Turgo, N. N. (2012). A “Balikbayan” in the field: Scaling and (re)producing insider’s identity in a Philippine fishing community. Qualitative Research, 12(6), 666–685. Twine, F. W. (2000). Racial ideologies, racial methodologies, and racial fields. In F. W. Twine & J. W. Warren (Eds.), Racing research, researching race. New York University Press.

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2 Converts in Multicultural Context

The introduction began to set the scene of multicultural and multireligious Britain. This chapter now turns to expand this picture more specifically in relation to converts to Islam, and as such begins to develop some themes that will permeate the rest of the book. The discussion is structured around building a picture of converts to Islam in Britain and why, as Franks (2000) commented, they can be hard to locate in relation to majority and minorities. To do this, the first part of the chapter discusses converts in historical perspective before then turning to the contemporary picture. This allows points of contrast and similarity to be highlighted which in turn both help understand the contemporary picture, which will be extremely important for the arguments as they develop in the later chapters of the book, as well as begin to highlight some of the main themes that will orient the discussion as a whole and those of the individual chapters.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_2

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Converts to Islam in Britain: Historical Overview Evidence suggests there were English soldiers who converted to Islam as far back as at least the twelfth century and the time of the crusades (Jawad, 2012). The earliest named English convert in an English source, John Nelson, dates to 1583—a son of a yeoman of the Queen’s Guard (Matar, 1998). Numbers of converts in overseas territories increased during the Elizabethan era (1558–1603), especially in Ottoman lands (Jawad, 2012; Matar, 1998) and in India (Gilham, 2014). Britons who converted to Islam and remained in Britain during this period, however, remain a ‘possibility’ but little evidence exists to shed light on who they might have been or what their lives might have been like (Matar, 1998). That Britons were converting to Islam at all at this time was met with great disbelief and concern. In fact, early attempts by English Christian travel writers to understand such conversions were motivated by attempts to find out how to better protect their countrymen from Muslims and Islam (Matar, 1998). It is from these early conversions, mostly a result of contact between the British and Ottoman empires, that two derogatory terms stem: to ‘turn Turke’ and ‘renegade’. More accurately this latter term was used in its Spanish form renegado, reflecting an emphasis that ‘apostasy was typified by the Papist enemies of England’ (Matar, 1998: 23). Conversion to Islam it seems was an affliction of foreigners and not something for the English of the time. It has been suggested that the patterns of conversion in this period were largely a result of force and coercion (Gilham, 2014), although the historical picture is more complex (Bulliet, 1979; Levtzion, 1979; Matar, 1998). Much more is known about British converts to Islam from the Victorian era of the latter half of the nineteenth century and the Edwardian period leading up to the First World War in the early twentieth century, from which period far more in the way of writings survive (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2014); not least in part because a number of converts were from the middle and upper classes. Hermansen, for instance, traces a number of dominant themes in pilgrimage narratives that ‘reflect the new mobility, in terms of resources and travel to exotic locations, of the Western middle classes’ (1999: 84).

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Notable in this regard was Henry Stanley, the first in ‘a new trend of the free conversion of Britons who remained Muslims by conviction in Britain’ (Gilham, 2014: 243). Henry, who converted in 1859, later became the first Muslim member of the House of Lords (Lord Stanley of Alderley). Another prominent convert was Abdullah Quilliam, a Liverpool solicitor who converted in 1888, and who had the title Sheikh al-Islam of Britain bestowed on him by the Ottoman Sultan and Caliph (Geaves, 2010). Quilliam founded the Liverpool Muslim Institute (LMI), ‘the first attempt to promote Islam publicly from within a mosque and an Islamic centre in Britain’ (ibid.: 3), and which was to be an important centre for converts, conversions and other rites of passage, and worship. It also published the weekly newspaper The Crescent and quarterly journal The Islamic World (Geaves, 2010). The first purposebuilt mosque, the Woking Mosque, wasn’t built until two years later. Female converts were also prominent. Lady Evelyn Cobbold is probably the most well-known female convert and reportedly the first British Muslim woman to complete the hajj. At both LMI and Woking women converts held prominent positions and at this time were ‘at the centre of the establishment of Islam in Britain’ (Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2020: 9). Converts during this time were typically Christian by birth, predominantly male and middle-aged (although numbers of women grew in the post-war years), came from all classes in society, and were chiefly conservative in social and political outlook (Geaves, 2010; Gilham 2014). Gilham finds that affectional, experimental and intellectual motivations and orientations were the most common during the period (Gilham, 2014). Indeed, part of the appeal for Quilliam was the rationality of Islam, which ‘met the intellectual challenges of the period but also kept him in touch with the monotheistic deity’, ardent belief in which had formed in his childhood (Geaves, 2010: 39). The reactions to these converts from the wider population, media and politicians were by and large negatively prejudicial and oppositional, entailing mockery, disdain, social ostracism, and misunderstanding, at times manifesting in violence and intimidation. Muslims attending services at the LMI, for example, were pelted with stones and eggs and the building vandalised. Such animosity would be particularly pronounced at times of political heat between Britain and various parts

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of the Muslim world (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2014). The converts were also construed as transgressing ethnic and imperial hierarchies and as a threat to the moral fabric and racial purity of the nation (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2014). Other tropes included accusations of flaunting their new religion through dress (although converts at this time, especially female converts, were far less likely to wear distinguishing items of clothing than converts today), and Islam as backward and oppressive to women. Those few who were vocal, politically active and critical of British foreign policy were routinely monitored by authorities and treated with distrust and suspicion (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2014). The criticism of Britain and its foreign policy from these converts was rarely, however, criticism of Britain and Imperial Britain per se. It was rather in relation to Britain’s changing relations with the Ottoman Empire and growing closeness to Russia, and therefore the future of Britain’s alignment in the global polity. Indeed, many maintained a belief in the British Empire. Geaves comments on Quilliam that he showed ‘it was possible to be a Muslim who was highly critical of some aspects of British foreign policy, yet still remain intensely patriotic to one’s country of birth’ (2010: 189). Converts themselves stressed that being Muslim did not entail disloyalty to Britain and many of those who left Britain and spent time living abroad in Muslim majority lands returned later in life to the land of their birth. On a more everyday level, many were eager to stress commonalities between Islam and Christianity and their ability to coexist in Britain. In efforts at familiarity and translation, institutions such as the LMI and Woking Muslim Mission used terms such as ‘Muslim Church’ and ‘Muslim Bible’ to refer to the mosque and Qur’an (Gilham, 2014). Furthermore, many of the activities at the LMI were adapted and tailored to fit in with and appeal to the working lives and traditions of the local population (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2015). Many, following Stanley, adopted a practical, pragmatic approach to being Muslim in Britain, negotiating adaptations of practices such as salat (the daily prayers) to fit in with British life patterns more easily (Gilham, 2014). Lady Evelyn (Zainab) Cobbold even continued to drink a little sherry (Gilham, 2014; Jawad, 2012).

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On a more personal and religious level there is deep commitment and religious faith. Stanley, in a letter to his brother, remarked, ‘you know I have always been a Mussulman [sic] at heart’ (Gilham, 2014: 30), and Cobbold likewise said, ‘It seems that I have always been a Moslem [sic]’ (Jawad, 2012: 46; see also Hermansen, 1999). For many, the appeal of Islam lay in its theology, in its simplicity and common sense in comparison to the doctrine of the Trinity in Christianity, and in its orientation towards society—its classlessness, egalitarianism and concern with social justice (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2014; Hermansen, 1999). These converts were to leave a significant intellectual legacy and historical reference point for future generations, which has been furthered in the notable contributions of more recent converts such as Martin Lings, Charles le Gai Eaton and Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) (Jawad, 2012). The significance of this historical overview lies in part in how this legacy and some of the themes that have begun to emerge provide context for understanding conversion to Islam in Britain today. There are numerous similarities as well as significant differences, both of which help us understand the contemporary picture, and which will re-emerge throughout subsequent chapters. The following section turns to develop the contemporary picture and highlight these themes.

The Contemporary Picture Over the last ten to fifteen years, interest in conversion to Islam in Britain has increasingly become a subject of scholarly interest as well as a newsworthy topic. Demographics of converts in Britain today are difficult to determine with any accuracy and certainty. There is no ‘convert community’ as such to speak of (Brice, 2008), although support networks have been developing in more recent years through groups in various cities, usually affiliated with a mosque but including a couple with national reach, as well as online and through social media. The process and act of conversion itself is a fairly simple and informal rite; all that is needed is to sincerely pronounce the shahada, the declaration of faith that there is no God but God and Muhammad is His Prophet, in front of at least

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two witnesses. There are no public records of conversions and mosques or community groups also do not typically keep records of conversions; there is no official religious or civic documentation involved, although converts can obtain certificates of conversion from certain organisations which can help obtain entry to Mecca for hajj. The census for England and Wales, while now including a question on religious affiliation, does not also include one for religion at birth, unlike the Scottish census. The best approximations are, therefore, based on extrapolations from the Scottish census and informal reporting from mosques. Within these limitations, estimates vary at between approximately 15,000 (Birt, 2002) and 100,000, with up to 5000 new converts each year (although this figure doesn’t allow for de-conversions) (Brice, 2007, 2010). Of these, it is estimated that more than half are white British and between two thirds and three quarters are female (Brice, 2010). In contrast to the period outlined above, and reflecting wider social changes in Britain, they are largely from the now broader middleclass, with a substantial number of working-class background; their educational level is generally high; the average age seems to be below 30, and previous religious socialisation is diverse but often low (Gilham, 2015; Jawad, 2012; Köse, 1996; Zebiri, 2008). Similar trends are also generally observed in other European countries (Özyürek, 2015; Roald, 2004; van Nieuwkerk, 2004; Wohlrab-Sahr, 2006). When we look at the contemporary picture many of the themes of the historical sketch still have relevance. While a more detailed discussion of these will take place in later chapters, some general points can be highlighted here. Many of the reasons given for converting in the historical narratives are also found in contemporary convert narratives. Converts today likewise stress the conviction of the heart and of being Muslim, a deep spirituality and the idea of having always been Muslim, albeit unknowingly until conversion. This is reflected, for example, in a comment made to me by Hannah, who was 52 and had converted to Islam 4 years before the time of interview and had previously been nominally Christian. She remarked in her narrative that she had come to realise that ‘I was Muslim all along and nobody told me’. The intellectual and affectional are similarly underlined as part of the appeal of Islam and its consistency with life in modern Britain. We see too the

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theological and the sociological present in their decisions to convert, highlighting the significance of a bridging approach to these. A further parallel is that to greater or lesser extents present-day converts might also look for practical, pragmatic solutions to reconcile their faith with their life and with the social context in Britain. Perhaps at least in part for these reasons it has been argued that historical figures such as Quilliam remain important examples of negotiating identity and place for a British Islam and Muslims (Geaves, 2010; Gilham, 2014; Jawad, 2012). These are features that converts in Britain share with other European converts. Roald (2004), for example, has noted how converts in Scandinavia can transpose aspects of traditional Christmas celebrations to their Eid celebrations or Ramadan, bringing some of them into an Islamic framework—such as a Ramadan ‘advent’ calendar for children, the doors of which are not opened until after the daily fast is broken. If these more practical challenges of combining two traditions can result in creative hybridisations, negotiating an Islamic identity and life in Britain continues to be a challenge. Certain patterns in discrimination bear resemblance to those of over a hundred years ago, such as negativised perceptions and characterisations of Islam and the trope of ‘betrayal’. We thus find a parallel in the negative reactions that many face, who, as Quilliam, ‘f[ind] out very painfully’ that ‘conversion to Islam [i]s not simply an act of personal belief ’ (Geaves, 2010: 215). That is, even if conversions are first and foremost personal (Özyürek, 2015), conversion becomes, whether converts want it to or not or like it or not, a decidedly political act. Contemporary examples of discriminatory reactions are evident and many of the same negativising tropes are still held up to converts in Britain now, at least in parallel form. Whereas earlier conversions may have been explained as being results of force, contemporary equivalents emphasise brainwashing, mental health issues or conversions of convenience in order to marry. What they are not in these perspectives are genuine religious conversions of conviction. The incompatibility of Islam and Britain also continues to plague converts through the trope of ‘betrayal’ of culture and values, despite converts arguing the contrary. The image of the convert in the media and public imagination has arisen as one associated with radicalisation and terrorism. This in

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part reflects the wider frames that Muslims find themselves being seen through in the post 9/11 and 7/7 context, and several high-profile attacks in Britain have been by converts, adding fuel to the fire. Notable among these was the murder of a British Army soldier, Fusilier Lee Rigby, in May 2013 by two converts to Islam (Michael Adebolajo and Michael Adebowale), who first ran him over and then attacked him with meat cleavers and knives. Another occurred in 2017, when Khalid Masood drove his car onto the pavement on Westminster bridge, killing four pedestrians and injuring more than 50, including also fatally stabbing a police officer, before being shot by another. The ‘zealotry’ of the convert thus takes on its fullest and most violent definition, shifting away from a more benign ‘in love’ stage (Roald, 2004, 2012). Following the discussion so far in this chapter along with that of Britain as secular in the introduction, we can briefly pause to outline how the genuineness of the conversion and of converts’ intentions and motivations come to be questioned in further detail. There are four ways in which this occurs. First, they are seen as not a genuine religious conversion, they are a ‘conversion of convenience’, for instance, where the conversion is an instrumental, secondary and strategic act in order to achieve a different aim, such as marrying. These undoubtedly occur; I spoke to one person who had converted for this reason and a couple of my participants referred to instances they knew of, critically it must be said. They are, nevertheless, very much a minority of conversions and do not reflect the majority of British converts to Islam in contemporary Britain, or at least those that remain Muslim for any length of time (Brice, 2010). Even when there is a Muslim partner involved, characterising them as conversions of convenience is grossly reductive of the deeply held religious feelings, commitments and convictions. It was in fact remarked to me by one of my participants that her husband was now more pious and practising following her influence, a point also related by a leader of a New Muslim Circle as being a not infrequent occurrence, and which at times can lead to problems or divorce (see also Roald, 2004). Secondly, conversions are questioned precisely because they are religious conversions in a context that can be suspicious of public religion, where religion is supposedly fading away or at least restricted to the

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private sphere. In this case, we can see the absence of the religious aspect more broadly. Moreover, they are converting to a religion already perceived as inclined to violence and oppression, which can give this view a dangerous edge. In this context, converts are converting to a ‘foreign’ religion attached to a specific ethnic and cultural group, itself already negativised, and this heightens the levels of suspicion and questioning. Thirdly, even if the physical threat is not so direct, they are dismissed as a result of falling in love or of personal instability; that is, a phase that will pass, that is functional as a coping mechanism or perhaps merely a subordinate (although undesirable) aspect of something else. Personal ‘crisis’ has been a dominant explanatory trope in the academic literature on religious conversion for decades, conversion being interpreted as a ‘phase’ by family members to cope with this reoccurred continually across the narratives of my participants. Fourthly, they might suggest processes of brainwashing, especially at the hands of ‘extremist preachers’. These negative reactions question the genuineness of both the conversion and of the convert’s intentions and motivations, whether by seeing them instrumentally as deliberate strategies or by psychologising and therefore reducing them to individual anomalies (see also Krotofil, 2011). It is against this background, and in these frames, that the convert emerges as a controversial public figure. This generates issues around the good or bad faith of the convert’s religious identity, which can further be seen in issues they face in acceptance from Muslim communities, where the genuineness of their motivations and identities, and their right to belong, might also be questioned (see Chapter 6). As well as the historical and contemporary parallels and similarities there are also, however, significant differences and these are just as significant for locating and understanding converts and features of their narratives. Britain and Britain’s place in the world, indeed the world itself, is markedly different. The place of religion in public life has also become notably different, both more pluralised and arguably more suspect as the modern Elizabethan era has progressed. Britain is now more tangibly multifaith, yet secular understandings of the place of religion and religious identities provide the dominant frames. This aspect of the difference has already begun to be discussed in the introduction and

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will return in later chapters. What is significant here for understanding the position of contemporary converts to Islam in Britain in contrast to over a century ago is the emergence of a larger and more visible Muslim presence in Britain and the changed landscape of Islam in Britain. The following section thus sketches this changing landscape before returning to consider the place of converts more specifically as part of it.

Born Muslims in Multifaith Britain Although Muslim communities date back to the late nineteenth century in cities such as London, Liverpool and Cardiff, Muslims, as other religious minorities, were largely absent from public consciousness at that time. With the expansion of the Empire, immigrant Muslim communities began settling in Britain during the nineteenth century but remained marginal until the second half of the twentieth century and the ‘fourth phase’ of Muslim communities in Europe (Nielsen, 1999), those who emigrated following the Second World War and commonwealth immigration patterns. The current British Muslim population is estimated at around 5% of the total population.1 Muslims constitute Britain’s second-largest faith group, and although are diverse in their origins (some 50+ nationalities), the majority come from Pakistan and Bangladesh. Converts, estimated at about 4% of the total Muslim population, thus form a ‘minority within a minority’ (Brice, 2010). One effect of this population shift is that the term ‘Muslim’ is thought of in relation to ethnicity and attached to an ‘other’, which is especially notable in the ways in which Muslims and Islam have become stigmatised. Important also is the context of Britain and its legislative and state– civic race relations focus. For Muslims themselves their religion became increasingly important as they settled in Britain and either brought their 1 According

to official statistics from the Annual Population Survey https://www.ons.gov.uk/abo utus/transparencyandgovernance/freedomofinformationfoi/muslimpopulationintheuk/. An MCB report gives a detailed breakdown and commentary on the Muslim data from the 2011 census: http://www.mcb.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/MCBCensusReport_2015.pdf. Both last accessed 8 September 2019.

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families over to join them or started to begin new families, and so Muslim communities began to institute Islam through organisations and mosques and to provide for religious worship and education, and later politics. Until the 2000s public funding could more readily be sourced based on ethnic and cultural traits, meaning that Muslim organisations presented a public face under these rather than religious banners (Nielsen, 1999), even if this did not necessarily reflect the centrality of religious identity during this period (Fazakarley, 2017). Yet, as noted in the introduction, a discursive and policy shift has occurred when it comes to minorities in Britain, at the forefront of which have been populations that migrated from South Asia and Britain’s Muslim population. Britain’s Muslims have, since the turn of the century, gradually come to be defined more and more through ‘religion’; it is notable, for instance, that earlier exemptions and accommodations, such as the exemption for turbaned Sikhs from wearing a motorcycle helmet in 1976, were provided on the basis of them being an ethnic rather than religious group. 1989 was to prove a pivotal year for the rise in public and popular awareness of Britain’s Muslim population. The protests that followed the publication of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, citing its blasphemy against the Prophet Muhammad, along with the ensuing fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini (then leader of Iran) calling for his death, announced Muslims and their religion into the public sphere. This was further amplified following urban riots in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford in 2001, supposedly stemming from what a report called people living ‘parallel lives’ in segregated societies (Cantle, 2001), and following which the government pursued its Cohesion agenda, centred around promoting cross-ethnic contact and adherence to ‘British values’. Notably, the far Right, beginning with the BNP under Nick Griffin, also changed their discourse from one of Britain having a race or ethnic minority problem to having a ‘Muslim problem’ (Modood, 2005). Thus, the emergence of public religion and of religious diversity occurs in a context of growing concern over social and cultural integration of minority communities, with a particular emphasis on the ‘otherness’ of Muslims, not least because of their religion.

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The fallout from the Rushdie affair eventually led to the creation of the umbrella organisation the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) in 1997, which was formed following a wide consultation and studying other organisations such as the Board of Deputies of British Jews (McLoughlin, 2005). This was not without controversy, nevertheless, as many Muslims felt that it did not adequately represent the range of Muslim communities in Britain. The MCB is still the largest Muslim umbrella organisation with over 500 members,2 and has continued to be the most influential single body (O’Toole et al., 2013). Yet, since 2005, the government has increasingly recognised as well as had a strong hand in creating a more diversified and pluralised set of bodies, a ‘democratic constellation’ (Modood, 2007), representing Muslims, including bodies for young people, women, bodies that represented sectarian differences and interests, and those focussed on mosque governance or areas such as education (O’Toole et al., 2013). The question now arises as to how converts fit into this contemporary picture of Britain’s Muslim population(s)?

Born Muslims and Converts in Contemporary Britain Following the migration of large numbers of Muslims following the Second World War and their establishment of Islam through organisations and mosques as they came to build new lives, ‘’British Islam’ rapidly became Islam from the Indian subcontinent and the convert ‘community’ became increasingly marginalised’ (Gilham, 2014: 238). In the preand inter-war years, as we have seen, converts had been prominent, even foundational, in Muslim organisations, which were successful because of the prominence of these converts and their ability to communicate in a way seemingly not alien to British people (Köse, 1996). In the latter half of the twentieth century, converts became increasingly marginal as part of ‘British Islam’.

2 See

https://mcb.org.uk/.

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This marginalisation was largely a result of three factors. The first is the emerging born Muslim population and their own cultural, social and political interests and struggles. The second is the deaths of prominent converts who might have served as community leaders and a lack of figures of the stature of Quilliam emerging. The third is that Islam and Muslims have established themselves in Britain since the Second World War in large part along ethnic and sectarian lines (see Geaves, 1996; Nielsen, 2003), which complicates the picture into which converts try and find a place. At organisational and institutional levels, in the United Kingdom just 2.1% of mosques have committees or trustees with people from more than one continent and a mere 0.3% have even one convert on them or at all involved in running the mosque (Naqshbandi, 2015). A number of my participants mentioned the division of mosques by ethnicity and school of thought, and how ‘you’re immediately lost because the vast majority of mosques aren’t designed for converts’, as Matthew, a 29-year-old white convert of 10 years, put it. This is also reflected in an interview with Batool al-Toma, who runs the New Muslims Project, when she commented that you very rarely find converts on the governing bodies of mosques, as these tend to be along sectarian lines, and this affects converts’ ability to feel like they belong and are accepted. It is this broad picture that the increasing numbers of contemporary converts to Islam in Britain are emerging into and grappling with as they negotiate and construct boundaries and senses of belonging into which they can reconcile their faith and identity. What results is that very often they are adamant about the need to ‘nativise’ certain beliefs and practices in the ‘spirit’ of Islam but that are concordant in Britain, and which is a significant aspect of the narrative distinction made between religion and culture. This is so alongside the fact that they make significant lifestyle changes in order to live more Islamic lives. This structural and institutional context contrasts with the situation in Germany (Özyürek, 2015), Scandinavia (Roald, 2004) and Italy (Salih, 2004). Roald (2004), for example, notes the contrast between Britain and Scandinavia, where converts play a much more prominent role in interfaith dialogues, attributing this to the difference in make-up between the Muslim communities in the respective countries and the

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structural patterns of how interaction with majority society is organised, especially in relation to the role of women—the leader of the Swedish Muslim Council is currently a female convert to Islam, Helena Benauoda. In 2006, the Central Council of Muslims, one of Germany’s largest Muslim umbrella organisations, elected a convert, Ayyub Axel Köhler, as its chairman, a position he held until 2010. Commenting on the situation in Italy, Salih (2004) points out that converts play a prominent role in the public sphere owing to structural arrangements between government and minority religion organisations. For Salih, as Özyürek, this serves to strengthen the exclusion of born Muslims as converts’ discourse of unity over diversity in fact serves to squeeze out born Muslims’ experiences as a cultural minority. In this regard, in Britain, by contrast, converts are not in a position of dominance or where they have the capacity to lead, shape or set the terms of the debate at these levels. As a result of the shift in the Muslim population, converts’ routes to Islam and how this links to the practice of their new faith have also changed. Those coming to Islam for the first time in Britain are far more likely to be exposed to practices considered more orthodox by a particular born Muslim community straight away than those who came to Islam through the LMI, who by contrast would have been exposed, at least initially, to a ‘diluted, syncretic Islam’ (Gilham, 2015: 31). This structural difference with regard to the Muslim population forms one of the most salient differences between the current and historical context, and one which emerges continually and consistently between and within converts’ narratives through the discursive divide between culture and religion (see also, Guimond, 2017; Roald, 2006; Zebiri, 2008). This division forms one of the major themes of the book as it relates to how converts are positioned and position themselves in relation to majority society as well as born Muslim communities. This is taken up in detail in later chapters. We can begin here, nevertheless, to outline some salient features in relation to the picture being drawn. To do so, it is relevant to reflect on two interviews with prominent figures, both of whom are converts and run groups for converts. The first, Batool Al-Toma, runs The New Muslims Project, founded in 1993 with the specific purpose of supporting converts to Islam in Britain

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given a lack of such support and services being available. The New Muslims Project is a national organisation and offers numerous services, including retreats, open days, courses, a helpline and print materials, notably its quarterly magazine Meeting Point. The second, Cara,3 runs a long-standing New Muslim Circle at a large and important mosque in a major city. Both emphasise the theme highlighted above, namely the need to delineate religion from culture, as far as is possible, and from both that of a convert’s own background as well as that of Muslim communities. Both also reflect on the structural character of Muslims in Britain, the emerging place of converts as an increasingly noteworthy ‘part of the scene’. Both explicitly reflect on the structural need for spaces specifically focussed for converts. Cara and Batool reflect on the growing numbers of converts in recent years and how earlier, when there were fewer, it was more necessary to assimilate into a Muslim community in order to live as a Muslim. This situation, however, has changed. The context now is very different with the growing number and confidence of converts and, Cara predicts, will continue to become so. For Cara, convert spaces are now becoming especially important to avoid the kinds of identity crises that result from the idea that a complete cultural transformation is a prerequisite of becoming Muslim. She does not see such shifts in negative terms, however. She talks about the ideal of universality within Islam, that she would like to see Muslims together and not separated by ethnicity. But also, she reflects on how people do tend to congregate around similarities of language, culture and sense of humour, which she does not see in and of itself as being necessarily negative. Importantly, with reference to converts, this is not least because of differing needs of support. Cara comments, for example, on how the number of converts from Hindu and Sikh backgrounds is, although smaller than white Europeans of Christian backgrounds, also noticeably rising and that these converts need specific support in light of the more difficult time they tend to experience (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). Batool likewise relates being challenged by born Muslims about why converts tend to group together. She responds by pointing to a parallel 3 Cara

is a pseudonym.

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with why Muslim communities have done so for reasons both of associating with people felt to be more relatable and of responding to discrimination (also Cheeseman & Khanum, 2009). She talks about the need for convert spaces as being, at least for the time being, necessarily spaces away from mosques. In fact, we might view Meeting Point itself as one of these spaces. It is thus that she explains Meeting Point focuses on educational, spiritual and practical issues and does not follow a particular school of thought. Moreover, she related how for these reasons (and to provide something more positive and uplifting) she has fought against ‘strong opposition’ to keep it this way and to keep a focus on the United Kingdom and not on getting caught up in and distracted by the ‘outward drama’ of ‘Muslim news’ abroad. That is, it has a strong contextual and in many ways, practical focus on life as a Muslim in Britain and very much foregrounds the idea of British Muslims and British Islam. Through the Point of View section in which a number of readers respond to an initial question posed by a reader on aspects of Islam and being a Muslim in Britain, it becomes apparent how all sorts of issues are being negotiated and interpreted along the lines of religion and culture. Issues such as circumcision, lowering the gaze, cultural navigation, celebrating birthdays and Christmas, organ donation, changing of names, in-laws, and the niqab, to mention just a handful of examples, are all debated. This focus is seen as especially important in a psychosocial environment in which converts can be immediately drawn into becoming political spokespeople for Muslims immediately after conversion. Converts, for instance, as Muslims more generally, are often asked to account for the actions of other Muslims, especially following terrorist attacks or in relation to certain practices seen as ‘backward’. For converts, especially when they are fairly new to Islam and still finding their feet as it were on a personal level, this can be a particularly difficult position to be put into. For Cara, the fundamental importance of this focus within the group she runs is to ensure that converts are able to maintain their (cultural) identity and to support them in navigating this within Islam. This is in order to prevent them from becoming ‘lost’ among pressures to conform to a particular way of life that accords to the Muslim family or community they know. That is, it is primarily a space in which converts can, with

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support, negotiate and develop their Islamic subjectivity. Drawing on a counselling background, Cara notes the specific vulnerability of converts, especially early on in their conversion journey when confusion and isolation can be overwhelming. The focus of the work of the group is to help each individual convert develop their relationship with God and, therefore, to mediate the road between what is pleasing for God and cultural practices that distract from, make no difference to, or help reinforce that. In this vein she stresses a focus on meaning, for example, when teaching the prayers, in order to ensure that words and action are not merely mimicked ‘robot-like’ but are understood in their significance as a means of communicating with God; they should ‘carry weight on your heart’ as she put it. This is not about denigrating cultural practices, however, but ensuring the centrality of faith in choices made and not ‘losing themselves’. She uses the example of a convert who began turning up in a sari to make the point that following certain cultural practices, modes of dress and so on, are in fact fine but that her emphasis is on ensuring that a convert is aware of the difference between this and the faith, that they are happy with it, and that it is not the result of pressure to conform on the basis that to not wear particular forms of dress would be ‘unlslamic’. Similarly, Batool talks about the need to indigenise Islam in Britain in a way which does not exclude the cultural backgrounds of converts. She sees an important aspect of this as part of ‘demystifying’ Islam by drawing similarities with existing practices to aid understanding and avoid alienation. (This is, albeit carried out very differently, a similar approach to many of the tactics adopted by Quilliam.) Here then we see a careful treading of the line in balancing the cultural and religious. This is quite a distinct position from that mentioned by Inge in relation to Salafi groups where they are encouraged to bond with one another against the rest of society (Inge, 2016: 140). A further point related by Batool refers to the navigation that inevitably takes place as part of the process of becoming Muslim and finding oneself and one’s way in Islam. She remarks of religious authorities, for example, ‘treat scholars like plumbers; always get three quotes’. This is not a wholesale rejection or circumvention of Islamic scholars and structures, it remains rooted in Islamic tradition, but is rather a

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recognition of the differences within Islam. In fact, the New Muslims Project’s website has a Respecting Diversity section in which it encourages converts to learn more about different Islamic groups, schools of thought and organisations while not accepting all formulations at face value. Batool further emphasises these points about a British Islam that converts can help forge and that will be more acceptable and open to them with a focus on urf . Urf refers to customary norms of a particular society, here especially as an aspect of jurisprudence, and thus appeal to this principle addresses the religion–culture divide through an approach grounded in Islamic thought. She uses this to challenge particular ways of doing things and for the legitimacy of adapting traditional practices of Muslim communities. She uses the examples of weddings and funerals to describe how ceremonies can suit the urf of converts by maintaining aspects of their cultural and traditional practice in so far as there is no contradiction with Islamic norms and ensuring necessary Islamic elements. Abdal Hakim Murad has also emphasised urf, noting how it is recognised by the four major Sunni schools and ‘is not simply a matter of assimilation and weakening, but reflects the time-honoured Islamic process of putting roots into new soil’ (2020: 209). In fact, in an editorial of Meeting Point in 2016 Batool makes a forthright claim for a living, pluralistic vision of Islam. Addressing this issue, she rails in characteristically combative style about how converts to Islam ‘often feel like square pegs being hammered into round holes’ when such an approach is denied them. She construes this as: the onslaught… [as] the dominant Muslim community strips away any evidence of personal individuality a particular cultural heritage might have passed on and which might well continue to enrich the colourful tapestry that is Islam and Muslim communities across the ages. This morphing of converts towards a kind of unification of cultural norms, ideas, habits and lifestyle… is destructive for those whose flair and imagination, aspiration and sense of exploration inspired within them the desire to take the first tentative steps along the path to spirituality and to a meaningful relationship with God. […]

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The overriding message… is that there is little room for any generosity of spirit… There is a feeling of being gagged to the point of lunacy and Muslim communities, particularly the convert community, are paying the price as they ride on the coat tails of the dominant cultural expression of Islam that appears to reduce our humanity to its barest and most acutely calculated minimum.

It is for these reasons that such an emphasis is placed on the need for non-prescriptive spaces in which converts can safely negotiate their subjectivity in a way which is focussed on supporting and promoting their personal flourishment, develop confidence and spirituality that is a sustainable part of their lives, and can contribute positively to Islam as an organic, living religion. As well as placing converts in relation to born Muslims, it also places them in relation to secularity. For, although there is a universality in an other-worldly and theological sense, it is also thoroughly secular in recognition of its necessarily historical, contextual and this-worldly embeddedness. Here, the recognition of the secular is a recognition of plurality. It does not so much see ‘religion as a sphere separate from all other social realities’ as some prominent understandings of secularism (Özyürek, 2015: 132–133), but recognises the overlapping, intertwinement and interdependence of these social realities in the modern world. It, moreover, places British converts to Islam today in a historical and contemporary context of ongoing debates that orient around the idea of a religion–culture divide and that operate in relation to Britain, Muslims and Islam in Britain, and Muslims and Islam as such. British converts to Islam do not represent a break or a new phase of this history and its relevance, but rather a newer and more recent aspect within that history as it inevitably and inextricably muscles into the present to find its own place and role in contribution.

References Birt, Y. (2002). Lies, damn lies, statistics and conversions! Q News, no. 350.

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Brice, M. A. K. (2007). Sleepwalking to segregation or wide-awake separation: Investigating distribution of white English Muslims and the factors influencing their choices of location. Global Built Environment Review, 6 (2), 18–27. Brice, M. A. K. (2008). An English Muslim in search of an identity. In C. Hart (Eds.), Englishness: Diversity, differences and identity. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/287998214_An_English_M uslim_in_Search_of_an_Identity, last accessed 2 September 2016. Brice, M. A. K. (2010). A minority within a minority: A report on converts to Islam in the United Kingdom. Faith Matters. http://faith-matters.org/ima ges/stories/fmreports/a-minority-within-a-minority-a-report-on-converts-toislam-in-theuk.pdf, last accessed 18 June 2018. Bulliet, R. W. (1979). Conversion to Islam in the medieval period: An essay in quantitative history. Harvard University Press. Cantle, T. (2001). Community cohesion: A report of the independent review team. Home Office. Cheeseman, D., & Khanum, N. (2009). ‘Soft’ segregation: Muslim identity, British secularism. In A. Dinham, R. Furbey, & V. Lowndes (Eds.), Faith in the public realm: Controversies, policies and practices. The Policy Press. Cheruvallil-Contractor, S. (2020). Women in Britain’s first Muslim mosques: Hidden from history, but not without influence. Religions, 11, 62. Fazakarley, J. (2017). Muslim communities in England 1962–1990: Multiculturalism and political identity. Palgrave Macmillan. Franks, M. (2000). Crossing the borders of whiteness? White Muslim women who wear the hijab in Britain today. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(5), 917– 992. Geaves, R. (1996). Sectarian influences within Islam in Britain, with reference to the concepts of ‘ummah’ and ‘community’ . Monograph Series Community Religions Project: University of Leeds. Geaves, R. (2010). Islam in Victorian Britain: The life and times of Abdullah Quilliam. Kube. Gilham, J. (2014). Loyal enemies: British converts to Islam, 1850–1950. Hurst & Company. Gilham, J. (2015). Upholding the banner of Islam: British converts to Islam and the Liverpool Muslim Institute, c.1887–1908. Immigrants & Minorities, 33(1), 23–44. Guimond, A. M. (2017). Converting to Islam: Understanding the experiences of White American females. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Hermansen, M. (1999). Roads to Mecca: Conversion narratives of European and Euro-American Muslims. The Muslim World, 89 (1), 56–89. Inge, A. (2016). The making of a Salafi Muslim woman: Paths to conversion. Oxford University Press. Jawad, H. (2012). Towards building a British Islam: New Muslim’s perspectives. Continuum. Köse, A. (1996). Conversion to Islam: A study of native British converts. Kegan Paul International. Krotofil, J. (2011). ‘If I am to be a Muslim, I have to be a good one’: Polish migrant women embracing Islam and reconstructing identity in dialogue with self and others. In K. Górak-Sosnowska (Ed.), Muslims in Poland and Eastern Europe (pp. 154–168). University of Warsaw. Levtzion, N. (Ed.) (1979). Conversion to Islam. Holmes and Meier. Matar, N. (1998). Islam in Britain 1558–1685. Cambridge University Press. McLoughlin, S. (2005). The state, ‘new’ Muslim leaderships and Islam as a ‘resource’ for engagement in Britain. In J. Cesari & S. McLoughlin (Eds.), European Muslims and the secular state (pp. 55–69). Aldershot. Modood, T. (2005). Multicultural politics: Racism, ethnicity, and Muslims in Britain (Vol. 22). University of Minnesota Press. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A civic idea. Polity Press. Naqshbandi, M. (2015). UK Mosque statistics for 2015. http://www.muslim sinbritain.org/blog/index.php?entry=entry150923-160414, last accessed 25 June 2018. Nielsen, J. S. (1999). Towards a European Islam. Palgrave Macmillan. Nielsen, J. S. (2003). Transnational Islam and the integration of Islam in Europe. In J. Nielsen & S. Allievi (Eds.), Muslim networks and transnational communities in and across Europe (pp. 28–51). Brill. O’Toole, T., Nilsson DeHanas, D., Modood, T., Meer, N., & Jones, S. (2013). Taking part: Muslim participation in contemporary governance report. University of Bristol. Özyürek, E. (2015). Being German, becoming Muslim: Race, religion, and conversion in the new Europe. Princeton University Press. Roald, A. S. (2004). New Muslims in the European context: The experience of Scandinavian converts. Brill. Roald, A. S. (2006). The shaping of a Scandinavian ‘Islam’: Converts and gender equal opportunity. In K. van Nieuwkerk (Ed.), Women embracing Islam: Gender and conversion in the west (pp. 48–70). University of Texas Press.

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Roald, A. S. (2012). The conversion process in stages: New Muslims in the twenty-first century. Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, 23(3), 347–362. Salih, R. (2004). The backward and the new: National, transnational and postnational Islam in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30 (5), 995–1011. van Nieuwkerk, K. (2004). Veils and wooden clogs don’t go together. Ethnos, 69 (2), 229–246. Wohlrab-Sahr, M. (2006). Symbolizing distance: Conversion to Islam in Germany and the United States. In K. van Nieuwkerk (Ed.), Women embracing Islam: Gender and conversion in the west (pp. 71–92). University of Texas Press. Zebiri, K. (2008). British Muslim converts: Choosing alternative lives. Oneworld.

3 Multiculturalism and the Multi-Religious Challenge

The empirical fact of multiculturalism in Britain has reawakened debates around religion’s relation to politics and its place in society and the public sphere. Moreover, this has been provoked to a significant extent by the presence and claims making of Britain’s religious minorities, and Islam and Muslims have been at the forefront. The previous chapters have outlined this multicultural and multi-religious context, or multiculturalism in its descriptive sense. This chapter considers in more detail a more substantive and normative meaning of multiculturalism, which seeks to think about how the reality of descriptive multiculturalism is thought about and managed in theoretical and policy terms. Within the now extensive literature multiculturalism is conceived differently in different historical and contemporary contexts. One immediate distinction is between ‘multination’ and ‘polyethnic’ multiculturalisms. The former is mainly concerned with nations below the level of the state: indigenous groups in Australia or the Quebecois in Canada, for example, and of which Will Kymlicka’s work (1995, 2001) on liberal multiculturalism is exemplary. Polyethnic multiculturalism, by contrast, mainly refers to immigrant groups in a post-immigration context. This is the form of multiculturalism that has taken hold in Britain and found in © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_3

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the work of what has been called ‘The Bristol School of Multiculturalism’ (BSM) (Levey, 2019), its most notable affiliates being Tariq Modood, Bhikhu Parekh, Varun Uberoi and Nasar Meer. It is the BSM mode of multiculturalism, and especially that articulated by Tariq Modood, that this book, with its focus on Britain, is concerned with. Multiculturalism in Britain has become something of a pariah in much political and academic discourse. In 2011, for example, then Prime Minister David Cameron blamed multiculturalism for the ‘weakening of our collective identity’.1 Nevertheless, this chapter argues that multiculturalism remains a relevant framework for thinking about religion and religious identity in society through its core concepts of recognition, difference and ethno-religious identities, and, moreover, how these relate to secularism. These are discussed in the first section below. The discussion of multiculturalism is then developed further by discussing alternatives which have emerged as challenges to multiculturalism’s approach. The discussion of the first two of these, interculturalism and ‘everyday multiculturalism’, serves to strengthen the rationale and continued relevance for the framework of multiculturalism. A third, however, serves to highlight the shortcomings of multiculturalism for the purposes of this book. This approach stems from political theology and is brought to bear primarily through considering the work of Luke Bretherton. In particular, the notion of hospitality is discussed in relation to multiculturalism to begin to show how the latter falls short with regard to specifically religious identities.

Multiculturalism’s Challenge: Difference and Recognition Multiculturalism is inherently bound up with issues of identity and belonging. In this area the work of Parekh (2006) and Modood (2007) (including various collaborations) have provided the most coherent and defining contributions to challenge the assumptions and positions of 1 See

https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/pms-speech-at-munich-security-conference, last accessed 5 August 2019.

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classical liberalism. Multiculturalism addresses a number of liberal biases in relation to the conception of public space and citizens as political agents, particularly liberalism’s tenets of the neutrality of the public sphere, toleration as a normative basis for social and political relations, and a reliance on individualism when it comes to thinking about equality. In terms of equality, it highlights how a liberal ‘neutral’ public sphere is a myth as it will always and inevitably reflect a particular culture, way of thinking and way of doing at the expense of others; rather than neutral, ‘liberalism is also a fighting creed’ as Taylor puts it (1994: 62). Thus, for example, when it comes to religion, religious faith in a strict liberal conception is a matter of individual, private conscience and should not enter into, or be limited in being able to enter into, public and political space and debate. It is for this reason that religious language, motivations, signs and symbols in places of education and work (especially for state-based institutions and public bodies) exercise so much controversy. The presumption of neutrality can then serve to disadvantage ethnic and religious minorities in important ways when it comes to their presence and acceptance in the public sphere (although we should note that not only religious minorities but religious majorities might also feel alienated by liberal secularism). For multiculturalism, it is not simply about equal rights despite differences, but about equality as the accommodation of difference in the public space, which can be shared with rather than dominated by the majority, based on the premise that the public sphere reflects various norms and the interests of all. It is thus concerned with a pluralistic thickening achieved by ‘equalising upwards’. Multiculturalism’s intervention here is based in the identity concept ethno-religious. ‘Ethno-religious’ captures socio-political identities as part of a two-way dynamic. On the one (negative) hand, a particular group in society might come to be ethnicised as ‘other’ and seen as homogenous, as might be the case for minorities from the perspective of a majority, and face discrimination on this basis. On the other (positive) hand, a group (such as Muslims or Jews) might relate to each other as a community in a political sense, to combat Islamophobia or antisemitism, or for forms of education (such as faith schools) to keep alive certain cultural or religious aspects, for instance. Notably, who counts as Muslim or Jewish

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in this ethno-religious sense is not limited to people who hold a particular belief or practice a faith. It will also include those for whom ‘Jew’ or ‘Muslim’ is an ethnic or cultural marker in the absence of any religious meaning attached to it, but for whom this identity category will be meaningful and the basis for (various and variant) claims made in the public sphere. This serves to highlight and address how, ‘although human beings share in common certain capacities, desires, experiences, conditions of existence and so forth, they are also cultural beings whose cultures differently develop their universally shared capacities and cultivate additional ones that are unique to them’ (Parekh, 2006: 125). Multiculturalism’s position, emerging out of anti-racism debates, is therefore to theorise Muslims in ethno-religious terms. This introduces two of multiculturalism’s central tenets: difference and recognition. A multicultural equality requires dropping the pretence of ‘difference blindness’ fundamental to liberal secularism, instead allowing marginalised minorities to also be visible and explicitly accommodated in the public sphere through a politics of recognition. Recognition is a positive mode of incorporation and accommodation that is stronger than toleration. Recognition of difference is necessary, ‘a vital human need’ (Taylor, 1994: 26), for a society based on ideas of mutual respect and equality, not least because ‘the withholding of recognition can be a form of oppression’ (Taylor, 1994: 36). In this way, ‘multiculturalism refers to the struggle, the political mobilisation but also the policy and institutional outcomes, to the forms of accommodation in which “differences” are not eliminated, are not washed away but to some extent recognised’ (Modood, 2007): 39). Such recognition seeks to balance individual rights with group-based rights, although the latter remains subordinate to the former where there may be conflict of those rights. This is based on the premises that collective senses of identities are subjectively important to people that hold them and, moreover, form important sites of social action in relation to the social context and demands for equality (Modood, 2007; Young, 1990).

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Multiculturalism Challenged Two important challengers in the literature in the last couple of decades have been from interculturalism and from what here is taken under the umbrella term ‘everyday multiculturalism’. These two orientations share a focus and primary concern with the quotidian, what is called a ‘lived’ multiculturalism. Stemming from this, two central ways in which these approaches differentiate themselves from multiculturalism are through their approaches to identity and difference. I have written more extensive and general critiques elsewhere (see Sealy, 2018). Here, however, I concentrate on their approaches to identity and social relations of relevance to this book’s most immediate purposes, with a particular eye on religious identity, rather than a comprehensive critique. These approaches are then contrasted with multiculturalism’s approach. Despite important differences between interculturalism and ‘everyday multiculturalism’, in their general approach to identity and difference they bear remarkable similarities. Overall, it is argued that they do not offer a convincing alternative framework or conceptual apparatus to multiculturalism when it comes to thinking about identity and difference, and that they would in fact impoverish these concerns.

‘Everyday’ Multicultural Identities Just as there are multiculturalisms, plural, so too there are interculturalisms, which, as explicit theoretical challenges, have produced significant and ongoing direct engagement between multiculturalists and interculturalists (see Cantle, 2016a, 2016b; Meer et al., 2016a; Modood, 2016; 2017; Comparative Migration Studies Special Issue, Levrau and Loobuyk (eds), 2018). These interculturalisms differ from each other, at times significantly; Cantle, for example, sees Bouchard’s (2012) Canadian variant as too close to multiculturalism. In Europe, two prominent examples that overlap to a large extent are those elaborated by Zapata Barrero and Cantle, and Cantle’s has become the dominant conception engaged in debates in Britain (for Europe generally see CoE, 2008). The

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literature in the area of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ is likewise broad and varied but with a number of shared conceptual features. I take, therefore, ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (EDMC) as representing a broad ‘family orientation’ within the literature.2 Both interculturalism and EDMC charge multiculturalism with being out-of-date when it comes to recognising the multiplicity and fluidity of identities in contemporary ‘super-diverse’ societies. For Cantle and Zapata Barrero, in an era of globalisation and super-diversity, individual identities are just too protean in character; multiculturalism, they hold, reifies categorical singularities against empirical multiplicities. In fact, Cantle identifies that ‘the key difference between multiculturalism and interculturalism generally revolves around the way in which personal and collective identities are conceptualised and instrumentalised’ (Cantle, 2016b: 140). On the individual level, Cantle, interculturalism’s most bullish proponent in Britain, deplores what he sees as (borrowing from Sen), the ‘miniaturisation’ of people and their identities, where one identity category is mobilised around to the ignorance of identity’s multiplicity (Cantle, 2012, 2016a, 2016b; Sen, 2006). Cantle argues that identities in this way remain ‘fixed and given, rather than transitory and chosen—they are fundamentally about past heritage, rather than future personal and collective development’ (2012: 30). Similarly, in EDMC multiculturalism is referred to as a topdown perspective overly dominated by theory and detached from the complex realities of everyday lives (Anna, 2018; Noble, 2009b; Wise & Velayutham, 2009). In this way multiculturalism creates ‘unmoveable and unalterable’ reified differences which ‘necessarily come into conflict’ (Noble, 2009a; Semi et al., 2009: 66–67). For some there is a disconnect, or even a ‘clash’ (Semi et al., 2009: 66–67), between theoretical-discourses and lived, quotidian experiences of multiculturalism, arguing for instance that young people live ‘in the shadows’ of theoretical and political debates (Butcher & Harris, 2010: 450; see also Berg & Sigona, 2013). On these accounts, multiculturalism’s view of 2 See,

for example, ‘commonplace diversity’ (Wessendorf, 2013) or ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’ (Noble, 2009a).

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socio-political identity and difference reflects an out-of-date lack of a cosmopolitan sensibility, which throws up barriers to greater inclusion, integration and social harmony. In contrast to multiculturalism as they see it, interculturalism and EDMC share ‘a grounded approach to looking at the everyday practice and lived experience of diversity in specific situations and spaces of encounter’ (Wise & Velayutham, 2009: 3) as a way of ‘reinstating the dynamic, complex nature of the concept of difference and its processual nature’ (Semi et al., 2009: 69). Identities here are formed in praxis such that praxis is conceived as being ontological (Wise & Noble, 2016) and identity is equated with praxis; we are what we do, we might say. We can note here a parallel turn to the everyday in the sociology of religion over the last decade or so, where the emphasis is similarly on identity as practice (McGuire, 2008). Identity on these accounts can seem rather shallow, rather ‘unmoored’. The unfortunate effect of multiplying identities in the way these writers advocate is that it is reductive of certain identities that some people claim to be, and experience as being, overarching or fundamental. A religious identity is a good example of an identity that for many would be irreducible to other categories or to the material and social, something which highlights rather than diminishes the significance of a politics of difference (Young, 1990). A further important aspect and similarity between interculturalism and EDMC that extends from this view of identity is their reliance on contact theory. There is, nevertheless, a notable difference here. For interculturalism, contact needs to be fostered in order to overcome ‘parallel lives’ (for which it blames multiculturalism), for EDMC, contact is already taking place out of sight of multiculturalism. This is a significant difference and implies different policy measures, but for the purposes of this discussion it can be put aside as the overlapping emphasis and reliance on contact theory for social relations and cohesion is the main concern. Empirical evidence for contact as a panacea for inter-ethnic social issues is somewhat ambiguous and complex. Contact theory has often returned differing results precisely because ‘encounters never take place in a space free from history, material conditions and power’ but are structured by forces and relations in wider society (Valentine, 2008:

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333; also Amin, 2012; Tonkiss, 2005). There is, moreover, a disconnect between how positive local encounter may affect dispositions towards cultural others as individuals, but that this change will not necessarily extend to ideas of groups (Valentine, 2008; also Murdock, 2016). Thus, while someone from the dominant cultural group may have a good personal, everyday relationship with Muslim colleagues or neighbours, for example, this does not automatically or necessarily preclude reifying and racist attitudes to unknown, imagined ‘Muslim’ others; the ‘but not you, mate, you’re all right’ aside with which many people from ethnic minorities might be familiar. Moreover, work in social psychology has argued that, even where intergroup contact improves the attitudes of those of the majority cultural group towards minorities, a concomitant attitude to support social policies that would directly produce social change leading to equality does not necessarily follow (Dovidio et al., 2007). Subsequently, interculturalism and EDMC are unable to adequately address complex structural inequalities and how aspects of individual identities translate into social and political identities. They thus remain hampered rather than freed by the multiple, fluid and indifferent. A too individualised understanding fails to recognise important sociological processes of how identity is tied up with the dialectic between the personal, social and political. More specifically, they remain insufficient for thinking about religious identity as it will be conceived in this book, and particularly the implications for thinking about religious identity in social or political terms, restricting it to a discrete category that does not take seriously enough the idea of difference as something other than a problem to be solved. Pointedly, these ways of thinking about identities can have reductive consequences for the religious that are unable to capture how religious subjects may ‘always [be] in the condition of God’ (Bowker, 2015: 152). Interculturalism, EDMC and multiculturalism all highlight that difference is a politicised process of positioning in which some gain advantages over others, but the first two approaches, by remaining stuck in a negative definition of difference, fail to recognise its positive potential as well as how religion and culture are ‘real’. Difference can be something of a dirty word, a dangerous word, conjuring up pictures of ‘parallel lives’, memories and fears of negative otherness, of judgements

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of inferiority. This much is understandable. But to disavow difference, to lurch in the other direction, has its own ill effects. Difference blindness has its own problems, calling forth as it does discourses of assimilation and ignorance of structural inequalities, producing de facto hierarchies. The task, thus, is to both recognise difference and recognise it positively in a way that does not neglect serious issues of inequality. For this, multiculturalism is better positioned and equipped. The following section turns to a further approach that shares multiculturalism’s critiques of liberalism and also positions difference centrally but offers an alternative set of challenges to multiculturalism on the grounds of thinking about religious identity. The following now turns to bring into critical discussion with multiculturalism an approach grounded in political theology, where religious identity provides the central pivot point, and is drawn principally from the work of Luke Bretherton.

Multiculturalism as a Theological Principle This section elaborates an approach from political theology that sees multiculturalism as a theological principle and seeks to relate the core concept of hospitality to multiculturalism’s recognition. For the conceptual discussion, the work of Luke Bretherton, who has recently done most to elaborate a political theology oriented around the concept of hospitality, and who has done so in part in critique of the kind of identity politics multiculturalism is associated with, provides the main interlocutor. Given that Bretherton approaches the issues from an explicitly Christian perspective, this conceptual discussion will then be related to the work of Mona Siddique, who has elaborated on hospitality from an Islamic perspective. There has been no real engagement between multiculturalism and political theology and thus the following sections represent the beginnings of an engagement between the two and reading of their overlaps

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and differences.3 It should be noted from the outset that this is a necessarily narrow engagement. As well as notable overlaps, such as a shared critical stance towards liberalism, there are significant differences in the political visions of Bretherton and Modood, notably around the place of local, national, transnational and the exact form of democratic politics required. A fuller critical comparative analysis is beyond the scope of this book. For now, it must suffice to point out Bretherton’s concerns with delimiting the state to focus on social relations first and foremost in contrast with multiculturalism’s methodological nationalism. Working within multiculturalism, the concern here is how some of the central insights and conceptual premises of Bretherton’s political theology, based in his development and conception of hospitality, can inform and open up multiculturalism’s approach and blind spots vis-à-vis religious identity and its socio-political import. The political theology under discussion here takes a critical stance towards multiculturalism’s form of politics and, indirectly although importantly, towards multiculturalism’s conception of religious identity. The significance of bringing political theology into the discussion lies in how it ‘brings to speech what is often unsayable, silenced, privatised, or rendered illegible within technocratic and social scientific frameworks [and which] shape politics’ by ‘unmask[ing] the ways in which supposedly secular modern political thought and arrangements suspend or conceal religious frameworks’, as well as how it ‘can be understood as a protest against how politics is narrated and imagined within a wholly “immanent frame”’ (Bretherton, forthcoming).

Difference: Substantive and Liberative Multiculturalism is construed here as principally a normative theological principle, not just a political or empirical one, and seeks an understanding of both the universal and the particular. Multiculturalism on

3 Multiculturalism

has a more sustained engagement with literature on liberalism in political theory and racism, while political theology has tended to be in engagement with liberal political theory and political theology.

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this account ‘reflects the character of a God who rejoices in difference’ (Shannahan, 2010: 43; also Chaplin 2011: 49–50). Generally, and summarily, speaking, the universal is found in God, while the particular is found in being earthly and earth-bound creatures, necessarily constrained, positioned and constituted in time and space, and in the social, political and historical contexts within which we must relate to one another. This relating to each other necessarily takes political form as human ‘flourishing emerges out of and depends on being embedded in some form of common life’, which ‘cannot be built on the domination of others’ (Bretherton, 2019: 17). This adds an existential depth to a merely empirically descriptive or politically normative multiculturalism that has implications for thinking about identity and difference. Bretherton stresses ‘ad hoc commensurability’ (2016 [2006]): 111, 114) across difference (between Christians and non-Christians) on the basis of shared social practices, which is best played out at the local level where acts of hospitality and listening (see below) take place. Nevertheless, the emphasis on the local and informal here represents a very different approach from interculturalism or EDMC, which can be seen in the centralising of difference and a foundation in (theological) political ethics. Shannahan (in a direct critique of interculturalism) argues for engagement with political theology as a move towards a ‘hermeneutics of liberative difference’ to ‘rescue diversity from the hegemony of assimilationist community cohesion narratives’, and argues for a ‘re-imagined catholicity that holds together our commonality and uniqueness’ (Shannahan, 2017: 426, 423). Bretherton notes how there is a necessary particularity to Christian ethics, that differences between Christian and non-Christian ethics are substantive (not least in the former’s insistence on following Jesus Christ, for instance), and that, therefore, they cannot simply be folded into a general ethics. For Bretherton, ‘It is the nature of the relationship between the church and God that is decisive in specifying how the church is different from other communities: that is, distinctiveness lies in how God is present to and within the church’ (2016 [2006]): 108). We might note also that from a Jewish theological perspective the former Chief Rabbi, the late Jonathan Sacks, talked about what he called the dignity of difference (2003). He argued for a ‘paradigm shift’ in how we

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conceive difference and commonalities towards a way of thinking that does not result in movements towards sameness but combines a form of divine unity and universalism with secular diversity. This position stands in stark contrast to an ontology equated with practice and performance and requires as a start point recognition of multiple epistemologies rather than a flattening of multiple identities. In line with multiculturalism construed theologically, Bretherton does not see difference as necessarily a divisive problem. In the emphasis of how the church is both like and unlike its neighbours and has both points of convergence and divergence from its neighbours, Bretherton grounds difference in eschatology: ‘The difference between Christians and non-Christians is at heart an eschatological one”’ (2016 [2006]: 111; cf two of his interlocutors, Hauerwas and McIntyre [ibid.: 105– 106, passim]). The site of distinctiveness is thus not necessarily found in praxis, although it might well manifest here, and praxis is not afforded such ontological ground (Bretherton, 2016 [2006]: 108). It is on this ground, moreover, that difference is not a problem to be overcome, as in something to be reasoned or dialogued away, but a reality and site of opportunity for fulfilment of self and other and, therefore, full of liberative potential (Shannahan, 2017). The significance of taking difference seriously and beginning to see it as both substantive and liberative is to appreciate that what is meant is that others are not seen, related to, welcomed and so on despite their difference but rather are recognised in their difference. For Bretherton, conflict, as necessarily stemming from such substantive difference, ‘can be a necessary and constructive part of both social transformation and the relationship between two groups with incommensurable goals’ (2016 [2006]): 106). The status of difference as a fundamental orientation for politics and the need to develop a constructive way of living together is one shared with multiculturalism. Modood’s multiculturalism in fact ‘begin[s] with the fact of negative difference’ (2007: 37) and adds that positive identitymaking and assertiveness, held and led by minorities themselves, can challenge inferiorised negative minority identities. In this way difference is negotiated and re-imagined by ‘not the erasure [or flattening] of difference but its transformation into something for which civic respect can be won’ (Modood, 2007: 41; also Taylor, 1994; Young, 1990). If the modes

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of multiculturalism and political theology being considered here aren’t at variance in their position towards difference as a political ethic, where they are at variance is in their substantive conception of difference, and, subsequently, what the implications are of this for religious subjecthood and the kind of political relations that follow. We might point out in the first instance that, as just said, Modood starts with negative social difference and seeks to turn it into a positive; difference in Bretherton’s terms begins with a positive and indissoluble difference grounded in a religious ontology—and this in turn forms the site of seeing religious identity as something substantively different from ‘ethno-religious’. To more fully appreciate this distinction and its implications, we need to grasp a core concept of Bretherton’s political theology, that of hospitality, and relate this to multiculturalism’s core concept of recognition. The following sections develop this line of discussion.

Hospitality Hospitality has been identified as ‘a central and inaugural event in the world’s great wisdom traditions [and] marks that moment when the self opens to the stranger’ (Kearney & Taylor, 2011: 1). The notion of hospitality then is an old concept and one bound up with subjecthood, with the idea of difference and with relations in difference. Also important for the notion of hospitality, as evident in the quote, is that of the stranger. What becomes important is a sense of who are and what constitutes ‘strangers’ (more on which in Chapter 5) and what hospitality involves in relation to them. The notion of hospitality and of strangers is found elaborated by much earlier Christian scholars as well as Enlightenment philosophers and has also been discussed and theorised by contemporary philosophers. For instance, Kant outlined his concept of hospitalität, which concerned strangers as foreigners and set out that a stranger arriving in a foreign land should not be treated as an enemy or with hostility but should be granted the (limited) right to attempt to enter into relations (Kant names trade), although exactly how far this extends for Kant is debated (see for example, Lazos, 2018; Meckstroth, 2018). Derrida, as an example of a

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contemporary philosopher, approaches hospitality rather differently. For Derrida (2000) hospitality is ethics (and ethics is hospitality). From this he distinguished two ‘laws’. On the one hand, there is the law (the italicisation is Derrida’s) of unlimited, unconditional ‘pure’ hospitality, and on the other hand, there is conditional hospitality, subject to political, moral, juridical terms and conditions. For Derrida there is a continuous negotiation and movement back and forth between the two with the former an impossible ideal that the latter is measured against and ‘guided’ by; the latter in this way requires the former even if it can never realise it. Hospitality provides the key concept in Bretherton’s schema. As recognition for multiculturalism, it is conceived against liberalism’s notion of toleration, and thus becomes the key for relating to others in plural societies where the need to recognise difference along with what is held in common are at the heart of social and political relations. In this, hospitality has in fact been referred to as a ‘conceptual revolution in the ethics of religious diversity’ (Schilbrack 2020, 68). Bretherton’s concept is thoroughly theological, it ‘arises out of the witness of scripture and the social practices and doctrines of the Christian tradition’ (2016 [2006], 128), where ‘hospitality towards strangers constitutes part of the church’s witness to the Christ-event’ (2010, 211). Our attitude to the ‘stranger’ is, therefore, of existential as well as cultural and political importance. Hospitality is a call to act and be a certain way, where the relationship to others is also a reflection of the relationship to the divine. In terms of building a common life, Bretherton’s insistence on eschatology serves to mark both the sites of difference as well as commonality. Difference is marked by relations to Jesus Christ as Christians live between this age marked by Christ’s sacrifice on the cross and the next age marked by Christ’s parousia 4 ; ‘the result of Christians self-consciously living between this age and the next is that they are marked off from nonChristians, not by race, or culture, or even by religious practice, but by their union with Christ whose ascension marks a relativisation of this age and the inauguration of the new age’ (2016 [2006]: 121). Commonality 4 Christ’s

return and the completed transformation of creation.

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emerges from sharing in this age as it is on the earth we all inhabit and must share in the reality of a plurality of faiths, cultures and histories. It also does not seek to dissolve difference by appeal to a universal law, moral or otherwise, but ‘allows for Christians [and by extension others] to retain their specific criteria for evaluating the veracity of moral claims, while at the level of moral practice experiencing both continuity and discontinuity with their neighbours’ (ibid.). Politically, it is built on Jesus’ practices of hospitality, ‘as a guest of, and host to’ sinners and the poor and outcast, and how ‘through his hospitality… Jesus turns the world upside down’ (2016 [2006]: 219). Bretherton, based on a reading of Jesus’ radical practices in his ministry, gives hospitality an inverse and inclusive inflection. The guesthost dynamic becomes subverted and the guest is both guest and host, and the host, decentred, becomes also both host and guest. This subversion derives from how ‘true hospitality requires we understand both the experience of being a vulnerable stranger and what it means to receive all things from God’ and that hospitality is required not just when one is the host but also when one ‘journeys as a stranger through the midst of the world’ (2016 [2006]: 138). The transformative element of hospitality is, therefore, mutual and not one way. It is through hospitality that both or all parties are transformed and enriched. Hospitality then is conceived as a norm of social and political relations with others that subverts the binary and power dynamics between host and guest/stranger. It is in this sense that the notion can be transformative of identity and subjectivity, making one vulnerable to renewal rather than protectionist of something more rigid (Schilbrack, 2020; Shannahan, 2017). In this sense also it is as much about transforming hearts and minds, about addressing subjectivity, as it is structures and institutions (Bretherton, forthcoming). Hospitality is concerned with our acts, how we welcome strangers and how we should behave in these encounters, but also, it is an attitude, and, more than that, we might even say that it is a (transformative) way of being in a world characterised by inescapable pluralism, and a pluralism that is a normative good. Hospitality thus suggests the idea of tolerance is insufficient and insufficiently constructive (see 2016 [2006]: 147, 2019, Chapter 9).

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Hospitality in Islam This book of course is about converts to Islam so it is important to expand this discussion to what can be said about the idea of hospitality from an Islamic perspective. This is important, moreover, as Bretherton himself notes that ‘hospitality can only be understood within a particular tradition, and different traditions will have different forms of hospitality’ (2016 [2006]: 127) and that ‘living with those who are different, and framing relations with those who are different in terms of hospitality, entails understanding hospitality in the light of one tradition, and then bringing this conception into dialogue with understandings form other traditions’ (2019: 279). Following this, we might say that the notion of hospitality requires translation (an idea that will be returned to in Chapter 9). Here I turn to Mona Siddiqui and her book Hospitality and Islam (2015), where she lays out hospitality drawing on the Qur’an and various areas of Islamic thought5 . It might reasonably be asked why this chapter did not start with Siddiqui and use Bretherton in complement. The answer is twofold. First, Bretherton engages far more directly and purposefully in political relations and debates relevant for this book. Siddiqui’s book by contrast is less political theology than it is religious studies; hers is self-consciously a theological account that ‘refrain[s]… [from becoming] political or sociological critique’ (2015: 7). Secondly, Siddiqui herself notes that although the term hospitality has a rich tradition in Western philosophy and Christian thought, it has been ‘rather neglected’ in Islamic traditions and is without comparable systematic intellectual treatment. It instead appears in echoes of Islamic thought more generally on charity and neighbourliness and ‘must be teased out from the Qur’¯anic and Islamic literature’ (2015: 22; also Lumbard, 2011). How then does hospitality emerge in Islam? In contrast to the Christological understanding of hospitality, in the Qur’an ‘the dominant sense is one of provision where God provides for

5 It

should be noted that Siddiqui’s in primarily an account in the Sunni tradition (although she notes overlap with Shi’i thought), which is the tradition the majority of Muslims in Western Europe, including in the UK, follow in one form or another.

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his creation in multiple ways’ (2015: 123). Yet, Siddiqui argues that despite this theological difference, the call that hospitality represents in terms of how we should relate to others is the same: ‘If the structural context implicit in the devotional vocabulary of Christianity is different than that of Islam, the practical obligation to show care and hospitality remains the same’ (2015: 125). In the Islamic tradition as traced by Siddiqui, hospitality is, as for Bretherton in reference to the Christian tradition, a notion that constantly brings to the fore human earthly diversity. There is in Siddiqui’s account both the orientation towards the eschaton as well as the invitation from God to be a certain way in the here and now. This is something we also find in Tariq Ramadan’s work, where he quotes a passage from the Qur’an calling believers to recognise and engage positively with the ‘horizon’ of worldly diversity and complexity: (Qur’an, 49:13) ‘O mankind, We have created you from a male and a female, and appointed you races and tribes, that you may know one another’ (Ramadan, 2009: 15). As Ramadan elaborates from this passage, ‘Thus, man who has faith, has to acknowledge, at the very moment when he is busy with the affairs of humans, the facts of historical evolution as well as the diversity of cultures and worship’. To face up to his responsibilities as a believer is to comprehend the horizon of this complexity, and to activate himself to find, for his time and country, the best way of establishing harmony between absolute principles and daily life (Ramadan, 2009: 15). Siddiqui also understands hospitality as a state of mind, one ‘fundamental to the spiritual life’ (2015: 1) that ‘keeps the sacred alive in the ordinary’ (ibid.: 219). Hospitality for Siddiqui is ‘a generosity of spirit… which defines humanity itself ’ (ibid.: 1). Hospitality is also, Siddiqui argues, ‘a virtue that lies at the very basis of the Islamic ethical system’ and notes a saying attributed to the Prophet Muhammad, ‘There is no good in the one who is not hospitable’ (2015: 10–11). Furthermore, its call of openness and generosity reflects God’s nature as well as the human relation to the divine and being in the presence of the divine: ‘offering hospitality as a way of imitating the divine, as well as being obedient to God, is embedded in the rich vocabulary of charity, generosity, mercy

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and compassion which permeates the entire Qur’¯an and is found in so many of the h.ad¯ıths’ (2015: 124–125). Also, as with Bretherton, hospitality is transformative of the self, and by extension society, through its relation to the divine, ‘it demands a transformation of the self towards goodness and grace, to how God wants us to be with one another’ (2015: 14). This is so in relation to earthly others but also in relation to the divine, where the idea of the self is tempered through its relation to God (Lumbard, 2011) and not just in relation to oneself or society. ‘True welcome and hospitality’, Siddiqui elaborates, ‘is not about doing our duty; it always demands a magnanimity which stretches our minds and souls towards ever greater generosity. Only when we can give far more than we receive do we emulate God’s giving’ (2015: 164). It is thus a moral and ethical imperative and not a kind of bare political relation or just simple acts of charity or entertainment devoid of such depths; a way of being as much as a way of life rather than things we do and give and acts we perform. If this sounds too demanding to be able to expect it, is worth highlighting that it is about forgiveness as much as generosity, rooted in the reality of human diversity and life on earth bounded by space and time rather than an ‘impossible’ (unconditional) ideal. In this way it implies and sets out duties, in behaviour and attitude, but also has limits to these obligations. The host’s circumstances should be taken into account, by both host and guest.

Hospitality and Recognition: Common and Uncommon Ground The main features of hospitality then are that it asks that those who are different be welcomed in difference, and in a way that puts certain binaries at risk. Thus host/guest, majority/minority become categories ripe for subversion but not in a manner that aims to dissolve differences between the groups in question but one that takes difference seriously as necessary to mutual enrichment as well as developing a form of common life. The question that this section begins to engage is how hospitality relates to multiculturalism’s recognition (also Chapter 9).

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Bretherton is critical of a few framings of the church’s work and role as they appear in society and politics and two of these are relevant for considering multiculturalism. More on these are said in Chapter 9. Immediately important here is Bretherton’s caution against the terms of multiculturalism and the risk of ‘becoming just another minority identity group demanding recognition for its way of life as equally valid in relation to all others’ (2010: 1). Theology, Bretherton contends, is not reducible to nor exhausted by politics (2019) and religious ‘identity’ is likewise not reducible to political identity. The following passage from Peter Jones (2020) is instructive here in conveying the reductive effects of making religious faith about or equatable to identity: it would be an odd Muslim who, having protested that Mohammed was God’s Prophet and that the Koran was the Word of God, or an odd Christian who, having affirmed that Jesus Christ was God incarnate and that salvation lay in faith in Him, then went on to insist that what really mattered about those beliefs was their contribution to his identity. It may be that, in a religiously plural society, the very plurality of beliefs induces people to conceive their own beliefs in more subjective terms and to reach for the language of integrity and identity in demanding respect from others. But giving primacy to integrity and identity remains an odd move for those who take their religious beliefs seriously both as religious beliefs and as religious beliefs.

Difference, although at heart eschatological, has real world effects that call upon people to relate in particular ways—even though these are contested. We can relate this to multiculturalism’s explicit and purposefully socio-political conception of identity as found in the notion ethno-religious, where, deriving from a primarily sociological approach decoupled from the theological, the emphasis is very much on the ethnic; the religious appearing as a proxy for the ethnic. It is significant here that the term ‘British-Muslim’ is primarily invoked to reference a hyphenated identity where Muslim is more an ethnic and cultural marker than a religious one. Given this ethno-religious understanding of Muslim identities, it can encompass a whole range of relations to Islam, covering a spectrum of believers and belongers as was noted above. It includes, for example,

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people with varying degrees of religiosity or belief, some who have little or no religious commitment, and in the popular imagination and patterns of discrimination, some whether they like it or not. Two problems arise in multiculturalism’s treatment of religious identities here with important implications. One can be seen, for example, when Parekh (2008) discusses religious identity. While appreciating the ‘range and depth’ of religious identity, Parekh develops a discussion focussing on the dangers of spiritual literalism and fundamentalism, evaluating religion negatively against reason in a chapter indicatively titled ‘The Pathology of Religious Identity’ (2008: 130–151). In this frame, religious identity, as religious and not ethno-religious, appears as more simply problematic. Here appears the secularist fear and assumption that to recognise religious groups means recognising (potentially dangerous) doctrine, shadowed by a latent fear of theocracy looming as a spectre, and we are returned to difference, or specifically religious difference, as a problem. But there is no reason why recognition on the basis of equal respect should mean recognising the truth of doctrine as a matter of necessity (see Chapter 9). There is nothing in here which necessitates that a focus on equal respect need orient us away from a religious basis. The second problem is that if that if not seen negatively, religious in religious identity is simply ignored. This itself creates two types of analytical blind spot: that the identity one is recognising in fact can be its own form of misrecognition and, following this, that important factors of social and political relations are overlooked. Here multiculturalism fails to account for how religion can be a deeper formative force than culture or ethnicity, even though it is certainly shaped by them (Chaplin, 2011: 56) and fails to appreciate religiosity as a public identity distinct from ethnicity, even though the two might at times overlap. There are good sociological reasons for this emphasis on the ethnoreligious (discussed further in later chapters), yet converts necessarily problematise this conceptual ethnicisation of the religious category. It has also led to a position where religion-as-group-identity is opposed to religion-as-faith without seeing the profound, and socio-political, connections between the two. Indeed, as was noted above, we might call into question the capacity of the term ‘identity’ to fully capture how religious people and groups express and understand their faith and their

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religious worldview (Pennington, 2020: 51). This in turn highlights that even in relation to multiculturalism’s ‘religion friendly’ position, ‘where public life and institutions are principally governed as if transcendent religious authority is irrelevant—it will in practice almost inevitably lean towards programmatic secularism, if only by default’ (Chaplin, 2008: 23). The question that Bretherton alerts us to ask of multiculturalism here is that this need not cause us to eschew thinking about religious communities or conceptualise religious communities in a way that subordinates the religious to the ethnic. A grounding in ethno-religious is in many ways sociologically sound, but it impoverishes the religious side and as a result obscures what for many is the most salient and deep-rooted aspect of their subjecthood, and thereby obscures significant patterns and relations grounded in it. Hospitality has greater capacity in this regard. Hospitality alerts us to a deep and substantive theological orientation of identity, religious being, and how this orients social relations across difference. As a substantive disposition, it is a profoundly unsettling notion. Change and renewal are at the heart of this form of politics: a theological perspective here encourages rather than obfuscates a view of politics as spatially, temporally and historically contingent (Bretherton, 2010: 22). There is then no reason why it is necessary to eschew the religious in order to focus on the socio-political. When it comes to religious identity, this is an area multiculturalism has so far under-theorised as part of its particular vision of politics. The direct issues raised here in relating hospitality to recognition will be returned to and elaborated upon in Chapter 9. Beforehand, however, as a book not of political theology but working from within multiculturalism, it will be necessary to discuss how and why religious identity qua religious can and should be taken seriously as part of multiculturalism. The following chapter thus turns to address religious identity before Chapters 5 to 8 turn to patterns of social belonging.

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4 Resituating Religiosity

I feel like my childhood, because it was another country, already felt like a dream anyway. But even more so in my adolescence itself just feels like, it feels like a movie to me when I play it back in my mind. It doesn’t feel like it was reality. It feels like who I am today is who I’ve always been.

Vidya, a twenty-five-year-old lawyer from London of Hindu upbringing and who had been Muslim for seven years, was confident and assured, speaking openly and at length in a bustling Thai restaurant. This passage from her narrative, with her evocative characterisation of life and self before conversion being another country and dream-like, while simultaneously feeling like who she is today is the same as who she has always been, captures some of the overlapping complexities of religious identity being explored in this book. It is suggestive of the centrality and depth of religiosity for a sense of oneself and of the coherence this brings even in the midst of significant changes. This itself is something that can be expressed directly and forthrightly. Vidya remarked, ‘Dude, I’ve been the same person since before I became Muslim as I am today, and I have had friends over ten years who can attest to that fact’. Likewise, Hannah, 52, who had been brought up nominally Christian and had been Muslim for © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_4

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four years, remarked: ‘I was Muslim all along and nobody told me!’. This sense of coherence, underpinned and held together by a strong sense of religiosity, also emerges implicitly; that is to say narratively as a feature of how the narratives themselves work, and this feature will be explored in this chapter. In relation to multiculturalism, this chapter takes up why it is important and necessary to approach an understanding of religious identity unhooked from ethnic identity and elaborates on features suggested in the opening quote from Vidya’s narrative. Working from within multiculturalism it is necessary to outline an approach that is sociological rather than theological in its account of identity, albeit that one of the key arguments is that this must be with a ‘theological ear’. In the previous chapter it was argued that multiculturalism’s sociopolitical concept of ethno-religious identities served to reduce the religious of these identities to a proxy for ethnicity. The category of ‘Muslim’ is (quite rightly) broad and sociological, rather than narrowly scriptural. Thus: ‘when a Muslim identity is mobilized, it should not be dismissed because it is an identity of personal choice, but rather understood as a mode of classification according to the particular kinds of claims Muslims make for themselves, albeit in different and potentially contradictory ways’ (Meer, 2008: 67; also Fatima, 2011). This holds together the fact that Muslim can be a negatively ascribed identity as the site of discrimination, as well as the basis of claims made by Muslims, which may mirror claims made by other ethnic groups. The sociological hinge which forms the dialectic between outside perceptions of Muslimness and Muslims’ personal senses of self is that ‘although one may imagine a Muslim identity in different ways, when one is born into a Muslim family, one becomes Muslim’ (Meer, 2008: 67 my emphasis; see also Modood, 2007: 71). This formulation responds to arguments that criticising Muslims on the basis of a Muslim identity cannot be Islamophobic because it is criticism of a religion and religious identity. It challenges the position that, aside from the fact that a religion should not be protected from critique, unlike race or ethnicity a religious identity is voluntary—one cannot change the colour of one’s skin or the community into which one was born, but one can change one’s religion. It is thus seen to be freely chosen

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and can therefore be freely unchosen, making it a different sort of identity from ‘race’ or ethnicity. The concept of Muslim as an ethno-religious identity points to similarities between discrimination faced by Muslims on the basis of perceived Muslimness and discrimination on the basis of ‘colour’, and therefore challenges the logic of ‘advocating that those subject to discrimination or hostility should choose, where possible, to change their identity in order to avoid discrimination’ (Meer, 2008: 77). From this perspective, you cannot unchoose being a Muslim because you are born a Muslim. This is sociologically sound enough, and the issue of Islamophobia is discussed in more detail in Chapter 8 (see also, Sealy, 2021). However, the formulation here presents a difficulty with regard to converts. On the one hand, Meer’s open categorisation clearly has scope to include converts when it comes to mobilisation and claims. There are clear similarities and overlaps in the way they are ethnicised in Islamophobic discourses (see Chapter 6). On the other hand, however, converts’ identities as Muslims are seen as ‘voluntary’ as a result of being converts and not born Muslims, and they thus would still fall foul of the logic Meer challenges. In fact, Özyürek notes how ‘political figures who argue against recognizing Islamophobia as a form of racism frequently bring out the example of converts to Islam’ (2015: 376). On the one hand, converts can be seen to choose Islam. They make a deliberate change, often following and based on having explored other options, and some might even affiliate and disaffiliate with a number of religious traditions or groups through their lives as part of a conversion ‘career’ (Gooren, 2010). Some in fact emphasise that it was a choice. Converts then do seem to choose their religious identity, and therefore the category identity Muslim, which forms the mode against which they are discriminated. It appears clearer in the case of converts that they choose the identity Muslim in a way which would leave them outside of this foundational aspect of the multiculturalist argument. The emphasis on ‘voluntary’ and ‘choice’, however, requires unpacking. For many religious people, their religious identity is not experienced or understood in the language of ‘choice’ (Pennington, 2020: 54), something borne out in the narratives here, and this has implications

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for how we think about religious identity and, subsequently, social relations (explored in Chapters 5 to 8). One significant issue this gives rise to is that these kinds of emphasis, along with multiculturalism’s basis of ethno-religious, may in fact represent forms of misrecognition, and converts certainly experience misrecognition of their identities (Amer, 2019). It is necessary to begin by unsettling the apparently common sense understanding of the ‘voluntariness’ of religious identity. This helps address both the logic that concerns Meer, that Muslim as a religious identity is seen as voluntary and could and should be unchosen in the face of discrimination, as well as the multiculturalist conception of religious identity where the religious aspect is merely a proxy for ethnicity. What is needed, and what this chapter sets out, is a positive account of converts’ religious identities as religious. It is also something that the narratives themselves demand we take seriously. It is worth noting here that this endeavour is not itself one necessarily at odds with multiculturalism and has a basis within multiculturalism’s own terms. Modood, in making the case for considering ethnicity and cultural racism vis-à-vis a focus on colour and a political ‘blackness’ that had been dominant until the 1990s, argued that: ‘We must accept what is important to people, and we must be even-handed between the different identity formations’ (2015 [1997]: 170). This book elaborates why considering the case of converts calls us to be even-handed between religious and ethnic identities. In doing this, this chapter emphasises aspects of the narratives that are foremost deeply personal. This is not a matter of severing the personal off from the social but is rather a matter of emphasis. In later chapters these will be rehooked, but this stage of unhooking is a necessary step in reorienting our analytical lens precisely because of how the religious is so often sidelined, backgrounded, or explained away. This is necessary in order to appreciate how foregrounding the religious of identity both reflects the self-understanding for many and also affects our subsequent analytical frameworks and understandings of social relations. The emphasis of this chapter allows space for these aspects to emerge more fully. Furthermore, this emphasis is also taken on the basis that this aspect of the personal itself is not that of an isolated individual as a relation to oneself but is also a relation to the divine.

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Theological Reflections The case was made in the previous chapter for the importance of theological reflections as part of the sociological enterprise of this book and so exploring how theological reflections explicitly emerge in the narratives is itself an instructive place to begin. Theological ruminations and explanations on points of Islamic theology feature heavily in the narratives and are a core part of their reflective and reflexive character. They suggest that such explanations and reflections are not separable from the life as lived and that these theological reflections cannot be separated from the stories of happenings in daily life, whether exceptional or routine, trivial and banal. In other words, there is no clean separation between thought, belief and practice, they are mutually reinforcing and in this way certain theological and scriptural considerations stem from the empirical data rather than being an imposition on it (cf McGuire, 2008). This point itself suggests an epistemological implication: that we bring a ‘theological ear’ (Keenan, 2003: 20) to sociological endeavours. This ‘ear’ is a way of orienting sociological understanding and listening in a way that does not avoid or reduce elements of religiosity that are so central to participants’ subjecthood. Matters of theological import are not only explicit features but are also present implicitly throughout the ruminations and negotiations that form the reflective and reflexive narratives. A theological ear, therefore, is aimed at enriching sociological accounts. It acknowledges, for example, that ‘theology underlies action-driving values… as theological interpretations both motivate and constrain social action’ (Becker, 2017). One significant way they emerge is contrasting positions in other religions, particularly those traditions they were brought up in, with Islam (on which, see Chapter 6). A further way is through explanations or expositions of particular points. An aspect of these direct and explicit theological ruminations may of course be seen to represent my position as an ‘outsider’ on the basis of my being non-Muslim. At numerous times theological terminology in Arabic (as well as historical events and developments) was used to explain points, describe feelings and so on. Some used this language either with the assumption that I understood,

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or perhaps without worrying whether I did or not. Others paused to check if they should translate or explain, and at times when I said that it was unnecessary, did so anyway. Alternatively, they might use specific terms or reference particular events in the flow of the narrative assuming I was following, or perhaps not caring either way. All these instances and variations speak of how both I and my knowledge were perceived and served to mediate aspects of the account and how it was told. Nevertheless, there are two compelling additional reasons for these kinds of explanation which warrant serious reflection. That theological explanations are given, and at times at length, may also reflect the broader social need of these. On the one hand this can be seen to reflect the decline in the position of religion in society and with it religious literacy. There is a threefold need of justification on the part of the convert to Islam here. The first is a felt need to justify religious belief itself in this context. The second is to justify Islam as part of and compatible with Britain, as a minority faith about which many will know little. The third is to justify and explain Islam against the social and cultural context which so often misrepresents it. However, it also, I suggest, can be a more embedded feature of the narrative itself as a story of self-becoming. It is precisely because of this context that it becomes necessary not just for outsiders but at least as important for themselves also. It is interesting here to point out that a number of my participants held negativised views of Islam and Muslims prior to their learning more as part of the conversion journey. Richard, who had been brought up Catholic and had considered the priesthood and being a missionary, for instance, experienced a ‘period of resistance’ in himself, during which, despite having inwardly recognised that he was becoming a Muslim, his acceptance of this in his social life took longer to fully reconcile given the dominant perceptions of Islam and Muslims which he also had to overcome in his own mind. Yet the pull of religiosity eventually outweighed these concerns to the point where he is now ‘proud to be different’. Theological explanations and justifications also do narrative work more immediately concerned with the sense of personal journey that the narrative itself represents. What I want to suggest here is that these explanations are a centrally important part of the emotional journey of

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the individual and, therefore, of the emotional logic of the narrative. For instance, Zaara explains how she would never be one wife of two, three or four and that her husband ‘knows better’ than to suggest a polygamous arrangement, yet it becomes apparent that this has never been an actual question or issue between them, rather it features as an important part of her own negotiations of stereotypes on this level, and feelings of comfort and confidence as a woman and wife in Islam. This point can be elaborated by considering Stephen’s narrative. Stephen was fifty-six and had been Muslim for over five years when we met, having previously been Christian. On the surface of it he seems to routinely drift into a fairly staid and abstract explanation of certain points as matters of principle. He presents a discussion of issues such as changing your name or not upon conversion and the role of trials in faith in a way which can sound like him laying out some of these key features of what Islam is about; a kind of beginner’s guide almost, and as this kept recurring in the interview, I at times thought about how to get him back to his story. What emerges as the narrative progresses, nevertheless, is that far from being staid, these abstract explanations in significant ways are his narrative. In important ways they are his reflections, negotiations and experiences; and they are his reflections, negotiations and experiences. There is undoubtedly a good amount of narrative editing going on, but these apparently abstract points come to be, in significant ways, his story. He has gone through these things and the abstract now represents his surface story, but a surface that belies the emotional and reflective content it draws on. These driftings are not merely explanations for the sake of the listener but are there for the sake of the narrative itself— without them the narrative would lose coherence and integrity. They are also there for the sake of the individual teller. They go some way towards mapping Stephen’s negotiations and choices through reasonings and rationales, cognitive and felt, through the entanglement of his personally held thoughts and feelings and the social milieu, which are inextricably and mutually embedded. Moreover, they are part of a selfmaking which does and can only take place in a particular context, in

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this case one in which such explanations, and as well-formed and articulated ones as possible, are necessary to shield or defend oneself from accusations and suspicions as well as positively articulate his faith. Following the discussion so far, and in anticipation of its continuation, some reflections on some of the important theological principles that bear on the empirical discussion of converts’ narratives, and that are significant for locating an Islamic subjectivity that emerges from them, is necessary. In particular, these relate to the idea of coherence identified at the outset of this chapter. A central and defining feature in conversion studies literature has been that of change (see Snow & Machalak, 1984; for specific examples in conversion to Islam scholarship see Al-Qwidi, 2002; Neumueller, 2012; Köse, 1996; cf Alyedreessy, 2016). The importance of the notion of change for conversion can be seen in the Latin convertere, meaning ‘to turn’ or ‘to head in a different direction’. In Christianity ‘turning’ suggests a reorientation to meaning of life (Gillespie, 1991). Arabic, by contrast, has no direct equivalent for the English word ‘conversion’ or ‘to convert’. In fact, it has been argued that, as a result, this calls into question the ability of the term ‘conversion’ to capture the experience of conversion in Islam (Hermansen, 1999, 2014). Moreover, neither classical nor modern Islamic literature has offered theories or extended analysis and discussion of conversion in Islam (Al-Qwidi, 2002; Poston, 1992). It has been argued, for example, that ‘conversion’ is in fact an ‘outsider’s perspective’ (Roald, 2004: 14, 86–87). Underlying concepts commonly found to refer to converts in Islam relate not to change but to continuity. The term ‘revert’ instead of convert, is used more commonly by born Muslims and many converts (reverts) themselves. Revert reflects the idea that all souls are Muslim, having recognised God in pre-eternity, and is in turn found in the concept of fitrah. Although it has no exact English equivalent, fitrah captures the idea of ‘natural disposition’ and is inherently ontological. A revert is not as such changing from one religion to another but accepting and returning to an original and innate state of being a Muslim having been brought up in a non-Muslim context by a non-Muslim family. It is in this sense that the term revert is also used for born Muslims who have ‘returned’ to a pious way of living.

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It is important to note that the findings for whether ‘converts’ prefer the term convert, revert, New Muslim, embrace Islam, or become Muslim vary. For example, Roald (2004) finds a preference for New Muslim (also Abdel Haleem, 2003) and van Nieuwkerk (2006) for ‘becoming Muslim’ or ‘embracing Islam’. In this study, while revert was the most common term used by participants, this was not uniform. Some used the term convert, with one person friendlily remarking ‘or revert as you have it’ after I had used the term ‘revert’. Some used a mix with no apparent preference, and at one mosque I was advised by my initial contact to only use ‘New Muslim’ when talking to mosque leaders lest this invite a lengthy semantic lecture. Moreover, even where revert was preferred and the general term used, the idea of ‘New Muslim’ was also theologically present as a number of people emphasised the ‘new born’ status of being a convert—previous sins did not count towards one’s accumulation, for example. Sanjay, for instance, both emphasises his 20–25-year journey to Islam (he had converted 12 years before we met) and also refers at one point to being ‘brand new in Islam. Yeah, I was only about a year old at that stage’, meaning a year after formally converting. Yet, ‘New Muslim’ might also be shunned sociologically when it is used against their claims of being Muslim in such a way as to socially exclude and limit their voices and participation (discussed in detail in Chapter 6). Thus, there are temporally overlaying senses of continuity and change, which, significantly, may also mark theological and sociological overlaps. Our ‘theological ear’ then must remain sociologically grounded, which again highlights the relevance of a conversation between sociological and theological aspects rather than one against or over the other. In order to make this theoretical shift towards foregrounding the religious and continue the discussion of how this emerges in converts’ narratives, the following section turns to Georg Simmel’s notions of religiosity and religion. These are then applied in subsequent sections when the discussion turns back to an exposition of the narratives themselves.

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Religiosity and Religion Simmel’s writings on religion have occupied a marginalised position in sociology (Laermans, 2006; McCole, 2005; although see Montemaggi, 2017a, 2017b, 2017c; Varga, 2007) perhaps not least because he might be seen to have developed a sociology of religiosity (Laermans, 2006: 481) as part of his broader thinking grappling with subjectivity and social relations in modernity. Helle, in his introduction to the English translation of Simmel’s Essays on Religion, notes that ‘as a sociologist of religion and as a philosopher of religion, Simmel believes that neither he nor anybody else has a mandate to make any learned statement about what may exist in the beyond’ (in Simmel, 1997: xiv); and Hammond, in his preface, notes how Simmel had a certain ‘musicality’ when it came to religion (in contrast to Weber). We might then see Simmel as aptly agnostic in this regard. When it came to religion, Simmel distinguished between religiosity and religion. Religiosity for Simmel refers to a subjective sense of religiousness. Religiosity is ‘the fundamental quality of being in the religious soul and determines the tone and function of all these general or particular qualities of the soul’ (Simmel, 1997 [1911]: 10). Notably, religiosity is understood not as something that one merely has but as being such that one ‘functions in a religious way’1 (Simmel, 1997 [1911]: 10; 1997 [1918]: 22), suggesting a ‘religious mode of existence’ and represents ‘a form of life in all its vitality, a way in which life vibrates, expresses itself, and fulfils its destinies’ (1997 [1911]: 14). It can thus, also, create a sense of coherence and harmony (Simmel, 1997 [1912 (1906)]. By attuning to this relational dynamic, we can point to its quality of overcoming fragmentation and contradiction in the processes of identity. This is not to ignore contradictions and conflicting forces, but rather to recognise that religiosity creates the space where ‘these conflicting forces now suggest a deeper, hidden unity’ (Simmel, 1997 [1904]: 37).

1This conception is therefore very different from how the term religiosity often appears in sociological studies, measured by things such as regularity of prayer of attendance at a place of worship.

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For Simmel, religiosity stands in contrast to but also in direct relation with religion. They are dyadic rather than dichotomous. Religion, representing the social dimension, refers to the cultural forms necessary to ‘being in the world’ empirically; it is the externalisation of religiosity found in practices, rituals, institutions, texts and so on. These external forms cannot be done without, and, in a profound sense, religion, in its physical, material existence is a form which shapes religiosity (Simmel, 1997 [1912 (1906)]: 140). No matter the apparent force with which the experience of religiosity may want to express itself in a vital and unmediated way, the use and creation of external forms is a necessity (Simmel, 1997 [1912 (1906)]). Yet, religiosity is not merely something one possesses and performs at certain times or in certain places. For Simmel, it is in fact religiosity which is at the heart of the processual dynamics, religiosity that actuates religion rather than the other way around (for example, 1997 [1912 (1906)]: 211). Religiosity thus construed becomes primary and centralised. Religiosity then is a way of being, a way of living and experiencing the world and engages with the efforts of converts to find a congruity in their conversions, a sense of harmony and unity in their identities and ‘fullness’ in their being. The rest of this chapter turns to how religiosity emerges from the narratives that make up this study.

The Heart of the Matter So, basically I was 17 and it was after I found a CD. And the CD had like a picture on it of a mosque. I was like ‘wow what’s this?’ Curious. Stick it in the CD player and what I heard after that I just can’t explain. I was quiet for about half an hour. I couldn’t speak. I was just like oohhhhh. And I just… my heart just connected to this, and it’s like whatever that is, I want that; I want that in my life. […] I don’t know what the word is I’m looking for, but you know, it did completely turn everything around and just from that CD. Just from hearing that CD just changed my life completely… Oh I’m getting emotional now, I’m gonna shut up for a minute. Sorry, I do go on.

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This passage comes from Saoirse’s narrative. Saoirse, who had previously been Roman Catholic until converting to Islam over 11 years ago, conveys her sense of a deep heart-felt connection and resonance. For Saoirse, discovering and embracing Islam is bound up with hard stories; of tragedy, of bad relationships, of a life that was doing her no favours and that Islam saved her from. These she remembers throughout the interview as she consistently drifts ‘miles away’ into reflection and ‘goes on’, before recovering herself, apologising and then continuing. Each section of the interview comes to a close in a similar fashion. It is the reflective emotion here that is in many ways guiding the story, dictating the length and expansion of each passage. For Saoirse, as for many others, it is the heart which seeks, which connects and finds what it had been missing, what it had always perhaps yearned for, even if the person was unaware of it or ignored it for years as they pursued life in other directions, such as a successful and demanding career. Azari and Birnbacher, drawing on an inter-disciplinary study bringing together neuroscience and religious studies, have argued that ‘religious experience emerges as “thinking that feels like something”’ (2004: 915) and this seems to capture an aspect of this nicely. As Katarzyna remarked, ‘I think for me erm, I do think it’s important to understand things. Erm and, and then have knowledge. But unless, unless I understand it in my heart or you know when you say your gut feeling, that sense of peace…’. We can also see this in the following passage from Aakash’s narrative: It’s a two-way connection, and what it does, it overrides the brain’s thinking. So, the fact that we have a human heart and that faith resides in the heart and then this was the thing that was the centrepiece of the spiritual existence of a human being, that was the first big point and then I had to make sense of that.

Aakash, from an upper-class Hindu Indian family, emphasises the cognitive and intellectual throughout his narrative. He stresses his education at a leading university, his successful and lucrative life working in the financial sector, and his account is full of references to books by prominent intellectuals in business, science and religious thought. Yet, it is faith that

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comes first here and that he must then, through research, place in a corresponding ‘intellectual framework’. This is a key part of the process that forms the dynamic between heart-felt religiosity, and an intellectual and practical framework of religion. A further point with regard to a ‘theological ear’ can be highlighted here. On the one hand, is the importance of becoming Muslim ‘by a recognition of the heart’, but with the heart being, in Qur’anic terminology, the seat of the intellect (‘aql ) (Dutton, 1999: 163; Kocaba¸s, 1987). Ahmad in fact argues that ‘aql ‘dwells with rather than banishes the cognate Islamic notion of qalb (heart)’ (Ahmad, 2017: 30). These heart-felt moments are for the most part not related to formalised scriptural or ritual aspects of Islam as religion, at least to begin with, but are more ineffable. Initially, for example, the Qur’an made little sense to most and required sustained learning to begin to be able to approach, understand, and appreciate. Richard conveys this, albeit in franker and blunter terms than most: ‘So, I’d got this copy of the Qur’an—didn’t make any sense to me. I hear some people “Oh, I read it and this light went off ”. Bollocks. It doesn’t work like that—it doesn’t make sense. Most people are like “huh?”, need it explained to them’. Listening to my interviewees’ stories, it became apparent that moments of profound resonance and connection are mostly embedded in a particular personal moment, the significance of which is unnoticed and unappreciated by others, rather than in any rite or formal process (cf. Al-Qwidi, 2002). In fact, many report feeling nothing, or at least nothing in particular, and certainly not a deep and direct connection with the divine, upon pronouncing the shahada; the declaration of faith that, pronounced in front of two witnesses, marks the formal moment of becoming Muslim. Kate, who had been Catholic and at 18 was the youngest of my participants, said that in contrast to some convert stories she had heard or read about, ‘I didn’t feel anything really. I thought that like, oh I’ll feel like a new person. But I was like, I’m the same person. So yeah, I just felt nothing at all. I didn’t feel like a new person like I thought I would’. For many the inscrutable ‘feeling’ did not come at this formal moment of becoming a Muslim, but more often through prayer. Adele and Richard both talk about how witnessing prayer had been what first left a deep impression on them and resonated with them.

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Vidya remarked how ‘when I bowed down to pray, that day something inside of me connected with Islam and that connection has never left me… I know that I was guided, and that’s how I feel—I was guided by God to being a Muslim’. Passages such as these reflect that for many the language of choice and identity do not adequately capture religious experience. What passages such as this call us to acknowledge is that God is not seen as part of their individual story and identity so much as they also see themselves as part of God’s. A number of people in fact recounted having felt like they had become Muslim prior to their shahada, having accepted Islam in their hearts in a more private moment. For Zaara, for instance, this came while she was sitting in her local library reading. Rosie provides an interesting example of this. As the narrative develops it is apparent that she considers she has been a Muslim for twenty years, having accepted Islam at a point prior to her shahada and therefore, for her, meaning the shahada was a significant ritual but not the key moment. However, when asked the direct question ‘How long since you converted?’, she responded with nineteen years, dating it to her shahada. This highlights quite nicely a difference between life as narrated and direct responses to direct questions.

A Fusion Between Horizons of Past and Present With these senses of connection and discovery of themselves, a key sense in which religiosity emerges is in a past-oriented sense of a religious self. Conversions in this vein are foremost experienced as being personal: ‘it’s between me and God’ as Zaara put it. But this sits in the broader relational aspect oriented towards the divine rather than an isolated, individualised conception. We can see this past-oriented aspect of religiosity captured in comments made by Richard and Hannah. Both talk about this already existing and deep sense of religious subjectivity, which until they discovered and embraced Islam had been something of a homeless, perhaps dormant sense, lacking a broader framework; that is, an unactuated religiosity lacking developed elements of religion. Richard, for example,

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remarks about having had a connection with God since he was a child but this sense not fitting in with Catholicism, and he therefore felt a need for ‘finding a home for it ’. Mirroring this is Hannah’s realisation that ‘these [Islam’s] principles are my principles’. Likewise, she speaks about how, on this basis, ‘it [converting] was no effort’ as a result of ‘it’ being ‘of me’; that is, it is congruous with an already existing sense of religiosity, the ‘it’ referred to by both. In these kinds of ways, existing values, attitudes, beliefs and dispositions become recontextualised within an Islamic framework stemming from religiosity. This can be seen explicitly in Hannah’s remark that ‘I was Muslim all along and nobody told me’. The significance of this lies in the fact that it is seen to be the fulfilment and full realisation of a sense of being that had always been there, where that being is understood in terms of religiosity. In narrative terms, telling a story of oneself and of movements from the past to the present, this is an important way in which the narrator and the protagonist are ‘fused’ as part of a retrospective teleology. As Brockmeier puts it: ‘I tell a story about someone who in the course of this story turns out to be me, that is, the I who has been telling this story all the time’ (2001: 251, italics in original). This can further be seen at work in this passage from Saiorse when she is describing taking up the headscarf and beginning to cover, and doing so in public: Because before I’d y’know gone through a rock phase y’know and all that business. And I tried to fit in. Not tried to fit in on purpose but y’know, you blend with people, y’know, you follow their sense, like... But when I got the scarf, when I put the scarf on, I felt this is my identity. I love this. It’s like when I was younger, I used to see women with the face veil on. I’m like wow, y’know. How they can walk around and you don’t know what they look like? And for some reason… I was only about 8 or 9, and where we used to live, they used to come to the park. We used to go to the park for a stroll round the corner from where we lived so I was in there nearly every day… And I used to look up and think ‘wow’. But I didn’t know why I found it so fascinating. And for me, for them, when I started wearing it, I was like, now I understand why I used to look at them and think they’re just so beautiful, because you don’t know who they are and they’re confident in themselves. […]

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This is you and if you’re happy with that, you just make people think yeah, she’s fine. Y’know whatever you can say is not gonna… but it just made me feel yeah. I felt a part of something. I felt complete shall we say. Complete – that’s the word I’m looking for. I felt yeah, this is me.

Several points are important in this passage, which reflect the discussion so far. Previous ‘phases’ were about fitting in with others and their sense. There’s nothing strange about this, especially for a teenager, but notably it is following her adoption of the headscarf that she feels like she understands who she is. This leads directly into a recollection of seeing veiled women as a child growing up and always finding it fascinating but being too young to understand why. Now, as an adult, she does understand the significance of this moment, although narratively we might say that she imbues this reflective memory with new significance based on the present, and narratively impresses this understanding on her younger self. Significant is the ‘something’ she feels a part of. Taking this phrase on its own, it would seem to indicate being a Muslim, and now being a visibly recognised and recognisable part of a/the Muslim community as a result of wearing the scarf. However, the way this is emplotted, that is, emerges in a non-linear way as part of a series of connections and juxtapositions in the narrative as it moves between present and past, offers a different reading. This sentence is embedded in a passage of selfdiscovery of a coherence and harmony, providing ‘order over the flux of the present’ (Plummer, 1995: 40), of gaining self-confidence, and of being able to walk around in public visible and proud. The more intriguing interpretation of this phrase then is that the ‘something’ is in fact herself, and more specifically, herself in Islam. Even when deliberately adopting the visible, there is considerably more going on in relation to identity than merely joining or taking on markers and signifiers.

Of Eggs and Atheism The question arises here about how far such aspects of narratives as these depend on previous religious socialisation. It is perhaps easy enough to appreciate how, to quote Adele, for instance, ‘I guess if you’re somebody

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who was raised to be God-conscious, [experiencing a theological impasse or having drifted away from religion] does leave a bit of a hole, and that’s when you go on your little search for it again’. Adele had been brought up in a religious family and had previously been a practising Catholic. Adele recounts how she ‘felt like when I had prayed in Catholicism, I never felt like I had really been doing anything. I felt like I’m having a conversation with myself and going crazy’. Likewise, Gayle, who was nominally Christian prior to conversion, reflects a sense of self-hypocrisy and hypocrisy in front of God when she says, ‘And I thought, no hang on a minute I can’t do this. I can lie to somebody if I need to, but I cannot get on my hands and knees and say to God “I believe in God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost” in church praying when I know and He knows I don’t believe it’. It might be expected, or at least not unexpected, that people who grew up practising a religious faith before their conversion, even if that had drifted into something more or less nominal, would be readily able to construct a sense of religious coherence. But what of my participants who explicitly identified as atheist prior to converting to Islam? For them, the construction of such a past-oriented sense of innerreligious coherence is of course different. Often, these are stories of being atheist or even anti-theist, which they can even emphasise for contrast. However, despite this important difference in background religious socialisation and thought, these stories also bear some similarity. For these interviewees, their tales of seeking answers to questions and doubts about life, purpose and being, of emptiness that needed filling, are embedded in philosophical yearnings. Initially detached from the overtly theological, these nonetheless come to be drawn into a religious orbit. Lewis, who was 22 and worked in social research, recounts how reading and debating philosophy and social theory with his family and through his undergraduate studies left him ‘so dissatisfied with the fact that everything had a gaping hole in its logic and it was… it didn’t make any practical sense’. In fact, Lewis later on, when talking about going to pronounce the shahada, remarks how he did not tell his family to begin with because he ‘decided to be careful and a bit more slow about it “cause it’s something that’s quite big”’ and that ‘people think it’s a

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dangerous er philosophy/religion’. What is evident in the slight prevarication in this last phrase is how what might previously have been described in more secular philosophical terms now begins to take a distinctly religious or spiritual characterisation as the lines become narrated in fuzzier terms. Moreover, he goes on to recall a ‘poignant memory’ from his childhood of ‘getting down on my knees and praying in the Christian sense’, helping to establish a longer essence of connection with something greater than himself and the material world. Whereas it is not uncommon for secular atheists to talk about a ‘spiritual phase’ when they were younger and experimenting, in this and similar aspects in other narratives it is atheism that is a ‘phase’, merely an alleyway on the path to Islam. We can see this quite clearly in a story Rosie, who had not had a religious upbringing, tells about beginning to realise ‘who she is’ and what she believes: And I was with my boyfriend at the time and we were on a train going somewhere and he was telling me about, he was a mathematician, and he was telling me about eggs; a very strange conversation but it stuck in my head (…) he was really into the fact that mathematics was elegant and it’s amazing and isn’t that cool, and all of that… He said to me once, ‘Do you know why eggs are shaped the way they are; as opposed to being spherical they are egg shaped?’ And I said, ‘No idea. You tell me.’ And he said, ‘It’s because if one of them rolls out of the nest, it won’t just roll away as it would if it was spherical, it rolls in an arc back to the nest.’ And I thought ‘Ooh, that’s really clever, isn’t it?’ And I remember he really took huge offence to the fact that I had said ‘that’s clever ’ because I had implied it was a design. And I remember he said ‘what do you mean that’s clever?’ And I was like, ‘it’s quite clever that they are designed like that’ - and I even then said they are designed like that. And it got worse. And he was like, ‘What do you mean that they are designed like that? They evolved like that.’ And I remember I said ‘Have you ever seen a fossil of a spherical egg?’ (…) And I think that was the only time that we had ever had an argument actually, so it was quite amusing. But that conversation sort of stuck in my head because I started thinking, you know, okay obviously not an atheist, just simple as, I am not an atheist.

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I can’t be if I think things like this (…) So then I said to him ‘Okay, I am not an atheist: I had better figure out what I am then.

At the time of this story Rosie was living abroad, identified as atheist, and also talked about how she would consistently question a Muslim friend of hers in order to outsmart and out-argue her on religion, feminism and other topics. Following the realisation narrated in the story above, and following some other experimenting and searching, her questions began to change from trying to ‘debunk everything [her friend] believe[d] in’ to asking about what she believed with an open curiosity. We might see Rosie’s story of the egg as an analogy of the discussion so far as it pertains to religiosity. Converts are, having been brought up outside of Islam, returning to Islam and this sense of being. Yet, this begs the question, if this is in important ways how a sense of continuity and coherence is established, how do we account for change? Changes do occur in a number of areas of life and at first glance seem to threaten a sense of self-coherence. The actual rite (if that is not too strong a term) of becoming Muslim, as we have already seen, is comparatively simple. This, however, is not to suggest that conversion is either easy or a simple matter of belief. Changes to lifestyle and diet will follow; the five daily prayers, fasting during Ramadan, giving up pork and alcohol, adopting Arabic terminology to varying degrees, changes to traditional celebrations and modes of socialising, for example. The following section addresses how the framework of religiosity and religion helps us appreciate both the coherence of self so far outlined as well as the significant changes converts do undergo as part of their becoming Muslim. It addresses, thereby, a sentiment expressed by Vidya in continuation from that with which this chapter opened: as she goes on to contrast ‘I’ve changed the way I behave’ but ‘I’ve never changed myself, who I am’.

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Religiosity Past and Future: Being and Becoming And erm it was just sort of from there it just grew that I was thinking ‘yeah, this is it, this is what I want to be, this is who I am’. And it wasn’t that I felt I needed to change, it was sort of that I sort of realised that yeah, this is how it is: this is what I’ve been looking for. And I felt like it is me and not that I had found something that I needed to alter for. I did need to make changes obviously because I had been doing things that were not going to be compatible. Erm, but it was, it just felt very natural in that way.

Evident in this passage from Rosie’s narrative is a good degree of ambiguity surrounding the ideas of continuity and change occurring as part of conversion. The two appear together in a way which seems contradictory and jarring. How can you already be the person you want to be? This apparent problem in conceiving of a religious self becomes crucially important to understanding the continual and renewed sense of faith and piety developed through practice. It is these dynamics that make coherent the assertions of both already becoming oneself in relation to what one already is at the moment of accepting Islam, and becoming more in relation to God continually through practice. To understand this, we need to bring the past-orientation of religiosity into discussion with a simultaneous future-orientation. One both is Muslim and at the same time is constantly becoming Muslim through developing an Islamic teleological subjecthood. From a theological perspective, Tariq Ramadan describes it thus: ‘all of us are required to return to ourselves and to rediscover the original breath, to revive it and confirm it’ (Ramadan, 2004: 17). In a philosophical idiom, Paul Ricouer distinguishes between identity as idem, the sense of ‘being the same’, and identity as ipse, the sense of being ‘self-same’. Ipse as self-sameness or self-constancy ‘rests on a temporal structure that conforms to the model of dynamic identity arising from the poetic composition of a narrative identity’ (Ricoeur, 1990: 246). To appreciate this from the narratives, the dynamics between religiosity and religion are significant.

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These dynamic past and future-oriented aspects and the centrality of religiosity can be demonstrated through discussion of perhaps the more obvious forms of change, those in behaviour and practice mentioned above. These are experienced as difficult to greater and lesser extents by different people, and approaches to practices vary, at times considerably, between and even within individuals over time. However, even if there are variations in actual practice, what is central to these practices is religious subjectivity and its development. An example of what is meant here comes through in the ruminations on the hijab for many. Hannah relates how she resisted it at first, remarking that at one point she felt, ‘I can never be like this’. Through her initial contact of seeing women wearing hijab at a New Muslim circle and some personal experimentation in front of the mirror, she could not reconcile the embodied sense of the person seen in the mirror with the hijab on as the same person standing in front of the mirror, who the hijab did not ‘fit’. However, later, based on her reflection, reading and interpretation, she accepts that it is a Qur’anic injunction that the hijab should be worn. She therefore brought it into the orbit of her religious sense of self and subsequently worked towards adopting it, taking it up to the point where she now feels ‘naked’ without it. Hannah was not alone in this approach to the hijab. Zaara, for example, remarks, ‘the reason I didn’t take hijab was because I wasn’t ready to because of lack of knowledge. And I’m not gonna do something because somebody tells me to or because it has to be done, I need to know why (…) when I realised it’s actually a commandment from God, from Allah, I decided to take it because it’s practicing my faith. That’s what hijab means to me’. A further point with regard to a ‘theological ear’ that also questions the dichotomisation of belief and practice can be highlighted here: the emphasis is on becoming and being Muslim ‘through submission, of the heart and the limbs’ (Dutton, 1999: 152, emphasis added) to God. It is the relation here that is important rather than one or the other.

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Ontological Responsibility All of these movements of being and becoming have strong ethical undertones and a sense of ethical responsibility can become a core aspect of this process. Focussed on the self this can be construed as a sense of ontological responsibility. We can see this ontological responsibility illustrated when Vidya says, in recounting her shahada and going out for a meal afterwards: At that point you are happy and you’re relieved and you, you know you feel… I felt very spiritually at ease. But then I realised, whoa I’m a Muslim, like I have to get my shit together…. It’s time to focus and get it right. It’s kinda like you know how, I’m not sure if you’ve experienced this or if anyone’s kinda helped you understand this, but you kinda feel like it’s… It’s not like a rebirth but revert means you reverted back to your original state, that means that everything in between wasn’t really who you were; it was kinda more like a superficial version, and so that’s all gone now. So that’s kinda how I felt and that’s why it was daunting. I’m like finally here in reality, I’ve gotta be real, I’ve gotta live my life now, this is my only chance, y’know.

What emerges as significant in passages such as this one is the strong sense of responsibility towards oneself. Having discovered the ‘Truth’, one no longer has any excuses for not being oneself, and must, as Vidya colloquially but very much to the point put it, ‘get one’s shit together’. In summary, while it may be that in some particular circumstances a different identity category, such as gender or ethnicity, may ‘rise to the top’ so to speak, this political process of identities need not, indeed perhaps cannot, dilute or displace their religious character, which evades and does not so obviously square with such flattening side-by-side categorical pluralities or reductions, nor can it serve as a mere proxy for ethnicity, all of which serve to contain the religious aspect of these identities from its fullest character, from ‘fullness’ to borrow from Charles Taylor (2007). Against the fractured, the fragmented and the fluid, there is in fact often a good deal more unity, or congruity, on display than is often acknowledged. This means taking seriously that for many

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believers the emotions they experience are experienced as having extrasocial, atemporal, acultural and ahistorical qualities—qualities recognised by Simmel (1997 [1904]: 43), even as they are inevitably shot through with these characteristics. It is always gradual, something worked on, constantly aspirational, and an always and inevitably incomplete state, at times joyous, at times disciplining, when the inside and outside aspects, when religiosity and religion, come closer together. The focus of this chapter has been to excavate something of the depth of religious identity and why it is necessary to analytically foreground it for the concerns of difference and recognition central to multiculturalism and that consideration of hospitality, as well as the force of the empirical material highlighted. The following chapters go on to consider social relations from this analytical vantage point to develop and further highlight the significance of this reorientation for the considerations of multiculturalism.

References Abdel Haleem, H. (2003). Experiences, needs and potential of new Muslim women in Britain. In H. Jawad & T. Benn (Eds.), Muslim women in the United Kingdom and beyond (pp. 91–106). Brill. Ahmad, I. (2017). Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to the marketplace. The University of North Carolina Press. Alyedreessy, M. (2016). British Muslim converts: An Investigation of conversion and de-conversion processes to and from Islam, PhD thesis, University of Kingston. http://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/37045/1/Alyedreessy-M-37045.pdf. Last Accessed 9 August 2018. Al-Qwidi, M. (2002). Understanding the stages of conversion to Islam: The voices of British converts, PhD thesis, University of Leeds. http://etheses.whiterose. ac.uk/485/. Last Accessed 2 September 2016. Amer, A. (2019). Between recognition and mis/nonrecognition: Strategies of negotiating and performing identities among white Muslims in the United Kingdom. Political Psychology, 41(3), 533–548. Azari, N. P., & Birnbacher, D. (2004). The role of cognition and feeling in religious experience. Zygon, 39 (4), 901–917.

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Becker, E. (2017). Why sociologists of religion need theological training. The Sociological Review, blog post. https://www.thesociologicalreview.com/blog/ why-sociologists-of-religion-need-theological-training.html. Last Accessed 21 June 2018. Brockmeier, J. (2001). From the end to the beginning: Retrospective teleology in autobiography. In J. Brockmeier & D. Carbaugh (Eds.), Narrative and identity: Studies in autobiography, self and culture (pp. 247–280). John Benjamins. Dutton, Y. (1999). Conversion to Islam: The Qur’anic paradigm. In C. Lamb & M. D. Bryant (Eds.), Religious conversion: Contemporary practices and controversies (pp. 151–165). Cassell. Fatima, S. (2011). Who counts as a Muslim? identity, multiplicity and politics. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 31(3), 339–353. Gillespie, V. B. (1991). The dynamics of religious conversion. Religious Education Press. Gooren, H. (2010). Religious conversion and disaffiliation: Tracing patterns of change in faith practices. Palgrave Macmillan. Hermansen, M. (1999). Roads to Mecca: Conversion narratives of European and Euro-American Muslims. The Muslim World, 89 (1), 56–89. Hermansen, M. (2014). Conversion to Islam in theological and historical perspectives. In L. R. Rambo & C. E. Farhadian (Eds.), The oxford handbook of religious conversion (pp. 632–666). Oxford University Press. Keenan, W. J. F. (2003). Rediscovering the theological in sociology: Foundation and possibilities. Theory, Culture and Society, 20 (1), 19–42. Kocaba¸s, S¸ . (1987). The Qur’anic concept of intellect (The Word aql in the Qur’an). The Islamic Philosophical Society. Köse, A. (1996). Conversion to Islam: A study of native British converts. Kegan Paul International. Laermans, R. (2006). The ambivalence of religiosity and religion: A reading of Georg Simmel. Social Compass, 53(4), 479–489. McCole, J. (2005). Georg Simmel and the philosophy of religion. New German Critique, 94, 8–35. McGuire, M. (2008). Lived religion: Faith and practice in everyday life. Oxford University Press. Meer, N. (2008). The politics of voluntary and involuntary identities: Are Muslims in Britain an ethnic, racial or religious minority? Patterns of Prejudice, 42(1), 61–81. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A civic idea. Polity Press.

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Modood, T. (2015) [1997]). “Difference”, cultural racism and anti-racism. In T. Modood & P. Werbner (Eds.), Debating cultural hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 154–172). Zed Books. Montemaggi, F. E. S. (2017a). Religion as self-transcendence. A Simmelian framework for authenticity. Simmel Studies, 21(1), 89–114. Montemaggi, F. E. S. (2017b). Belief, trust, and relationality: A Simmelian approach for the study of faith. Religion, 47 (2), 147–160. Montemaggi, F. E. S. (2017c). The authenticity of Christian Evangelicals: Between individuality and obedience. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 32(2), 253–268. Neumueller, C. (2012). The 21st century new Muslim generation: Converts in Britain and Germany, PhD thesis, University of Exeter. https://ore.exeter.ac. uk/repository/handle/10871/8406. Last Accessed 9 August 2018. Özyürek, E. (2015). Being German, becoming Muslim: Race, religion, and conversion in the new Europe. Princeton University Press. Pennington, M. (2020). Cohesive societies: Faith and belief . The British Academy. Plummer, K. (1995). Telling sexual stories: Power, change and social worlds. Routledge. Poston, L. (1992). Islamic Da’wah in the West: Muslim missionary activity and the dynamics of conversion to Islam. Oxford University Press. Ramadan, T. (2004). Western Muslims and the future of Islam. Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1990). Time and narrative volume 3 (Trans. K. Blamey & D. Pellauer). University of Chicago Press. Roald, A. S. (2004). New Muslims in the European context: The experience of scandinavian converts. Brill. Sealy, T. (2021). Islamophobia: With or without Islam? Religions, 12(6), 369. Simmel, G. (1997). Essays on religion (Trans. and Ed. Horst Jürgen Helle in collaboration with Ludwig Nieder). Yale University Press. Snow, D. A., & Machalak, R. (1984). The sociology of conversion. Annual Review of Sociology, 10, 167–190. Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. van Nieuwkerk, K. (2006). “Islam is your birthright”: Conversion, reversion and alternation: The case of new Muslimas in the west. In J. N. Bremmer, W. J. van Bekkum, & A. L. Moledijk (Eds.), Cultures of conversions (pp. 151–164). Peeters. Varga, I. (2007). Georg Simmel: Religion and spirituality. In K. Flanagan & P. C. Jupp (Eds.), A sociology of spirituality (pp. 145–160). Ashgate.

5 Religion, Culture and the Stranger

A common refrain in the narratives is, as Hannah remarks, ‘there’s a great deal of culture in Islam, which isn’t Islam’. Here is a straightforward assertion of a divide between religion and culture and that the latter can muddy the former and needs to be unpicked from it. The central and underlying feature that runs throughout this and the following chapters is this discursive divide and distinction between religion and culture, or to echo the terms introduced in Chapter 4, between religiosity and religion, a feature common across the narratives. Understanding this divide is central to understanding converts’ place in society and social and political relations, both how they are seen by others as well as how they position themselves. This chapter serves to introduce and discuss some of the conceptions that will be important when we turn to consider the empirical material in more detail in the following chapters and it begins to outline what kinds of issues are at stake. It begins by assessing existing approaches to understanding the religion-culture divide and sets out how the approach this book takes is distinctive and the reasons for this.

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Subsequently, it turns to outline how converts might be considered strangers, a concept central to hospitality, as a way of analysing the religion-culture divide as it emerges in the narratives and converts’ social and political relations that stem from them, and which are discussed in further detail in the chapters which follow. It is important for the more general discussion in relation to hospitality that this book engages that an understanding of what kind of strangers converts are is laid out. To do this, it draws on another of Simmel’s writings, his short but influential essay The Stranger, and elaborates a reading of this essay that will form the analytical approach towards the empirical material being considered and its connections to the notion of hospitality.

The Religion-Culture Divide: Deculturation: A Problematic Central to the issue here then is the dynamic of the religion-culture divide. Olivier Roy, one of the foremost commentators on Islam in Europe in recent years, has conceptualised this deconnection of religion and culture as deculturation, whereby religious and cultural markers are separated from one another, and suggests that converts ‘epitomize [this] phenomenon’ (2010: 14). Roy argues: ‘If religions are able to extend beyond their original cultures, it is because they have been able to “deculturate” themselves’ (2010: 7). From the perspective of the distinction between religiosity and religion, where it is the former aspect that actuates the latter and not the other way around, however, this formulation becomes rather awkward. In Roy’s formulation converts as agents are entirely absent: ‘religion’ is deculturating itself. Rather than Islam deculturating itself, however, it is converts1 as active agents who are undertaking this process as part of how belonging is negotiated. This might seem a mere semantic quibble but reorienting the emphasis necessitates a rather different analysis. Thus, rather than deculturation, we 1 It

should be stressed again that this process is not exclusive to converts, many born Muslims, particularly young Muslims are similarly negotiating this dynamic, although the focus of this book is converts.

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are better saying reculturation to capture the process of how religion is being remoulded, or translated , as it is mediated through another cultural framework by converts and how this stems from religiosity. Rather than the separation of cultural and religious markers that Roy points to, it is rather their reconfiguration that demands attention. Reculturation better maintains the sociological truism that converts, as all of us, are culturally embedded and agentive subjects rather than seeing them as free of cultural baggage or swept up in what ‘the religion is doing to itself ’. Subsequently, converts cannot but approach Islam and attempt to reconcile it with life in Britain in a way that constantly gives away that context that is embroiled in the dimensions of Britain as Christian, secular and plural; the whole process is inevitably shaped by its context. That doesn’t mean there is nothing to say for deculturation, but we have to see deculturaltion as referring to a discursive tactic, and reculturation referring to a sociological process. Focussing on re- rather than deculturation has a further advantage in that it can register not just a one-way process in which Britain and British culture (whatever that may be taken to be) processes and repackages Islam. It is not a case of merely what ‘British’ does to ‘Islam’. It is rather about a mutual, intersubjective process in which difference is both preserved, without becoming static, and seen not as a problem but as a part of a solution. Whereas for Roy, deculturation ‘transforms the gap between the believer and the non-believer into a barrier, since now they no longer share either religious practice or common values’ (2010: 8), reculturation as a sociological process points to connections, and that these are cross-cutting and dynamic at the same time as marking difference. There is no simple binary between religion and culture, they should rather be considered as dyadic.

Reculturaltion: Assimilation and Exclusion A shift to reculturation helps us dispel two opposite positions for thinking about converts’ patterns of belonging, what will be called the assimilationist account and the exclusionist account. According to the assimilationist account converts seek belonging through assimilating into

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born Muslim communities, where the religious is subordinated to an adopted cultural transformation. On this account it has been suggested that converts, through acts of performative conformity, mimic the practices and behaviours of a Muslim community as a tactical mode of belonging to it or becoming more like them (Moosavi, 2012; cf HervieuLéger’s ‘convert’, 1999). Here, recognition is granted and hospitality is extended to converts on the basis of cultural similitude, which is something they actively seek. The view of the exclusionist account is at the root of charges of Eurocentrism that can be levied at converts, and reflects what some might refer to as ‘protestantising’ the faith (Roy, 2006). On this account converts seek belonging through the exclusion of born Muslims, based on ‘their’ cultural understanding. Here, a Muslim identity is asserted while Islam is bent to fit neatly in with a westernised lifestyle (whatever that might mean precisely), or Islam is reduced to a matter of belief or conscience. An alternative version of the exclusionist account is put forward by Özyürek (2015), who suggests that converts are necessarily Islamophobic as a result. This more specific rendering of an exclusionist account will be expanded in Chapter 8. On the exclusionist account, hospitality is denied by converts who fail to recognise born Muslims based on ethnic differences. The first of these positions, the assimilationist account, will be called into question on the basis that it subordinates religiosity to pre-existing forms of religion in a reversal of the Simmelian formula. On these grounds it ignores the difficult relations converts often have with Muslim communities (see Chapter 6), as well as the difficult negotiations they must make as they strive to belong not to an identifiable born Muslim community to which they happen to live near, nor even to an abstract and elusive ummah, but to Islam as a faith in the context of twenty-first century Britain and its three dimensions of Christian, secular and plural. Even when they do find their position in relation to a born Muslim community, this is far from a matter of assimilation, as will be seen. Conversion presents choices and negotiations along the lines of religion and culture that are simply unavoidable. Conversion itself highlights and confronts converts with their own assumptions and background, issues of theology (in a practical sense even if not in a more academic sense) and the differences between born Muslims themselves.

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A number of participants talked about the confusion of being told conflicting things, even when people were ‘well-meaning’. Susanne, for example, who had been Muslim for 17 years, talks about becoming aware of differences between culture and religion both through her husband, who is of Bangladeshi background, and meeting other convert women ‘all married to different cultures’, and who all had different views of things based on what they had been told as a result. For Susanne: with that I think also a lot of clarity came. It’s a difference between culture and religion. A lot of the things were told to me which are religious, but they’re actually nothing to do with Islam; they’re cultural. And I needed to learn how to separate the two. And of course, as a result of that, I started erm disliking some of the cultural practices and as a result, Muslims.

This was narrated as part of Susanne’s ‘second cycle’. As part of the third cycle, however, in which she found ‘my own ways about Islam’ she now has ‘softened’ and is ‘more able to connect with Muslims’. She goes on to say that now: I feel more grounded in my religion and I don’t feel I’m blind to some of the falsehood that we have in the community, so I can now say things I never used to say before… we have to make Islam a modern reality, not an archaic religion, it’s not a set of dogmas.

The second of these positions, the exclusionist account, under-estimates the changes converts do make as part of their conversion and the negotiations with self and society that go into these, as well as the very real difference between and diversity within faith traditions (religions) even as they are remoulded in diverse ways by those who follow them on the basis of religiosity. It is also here that sociological differences between converts and born Muslims, despite the parallel in the religion-culture divide in their discourse, are important. From this angle converts’ reculturation need not be seen simply as a boundary of exclusion between racialised bodies which opposes converts on the one hand to born Muslims on the other. This is because it allows the site on which difference is conceived to be placed on the religious rather than the ethnic

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plane. This marks an important conceptual and interpretive shift with implications for theorising difference. From this perspective, we can start with ‘the shared criterion’ of religiosity. This of course intersects with ethnicity and culture, but the argument is that this deserves analytical attention itself. From this starting position Islam is, rather than restricted to a site of ethnic contestation, a shared area of ‘conditions for communication’ with ‘a shared fund of common understandings’ (Hylland Eriksen, 2015: 7). The aim of this interpretive shift is to strike a more coherent sociological balance between political and religious categories. This alternative, I suggest, better fits converts’ self-understanding and better fits claims of Islam as being a universal religion, the historical spread of which has, of course, always resulted in variance in interpretation and practice. The critiques of the two positions identified here also lead us to question a further of Roy’s (2006; cf Nielsen, 1999) arguments, that theological development and innovation among Muslims in Europe has stagnated. Rather, everyday forms of theological engagement are in fact vibrant and dynamic, something that will also be borne out in subsequent chapters. The following section moves on to consider three further approaches, from prominent Muslim thinkers in Europe that also question Roy’s assertion at a more theoretical level.2 The thinking of Tariq Ramadan and Bassam Tibi provide a contrast in how questions of how Islam and Muslims are to understand their place as religious subjects in contemporary Western Europe are being answered. They are not foremost about converts but they serve to map something of the ground of these debates in a wider sense related to Muslims in Europe. The third thinker is Abdal Hakim Murad, a prominent theologian and British convert to Islam who is more directly concerned with Muslims and Islam in Britain. In considering these three thinkers, we can point to some of the issues of religion and culture and the religion-culture divide that underpins the discussions in this part of the book.

2 How

these relate to multiculturalists will be brought out in Chapters 8 And 9.

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Euro-Islam, European Islam Struggles over the religion-culture divide are reflected in scholars that converts frequently cite as influential and helpful, figures such as Tariq Ramadan, and prominent converts Abdal Hakim Murad (Tim Winter) and Hamza Yusuf. Thinkers such as these seek interpretations and understandings of Islamic texts and traditions consistent with life in a politically secular, non-Muslim majority context. They point to pluralism and contestation throughout Islam’s history and, in different ways, humanize, historicize and rationalize Islam (Hashas, 2019), remaining rooted in tradition but also renewing, revising or reforming (or some combination of these) the faith. For converts, these are all seen to present and explain Islam in ways relatable and relevant to the contemporary context and the struggles they experience, contrasted with being told to consult a scholar in Pakistan, for example, which ‘has no relevance whatsoever’, to quote Rachel. This section begins by outlining two influential but alternative takes on the normative relationship between ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’, those of Tariq Ramadan and Bassam Tibi, before turning to consider Murad. As normative, Ramadan and Tibi provide, in Tibi’s words, ‘a vision for a better future’ (2008: 165) for how Islam and Muslims are to be conceived as part of a multicultural Europe. Underlying their frameworks is what we can think of as the religion-culture divide, emphasising the universal aspect of Islamic faith while grounding Islam as religion in historical, cultural, social and political contexts and constructs. They also both emphasise connections with the West, both historically as well as compatibility between Islam and modernity (although differ on the details). On the roots of the issue, how to deal with it, and how to conceive of this future, however, they represent two alternative understandings for thinking about the relationship between religion and culture and how Muslims are to live in Europe and in Islam. A thorough-going critique of the various lines of thought on EuroIslam found in both writers is beyond the scope of this section. Rather, what it will serve to highlight as significant for the rest of the book is a struggle at the heart of the religion-culture divide. Tibi, who has also directly criticised Roy for distorting the idea of Euro-Islam, is at

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great pains to distance his thought from that of Ramadan, whom he considers a ‘rival within Islam in Europe’ (2008: 156), so we will start with Ramadan. It is useful to first note that on identity, for Ramadan: ‘The principle of election in the Muslim community is not consequent upon the sole fact that its members are nominally ‘Muslims’ without any other form of commitment. To be Muslim is tantamount, first, to living the experience of piety’ (Ramadan, 2009: 237). Beginning from a doctrinally rather than socially derived definition, Ramadan here unsettles the argument that one is Muslim simply by being born so, whether this is an identity ascribed from the outside or claimed from the inside. On what we are calling the religion–culture divide and reculturation, Ramadan has commented that ‘we need to separate Islamic principles from their cultures of origin and anchor them in the cultural reality of Western Europe’ (quoted in Le Quesne, 2000). But this is not a matter of a clash between religious and cultural or national identities or between Islam and Europe. Muslims’ religious identity is to do with ‘being’ in a fundamental sense, and national identity a matter of dealing with fellow citizens (Ramadan, 2002: 163). For Ramadan, Islam and the essence of faith and identity it provides, is the same everywhere, but European Muslims must establish independence of thought and politics from Muslim majority countries in a way appropriate to the context of Europe. That is, ‘the principles remain the same, but the ways of being faithful to them are diverse’ (2004: 36). This involves a ‘labour of reform… that will allow Muslims to establish themselves freely and confidently’, which in turn involves a ‘double dialectical approach, encompassing both the contextualised study of the texts and the study of the context in light of the texts’ (2004: 63). This necessitates knowledge of Islamic texts as well as the sciences, including social sciences and, moreover, is not a debate restricted to Muslims, but one which is open to non-Muslim experts (2004). When it comes to this re-contextualisation, an important move that Ramadan makes, and the one that Tibi takes direct umbrage with, is to redraw the distinction between dar al-harb (abode of war) and dar al-Islam (abode of Islam) as one of space rather than place. Ramadan’s foremost concerns are freedom of religion and freedom of worship,

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which he emphasises over and above the (religious) character of the legal and political system.3 Thus, rather than Muslim majority countries or countries with a Muslim legal and political framework constituting dar al-Islam and non-Muslim countries constituting dar al-harb, Europe can be seen as consistent with the former if it provides sufficient religious freedoms, and Muslim majority countries may in fact represent the latter if the legal and political system is anti-Islamic in the sense of limiting religious freedom. This produces a reimagining of European space rooted in Islamic doctrine. To do this he also introduces the concept of Western countries as dar al-shahada (abode of testimony), where Muslims enjoy freedom of religion but are also, through force of a non-Muslim majority context, ‘brought back to the fundamental teaching of Islam and invited to meditate on their role’ (2004: 77; also 2002). As dar al-shahada, the West both provides the context for Muslims to practice their faith as well as a context which calls Muslims to renew their faith as they negotiate religion and culture. The extent of the freedom that Muslims have in order to practice and feel secure in their faith is of course both varying across Europe as well as a matter of controversy of extent, something Ramadan himself is not unaware of. Ramadan also insists that passive adaptation to the status quo, adapting to the challenges it gives rise to without maintaining a more engaged critical and contributive stance, is not enough as part of a reform agenda (Ramadan, 2008). In terms of this critical and contributive position in the political life of the country in which they live, for Ramadan, Muslims, as citizens engaged in forms of ethical citizenship, are to prioritise social interest more broadly and not focus narrowly on their own community interest (Hashas, 2019: 101). Ramadan maintains an elevation of the umma as a transnational fraternity, however, to which Muslims are required to develop a sense of as a core part of Muslim identity, although this is not to be understood as oppositional to the state in which they live, where they are compelled to respect the legal framework. This discussion highlights the normative thinking of Ramadan for how

3 see

also An-na’im (2008) on the necessity of a secular state for Islam in Muslim majority countries.

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the religion-culture divide can be both a force of necessity as well as a positive process of faith renewal and active civic engagement. Turning to Tibi, his two main targets are, on the one hand, Islamists and Islamism (of which he sees Ramadan as being a part), who essentialise and concretise Islam as a faith in a particular cultural and political interpretation; and on the other hand, a Europe or Europeans indifferent to their own civilizational history and identity. For Tibi, Islamism, as ‘political Islam’, represents a position that calls for the necessity of the Islamization of society and is about political order rather than faith. Islamism as such represents a conflation of Islam as a faith with Islam as a political ideology that essentialises and particularises Islam against the idea of a faithful community (Tibi, 2012). The ‘ideology of Islamism’ in Europe, for Tibi, is not without a certain grain of hypocrisy. It makes full use of the civil rights Muslims enjoy in Europe as it contests European values but at the same time puts forward a model that ‘despises’ those rights (2008). The focus for Tibi then is on the adoption of what he refers to as European civic values. To this end, with regard to Islam itself, Tibi, rather than trying to reform certain Islamic concepts, as does Ramadan, calls for ‘a clear abandoning of concepts such as da’wa, hijra and shari’a, as well as jihad ’ as being against religious pluralism (2008: 180). He, moreover, sees the idea of the umma as also potentially problematic in this regard: ‘I contend that an Islam based on a worldview of a universal umma united vis-à-vis non-Muslims (in a variety of categories) has a problem with democratic pluralism’ (2008: xiii). This is because it undermines the ability of Muslims to become European citizens ‘of the heart’ (2008: 166) by concretising what is abstract and symbolic into a particular cultural form. For Tibi, ‘the substance of the notion of Euro-Islam is aimed at the incorporation of the European values of democracy, laïcité, civil society, pluralism, secular tolerance and individual human rights into Islamic thought’. Tibi argues that Islamism does not have the capacity to do this, whereas Islam does, although work is required on the part of theologians and lay Muslims alike. This position thus represents, foremost, adaptations in thought that Muslims should undergo in order to live in Europe, which notably include embracing a secular civil society (notably secularity not radical secularism) and eschewing a religionisation of politics

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(Islamism) (2012). Such reforms are not alien to Islam, however. Tibi highlights the capacity for learning from the other in Islam’s history, which are based in a shared historical inheritance with Western Europe— the ‘Hellenization’ of medieaval Islam—and calls for a renewed tradition of this kind that he sees as having fallen stagnant in recent centuries (2001, 2008; see also Kuru, 2020; Murad, 2020) but which can help pave the way towards Tibi’s vision of Euro-Islam.4 Fundamental to understanding Tibi’s position is the notion of asabiyya, which he draws from Ibn Khaldun. By asabiyya he refers to a civilisational self-awareness found in a system of values and norms (2008: 158). His use of the language of civilizations is not meant to imply a static cultural homogeneity and Tibi rejects a crude ‘clash of civilizations’ understanding. He notes the historical relationship between Islam and Europe, in its positive and negative encounters, but points to a distinction in asabiyya between the two - and that on this basis Europe cannot constitute dar al-shahada. This forms the main departure point for the disagreement Tibi has with Ramadan’s conceptualisation. For Tibi, conceiving of Europe as dar al-Islam means conceiving it as an Islamic space and denying its own, European, ‘civilisation’. This for Tibi is representative of political Islamism and ‘an offense to the idea of Europe’ (2008: 210), which has its own abasiyya, and which needs to be better appreciated by Muslims and Europeans. While there is a strong onus on Muslims to reform, there is also an onus on Europeans to conceive of Europeanness in a way open to Muslims: ‘both are responsible for the existing state of affairs’ and subsequently for rectifying it (2008: 193). Tibi sees Europe’s asabiyya as having become too weak and thus susceptible to being undermined by stronger claims. For Tibi, a target of this critique is what he sees as the political correctness of multiculturalists. Multiculturalist tolerance for Tibi is a form of weakness and indifference ‘self-perceived as a progressive cultural relativism’ (2008: 172). It is this weakness of multiculturalism that Tibi sees as being unable to ‘win the hearts and minds of Muslims born in Europe’ (2008: 171). Multiculturalists, in Tibi’s view, put diversity above rights in a way 4 See

also interview at http://www.signandsight.com/features/1258.html.

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which results in a crude communitarianism and cultural relativism rather than a form of pluralism that combines diversity with shared values. For Tibi, multiculturalism does not posit a route out of minoritization, but preserves the gap between majority and minority (2008, 2009). While we might reject this understanding of multiculturalism as one akin to a crude communitarianism that does not reflect the multiculturalism of this book (see Chapters 3 and 9), we might also note that it is a similar critique to that Bretherton makes of identity politics resulting in a series of competing interest groups. What is needed, Tibi asserts, is the development of a “Euro-Islamic asabiyya” in order to bridge between the two (2008: 159). In this rendering, Islam’s cultural forms are specific to its context rather than being fixed and unchanging, even as core Islamic principles remain the same. In this way Euro-Islam is one of a variety of ‘Islams’; Tibi also distinguishes an Afro-Islam and Indo-Islam (2008: 182). The development of Euro-Islam for Tibi is the only sure way to integrate Muslims and Islam into Europe in a way to combat both an encroaching Islamism as well as an exclusionist ethnicization of Europe.5 This is in a context in which responses to Islamist extremism have been at the forefront of national debates and policy concerning Muslims in Western Europe, and concerns over the alienation of some Muslims from an inclusive national identity as well as the influence of foreign powers— Saudi Arabia often chiefly among them—through mosques have risen to the fore. Indeed, Tibi states that ‘a moderate Islam open to change and also open to Europe could help achieve the dual goal of being inclusive while preserving Europe’s identity’ (2008: 197). This outline of Ramadan and Tibi is not to suggest that either thinker ‘has got it right’, even vis-à-vis the other, and there are various points of both thinkers that warrant and have come under developed critique and engagement, not least, as Jørgen Nielsen (2007) has pointed out, because there is more than one way to be European and more than one way to be Muslim, let alone myriad ways of being both. A more detailed critique is beyond the scope of this book. For present purposes, the most salient and pertinent points are their relevance to thinking about 5 although

Tibi has since despaired at the prospect of a Euro-Islam becoming a reality.

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the religion-culture divide, and how they represent contrasting strands of thought and unavoidable tensions in how this relationship is understood, envisioned and enacted. To be perhaps a little crude about it, for Ramadan, Europe is to be conceived in ways appropriately Islamic, whereas for Tibi, Islam is to be conceived in ways that are appropriately European—although both better represent a hybrid picture albeit with these general emphases. The subject at issue for both thinkers is of course born Muslims of an immigrant background, and there are important contrasts between born Muslims and converts that affect the way these ideas might apply. The theme of the subsequent chapters revolves around how converts are negotiating these issues and with what effects. We can now turn to briefly consider the thought of a further thinker who we can also read through the prism of the religion-culture divide and dynamic, Abdal Hakim Murad, himself a convert. Murad, in a series of collected ‘polemical essays’, also emphasises an approach grounded first and foremost in religiously derived principles rather than the sociological, and rejects a view of society that is ‘merely sociological’ on the basis of its reductive tendencies ‘strictly biased against any acknowledgement of divine intervention’ (2020: 122). In what we might see as an implicit challenge to multiculturalism, and not too different from Bretherton’s (Chapter 3), Murad asserts that ‘identity-religion’ must be rejected in favour of a theological response. Murad is also concerned with identifying what in Islamic thought and tradition is continuous because it is either part of a ‘time-honoured rootepistemology’ or the ‘cumulative wisdom’ of Islamic tradition as it has developed (2020: 3). The aim is to develop, or perhaps more consistent with Murad’s position, recover, an Islam which can offer an ‘uncompromising theory of Islamic belonging in the European homeland’ (ibid., and 186). As with both Ramadan and Tibi, Murad emphasises a two-way process of inclusion and adaptation between Islam and Europe. On the one hand, he rejects assimilationist accounts of integration, where Muslims would necessarily adopt and adapt the social beliefs of the majority secular culture, losing their distinctiveness. In this, we can detect traces of Tibi’s emphasis on asabiyya. We have already mentioned Murad’s insistence on recovering aspects of Islamic civilisational tradition, and he is also critical of what Britain has lost in terms of its

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‘metaphysical anchorage’ and its ‘traditional Christian moral compass’ (ibid.: 10, 27, 31, 75, 190), although, as Ramadan, its laws of freedom of religion can provide a more conducive context than some Muslim majority countries (ibid.: 241). Murad also draws out the historical process of incorporation of dissenting Christian groups following the Reformation as a route to how British Muslims can too be incorporated in an already present form of integration, thus anchoring this in a contextualised historical process (2020: 87–89). On the other hand, Murad is also clear that Muslims must reject forms of anti-Western fundamentalism and assertions of Muslimness that are identarian and ego-centred. Muslims must, he says, avoid reactions of outrage and pride: ‘moral excellence, rather than enjoying a succulent dish of revenge served hot or cold, is always the authentic Muslim goal’ (ibid.: 169, 173). A central part of this is emphasising theological moorings, din rather than ‘a mimetic aspect of ethnic inheritance’, emphasising ‘courtesy and good neighbourliness’ rather than ‘the triumphant vaunting of ancestral homeland’ (ibid.: 208); that is, something that is authentically Islamic and British. On this basis Murad emphasises ‘urf (local customary norms) (also Chapter 2) as a way to both preserve what is Islamic and necessary while also fitting into rather than jarring against a particular context (ibid.: 209). Politically this means joining with fellow citizens in discussions on the public good, where Islam must be a strong and equal voice in Europe and where interfaith work is key to recovering or rebuilding the ability to lead a religious life in contemporary, secular and multireligious Britain. Before moving to the final section of this chapter, which will set up the analytical discussion in the following chapters, it is important to take stock of what has been covered so far. The focus to this point has been to begin to interrogate the religion-culture divide, anticipating the discussions in the following chapters that discuss this in detail as it is found in the narratives this book draws on. To this, contrasting positions on the religion-culture divide have been identified. The first two were more socially determined positions in relation to identity, the assimilationist position on the one hand, and the exclusionist position on the other. Both of these positions rely on a view of identity that represents an ‘ethnic gaze’. The second set of positions, those of Tibi, Ramadan and

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Murad, were more normative and by contrast presuppose a ‘religious gaze’. The main difference between these writers wasn’t so much the identity of Muslims but rather the identity of Europe and what follows from this in terms of how Muslims are to understand a European Muslim identity. These points will form important frames of reference in the chapters that follow. The important point here to note is the contrasting ways in which the translatability of Islam into a European context is undertaken (and these examples by no means exhaust such thinking). A useful way of thinking about this translatability is through what Ricoeur has referred to as faithfulness versus betrayal (2006); that is the way in which Islam can be translated that is faithful to its principles as well as to those of Europe. Considering Tibi, Ramadan and Murad allows us to begin to unsettle the assimilationist and exclusionist accounts from the previous discussion. Whereas these are premised on ethnicity and the culture side of the divide, a different picture and different possibilities begin to emerge when the emphasis is rather placed on faithfulness. For one, this marks a shift from a binary to a dyadic conception. This holds out greater prospects for seeing converts as Muslims on the basis of religious subjecthood as well as beckoning new ways of understanding their belonging in ways that cut across rather than sever asunder the religion-culture divide. It is not then a matter of whether such translation can take place, but how this is inevitably negotiated as part of a contextualised dynamic process; and, moreover, how this can be an enriching and contributory process. The following chapters will develop these relations and positions more fully. In order to do so, the following sections of this chapter turn to consider an alternative way of analytically approaching patterns of belonging of converts to Islam in Britain, one that challenges the dichotomization of the assimilationist and exclusionist readings and that opens up how we situate Muslim converts in discussions of belonging. It does so, moreover, by relating converts to a concept at the core of hospitality, that of the stranger. It develops an analytical approach to converts to Islam as strangers that are neither seeking assimilation to Muslim communities through eschewing their own cultural background nor simply eschewing Muslim communities through elevating their own cultural background. Rather, the following sections outline an approach

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that will run through the rest of this part of the book and that looks at how converts relational patterns cut across the religion-culture divide.

The Stranger The idea of the stranger is central to the notion of hospitality. For Bretherton, the stranger includes different others (notably nonChristians) as well as those vulnerable and in need (particularly, in the contemporary period, refugees and asylum seekers). The strangers that appear from the Islamic sources, as with Bretherton’s account of Jesus, include the wealthy as well as, and especially, the poor and those on the margins of society, those familiar as well as those ‘nameless’ (such as travellers), but emphasises those ‘who are unknown rather than welcoming those whom we wished to know’ (Siddiqui, 2015: 30). Yet, there is something more here too, and two points highlight a particular religious reading in conceptualising the stranger. The first is the idea of being a stranger in the world , with an eschatological orientation, because ‘real life, that is, eternal life, begins only after death’ (Rosenthal, 1997: 59; also Siddiqui, 2015). Another is that of strangers as religious others, thereby uniting Muslims. This is of course the idea of the umma. Rosenthal points out how ‘an undeniable basic truth concerning Islam [is that] within the community of believers and wherever Muslims were in political control, there was, in theory, no such distinct category as a “stranger”’ (Rosenthal, 1997: 35–36), and we saw above that Ramadan preserves this ideal as a core part of an Islamic identity. Yet, despite this more theological ideal, it is true now as Rosenthal noted of the medieaval period that, ‘among the constantly changing currents of life in any given Muslim Society, the actual situation was obviously different from the ideal one. There were “strangers” everywhere…’ (1997: 36). In the chapters that follow, this will be given a contemporary context, that of Britain, as we explore the religion-culture divide as it comes through my participants’ narratives. Before turning to this discussion, the following section will outline a conception of the stranger that will help guide its analysis. Here we turn again to Simmel and his influential essay on the stranger as social type.

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The Stranger (Re)considered Simmel’s short essay, just six pages, has been one of his most influential (Levine, 1991). The literature surrounding the stranger as a social type has burgeoned and been the departure point for the social types of the ‘marginal man’ (Park, 1928; Stonequist, 1935), the ‘newcomer’ (Schuetz, 1944; Wood, 1934), the ‘sojourner’ (Siu, 1952) and the ‘flâneur’ (Bauman, 1993). The ongoing influence of Simmel’s essay is reflected in further developments of the concept, which have included, among others, strangeness as a condition of urban life (Bauman, 1995; Harman, 1987; Lofland, 1973), or of life in the contemporary (postmodern) world (Bauman, 1988), psychoanalytic conceptions of how we are ‘strangers to ourselves’ (Kristeva, 1991), and the stranger-as-figure, that is, social, spatial and/or cultural strangers. Given this range of conceptions, the stranger now traverses various additions and emphases, and has often produced more confusion than clarity about its definition (Levine, 1991; McLemore, 1991). We can identify two broad, and often opposing, emphases, nevertheless. The first is stranger-as-figure. This has been used to delineate who strangers are in modern societies, noting among others, ethnic minorities (Amin, 2012; Park, 1928), migrants (Amin, 2012; Diken, 1998), the poor and ‘flawed’ or ‘non’-consumers (Bauman, 1991, 1997). For some, ‘strangers’ are definitional to modernity (Vernon, 2014), and this is perhaps especially so in ‘superdiverse’ societies; Lofland’s evocative phrase suggests, the city, or at least its public space, is ‘a world of strangers’ (Lofland, 1973; also Iveson, 2006). For some this goes beyond the ideas of strangers as people we simply don’t know, or as unfamiliar ‘others’ of different kinds, and has led to a claim that we are all strangers, with the idea of the ‘cosmopolitan stranger’ (Harman, 1987; relatedly Bauman, 1988, 1993; cf Jackson et al., 2016). Recent critiques have sought to develop a second line of emphasis against stranger-as-figure. This focuses on the relational aspect of the stranger, emphasising the characteristics of relations and contact rather than of individuals or groups (for example, Horgan, 2012). Ahmed (2000) has argued that the stranger should be seen as produced in

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the encounter; the encounter being prior to the ‘stranger’. This, for Ahmed, avoids ontologizing the stranger-as-figure and the danger of ‘stranger fetishism’, which she sees as concealing social relationships and boundary making. Ahmed in fact argues that multiculturalism involves stranger fetishism: the stranger is produced by the discourse of welcoming the stranger, the act of inclusion itself being a process of ‘othering’ (Ahmed, 2000; Bennett & Crawley-Jackson, 2016; Jackson et al., 2016; Koefoed & Simonsen, 2011). Alexander has similarly argued that ‘the construction-of difference, not commonality, that makes potentially marginal groups into dangerous ones’ (Alexander, 2013: 83). A problem, however, is that it does not deal very satisfactorily with difference, especially where, as this book is suggesting, difference is both ‘real’ as well as emphatically not solely a ‘problem to be overcome’. Strangers and difference are in these accounts constituted in their recognition but recognition itself is seen as problematic and constraining. By foregrounding the encounter in this way, however, there is the danger of ahistoricizing and apoliticizing the stranger (something recognized but not resolved by Ahmed). In an historical and sociological sense, rather than psychological, we all carry cultural baggage such that the stranger cannot be, as Schuetz’s newcomer, ‘a man [sic] without a history’ (1944: 502) because we are all shot through with a range of contingent meanings, understandings and interpretations based on historical and contemporary socio-cultural codes. This runs throughout the above discussion orbiting around what we have called reculturation. There is tension then in the above conceptions between emphasising stranger-as-figure or ideas of the relational stranger. Yet, this tension can point us towards productive dynamics; dynamics not of dichotomous one-or-the-other but dynamics between the dyads of familiar and unfamiliar, negative and positive, figure and relation, commonality and difference. The dynamics and tensions at play here are already present in Simmel’s formulation, and throughout Simmel’s thought more generally. Consideration of the key aspects of the stranger that Simmel highlighted can offer a productive way of thinking about converts’ narratives and the religion-culture divide, and thus the following section outlines these.

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Simmel’s Stranger In The Stranger Simmel identified the singular characteristic of the stranger 6 as one of ‘an attitude of objectivity’, from which ‘he [sic] is freer practically and theoretically; he surveys conditions with less prejudice; his criteria for them are more general and more objective ideals’ (1950). This characteristic of objectivity stems from the fact that ‘as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow’ in relation to the group under question, ‘he has not belonged to it from the beginning, that he imports qualities into it, which do not and cannot stem from the group itself ’ (ibid.). The characteristic of objectivity is of course problematic to the point of being unattainable. Nevertheless, Simmel’s characterisation offers a good starting point for understanding the patterns and dynamics of belonging for British converts to Islam. This is not least because Simmel did not mean objective in the sense of positivist knowledge free of social influence. For Simmel, the objective and subjective cannot be separated (Marotta, 2010, 2012)—something also evident in his discussions of religiosity and religion. Objectivity here registers the core aspect of distance in the relation as an alternative position from which a critical conversation can emerge. This aspect of distance is one side of an important dynamic for this conception of the stranger. Significantly, the stranger can also be ‘an element of the group itself ’ (Simmel, 1950: 402). As such, the position is one of being both far and near. That is, a person may be part of a group in a spatial sense while still not in a social sense; they may be in a group but not of it (McLemore, 1991). This simultaneous relation of nearness and distance is at the heart of Simmel’s conception of the stranger. In fact, Simmel is quite clear that the stranger as ‘no “owner of soil”’ is meant in both a physical (territorial) as well as figurative (social) sense, and how the stranger is considered by others is important for this (Simmel, 1950: 403). The stranger is, therefore, both a structural figure and a form of relation.

6To indicate that when I am using the term ‘stranger’ meant in reference to Simmel’s conception, it is italicised throughout from this point forward.

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Importantly, Simmel’s stranger carries the positive sense of contribution (Simmel, 1950). The stranger is able, as such, to ‘problematize the normal, accepted ways’ in a society or of a group (Harman, 1987: 16). This makes the stranger distinct from how the convert is conceived in the assimilationist account discussed above, as well as from the newcomer and the marginal man, who may assimilate from a temporary position (Harman, 1987; McLemore, 1991; also Levine, 1991; Wood, 1934). In contrast, the qualities of nearness and distance of the stranger are not opposing positions that somehow need to be overcome, they are copresent in the position of the stranger (Levine, 1991) as a characteristic of the social relations between the stranger and society, and groups therein (Koefoed & Simonsen, 2011). While it may be feasible that a particular type of stranger may lose their strangeness over time, this is neither inevitable nor necessary. It is these qualities that give the stranger continued relevance for ‘bring[ing] us into contact with the limits of ourselves; he [sic] is a figure of fascination because he reveals to us what lies beyond the familiar’ (Tiryakian, 1973: 57). We might also want to suggest that as much as ‘we’ may learn from the stranger, so too the stranger learns from ‘us’—not least as a process of mutual learning and enrichment is central to hospitality. The stranger is not a position of epistemological advantage to finding commonality but is rather a site and relation of critical conversation between self and other and between commonality and difference. The stranger for Simmel is neither necessarily a definite friend or enemy, may be positively or negatively received,7 and can undermine binary thinking—Simmel always being more interested in what happens between (Marotta, 2010; Marotta, 2012; also Bauman, 1991). Following this discussion of the stranger, the following chapters outline how converts are to a large extent positioned and also position themselves as strangers, albeit in ways quite distinct from each other. We can see converts moved into a position of strangeness by both those aspects of society they have supposedly ‘left’, whether that be in reference 7 We

can note here following these points that the concept of the stranger in the Islamic tradition encompasses both a positive as well as negative side (Rosenthal, 1997). This is somewhat differently conceived, being focussed on the traveller, but an appreciation of both of these aspects is itself of importance for how the concept is to be applied here.

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to family, friends, or majority society more broadly, as well as positioned as strange by Muslim communities. As a result, it is often said that a convert’s best friend is another convert, and many narrated great relief and excitement when they first found a revert group they could join (also Krotofil, 2011). This is not just because of a level of understanding based on a shared experience of conversion, but also registers the limbo or ‘no man’s land’, to quote Gayle, they often find themselves stranded in. By tracing lines of nearness and distance in the narratives, however, converts can be lifted out of this limbo. It is precisely the aspects of commonality and difference, of nearness and distance and holding these tensions at play that forms the strength of Simmel’s formulation and its fruitfulness for the discussions which follow. This is significant when, as we will see across this and the next chapter, converts can be made stranger-as-figure in a negative sense, while position themselves as relational strangers in a contributory sense. Simmel’s characterisation offers a good starting point for understanding the patterns and dynamics of belonging for British converts to Islam, and formed a point of reflection emerging from my participants’ narratives related to how they come to feel and understand their position.

References Ahmed, S. (2000). Strange encounters: Embodied others in post-coloniality. Routledge. Alexander, J. C. (2013). The dark side of modernity. Polity Press. Amin, A. (2012). Land of strangers. Polity Press. An-na’im, A. A. (2008). Islam and the secular state: Negotiating the future of Shari’a. Harvard University Press. Bauman, Z. (1988). Strangers: The social construction of universality and particularity. Telos, 78, 7–42. Bauman, Z. (1991). Modernity and ambivalence. Polity Press. Bauman, Z. (1993). Postmodern ethics. Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1995). Life in fragments. Blackwell. Bauman, Z. (1997). Postmodernity and its discontents. Polity Press.

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Bennett, L., & Crawley Jackson, A. (2016). Making common ground with strangers at Furnace Park. Social & Cultural Geography, 18(1), 92–108. Diken, B. (1998). Strangers. Ashgate. Harman, L. D. (1987). The modern stranger: On language and membership. Mouton de Gruyter. Hashas, M. (2019). The idea of European Islam: Religion. Routledge. Hervieu-Léger, D. (1999). Le Pélerin et le Converti: La Religion en Mouvement. Flammarion. Horgan, M. (2012). Strangers and strangership. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(6), 607–622. Hylland Eriksen, T. (2015). The meaning of “we”. In P. A. Kraus & P. Kivisto (Eds.), The challenge of minority integration (pp. 2–21). De Gruyter Open. Iveson, K. (2006). Strangers in the cosmopolis. In J. Binnie & J. Holloway, S. Millington & C. Young (Eds.), Cosmopolitan urbanism (pp. 70–86). Routledge. Jackson, L., Harris, C., & Valentine, G. (2016). Rethinking concepts of the strange and the stranger. Social & Cultural Geography, 18(1), 1–15. Koefoed, L., & Simonsen, K. (2011). “The stranger”, the city and the nation: On the possibilities of identification and belonging. European Urban and Regional Studies, 18(4), 343–357. Kristeva, J. (1991). Strangers to ourselves. Columbia University Press. Krotofil, J. (2011). “If I am to be a Muslim, I have to be a good one”: Polish migrant women embracing Islam and reconstructing identity in dialogue with self and others. In K. Górak-Sosnowska (Ed.), Muslims in Poland and Eastern Europe (pp. 154–168). University of Warsaw. Kuru, A. T. (2020). Islam, authoritarianism, and underdevelopment: A global and historical comparison. Cambridge University Press. Le Quesne, N. (2000, December 3). Trying to bridge a great divide. Time. Available at: http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,917 1,90623,00.html. Last Accessed 9 June 2020. Levine, D. N. (1991). Simmel at a distance: On the history and systematics of the sociology of the stranger. In L. Ray (Ed.), Formal sociology: The sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 272–286). Edward Elgar. Lofland, L. H. (1973). A world of strangers: Order and action in urban public space. Basic Books. Marotta, V. (2010). The cosmopolitan stranger. In S. van Hooft & W. Vandekerckhove (Eds.), Questioning cosmopolitanism (pp. 105–120). Springer. Marotta, V. (2012). Georg Simmel, the stranger and the sociology of knowledge. Journal of Intercultural Studies, 33(6), 675–689.

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McLemore, S. D. (1991 [1970]). Simmel’s “stranger”: A critique of the concept. In L. Ray (Ed.), Formal sociology: The sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 263–271). Edward Elgar. Moosavi, L. (2012). British Muslim converts performing “authentic Muslimness.” Performing Islam, 1(1), 103–128. Murad, A. H. (2020). Travelling home: Essays on Islam in Europe. The Quilliam Press. Nielsen, J. S. (1999). Towards a European Islam. Palgrave Macmillan. Nielsen, J. S. (2007). The question of Euro-Islam: restriction or opportunity? In A. al-Azmeh & E. Fokas (Eds.), Islam in Europe diversity, identity and influence (pp. 34–48). Cambridge University Press. Özyürek, E. (2015). Being German, becoming Muslim: Race, religion, and conversion in the New Europe. Princeton University Press. Park, R. E. (1928). Human migration and the marginal man. American Journal of Sociology, 33(6), 881–893. Ramadan, T. (2002). To be a European Muslim. The Islamic Foundation. Ramadan, T. (2004). Western Muslims and the future of Islam. Oxford University Press. Ramadan, T. (2008). Radical reform: Islamic ETHICS and liberation. Oxford. Ramadan, T. (2009). Islam, the West and the challenges of modernity (Trans. S. Amghar). The Islamic Foundation. Ricoeur, P. (2006). On translation. Routledge. Rosenthal, F. (1997). The stranger in medieval Islam. Arabica, 44 (1), 35–75. Roy, O. (2006). Globalized Islam: The search for a new Ummah. Columbia University Press. Roy, O. (2010). Holy ignorance: When religion and culture part ways. Columbia University Press. Schuetz, A. (1944). The stranger: An essay in social psychology. American Journal of Sociology, 49 (6), 499–507. Simmel, G. (1950). The stranger. In K. H. Wolff (Ed. and Trans.), The sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 402–408). The Free Press. Siu, P. C. P. (1952). The sojourner. American Journal of Sociology, 58(1), 34–44. Siddiqui, M. (2015). Hospitality and Islam: Welcoming in god’s name. Yale University Press. Stonequist, E. V. (1935). The problem of the marginal man. American Journal of Sociology, 41(1), 1–12. Tibi, B. (2001). Islam between culture and politics. Palgrave. Tibi, B. (2008). Political Islam, world politics and Europe: Democratic peace and Euro-Islam versus global Jihad . Routledge.

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Tibi, B. (2009). Islam’s predicament with modernity: Religious reform and cultural change. Routledge. Tibi, B. (2012). Islamism and Islam. Yale University Press. Tiryakian, E. (1973). Sociological perspectives on the stranger. Soundings, 56 (1), 45–58. Vernon, J. (2014). Distant strangers: How Britain became modern. University of California Press. Wood, M. M. (1934). The stranger: A study in social relationships. Columbia University Press.

6 Being Made Strange: Dislocated, Functionalised and Refused

Nicola was forty seven and had been a Muslim for around two years. She was born in the area in which she now lives but has previously lived in the Philippines and the USA as her ex-husband was in the military. She relates a story in relation to her hometown, of being stared at and whispered about on a local bus journey after adopting the hijab. She exclaims frustratedly: ‘…even though I’m a Muslim, I’m still that same person. And that’s what people… people I think don’t realise, you’re still that same person… I still have a personality! I’m still that person…’. The changes that converts undergo, or are perceived to undergo, throw up considerable difficulties when it comes to negotiating the inner sense of self (Chapter 4) with perceptions from outsiders, whether they are known or unknown, and by whom converts are or can feel seen anew. Thus, Emily, discussing her family’s reaction to her conversion, noted of her father, ‘he thinks that I’ve [in a tone of mock horror] “changed”’. These point to the often-uneasy relationship between the personal and the social. For the people on the bus with Nicola, and for Emily’s father, they have visibly changed as they now wear hijab and, moreover, this acts as a signifier of a deeper change; as a result, they have become different, they have become ‘Other’. Yet Nicola and Emily, experiencing themselves © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_6

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from the inside, become frustrated by such a one-dimensional view of who they are. Having recognised oneself as Muslim as a matter of faith, the dialogic process with both born Muslims and non-Muslims doesn’t so much begin as takes on new significance (also Krotofil, 2011). This chapter focuses on how converts come to be positioned as ‘other’ by majority society, by friends, family and the ‘community’ in which they live, as well as by born Muslim communities. It charts forms of discrimination that converts face, the ethno-cultural and ethno-religious lenses that underpin these perspectives and the way that these group category boundaries serve to exclude converts. Conversions are, first and foremost, personal and the deeply personal aspect of these conversions was the focus of Chapter 4. Nevertheless, while deeply personal they occur in a particular place and time and in a particular socio-political context characterised by certain forms and patterns of relations. A recent report has argued that religious prejudice, rather than prejudice based on nationality or ethnicity, is the ‘“final frontier” for diversity, a place where individuals are willing to express negative attitudes’ (Hargreaves et al., 2020: 10, 57–58). In the UK, discrimination against Muslims stands out in this picture. Whereas, overall trends of racism and religious discrimination may show decline (Weller et al., 2015), the trend for discrimination against Muslims shows the reverse (Modood, 2019). Moreover, attitudes towards those who are religiously different in the UK are largely tolerant, but people feel least positive towards Muslims. Opinion polls have routinely found that over half think Islam is not compatible with ‘British values’, in stark contrast to over 90 per cent of Muslims reporting a strong sense of belonging to Britain (Ipsos Mori, 2018), and on a range of measures people from different ethnic and religious backgrounds report greater discomfort with and harder attitudes towards Muslims than ethnic diversity more generally (Ballinger, 2018, chapter 8; EB 437 2015; also Hargreaves et al., 2020; Storm et al., 2017). While controversies and challenges in recent decades have arisen in relation to accommodating a number of faiths as part of contemporary religious diversity in the UK, Muslims and Islam have attracted particular attention and shone an acute light on these issues. A further important

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aspect of this has been related to issues terrorism and extremism— whether violent or non-violent—and the process of securitization that has subsequently focussed on Muslims and Islam. The convert here emerges as a controversial public and political figure, his or her conversion often portrayed as a kind of cultural or political betrayal and associated with extremism (Chapter 2; for media representations see Sealy, 2017; Spoliar & van den Brandt, 2020). In this climate it is perhaps no surprise that converts face considerable difficulty and discrimination from that and those which they are deemed to have ‘left’, from family, friends and more widely in society. They also, however, face discrimination from born Muslim communities, or that and those they are supposed to be ‘joining’. It is these patterns of how converts are made strange, how they are seen and positioned as strangers that this chapter explores. It looks at, on the one hand, how they become estranged from the former and also how they are kept strange by the latter. These two processes also point to how converts are misrecognised and denied hospitality, appearing as negativised strangers. The idea of the stranger, which is fundamental to the concept of hospitality, will be explored here in more detail in relation to how they are seen by others emerges in their narratives. As such, and to a large extent, this chapter elaborates the negative stranger, how the stranger appears as a figure of the ‘Other’; how the stranger appears to lack ‘place’ in society and appears stuck between opposing and often competing positions. This chapter, then, provides the first half of an answer to the question of what type of stranger converts are, before the following chapter goes on to address converts as strangers from their own perspective.

On Estrangement In relation to (repeatedly) being asked about ‘the rules’ of Islam, Saiorse recalled a conversation: It’s like, ‘Don’t you find it difficult?’ They all say, ‘Was that the hardest part?’ No, the hardest part was telling my family. It was like, ‘The rules,

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you can’t do this and you can’t do that. Don’t you find that difficult?’ No, just telling my family was the difficult part!

The following extended passage from Gayle expands on what telling the family can be like: Okay, my erm I have a son, a daughter, a grandson and I had a mother. My father was dead at that time, my mother was the person I looked after err on a part time basis. She was a lot older. I was her only child, so she ignored it all, she would not accept it, she ignored it. She constantly played this little game of ‘I’ll give you ham sandwiches’, and ‘I’ve got the neighbour to get you liqueur chocolates’, and ‘take that thing off your head’, and ‘oh, show more skin’, and all this kind of stuff, and ‘you don’t really believe that’. Err, my son lives and works in London. And when I went up to [visit] him after I’d told him [I’d converted]. It was a Saturday, he marched me down to the centre of Xxxxx, into a shop, insisted I bought a Pakistani outfit, clothes, headdress and then went to the nearest loo and changed and then took me to a pub to celebrate. I said ‘George, I can’t go into this place err wearing this.’ ‘Oh yes you can. You can drink coke, it’s fine.’ So on a Saturday night I was inside a very raucous pub in Xxxxx with some very drunk people dressed completely head to foot in Pakistani gear, which I didn’t like, it didn’t fit me; I felt very uncomfortable in celebrating the fact I was a Muslim, that’s how he dealt with it. Erm he, for 10 years he supported me on that but then started finding it more challenging. I had supported him when he came out earlier when he was, as he was, is gay. I supported him on that so he felt he had to support me on this if you see what I mean. Then it, after 10 years it got a bit challenging, ‘oh come on Mum. Now really, now go back to norm’, you know. He never said that but I could see him struggling. He’s now worked through that and is back more comfortable with it. Err my daughter didn’t speak to me for 11.5 years but then she came back, and suddenly, ‘cause of a friend’s suicide. She had nothing to do with Islam, and we are now close - as close as you can be to a nonMuslim and a Muslim in the respect of we can text each other whenever we want to, we meet up maybe once a month. Err she had made the big step of saying when she gets married, I can wear a headscarf. I can wear whatever I like indeed if the rest of the people don’t like it, tough, they

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can just go and disappear. So that’s a massive thing, err more massive than anyone can really realise. Err and that’s, she actually invited me to her house two years ago for lunch before Christmas, which was the first time she would sit and eat in a place with me since I had become Muslim, which is… Well that’s not quite true, after 4.5 years, the first 4.5 years was okay, then we had 11.5 years ‘no way am I going into a café anywhere with this woman. You are not my mother.’

Gayle was pensive at this point of the narrative in contrast to her generally confident, assertive demeanour; she looked down more, into the distance more, and fiddled with the brass number plate on the wooden table of the café we sat in. This passage begins to highlight the various responses converts can get and it is perhaps no surprise that these aspects of the narrative that dwell on this estrangement emerge strongly in relation to friends and family, with family generally being the more significant. These passages were always, and more than most, pregnant with welling emotion; at times marked by a smile, a laugh, other times by sarcasm, a quieter moment, or even tears. We can begin to see in these passages the gap between converts’ experience and the perceptions of outsiders. While for Saiorse the most important and hardest aspect is maintaining existing close relationships and concern over how they will be affected by her conversion, the questioner in the above exchange struggles to even hear this because they are focussed on pressing her about ‘the rules’, thereby containing her story and her ability to tell it. It is significant that it is precisely this kind of perception and discourse on Islam that is present in the wider socio-cultural context that goes a long way to producing the kind of anxiety Saiorse experienced in this regard. As a result of these kinds of responses, many converts employ various tactics as they gradually integrate certain changes into their daily lives before ‘coming out’, to use a common phrase from the narratives. For example, Richard hid his conversion from his family for three years to prevent them from being able to say that he was different since becoming Muslim. He related how he wanted to prevent them being able to say that ‘”Oh, you can see he’s gone weird.” So, I thought no, I won’t say anything, and then you can’t use that line’.

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This is especially so for female converts when changes in clothing form visual indicators of their conversion and ‘change’. Simran, for example, who had been brought up Sikh, talks about adapting her clothing and covering her head with large hoods or a wrapping in a ‘more western style to please her [mum]’. To justify this, she would at times lie about having conditioner in her hair to explain the covering. It is only after a period in which confidence develops sufficiently, or the burden of pretending becomes too onerous, that they, as Simran among several others phrased it, ‘come out’.

A Continuum of Estrangement As a result of changes in relationships such as these, Ramahi and Suleiman (2017) have suggested that converts find themselves moved into a position of being an ‘intimate stranger’ in relation to close family members, a term they employ to capture ‘benign neglect’—indifference on the part of family members and a disconnect between how the convert and their families perceive their conversion. Nevertheless, as the above examples have already begun to illustrate, while ‘intimate stranger’ fits some well, it doesn’t capture the range of reactions that converts face. Experiences varied from pleasure, to indifference, to extreme pressure and even abuse and ostracism. Rather than a single concept then, this is better understood as a continuum in order to capture the variance in experience, how this can change (as with Gayle and her daughter), and the bewilderment, suspicion and hostility that many experience. At the more positive end of the continuum, Lewis, for example, talked about his mum being pleased that ‘she had got her son back’ as she recognised his happiness and fulfilment. A couple of others talked about being surprised by their parents’ ‘as long as you’re happy’ reaction, representing a level of indifference. Yet for others, the reaction is harder. Richard’s tactic mentioned above, for instance, was ultimately unsuccessful and his mother still did not speak to him. Significantly also, is that it seems that ethnic minority converts on the whole (though certainly not exclusively) suffer at the hands of their family more than white converts (conveyed by Cara, see Chapter 2). The term ‘intimate stranger’ appears far too

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benign to be able to encompass some people’s experiences. Rizwan, who was brought up Hindu, was physically beaten and had to leave home. Zaara, who was brought up Hindu/Sikh, and Gayle, who was Christian, were both ostracised by their families. Simran’s mum still wasn’t speaking to her at the time of the interview. These kinds of reactions are frequently contextualised in wider geo-political issues that play out at a local level. Simran, for instance, situates the animosity she experienced from her extended family and her mum in the ‘bad blood’ that continues to exist between Sikh and Muslim communities stemming from the ‘backdrop’ of post-partition politics, community relations also referred to by Zaara. Friends are the other intimates where things change and a variety of responses are found, although friends proves a more flexible category than that of family for converts to manage, where sub-categories of friends can be distinguished. A distinction in this is often made between friends and close friends, or as Kate, an eighteen year old Black British convert who hadn’t yet told all her friends because of hostility she had already faced from some, put it, a distinction between friends and ‘really, like, friends friends, friends friends friends’. Nicola, for instance, at a particularly poignant part of her interview talked about how many of her friends hadn’t known that for a long time, after having been out for an evening together, ‘when I went home I used to feel empty’, and so didn’t appreciate her gradual inner journey to Islam. Anna says that, ‘And people who know me they see that I’m… they can see that I’m happier and… they see a difference in me but basically can see I’m still that same person’. Likewise, Mrs Ahmed, who was the ‘newest’ convert I spoke to and hadn’t yet made any Muslim friends beyond her husband’s family, says that some of her friends, ‘others looking in’, ‘have a bit fallen through the wayside’ and were ‘surprised’; while others, ‘some of my closer friends… who maybe know me a bit better can understand it a bit more’. Likewise, Rachel relates: Erm so although there were sort of peaks and troughs, I’d say there were more troughs than peaks at the beginning with lots of questions of why have I bothered to do this because I’d lost lots of friends who were nonMuslim ‘cause they didn’t agree with what I did. They didn’t agree that

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I didn’t drink anymore. That was a lot of people’s main problem, that I didn’t want to drink alcohol anymore, which I thought was a really strange thing. But then thinking back about it, the friends that I did have, most of the socialising that we did was going out to clubs and drinking so to them it was like ‘well, what are we gonna do with each other now you don’t drink?’… But I’ve also found that the friends I did lose were the ones that were sort of convenience friends, the friends that I’ve kept are friends that I’ve had since I was little, since I was older, but they’re all more genuine friends that we can talk about things and can be open, they don’t judge. So it’s, it’s been eye opening in terms of the quality of people I have around me as well, which is a good thing overall, although it doesn’t feel very nice, you know, as it’s happening.

Estrangement and Islamophobia The process of being made strange is not only one experienced in relation to those to whom one is close, however. It also emerges in a wider social sense of no longer fitting into the social imaginary. Being positioned as strange in society more generally is dominated by the trope of ‘betrayal’ and can result in verbal and physical abuse in the street. Richard, while he was walking to a mosque, for instance, talks about being challenged in the street when a guy tried to punch him shouting, ‘you’re a disgrace to your country’. Zaara related being shouted at in the street when she was with her children and being called a ‘terrorist bitch’. Vidya talks about previously wearing niqab and dealing with being verbally abused and spat at in the streets. This repositioning can further be seen in the form of direct questioning or having phrases like ‘Paki lover’ shouted at them. It is also captured in instances such as a comment Saoirse overheard a mother make to her daughter at a bus stop in reference to what the mother felt was an incongruity between Saoirse’s white face and headscarf: ‘I don’t know why these girls do it, they get married to these Asian people and they change their life. You know, they put a scarf on and they think they’re one of them’. Saoirse here is seen as having chosen to become someone else and chosen to leave her ethnic group. The trope of betrayal, as well as the other terms such as that hurled at Zaara, give a stark example of how converts can become the negativised stranger.

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While these kinds of views might be at a more extreme end, they are so on a scale where Islam and Muslims, and converts for becoming ‘one of them’, are seen as alien, as not belonging, as strangers in the negative sense, and to whom recognition is withheld and hospitality not offered. Such explicitly aggressive forms of Islamophobia occur more rarely and briefly in the narratives, however. More common are subtle rather than explicit forms (Moosavi, 2015). Subtle forms can emerge in the background as a general awareness which colours the way converts feel and experience the social world and things that occur in day to day life. Several express a subtle, felt awareness of change in people’s behaviour towards them, such as small avoidances or looks. This was palpable when Nicola related an experience on the bus to work, a local journey she had taken many times in her hometown but that was now suffused by a different atmosphere: I’d get the bus to work – oh my God. Nobody would sit next to me on the bus in the morning. First of all, I didn’t notice it and then it was like the bus is kind of full but nobody’s sitting there. And it was, like, oh, okay [...] And it was like, what are these people worried about? It was really, really… I just wanted to say to these people do you think I’m gonna bite or something? Am I smelling okay?

Along these lines the political and social atmosphere and shifts in this psycho-social background can be felt keenly. Some, for instance, talked about how seeing incidents on the news involving Muslims heightens their awareness of their surroundings as they move through public spaces following these reports. Amber, a 33-year-old administrator who lives in London, for example, struggles to talk about actual incidences of Islamophobia she has faced, even when she suggests them, but instead refers to the atmosphere she feels when Muslims are in the news and how this affects her experience of the city in a state of constant anticipation. Whether explicit or subtle, physically or verbally violent, or even none of these, converts become all too aware of how the way they are seen and positioned by others has changed, and how the social spaces and their atmosphere that had previously been familiar are now very different.

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Thus, through explicit and subtle ways, British converts are repositioned as part of the cultural landscape, no longer of the majority but part of a minority (Jensen, 2008; van Nieuwkerk, 2004). White converts can be ‘re-ethnicized’ and become decentred as no longer of the majority but rather as part of an ethno-religious minority; they have become religiously, and thereby culturally ‘other’, a process that represents a conflation of the religious with the cultural and ethnic. A conflation of religion, ethnicity and culture is also present in the fact that while white converts are estranged from the majority, ethnic minority converts pass invisible from this gaze: they are already racialised as other and go unnoticed as converts by the white majority. They do, nevertheless, often face estrangement from their more immediate community, tied to similar processes as discussed in relation to family relationships above. These represent just some of the ways in which the experiences of converts of different backgrounds relate to broader racialization and ethnicization dynamics and local, national and international social and political events and processes.

The ‘Immigrant’ Experience The discussion so far forms an important point of comparison relevant to multiculturalism. Within literature on multiculturalism in Britain the category ‘British Muslim’ generally refers to those who were born Muslim; that is, born into a Muslim family who emigrated to Britain, or are the children, grandchildren (and so on) of migrants. As such, the framework is based on a post-migration background with British Muslims resultingly being conceptualised as an ethno-cultural or ethnoreligious minority. As Roy rightly observes, ‘Islam in the West has been systematically researched through the lenses of sociology of immigration and ethnic studies’ (Roy, 2006: 103). Along these lines of seeing Muslims in ‘ethnic’ terms it has been suggested that ‘a White British convert… undergoes the “immigrant experience” of having to integrate into a society in which, paradoxically, [s/]he is already culturally a part’ (Suleiman, 2015: 6). This has a common-sense appeal, yet on

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closer inspection can serve to obscure particular aspects of converts’ experiences. Many converts of course are not immigrants. Others, especially those of Hindu or Sikh background, may have immigration backgrounds although not be immigrants themselves. Some converts are immigrants, European or non-, having moved to Britain either long- or short-term. These converts may have converted either before or after coming to Britain.1 They will have all gone through an immigrant experience, albeit of different kinds. This would be so, however, not in relation to their being Muslim. What is more intriguing, and I suggest more illuminating, are precisely those reasons converts are not undergoing the immigrant experience. It is this, moreover, that suggests the fruitfulness of employing Simmel’s conception of the stranger. It is, for example, as a result of cultural nearness that the critiques they make of Britain are seen in many ways as unremarkable (Chapter 7)—it is, after all, perfectly normal for people to criticise and be able to criticise their own country, and this marks some ways in which cultural nearness emerges. Moreover, while converts’ organisational or institutional affiliations, lifestyle patterns, friendship groups and so on may change, many of my participants continue to live, work, play, walk, take public transport, shop and so on in the country, city, town or village in which they did all those things prior to their conversion. It is precisely this that can cause much of the difficulty. The places, buildings, roads, faces, routes, language and so on have not changed. Nevertheless, the ways they feel, relate and react to them, and are felt and reacted to by them or within them, have. Furthermore, patterns of discrimination are different. While experiencing discrimination in many ways similar to born Muslims, converts also face discrimination of both a different feel and sort. This is suggested by the trope of ‘betrayal’ itself in the discriminatory discourse from nonMuslims, family and friends—a betrayer or traitor is after all an insider rather than an outsider. This is especially true for white converts when we look beyond the family because of the importance of the visible in these forms of discrimination, where Islam and Muslims are framed as ‘other’ 1 See

Krotofil (2011), for discussion of Polish migrants who have converted to Islam.

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in the national context. For converts of Hindu or Sikh background, the betrayal links to politics of ethnic and religious relations more directly related to India, Bangladesh and Pakistan (although Britain is of course historically entwined here too). ‘Betrayal’ again speaks of the entanglement of ethnicity, culture and religion in regard to Islam. It represents not just the view of the foreignness of these three, but also the perception of threat seen as inherent in them. The Islamophobia they face from non-Muslims can be different precisely because they are not undergoing the ‘immigrant experience’. It is, however, and especially when family is set aside, relations with and being positioned by born Muslims that feature heavily in the narratives, and it is this that rest of the chapter turns to. Again, the conflation of religion, culture and ethnicity can also be seen at play. In relation to born Muslim communities the positioning is also one that is ethnicised, and in this way also reflects the conflation between religion, ethnicity and culture. Moosavi (2015) has argued that white British converts experience a loss of white privilege in relation to Muslims. Moosavi argues that: ‘The binary understanding of whiteness = privilege and non-whiteness = disprivilege must therefore be reconsidered… in some contexts, whiteness can signal subordination rather than dominance, marginality rather than normativity, and disadvantage rather than privilege’ (2015: 1930). Gayle captures aspects of how this privilege might be lost as well as used, and how this can be frustrating on both counts. She describes, for instance, the strange position white converts find themselves in, when they might be ‘like goats – wheeled out when useful’. She also recounted a time she had gone to a halal butcher in London with her son so he could cook her dinner, ‘I walked into this butchers. The men turned their back on me, physically turned their back on me and refused to serve me. He [her son] had to come into the shop eventually to allow me to be served. They were Pakistani and they were not serving this white woman who’s wearing a scarf. That’s being a revert’. Such a loss of privilege may help understand why the emphasis on discrimination from Muslims may be the stronger feature in the narratives. However, that this emphasis on discrimination from Muslims more than non-Muslims is also true for ethnic minority converts suggests this is not so straightforward.

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To understand this, it is necessary to return to the national level. Whereas, for white converts the process of their whiteness moving from an unmarked norm to a marked, ethnicised identity comes as something new and often somewhat of a shock, ethnic minority converts carry over previous understandings and experiences of how society is racialised and ethnicised. Thus, while white converts may experience a loss of white privilege in how they are estranged from majority society and now positioned as part of Muslim communities, they can simultaneously maintain a position of privilege on the basis of their whiteness vis-à-vis non-white converts in relation to both. This does not in fact go unmentioned by white converts themselves, although this is often a result of it being pointed out to them by ethnic minority convert friends or by witnessing the different treatment they can receive from born Muslims. In fact, it is precisely for these reasons Adele remarks how most of her experiences in relation to born Muslims have ‘been fairly positive. Maybe for the wrong reasons’. Something of this is captured in the following passage from Rosie’s narrative, where she relates a discussion she’d had with a friend, also a convert, about her mum’s worry she was going to be seen as ‘other’ and ‘resign my white privilege’ (as Rosie, not her mum, phrased it): And my friend said ‘but you weren’t’ and I said ‘why?’ And she said ‘look’, she’s like, ‘Look we were in the queue up there and that old man who started chatting at us started chatting with you first before he started chatting with me because you still are white’. She’s like, ‘even though you’ve got a scarf on and so you’re not totally white but you still have it easier than somebody like me who is visibly Muslim and an ethnic minority’. And I felt that was really interesting because it was true in that case. And so I started sort of watching how things happened and I have friends who have been through horrible racist incidents and I haven’t. I mean knock wood hopefully I never do but it was like, you know I’ve had friends who have been told go back where you come from and this and that, and I am not saying I’m immune to that, I have been, you know said things like, you know, ‘seen any terrorists lately, love?’ and stuff like that, but it’s very, very, very um minor compared to some of the things my friends have been…

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This is further exemplified in what Vidya, who had been brought up Hindu and had been Muslim for seven years when we spoke, presented to me as her theory on these issues as a preface to a story of how her and a convert friend of hers were treated differently: There’s this concept that I would say of a coveted revert . If you [me, the interviewer] were to become Muslim, you would be what I would call a ‘coveted revert’ because of your ethnicity, because of background, because of your skin colour (…), which means that everybody will help you, everybody. You’ll be at everybody’s house for dinner every single day of the week, they’ll give you a place to stay, they’ll find you a wife, they’ll, you know, take care of your babies. Everything is yours because you are a coveted revert. Then those of us, and I say us because I include myself in this specific category of reverts, are not necessarily the non-coveted ones but we are the ‘ethnic converts’, which means that because we come from some type of ethnicity that general Muslims call you know a more diverse minority type of ethnicity, we somehow can manage alone and we somehow can manage without the wide acceptance and support of the community because of our ethnicity.

As will be elaborated on below, that white converts are supported, married and fed to these levels is not necessarily the case. But Vidya’s passage does raise an important issue to do with the relation between ethnicity, culture and religion. Converts of a South-Asian background can, on the one hand, face extreme hostility from family, and on the other, be less visible as converts to born Muslim communities because they are seen as ethnically and culturally unproblematic, and therefore in little or no need of any specifically religious hospitality. In contrast to converts of South-Asian origin being ‘new’ but being seen as able to culturally get on with it, several of my white participants related stories about the constant assumption of being ‘new’ even if they had been Muslim for a number of years, or being asked where they, or their husbands, ‘were really from’. Rachel, whose husband Matthew is also a convert and both of whom are White British, related the following: Yeah, ‘cause people get very excited about the idea of a white-white couple, I find that weird. I had it, I went to baby group erm that’s based

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at the mosque… it’s quite a nice mix of converts, Arab Muslims, Asian Muslims erm some are new immigrants some have been here donkeys’ years. Erm and this grandmother came up to me and said, ‘Oh so how long have you been Muslim?’ So I told her and she said, ‘Oh and where are you from?’ I said ‘down the road’. ‘Oh right, where’s your husband from?’ ‘Wiltshire’. [Then] I got, ‘Where was he from before then?’ ‘Wiltshire’. ‘Oh, but where is he really from?’ ‘Wiltshire’. ‘So where are his parents from?’ ‘Wiltshire’. It went on like this for a good 10 minutes and then I said, ‘he’s white’. ‘Oh, right. Mashallah!’

From Stranger Functionalised to Stranger Refused In general, relations to born Muslim communities do not always meet expectations of being welcoming and friendly, even if they appear to be so in the first instance. A warm welcome in which they are greeted and hugged as a ‘brother’ or ‘sister’ following their shahada can be nice, a warmth they have not previously experienced. It is often, however, also a bit weird. Stephen, who had previously been Christian, was 56 when I met him and had been Muslim for over five years. He captures this here, ‘So everyone wants to come and hug you and get a bit of that purity from you. It’s a bit unusual situation [sic] [laughs awkwardly]’. Where this intial warmth is forthcoming, this often cools and converts may come to question the motivations of the initial warmth (Al-Qwidi, 2002; Roald, 2004); that is to say that the hospitality with which converts are met comes to feel shallow and fleeting. This may leave some feeling functionalised, greeted warmly for their purity on the basis that they are ‘new’ and untainted by sin and, therefore, greeted in this way for reward can be accrued by being close to them, rather than greeted as an individual person and a co-religionist. This can leave some feeling like something of a ‘collectors’ ‘item’, as Richard put it, or ‘a notch on the bed post’, ‘an arrow in the quiver’, or as ‘window dressing’ as it was also variously construed. If this is the more benign end of the continuum for how converts as strangers in relation to born Muslim communities are met, there are also

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a range of less benign responses. Gayle’s narrative again provides a good introductory sense of these: [Y]ou get two schools of thought: you’re either Madonna and everybody wants to be as close to you and your skin because you are a revert; ‘aaaah, you’re wonderful, you’re so special’, which drives you nuts and can be overwhelming. Or you’re a leper; you can’t be a Muslim, you’re just pretending to be a Muslim because you weren’t born a Muslim so you don’t have the understanding. So, therefore, you have to be very careful because possibly you might just be trying to worm your way into our, our families, our communities, our circles to spy on us for the government or something else. Or just because you’re one of these freaky individuals that is just actually wanting to play at being Muslim and it’s gonna be all right in a minute and you’ll go back to your normal.

Towards the less benign and indifferent end of the scale converts can experience outright suspicion and rejection (Roald, 2004; Zebiri, 2008) or be seen as ‘religious imposters’ (Rogozen-Soltar, 2012). Rather than functionalised strangers they become refused strangers. This exclusion can be based on converts’ background, being from a different culture and not speaking Arabic or ‘cultural’ languages such as Urdu or Punjabi (Roald, 2004; Zebiri, 2002); and especially for black converts, outright racism (Zebiri, 2008). That ethnic minority converts, whether Black or South-East Asian, suffer direct racism from Muslim communities was something conveyed by Cara (Chapter 2), who commented on how they often needed greater care and support from New Muslim circles owing to their experiences. In terms of Black converts specifically, they are not well-represented in the sample drawn on for this book, and the Black converts I spoke to did not discuss any specific anti-Black racism they had experienced. Other studies that have focussed on Black Muslims in Britain, however, have highlighted specific issues that Black Muslims face and it would be fair to assume that Black converts face similar discrimination. This was something that I heard of anecdotally from some of my participants with Black convert friends. Richard Reddie, in his ground-breaking study of Black Muslims in Britain argued that British Islam cannot be seen as a ‘post-race faith’ owing to anti-Black racism (Reddie, 2009) and a recent

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report has highlighted the issue of anti-black racism directed at Black British Muslims (Black Muslim Forum 20202 ). These kinds of issues might also lead to pressure to conform to certain practices and exclusion without such conformity. In one of the most pained passages in any of the narratives, Kamal, who was white British, had been Muslim for 7 ½ years and was struggling as a result of a marriage that had brought her to a crisis point in her faith, relates how as a result of changes she made to conform to the practices of her husband and his family, she lost one of her sons: He ‘left home and I think he felt that it was somewhere he couldn’t return to, this was not his home anymore. He loved me, he was very close to me, but he lost his mother… And I, if it’s the one thing I feel really, really bad about that I was just simply taking his mother away from him. I was not a person he recognised anymore. I will always feel bad for that and there’s nothing I can do about it’. Other painful experiences that appear include subjugation into domestic life and physical and verbal abuse. For some these are accepted for a while as they are told and believe that ‘that is how it is’ and they must ‘endure’ it. As Julia, a mixed race convert of 6 years, remarked: ‘you start hearing domestic violence in Muslim families. You think well maybe I’m going through the same thing. Maybe it’s supposed to happen like that; maybe it’s Islamic’. This can create an unbearable pressure to conform if one wishes to maintain one’s faith. There is a distinct gender angle to this where women suffer more than men, but it is not exclusive to women. Rizwan’s narrative was dominated by stories of domestic violence at the hands of his wife, passivity to it from her family and the local community, as well as the police, and references to others with similar experiences. Rosie talked about the ‘cultural expectations’ she faced ‘as a Palestinian wife’ from her ex-husband and his family. From the point of view of her new in-laws she was seen to have become Palestinian upon marriage, as this is where her husband and his family were from. As such, she was expected to conform to their ideas of social and political beliefs and 2 See

https://blackmuslimforum.org/2020/04/05/they-had-the-audacity-to-ask-me-if-i-was-mus lim-when-they-saw-me-a-black-woman-in-niqab-experiences-of-black-british-muslims/.

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behaviour. Related to domestic duties and how cooking should be done, she lamented that ‘I was, you know, expected as, as a Palestinian wife to, on a daily basis, produce these dishes that take like eight hours to cook and I, and I remember thinking “there’s gotta be short cuts”’. She remarks of her ex mother-in-law, however, ‘But she could tell, she could tell, she was, I, I swear that woman, she’s got like a sixth sense about when I was trying to cheat in the kitchen’. Politically she was expected to “take up the cause”, where Muslim-ness and Palestinian-ness were seen as entwined: ‘when I was married I was expected to become Palestinian, I was expected to immediately adopt the cause which is kinda funny because my ex, he used to sort of conflate giving dawah to non-Muslims with convincing them about the Palestinian cause […] um I was expected to adopt a particular side of that cause. Within the Palestinian side there are all sorts of factions and I was expected to adopt the flavour of the month of whatever faction they were supporting at that time. And it would change’. Relatedly, she was also expected to raise her children with a particular Palestinian sense of identity. She, for instance, contrasted the lapsed ‘myth of return’ of some diasporic populations with one that was very much alive for Palestinians in Britain: ‘That doesn’t happen with Palestinians, the Palestinians are waiting to go home, they’ve got the keys around their necks and they are waiting. And so because I was married into that as it were and I was expected to raise my kids with that mentality. That was a struggle’. At times this conflation and refusal may be aggressive. This passage from Saiorse captures her stranger-ness being refused, and it being refused on grounds of her ethnic and cultural background: And this went on and on; ‘Well you’re…’, what was the word? You know I’m glad I forgot it ‘cause it was a horrible thing to say. Y’know, you’re this and ‘I’m gonna take your scarf off.’ Erm, ‘Go back to your life. You’re European – you shouldn’t wear a scarf. You should be out drinking and partying.’ And I was like ‘No, I’ve been practising Islam for this long, who are you to tell me that?’ ‘I’m a born Muslim’ [he replied]. I said ‘What difference does it make? It says in the Qur’an that… a white person has nor superiors over a black person and a black person over a white person [sic], so y’know we’re no different in the eyes of Islam. A Muslim is a Muslim. If Allah’s chosen you to be a Muslim, you’re a Muslim. You’re

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no better than me ‘cause you’re a born Muslim. I’m not better than you because I’ve become Muslim.’ So he’s like ‘You’re not Muslim anyway. Your mum’s English and your dad’s Irish.’ ‘So? What difference does it make? They’re not Muslim, doesn’t mean I can’t be a Muslim’… Like, how can you say that?

Here, the potential positive presence of the stranger is denied through the refusal of the stranger. Moreover, this refusal is based on the claim that as white, with English and Irish parents and a Catholic background, she cannot be Muslim—Muslim here interpreted as an exclusive identity you are born into. In reference to such cases, and in very strong terms, Rosie, not only reflecting on her own personal experience but also those of other converts she has worked with in her role at a local New Muslim organisation over the years, talked about ‘religious abuse’. Rizwan likewise characterised such instances of refusal ‘spiritual abuse’ and ‘convert abuse’. The characterisation of these experiences in these terms highlights how, even when the root of the discrimination is seen to result from issues related to ‘culture’, it is conceptualised in language that positions it as related to religion. That is, the discrimination is interpreted against their claims as religious subjects, their religiosity; recognition of their Islamic subjectivity and hospitality in the fold of Islam is denied. These then represent how converts are misrecognised by being seen in exclusively cultural and ethnic terms and, moreover, how as a result of misrecognition and a lack of hospitality they ‘can suffer real damage, real distortion… misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being’ (Taylor, 1994: 25). Further to the refusal of the stranger, however, Saiorse’s passage also brings out the claim to belong, and to belong on the basis of her religiosity. As she elsewhere remarked ‘It’s like he told me not to be who I am’. Additionally, this is a claim that this is (necessarily) tied to a normative religious universality that is opposed to internal discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity. For both white converts and ethnic minority converts, the emphasis discussed in this section may reflect that these negative experiences are felt particularly because they are trying to establish their sense of belonging in relation to Islam and Muslims and

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thus feel more keenly that what they discover is a religion that does not meet their expectations of being ‘stubbornly egalitarian’ (Ahmed, 1992: 63). The processes and experiences described so far can lead to converts feeling isolated and dismayed, especially given a lack of support when they are also experiencing a difficult time in relation to other friends and family following their conversion (Ramahi & Suleiman, 2017; Zebiri, 2008). The sense of being positioned as a stranger, in its negativised sense, and having their voices ‘filtered out’ (Suleiman, 2013: 19) is something that converts can experience not only from the dominant cultural group they are perceived to have ‘left’, but also from the British Muslim communities with which multiculturalism has been centrally concerned and they are supposedly seeking to ‘join’. This chapter then has suggested that converts (re)positioning by others works against their claims to belong in Islam on the terms of religiosity, to belong in Britain culturally, and to belong in Britain as religious subjects on the basis of Britain being a multifaith, pluralistic society. How converts themselves establish these relations and forms of belonging is taken up in the next chapter.

References Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam: Modern roots of a historical debate. Yale University Press. Al-Qwidi, M. (2002). Understanding the stages of conversion to Islam: The voices of british converts, PhD thesis, University of Leeds. http://etheses.whiterose. ac.uk/485/. Last Accessed 2 September 2016. Ballinger, S. (2018). State of the nation: What does Britain think about race and diversity today? In S. Ballinger (Ed.), Many rivers crossed . British Future. Eurobarometer (EB). (2015). Special eurobarometer report 437: Discrimination in the EU in 2015, European Union. https://op.europa.eu/en/publicationdetail/-/publication/d629b6d1-6d05-11e5-9317-01aa75ed71a1/languageen/format-PDF. Last Accessed 24 April 2020. Hargreaves, J., Kessler, E., Izamoje, D., & Symon, A. (2020). How we get along: The diversity study of England and wales 2020. Woolf Institute.

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Ipsos Mori. (2018, February). A review of survey research on Muslims in Britain. https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/publication/documents/201803/a-review-of-survey-research-on-muslims-in-great-britain-ipsos-mori_0. pdf. Accessed 27 August 2019. Jensen, T. G. (2008). To be “Danish”, becoming “Muslim”: Contestations of national identity? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34 (3), 389–409. Krotofil, J. (2011). “If I am to be a Muslim, I have to be a good one”: Polish migrant women embracing Islam and reconstructing identity in dialogue with self and others. In K. Górak-Sosnowska (Ed.), Muslims in Poland and Eastern Europe (pp. 154–168). University of Warsaw. Modood, T. (2019, June 25). Oral evidence: Islamophobia, HC 1828, Home Affairs Committee. https://www.parliamentlive.tv/Event/Index/507 388ce-dcc4-42d1-a1b0-3f5dbfa0b2d8. Accessed 27 August 2019. Moosavi, L. (2015). The racialization of Muslim converts in Britain and their experiences of Islamophobia. Critical Sociology, 41(1), 41–56. Ramahi, D. A., & Suleiman, Y. (2017). Intimate strangers: Perspectives on female converts to Islam in Britain. Contemporary Islam, 11(1), 21–39. Reddie, R. S. (2009). Black Muslims in Britain. Lion. Roald, A. S. (2004). New Muslims in the European context: The experience of scandinavian converts. Brill. Rogozen-Soltar, M. (2012). Managing Muslim visibility: Conversion, immigration, and Spanish imaginaries of Islam. American Anthropologist, 114, 611–623. Roy, O. (2006). Globalized Islam: The search for a new Ummah. Columbia University Press. Sealy, T. (2017). Making the “other” from “us”: The representation of British converts to Islam in mainstream British newspapers. Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 37 (2), 196–210. Spoliar, L., & van den Brandt, N. (2020). Documenting conversion: Framings of female converts to Islam in British and Swiss documentaries. European Journal of Women’s Studies Advance Online Publication. https://doi.org/10. 1177/1350506820920912. Storm, I., Sobolewska, M., & Ford, R. (2017). Is ethnic prejudice declining in Britain? Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minority Britons. The British Journal of Sociology, 68(3), 410–434. Suleiman, Y. (2013). Narratives of conversion to Islam in Britain: Female perspectives. University of Cambridge in association with The New Muslims Project.

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Suleiman, Y. (2015). Narratives of conversion to Islam in Britain: Male perspectives. University of Cambridge in association with The New Muslims Project. Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton University Press. van Nieuwkerk. (2004). Veils and wooden clogs don’t go together. Ethnos, 69 (2), 229–246. Weller, P., Purdam, K., Ghanea, N., & Cheruvallil-Contractor, S. (2015). Religion or belief, discrimination and equality: Britain in global contexts. Bloomsbury. Zebiri, K. (2008). British Muslim converts: Choosing alternative lives. Oneworld.

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My husband and I (we’re both converts) have found we somewhat don’t fit into the categories people like to create based on born Muslims (and many times by born Muslims). It’ll be great to speak to you more about it tomorrow.

I received this comment in an email exchange with Rachel prior to our meeting. This reflects the no-man’s land that converts can often find themselves in based on the perspectives of and how they are positioned by others, and the frames that are relied upon for this. Yet, it also hints that there is an alternative, something to be discussed, that can better accord with her and her husband’s own understanding of who they are and how they fit in. The stories I heard that afternoon, with their frustrations as well as the openings, oriented around grappling with a distinction between religion and culture that was complex and cross-cutting. This was to prove to be a strong feature across all the narratives I heard and forms the site on which converts’ claims to belong and relational positioning vis-à-vis aspects of society can be traced. Some two decades ago Franks (2000) suggested that the idea of a British Muslim convert can be hard to locate in relation to majority © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_7

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and minorities in society and Gallonier (2015) has highlighted how this is complicated by different historical legacies of colonialism and ‘race’ in different countries. In the previous chapter we saw how converts are misrecognised and suffer a lack of hospitality. It was shown how they are positioned by others as strangers; that is, as distant from born Muslims, to whom they remain strangers, and by those closest to them and by society more generally, to whom they become strangers. It was also shown that this (re)positioning of converts occurs as a misrecognition of their religious subjecthood, where they are or continue to be seen, and excluded, as the religious is conflated with ethnic and cultural bases. To see how converts sense of social identities emerge as they find their way in Islam and re-find their way in Britain, we can explore how religiosity cuts across the religion–culture divide and orients their relations to majority and minorities, especially born Muslim minorities, and what kind of groupings and solidarities result. To do this, we can point to another sense in which converts appear as strangers from that outlined in the previous chapter, and one which points to religiosity. The use of Simmel’s notion of religiosity here, understood as a ‘mode of being’, alerts us to how religiosity is the orienting and ‘actuating’ force; that is, it is religiosity that is the principal motivating factor in organising social and political relations. This comes through in how converts as strangers is a position that emerges as a subject position in their narratives. The guiding questions here are, how and in what relations do the aspects of nearness and distance emerge in the narratives? And what implications does this suggest for social and political belonging? It is, after all, a socio-political sense of identity that multiculturalism is foremost interested in when it comes to recognition, so it is instructive to look at how religiosity can also shape and orient, and be constitutive of, converts’ social relations. On this account the aspects of nearness and distance emerge not as a problem or position to be overcome, but as a critical form of opening up space for emergent subjectivities as positive and contributory and that helps us situate converts’ own sense of social belonging. Multiculturalism is concerned with how we come together (or not) as co-citizens and how we are to imagine and construct citizenship and civic life. Our view of difference, therefore, is one which is not based on ‘otherness, exclusive

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opposition, but specificity, variation, heterogeneity’ and is ‘a function of the relations between groups and the interaction of groups with institutions […] a social process of interaction and differentiation in which some people come to have a particular affinity’ (Young, 2011 [1990]: 171–172, emphasis in original). As part of identifying the ascribed negative and turning it into something positive ‘for which civic respect can be won’ (Modood, 2007: 41), the argument being made is that we must attend to the specifically religious basis of difference of subjecthood, where relational affinities of difference orient around religiosity rather than ethnicity, and that this must be given value in the political sphere. This chapter then looks at how relationships are built and experiences shared around religiosity and the cross-cutting patterns that emerge from this. Thus, it addresses how an account of the interpersonal relations that does not take religiosity into account fails to comprehend relations that weave together the social fabric of converts’ citizen-relations.

The Religiosity of the Stranger Converts are not ‘typical’ strangers. They are not a group that are most often focussed on when the notion is applied, such as migrants, asylum seekers, those living in extreme poverty, although some individuals might be one or more of these. As hospitality has highlighted, first and foremost, converts as strangers rests upon their religious subjecthood and, more specifically, their Islamic religious subjecthood, and more pointedly still, as their Islamic religious subjecthood intersects with their ethnicity. Central to this endeavour is charting the dynamics found in the religion–culture divide. This divide can be mapped onto Simmel’s notions of religiosity and religion. The religion side of the divide here becomes a parallel to religiosity, the culture side becomes a parallel to religion. Religion here forms a specific aspect of the culture side of this dynamic in relation to Islam as here religion refers to the forms that are necessarily brought into being in the world, actuated and continually reactuated by religiosity. These forms include, texts, textual interpretation, institutions, ritual, organisational structures and so on.

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What was important about the dynamics of belonging sketched in the previous chapter was not just that converts must stake out a way of being Muslim and belonging in Britain, but also that they must equally stake out a way of being British and belonging in Islam. Theirs is, by force of the contingent circumstances of history, politics and society, a process of struggling and striving for an expression of Islam that can ‘live, breathe and flourish in an English [or British] cultural idiom’.1 This chapter will look at how my participants narrate their own position in relation to born Muslims as well as majority society. It will also show how their social and political relations are better understood not solely or even primarily around racial and ethnic categories to the exclusion of the religious. In contrast, it will suggest that what emerges from the narratives is a far more nuanced picture of religion, ethnicity and culture and the connections between them as cross-cutting, but a picture also where religion is given more prominence than is usual in these debates. The stranger, conceived here as a form of belonging, contrasts with both the assimilationist account as well as the exclusionist account that were discussed in Chapter 6. In reference to the former, it is not premised on conformity or a matter of becoming ‘the same as’ in order to belong. In reference to the latter, it does necessarily usurp other forms and patterns as part of its own claims; it does not suggest that there is only one way of relating to the category, in this case ‘Muslim’. Rather, it is established through patterns of nearness and distance which, although significant and structuring, are not static and reified. The negotiations between religiosity and religion better reflect a form of what has been called ‘elastic orthodoxy’, or how we can see converts ‘work tactically within this framework [the local consensus on what it means to be Muslim], stretching it to apply to new contexts and situations’ (DeHanas, 2016: 78). In order to make this case, the following sections will detail how the aspects of nearness and distance cut across the religion–culture divide. Two important caveats and points of clarification are in order 1This quote is from Yahya Birt discussing his journey to Islam: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=yred5GxZ_nY&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR2wg3ei_urgjPeloc3k-jkdmbVrfkhcNO4T KefG8YCtwlq8JWHYxU-25IE.

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beforehand, however. First, religion and culture along with nearness and distance do not represent discrete categories or a neat division between these aspects. As will be shown, it is the dynamics between them are of importance. Secondly, neither do they suggest that what is referred to as ‘religious’ or ‘cultural’ is somehow inherently religious or cultural or can be designated as such. The exact features and practices that are narrated on one side or the other vary between individuals and even over time within individual narratives, there is no ‘typicality’ in this regard. As such, the focus is not the ‘whats’ (what is ‘religious’, what is ‘cultural’) but rather how and with what effects the aspects of religion and culture and nearness and distance emerge. That is, it is the religion– culture dynamic that forms the common feature across narratives despite individual trajectories and variances or socio-demographic characteristics—and this dynamic is the focus of the discussion (see also Sealy, in press).

Religiosity and Belonging in Britain In relation to the idea of majority we see religiosity emerging as the principal orienting factor for converts’ public identities in several ways: with regard to both cultural nearness as well as religious distance. In terms of religious distance this is so in relation to Britain as Christian and Britain as secular. Notably, however, the former takes a more personal expression and does not serve as a means of sense of alienation from Britain, it is a strong form of secularism where a sense of alienation in distance can emerge (cf Laborde, 2017). Distance in relation to Christianity as the dominant religion in Britain has two modes of expression. One is theological. The Trinity and the idea of Jesus being both human and divine in various Christian traditions, including the established Church of England, for example, are seen as unpersuasive and are contrasted with the simplicity and oneness of God in Islam (tawhid ). This might be a deeply personal sense of a lack of connection but can also be expressed in more generalised terms (a matter that will be returned to below).

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Relatedly, distance is expressed in how this links to praxis, predominantly in relation to their more immediate ‘community’, by which here I mean loosely their family (including extended), friends and neighbours or colleagues with whom they have some level of interaction and relationship in their day to day lives. In this way, this is a feature of the narratives of those who were previously Christian or brought up in a Christian household or community. Christianity is also often viewed as being largely a nominal, ‘cultural’ tradition, something identified with on the basis of its historical significance and cultural legacy but now too empty of spiritual content; a type of belonging without believing if you will. Sophie, who had previously been a practising Christian until converting to Islam in 2009, said, for instance, ‘I’m categorising and matching and shouldn’t really… but having been Christian, and I know how I was, you just do things for the sake of doing them and you don’t really have a purpose to do anything if that makes sense… [laughs]’. To quote Adele, who had grown up a practising Catholic and studied theology at a Catholic university: ‘it’s kind of like something people do traditionally and culturally now rather than it being something that people follow as a faith’. Adele talks about how her own sense of religiosity didn’t seem to fit in with her Catholicism, causing her to ‘feel like a stranger in there [meaning both her church and the Church]’. The way in which distance is narrated here is mirrored by those brought up in households or communities of minority faiths. These faith traditions are similarly seen to be theologically unpersuasive and a matter of inherited cultural practice rather than something more substantively religious. Vidya, for example, who gave Hinduism ‘a shot’ before finding and embracing Islam, found Hinduism lacking, being ‘more about culture and tradition’. These kinds of rejections are frequently related to their questioning why certain things are or are not done in a certain way but not getting satisfactory answers, or being told to not ask questions but just follow. Sanjay, a 46-year-old convert of 12 years who had been brought up Hindu, for instance, related a story where he asked, ‘How do you know God is blue? How do you know God has eight arms? How do you know God rides this tiger?… and the answer was either err a backhander across the top of my head or erm just a, “look, this is the way it is”’. Formerly nominal Christians or atheists might also

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have “tried” other religions before coming to Islam and similarly found them wanting spiritually and theologically. For instance, other religions Rosie looked at fell short of providing the right kind of balance between religiosity and religion. Buddhism, for example, seemed to her more like a ‘dressed up atheism’ for theological and philosophical reasons. This sense of a lack of spiritual depth, furthermore, has a parallel with a distance in relation to secularism, where that is taken its stronger, ideological sense akin to what has been called ‘radical’ or ‘programmatic’ secularism (Chapter 1). Here the distance is more pointedly critical and is as much about cultural distance as it is religious distance. What arises in this relation is critique of, on the one hand, certain aspects of western lifestyles as over-individualistic, materialistic and over-sexualised, especially of the female body (also P˛edziwiatr, 2017; Zebiri, 2008), as well as, on the other hand, of perceptions of the position of women in Islam as oppressed by cultural and group constraints and confined to passive, sexless domesticity. For my female participants, this was often a point they had to overcome in relation to their own perceptions of Islam but was also one where they would find a position that spoke to them and that contrasts with these perceptions of women. For Vidya, it was the framework of Islam that taught her ‘this is my body, this is my brain, this is my heart, this is my soul, these are my things’. Moreover, she emphasises that she is a strong Muslim woman who is comfortable with how she behaves, what she does and wears, and emphatically not ‘because someone tells me, not because some man comes and tells me what I should put on my body and what I shouldn’t put on my body, or the way I should act’. For Gayle, it was Islam that gave her a place to belong precisely because it helped her be ‘somebody that, hey, I needed to have an opinion, and I needed to say an opinion, and I had a life’. Yet this framework is activated from a sense of religiosity that holds the potential to learn ‘the true meaning of these things’ as Vidya put it. Julia also inveighs against a view of the oppressed, passive and sexless Muslim woman to dispel any sense of her alienness in this regard: I go into Ann Summers shops to look at vibrators and stuff. Like, people look at me and go ‘Oh God, does she actually have sex, d’you actually

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have sex with them? How can a guy find you attractive wearing all that?’ Well actually we don’t wear this at home. D’you know we we we actually dress up for our husbands, we wear makeup at home, we we wear lingerie at home, we actually wear short miniskirts at home, we wear leggings at home you know; we look attractive to our husbands at home and our family at home, you know. But yeah, I get that a lot. You get a lot of people like, ‘Shit man, she is actually buying a vibrator’. Yeah, we have sex love. And what I do? I wind them up and pull out the biggest black one. I’m like, ‘How much is this?’ Yeah, it’s funny.

The religious underpinning may contrast with a cruder secularism, but the resulting beliefs and values are seen as perfectly at home with secular values and ideals in many ways, where this is founded in a form of pluralistic secularity accommodative of the religious. The sense of distance established in these critiques is not about establishing unbelonging, it is about belonging as Muslim. They are a direct challenge and push back against sets of discourses which tout their ‘othering’ as religious subjects set against secularised understandings, as well as their being positioned as a cultural and religious ‘other’. This, therefore, suggests the congruity felt between being British and Muslim and the frustration at this being questioned. It also represents the claim that Islam belongs. The critiques of aspects of western lifestyles emergent in the narratives represent no crude ‘clash’ of cultures or values and aspects of Britain are not simply critical or rejectionist but are far more ambiguous. To appreciate this requires appreciating how cultural nearness emerges and is related to these points of distance. These points of nearness, or connection, to Britain and the culture or part of society they are so often positioned as having ‘left’ or ‘betrayed’, highlight rather the view of Islam’s compatibility with Britain. One way these emerge is in fairly simple statements and claims of normalcy, such as Richard’s declaration, ‘I’m just a normal bloke’. Very often, however, the claims are more explicit and bold. Richard, in discussing his attitude towards certain cultural adaptations he has and hasn’t made states, ‘I’m English. I live in England. Saudi is for the Saudis’. Likewise, Zaara declares forthrightly, ‘I’m still me. I’m still Zaara from the East-End’. These direct assertions are made in this way precisely because it is felt they need to be

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made in the face of the process of their being repositioned and dislocated from belonging. Significant is when they appear in the narrative. They very often appear in this explicit way embedded in stories of facing public forms of discrimination or abuse, either personal attacks or in broader reference to the social context and difficulties in being Muslim in Britain. In this way, they form a rebuttal and a challenge. In one passage, for instance, Zaara, when discussing discrimination and attacks against Muslim women and the government’s response, rails, ‘I was outraged, and I was furious, and I wanted to talk to Cameron.2 I wanted to phone him and say “you wanna come down the East End mate and have a pie ‘n’ mash3 with me and I’ll teach you about London culture”’. These assertions serve to deny their public identity being drawn into one of being part of an ethno-religious minority rather than as more simply British. There are times when what might be called more cultural aspects of Islam are highlighted, or the ‘pull factors’ beyond just faith. This is part of the ‘framework’ Islam provides for life and society. Abstention from alcohol and monetary interest are linked with less damaging ways of living for both self and society, for instance. Yet, in relation to changes in lifestyle such as these, which seem to suggest cultural distance from Britain, the ‘enhanced ethics’, to quote Rosie, that these are based on are seen to not only be the more significant aspect, but also to concord with rather than be distant from British values, which in turn ‘are totally in synch with my faith’. Islam’s compatibility with science and general scientific understandings of the world are also consistently emphasised, again highlighting how these are not alien and not as distant as they are often perceived to be. This also reflects and challenges the wider context in which science and religion are so often readily opposed, as well as the importance and relevance of scientific explanations and reasoning itself in the modern British context alongside explanations and reasonings based on faith. This echoes Bowker’s distinction between God as primary cause, but which may be ‘exercised through the secondary causalities in the created order on which we in general focus our attention’ (2015: 153). While it 2 David 3 Pie

Cameron, who was Prime Minister at the time of the instance being related. ‘n’ mash is a traditional working class dish from the East End of London.

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is stressed that scientific understandings have their limits, the importance of a scientific worldview within these (or what’s seen as its own) limits is not only an important justificatory aspect of the narratives, but also in several forms a significant barrier in understanding they had to overcome before accepting Islam.

Religiosity and Born Muslims For me, it was a very, very colourful way of seeing that, you know, really it’s about my way because essentially I have always been European, I can never become Eastern. My religion is an Eastern religion, but I can never become Eastern unless I incorporate that into my European way of thinking.

This quote is from Susanne’s narrative, relating her coming to realise the religion–culture divide and how people from different backgrounds expressed God. It highlights the distance between Eastern and European ways of thinking that became apparent to her through meeting other converts and Muslims in her area. For Susanne, this was an important step that enabled her to begin to unpack the religion–culture divide in a way that enabled her to begin to reconcile her own religiosity with forms of religion that were inevitably ethnically and culturally marked and embedded. This brings the discussion round to ways in which relations to born Muslim minorities emerge. Here, a key dynamic is religiosity emerging as the principal orienting factor for converts’ public identities with regard to religious nearness in relation to Islam and cultural distance in relation to born Muslim communities. Moreover, far from seeking assimilation into existing born Muslim communities, the narratives being considered here most often contrast a sense of cultural nearness to Britain with a sense of cultural distance from those communities. In fact, many of my interviews were bookended, that is they formed the main trope of the discussion either side of the actual recording, by just such references. Responding to ‘a big pressure to almost convert to being Asian or Arab’ in patterns of social

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behaviour such as making small talk and eye contact from Muslims in her local area, Rachel continues, ‘no, that’s a British thing. I’m staying British thank you very much’. Significantly, it is this move that opens up the space for the religion–culture dynamic as captured in this passage, again from Rachel: Erm so as I say inner changes would be figuring out what I felt about things and not taking things for gospel when people say stuff. And when you ask for proof, so for example someone said, ‘Oh well the hadith that says this’, I say okay where’s your proof? Where’s your reference for that? And if they couldn’t provide it, I’d be like I’m not going to believe that then thank you very much.

It is here, also, that their position as stranger is asserted and claimed in this relation. This position as stranger registers the aspect of cultural distance while also registering the contributory role of the stranger. Here, practices which are seen as religiously ‘empty’ and a matter of culture and tradition as well as those that are presented to them as Islamic but are ‘actually’ cultural are called into question. Hannah, for instance, talks proudly about questioning the claims of born Muslims on Islamic propositions, asking them to show it to her in the Qur’an or sunna, she says: ‘Erm, mash’allah I’ve made people question their own faith and, and come better onto the d¯ın just through my stupidity. What I would think was stupidity, just going “but I can’t find it anywhere, I can’t find it”’. Through these questioning processes converts can simultaneously find their way in Islam, push back against pressures to simply conform, while also critically contribute to negotiating an Islamic life in Britain (see also Chapter 8). In some cases, highlighting the emptiness of religious content of some practices might be a form of protecting the religion from the corrupt practices of some adherents. Angela, for example, talks about a corrupt imam who was caught stealing from a supermarket and selling the goods on, but who was able to remain an imam after being caught. Commenting on the unIslamic behaviour of some Muslims, she remarks, ‘the greatest shame is that they still hold onto erm Muslim as being their

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primary identity, when it’s really, it’s their cultural identity, not their religious identity’. This, she goes on to say, has a detrimental effect on the religion as whole because people who ‘are not living up to the integrity of the religion, but who still very much pride themselves on being Muslim and this, the conflating of those two is very damaging to Islam’. We find here a separation between a sociological identity of Muslim contrasted with one founded on religiosity and the modes of behaviour and conduct that are seen as integral to it (see also Murad, 2020). At times certain attitudes and practices were quite simply (even curtly) dismissed as something like obvious nonsense. Saoirse talks about how she will happily stop and stroke dogs in the street, whereas ‘a lot of Muslims here, they wouldn’t go near a dog “cause it’s this”, that and the other’. Rosie talked about Muslim communities needing to ‘get over’ certain issues, for instance, ‘arguing about, you know, do you have to take your socks off when you make wudu’. Others mentioned similarly ‘trivial’ things such as being told to sit down when drinking water, which foot to put down first when entering the bathroom, eating with your right hand, and being told off for not calling women ‘aunty’ or men ‘uncle’. The exact practices, forms of dress and so on that are rejected as well as the exact views and values and actions they call forth vary between individuals, yet the feature of distinguishing between religion and culture is a consistent one. An important part of this dynamic is precisely that many born Muslims either imbue ‘cultural’ practices with (questionable) religious significance or merely perform certain actions and practices without the perceived right, religious intention. This is because practices, of whatever form—whether formally recognised religious ritualistic practices such as praying or simpler (supposedly secular) acts of kindness towards others—must be performed not out of mere habit or duty, or for show, but must emanate from a love of and desire to please God. Topal (2017) in fact notes this dual emphasis, on both reason and practices, in the Qur’an. Acts, along these lines, are seen as ‘valid only if and when it is based on the niyya (intent) of the giver, thereby making it a voluntary contribution for the sake of Allah’ (Ahmad, 2017: 45). Asserting the cultural difference and significance of intent and not merely the act, Rachel remarked, ‘To me, in our society we do make eye

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contact, we do chat to people, we do make small talk, “Oh the weather’s crap outside. Have you seen it? Yeah, it’s freezing ha ha”. To me, that’s not flirting—it’s just you making chit chat’. Intention is vital here as this is perfectly compatible with Islamic modesty in the way it is tied to intention—the intention is not to flirt or to display. Several of my female participants talked about what other people would see as an issue with talking to me as a non-Muslim man, but what they saw as perfectly fine and a good example of belonging in Britain. Both Julia and Hannah, for instance, talked about being able to sit opposite a guy without flirting and lusting over him. Amal talked about how she found it ridiculous (with eyes rolling) that others wouldn’t want to participate and be interviewed for the reason it involved being with a non-Muslim man. In these ways, the control of modesty is made as much an internal process firmly situated in a cultural context as it is one in which social interactions are regulated. Along similar lines to the above, Richard, for instance, talked about self-control rather than avoidance with reference to alcohol and not staying away from old friends because they drink. It is not, therefore, simply a matter of patterning society and interactions to avoid undesirable situations, although aspects of this are present, but about cultivating the self in a way that is in a sense deeper than mere avoidance, and at the same time being able to belong as a result. Far less trivial examples of cultural distance often relate to the treatment of women and social justice ‘not just for Islam but for all people’ as Angela put it. Rachel notices aspects of control a friend’s husband exerted that ‘reeked of almost sort of abusive [behaviour]’, restricting the cafés they would go in or when she could go out without him, using the cloak of it being ‘Islamic’. Along these lines they may challenge women’s exclusion from mosque and the reasons given for it as ‘excuses’ with ‘a strange logic’ to quote Matthew. Rosie related realising that there were no women recorded on her ex-husband’s family tree, ‘I was just like, “do not play with me when it comes to deleting me from history, dude. What the heck!” And I just remember thinking, I can’t do this culture’. Avoidance, especially when it goes too far as a form of unnecessary and even unhealthy gender segregation (although the exact line for this will vary), is seen as culturally alien to Britain and to their lives. This might even be

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seen as something against the religion. Rachel commented on not being able to pray in some local mosques, for instance: ‘My view is it’s a man telling me I can’t pray to God [, and] he has no right to do that whatsoever’. In this vein, Matthew, Rachel’s husband, talks about needing mosques that are accessible beyond a particular ethnic group and greater openness for women. In fact, during our interview he talked about trying to become an active member in the Muslim community they lived in but barriers like these might mean he has to, very reluctantly, try and form a separate community. This is not merely about practices as physical acts, but, as the emphasis on intention suggests, also relates to the ‘emotion regime’ of what is considered appropriate in a given situation (Riis & Woodhead, 2012). While in some ways converts seek to cultivate the correct emotional response in particular situations, this also can be challenged along similar lines. Both Hannah and Julia talk about how their loudness and personalities contravene certain acceptable norms, something not infrequently pointed out to them by others. Nevertheless, they also stress how this, as strangers, can show non-Muslims that they are ‘normal’ people and help to combat stereotypes. Moreover, such an attitude can also be beneficial for getting things done in a male-dominated community or mosque. Julia, for instance, mused about how ‘we live in a man’s world in Islam’, then talked about developing sufficient confidence as a Muslim that, ‘then I changed my attitude, I turned into a west class Muslim woman and I was like “fucking move out of the way, I need to speak to the imam”’. This assertiveness, the development of which enabled her to reconcile her place in Islam with her sense of personality, is also linked to the respect she now feels. For Hannah, this challenging of a public emotional norm was related to her grown up children from before she was Muslim. She relates stories of watching one son box in a nightclub and the after party of another who is a gay pop singer, and the ensuing struggle between ‘proper’ behaviour and supporting her children in a way congruous with her personality and their lives in Britain. Ultimately, she concludes ‘he’s my son, I’m his mother, that’s where we leave it, we’re done. So, things like that, you know erm are an issue for other people but not for ourselves’.

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These kinds of relations to ethno-cultural forms of religion mean that the ultimate authority established in the narratives is emphasised, as suggested by Rachel’s quote above, as being God. Yet, rather than viewing this as simply a form of ‘protestantisation’ of Islam or as an easy excuse to do what they want, foregrounding religiosity, and the arguments that have so far been made for that, call us to take this point far more seriously in how converts negotiate matters of faith and practice as part of social relations and public identity. As Matthew, Rachel’s husband, expresses it: the idea that a man’s [word] would be above God’s, to me it doesn’t make any sense”, and “I don’t know how God will judge anyone. If anything, I expect I’d be judged more harshly than those people because I’ve subscribed to set values which I believe are His values. I believe I’ll be questioned to make sure that I’m fulfilling those values that I’ve sworn an oath to essentially by saying my shahada, you know.

This is not a wholesale rejection or circumvention of Islamic scholars and structures, but a recognition of the differences within Islam and their need to negotiate their way through divergent interpretations and how they are confronted by these. These kinds of insistence and how they challenge some established forms of religion, ‘treat[ing] scholars like plumbers; always get three quotes’ as Batool put it, are reflected in how they base their belief and practice first and foremost on the Qur’an, and on sunna and hadith. Here there was often an emphasis on ‘seeing it in the Qur’an’ before accepting any particular position. If this sounds simplistic, it is because it perhaps is, and because of this orientation towards fundamental scriptural sources, converts have been linked with Salafism and forms of scriptural conservatism and literalism (Özyürek, 2015). Yet, few of the participants identified themselves as Salafi. They may have dropped in and out of a Salafi group, but they held no firm affiliation (see also Jensen, 2011). In fact, the term Salafi itself can be a deceptively ‘elastic’ label and refer to a wide spectrum of political positions (Inge, 2016). As Hegghammer (2009: 249) has suggested ‘the term “Salafi” is often better understood as a bid for legitimacy than an indication of a specific political programme’. In this vein we might see these so-called Salafi elements

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as important to how converts define themselves as Islamic subjects ‘in dialogue with, sometimes in struggle against, the things our significant others want to see in us’, or how they are misrecognised (Taylor 1994: 33). Matthew, describing himself as a ‘Qur’an-ist’ with ‘Salafi tendencies and principles’, and whose narrative is embellished with tales of the early Caliphs, states ‘I question the legitimacy of whether all hadith of the Prophet is genuine. This is because they were mostly written down the erm centuries leading after his death… in some cases they weren’t written down formally for 500 years’. Saoirse, conscious of our surroundings, wrote down ‘Salafi’ as the school of thought she aligns with so as not to be overheard saying it in the café (despite it being empty other than the staff and two women at the opposite end of the room from us), aware of how that is perceived as being doctrinally conservative. Nevertheless, at numerous points she expressed anything but conservative social attitudes; the occasion of an older man with long grey hair, painted nails, dressed in all black and wearing high-heeled boots walking past the window did not prompt a point of reflection on traditional, conservative gender expressions and roles but of the value and richness of pluralism and of people being able to live confidently and dress accordingly. This is not to say that many don’t hold conservative social views on certain issues, but that there is no simple relation between their being Muslim or converts and their social and political positions; rather their being strangers is a position to which they critically contribute to debates formed by the connection and distinction between religion and culture. An apparent paradox emerges here, one which is often expressed and left as asides in the narratives, perhaps reflecting its difficulty by virtue of being contradictory. That is that despite an indictment of Christians or Hindus and so on, and their behaviour as a reason to reject these faiths, the same rejection does not necessarily translate for Islam despite mirrored criticisms of ‘cultural Muslims’. However, taking religiosity as a start point, converts’ critiques of born Muslims can be seen as points of critique from a position of nearness, as critiques from within Islam, and as such do not result in the dismissal of the whole, whereas critiquing other faiths from the outside produces a collapse between parts and whole. Converts, therefore, certainly position themselves as distant in

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relation to other religions on theological grounds with theological references and explanations, but ultimately what emerges as fundamental, and what solves the contradictions inevitable of religion, is the deep, felt connection of religiosity. These positions reflect an alternative sense of collective identity as Muslim that does not orient around ethnicity but has at its heart religiosity. This is also reflected in the idea of the umma. It has been suggested that the umma and its promise of a transnational identity and community attracts converts to Islam and is a cornerstone of the universality and this appeal (Roy, 2006; Soutar, 2010). In the narratives here, the umma is an ideal, and the divisions within ‘the Muslim community’ are lamented, but my participants seem all too aware of the disconnect between the ideal and reality. The umma is not a romanticised actuality or even potentiality but is something that is tied to the core of the Islamic message and religiosity, but unrealised in religion. Rachel, one of the few to even explicitly mention the umma, in fact rejects being ‘just part of the umma’ as this means being lost in a sea of cultural codes and practices to which she cannot relate and in which she loses significant aspects of her identity and agency. A position in which the tension between religiosity and religion can be seen with some force is evident in a telling passage where Matthew and his wife Rachel concur about not wanting to go on hajj, despite it being one of the five pillars of the faith, for moral political reasons: ‘well, I don’t particularly want to fund a nasty government and give them lots of money’, remarked Rachel. In this case, adhering to the principles of the faith and the core of its moral message means rejecting one of the pillars of the faith as the two are in contradiction based on a disjuncture between the motivation of religiosity and the ethical self, and the religion of the Saudi government. This reflects converts walking an at times ambivalent line between the authoritative and autonomous, between religiosity and how it necessarily breaks through religion in a way which can repattern forms of social belonging and political behaviour. It provides a compelling example of how ‘the richness of the religious contribution to politics lies in its specific capacity to rework experience and extract from it what is important so that its meaning can guide us in

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our future ethical and political positions’ (Guillard, 2020: 364). Indeed, for Matthew, Islam ‘grew me politically as well as personally’. There are further ways in which religiosity rather than ethnicity can be seen in guiding their public actions and forming the basis for collective action. Matthew, talks about the need for greater support so Muslim issues can gain greater traction with the public and also more Muslimfriendly representation in the political sphere. Notably, these tend to emphasise a pluralistic openness as they seek to not be contained within an ethnically sectarian position but emphasise living a faithful life in public. Angela also, for instance, talks about the importance of interfaith fora for community involvement as spaces for pluralistic dialogue around faith in society, and which don’t focus on particular cultural forms or ‘echo chambers’; Richard aims to inspire people through his work with the homeless and mentoring young people, deeply oriented by his faith but also with concerns and reach that reflect a pluralistic social conscience. The exact values and ethical positions and what forms of public action they call forth of course vary between individuals, but what remains consistent is their stemming from religiosity as part of the ongoing negotiations between religiosity and religion. It is through these dynamics of separating religion from culture and providing a critical take on this relationship that converts can be seen as strangers. Through claims to belong, of their nearness to Islam based on religiosity, the common identity under Islam can act not as a list of traits or values, but rather as ‘conditions for communication’ with Islam viewed as ‘a shared fund of common understandings’ (Hylland Eriksen, 2015: 7). This echoes the concept of elastic orthodoxy mentioned earlier as ‘the ability to maintain a core set of convictions without being so rigid that [one] cannot cooperate with others who do not share them’ (Lindsay, 2007: 216). On this reading, their negotiations and struggles between religiosity and religion are not simply a matter of accepting or rejecting established norms but are engagements in a field of (contributory) contestation. We can recall here also the arguments we noted in Chapters 2 and 5 in relation to urf , which highlights Islam’s flexibility in relation to different customs and practices and how it can be accommodative of them. Angela in fact notes the ‘flexibility that Islam sets up so that it can operate in a pluralistic world with people of different

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backgrounds and of different ideas’. The significant public as well as private identity emergent from all this is religious, this determines their critiques of existing forms of religion—this is done through the intersections of culture and ethnicity but is about opening up debate rather than reinforcing didacticism. This way of life, actuated and oriented by religiosity, shapes converts’ belonging to the political community by being the fabric of their interpersonal relations. If citizenship and relations of citizenship imply a way of carrying out public actions and a way in which relationships and the sharing of experience are developed, we simply cannot fail to account for religiosity and its role in how a sense of belonging and of relating are acquired.

Religion: Elastic and Tactical I don’t want to pretend either that erm, that converts have some err sort of pure unfiltered view of Islam, because we are products of our own culture and experience and heritage, and that informs our interpretation when we’re, when we’re reading and studying as well. But erm, I think it’s less. It’s less because to some degree we kinda turn our backs a little bit on our own culture erm to, to deliver something new.

This passage from Angela affirms converts’ position as stranger. Katarzyna likewise remarks about how she had travelled and worked in different countries and, ‘I would always be around so many different cultures’, so, ‘I was quite open to consider different points of view. I’m not saying… I don’t say I’m objective. I’m not saying I’m objective. But I guess, I, I, it’s easier for me in a way’. How much ‘less’ culturally inflected converts’ readings of Islam are is of course an appearance that only exists in its contrast, but these passages highlight the idea that however much one cannot attain a neat division between religion and culture, part of the strivance at the heart of their subjecthood is an interrogation of this relationship. Importantly, Angela’s passage is also about about coming from a particular position that holds out the promise of contributing to renewal through this process. This highlights against seeing the religion–culture

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divide as either binary and dichotomous, about opposition, and also against a full conflation of the two, where following a religious faith relies on the complete acceptance of an already laid out set of beliefs, views and practices such that all is required is conformity (the exclusionist and assimilationist accounts, respectively from Chapter 5). Rather, it is necessary to see the pairs of religion and culture and religiosity and religion as dyadic, in a constant and contested dynamic (dialectical) dance, neverending and always and necessarily incomplete. The former in each pair might never be fully contained by the latter but neither can it be without it. Its primary importance for converts lies in its critical form of subjectivity, what subjectivities are ‘heard’ and which have the doors closed on them. An editorial in Meeting Point (Feb 2002; see also Editorials in 2007, 2008) reminds its readers: For centuries, Islam has given people of vastly disparate cultures and backgrounds a common Islamic identity while allowing them to retain their own national flavours and keep the bonds of kinship intact. It has never required its adherents to contract amnesia nor demand [a] sort of ‘unilateral cultural disarmament’.

Related to the notion of ‘elastic’ orthodoxy mentioned above, we can begin to see converts engaged in a form of ‘tactical religion’. ‘Tactical religion’ ‘does not necessarily shun the spaces and controlled enchantments of the strategic, but it tries to enter into them, to appropriate aspects of them, to turn them to new uses and to gain some control over them’ (Woodhead, 2013: 16). Here Woodhead draws on de Certeau’s (1988) distinction between ‘strategy’, which would here be the authority from mosque leadership, Islamic scholars and Muslim communities, and ‘tactics’, those practices adopted by people who are sceptical of these forms of leadership and authority. Here then, the institutional forms of Islam can be seen to represent strategic religion, even if at the national level they do not. Converts and convert ‘circles’ represent an instance of tactical religion. This also can align converts with many young born Muslims who are equally turning directly to the Qur’an and hadith to find their way in Islam and Britain in a way that contrasts with their

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parents and grandparents; and why, for example Angela commented of young born Muslims, ‘Erm and I think young Muslims are starting to take their religion very seriously and trying to separate their religion from their culture. So, I quite like working with young Muslims as well, actually. I think they’ve got a lot of energy’. This chapter has traced various lines of the religion–culture divide. This has brought into view through what patterns of social relations emerge in the narratives and how, significantly, these are oriented through religiosity. Through positing converts as strangers and thereby considering the aspects of nearness and distance, this has shown how converts can positively position themselves as belonging in nearness to Islam on the basis of religiosity, as culturally distant from born Muslim communities, and culturally near in relation to Britain.

References Ahmad, I. (2017). Religion as critique: Islamic critical thinking from Mecca to the marketplace. The University of North Carolina Press. Bowker, J. (2015). Why religions matter. Cambridge University Press. de Certeau, M. (1988). The practice of everyday life (Trans. S. Rendall). University of California Press. DeHanas, D. (2016). London youth, religion, and politics: Engagement and activism from Brixton to Brick Lane. Oxford University Press. Franks, M. (2000). Crossing the borders of whiteness? White Muslim women who wear the hijab in Britain today. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 23(5), 917– 929. Gallonier, J. (2015). The racialization of Muslims in France and the United States: Some insights from white converts to Islam. Social Compass, 62(4), 570–583. Guillard, A. (2020). Political theology, religious diversity and the nature of democratic citizenship. Political Theology, 21(4), 358–365. Hegghammer, T. (2009). Jihadi-Salafis or revolutionaries? On religion and politics in the study of militant Islamism. In R. Meijer (Ed.), Global salafism: Islam’s new religious movement (pp. 244–265). Columbia University Press.

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Hylland Eriksen, T. (2015). The meaning of “we.” In P. A. Kraus & P. Kivisto (Eds.), The challenge of minority integration (pp. 2–21). De Gruyter Open. Inge, A. (2016). The making of a Salafi Muslim woman: Paths to conversion. Oxford University Press. Jensen, T. G. (2011). Context, focus and new perspectives in the study of Muslim religiosity. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34 (7), 1152–1167. Laborde, C. (2017). Liberalism’s religion. Harvard University Press. Lindsay, D. M. (2007). Faith in the halls of power: How evangelicals joined the American elite. Oxford University Press. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A civic idea. Polity Press. Murad, A. H. (2020). Travelling home: Essays on Islam in Europe. Cambridge: The Quilliam Press. Özyürek, E. (2015). Being German, becoming Muslim: Race, religion, and conversion in the New Europe. Princeton University Press. P˛edziwiatr, Z. (2017). Conversions to Islam and identity reconfigurations among poles in Great Britain. Studia Religiologica, 50 (3), 221–239. Riis, O., & Woodhead, L. (2012). A sociology of religious emotion. Oxford University Press. Roy, O. (2006). Globalized Islam: The search for a new Ummah. Columbia University Press. Sealy, T. (in press). The betweenness of the double stranger: British converts to Islam and patterns of belonging. Social Compass. Soutar, L. (2010). British female converts to Islam: Choosing Islam as a rejection of individualism. Language and Intercultural Communication, 10 (1), 3–16. Taylor, C. (1994). The politics of recognition. In A. Gutmann (Ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the politics of recognition. Princeton University Press. Topal, S. (2017). Female Muslim subjectivity in the secular public sphere: Hijab and ritual prayer as “technologies of the self.” Social Compass, 64 (4), 582– 596. Woodhead, L. (2013). Tactical and strategic religion. In N. M. Dessing, N. Jeldtoft, J. S. Nielsen, & L. Woodhead (Eds.), Everyday lived Islam in Europe (pp. 9–22). Ashgate. Young, I. M. (2011 [1990]). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton University Press. Zebiri, K. (2008). British Muslim converts: Choosing alternative lives. Oneworld.

8 Islamophobia and Religiosity: Religion, ‘Race’ and Ethnicity

My interview with Gayle had come to an end and we came out of the café we had been sitting in. Gayle was in her late 60s at the time of interview and had been a Muslim for 18 years. She had been brought up Christian although her faith had waned as she had grown up. Ahead of us, about fifty yards or so up the street, was a small group of women wearing shalwar kameez and sandals, with loose shawls draped across their shoulders. It was late winter and although a pleasant day, clear and dry, was not in any way strangely warm for the time of year. This prompted Gayle to talk about how ‘Pakistani dress’ doesn’t belong in the UK and was impractical. She further elaborated on a number of examples of what she referred to as the ‘culturally ignorant interpretations’ of Islam by born Muslims themselves; examples included a story of a Pakistani sheikh advising Muslims in Canada to wear sandals in the snow, saying that it was necessary to suffer for faith. In light of these examples she in fact remarked how fear of Muslims from the wider population was ‘understandable given how much stupidity’ there is. That certain practices, behaviours, forms of dress, even attitudes are held to be cultural rather than religious and at times culturally ‘other’ to Britain was seen in the previous chapter in regard to how converts © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_8

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position themselves as strangers, as distant from these practices. On more than one occasion a participant admitted to being ‘slightly racist’, and I heard many things which would normally be considered as such. These can come to represent particularly stark examples of the religion–culture divide. In this vein, in her study of German converts to Islam, Özyürek argues that ‘in trying to attain this pure Islam and save Islam from its negative associations… the idealized untainted Islam they [converts] promote leaves… immigrant Muslims… to bear the full brunt of the racialized stigma of Islam’ (2015: 68; see also, on Italy, Salih, 2004). Moreover, that ‘defending the place of Islam [is achieved] by disassociating it from the stigmatized traditions of immigrant Muslims’ (Özyürek, 2015: 5). This then represents a particular, and particularly strong, version of the exclusionist account (Chapter 5) that sees converts, in the process of establishing themselves as Muslims in a Western European context, excluding ‘culturally other’ born Muslims from a Europeanised, ‘secularised’ and ‘protestantised’ Islam. On Özyürek’s account, in reculturating Islam, converts are necessarily Islamophobic. Converts are seen here as complicit in a form of Eurocentrism and Islamophobia which reproduces the processes through which born Muslims are othered and excluded. That is, in discursively securing their own belonging and citizenship in Western polities, converts exclude born Muslims from these same claims. Özyürek posits this as a paradox and argues that: prevalent ideas of secularism that define religion as a sphere separate from all other social realities combined with the increased racialization of Muslims prompt converts along with some other European-born Muslims to promote an Islam that can be rescued from its association with the despised aspects of Middle Eastern values and practices, and shown to be fit for European minds and lives… an inclusion of Islam into Europe comes at the expense of a simultaneous exclusion of racialized Muslims from it (2015: 132–133).

For the purposes of this chapter, despite the immediate parallel between Özyürek’s argument and features from my participants’ narratives, this requires unpacking. In the first instance, we can note, as has been

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argued in the previous chapters, that converts do not see religion as a wholly separate sphere from other social and political spheres in the way supposed—the picture of secularism Özyürek presents is not one that fits in very neatly with how my participants understand or want to live through their own religious identities in both private and public ways. Nevertheless, the aspect of the argument that forms the focus of this chapter is that the foundation of Özyürek’s position subordinates and sidelines religion in relation to ethnicity; that is, it sees Muslims and converts exclusively as racial subjects. It is in fact thus that she states, ‘it is safe to conceptualize white Muslim stigmatization of immigrant background Muslims as both racist and Islamophobic’ (in Mandel et al., 2015: 377). From such a position it is not just that converts can be considered Islamophobic as a result of the religion–culture divide aspect of their narratives, but that the very process of conversion itself is a racist act. A further problem is that a consequence of this position is that it becomes not even what converts do or say that is the problem so much as it is that converts are doing it; it is not so much the ‘what’ or even the ‘how’ but the ‘who’ that becomes the problem. Mandel, in a response to Özyürek’s book, takes this further, suggesting that religious conversion to Islam is a form of ‘intellectual appropriation of the “other”’—a reading of her position Özyürek assents to (Mandel et al., 2015: 363; for a similar point, Mossiere, 2016). On these grounds, this position is itself a form of grotesque essentialism. Thus construed, Islam could only ever be a parochial ethnic religion of certain people and any universalistic religious claims would dissolve. Were this an outlook that was inherent to the religious tradition itself, conversion in this instance would be far harder, and one would have to assume more tightly regulated, whereas all that is in fact needed is sincerely reciting the shahada in front of two witnesses. This, then, makes the category error of reducing and confining religion to an aspect of ethnic identity and religiosity to an ‘intellectual’ position and power relations. Furthermore, it fails to appreciate the myriad places and ways in which Islam is followed throughout the world, and has been throughout history, and how debates about the religion–culture divide, or between religiosity and religion, are inherent, as they are in all religious traditions. It is also a denial of the force of sociological necessity that

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converts must reculturate to some extent, just as many especially younger generations of born Muslims do, as well as a denial of converts’ religious subjecthood. The religious is reduced to and contained by the ethnic and Islam becomes ethnicised . Islam as a religion loses any universal theological thrust or import and becomes a parochial religion cum culture of a people rather than a ‘shared fund’. In this way it really is crudely ethno-religious. In the following sections I unpack and explore this position along intersecting lines of the religion–culture divide but, consistent with the general argument of the book, foreground religiosity in the analysis. The purpose of this is not to deny Islamophobic tropes in converts’ narratives or to defend them. Rather, it is to suggest that the force of the conclusions drawn by this rendering of the exclusionist account are, as a result, open to the following charges: they are problematic in their simplicity, suspect in their sociology, naïve with regard to a ‘theological ear’, rely on a priori adjudging converts religious experiences as bad faith narratives and ideologically predisposed to ignore or denigrate converts’ often extremely difficult position and experiences in relation to ‘majority society’ as well as born Muslim communities. In addressing the paradox identified above we have to begin by firstly recalling that, as already suggested (Chapter 5), converts reculturate rather than deculturate because they must reculturate. This is a sociological truism despite discourse that emphasises the contrary, including that of some of my participants. Of course, Özyürek’s position can still stand at this point, for the answer to how that reculturation takes place may well be that they reculturate by reproducing Islamophobic discourse. Converts’ own suggestions of deculturation might in fact attest to this. In what follows however, I want to interrogate this ‘how’ a little further. What I suggest is that there is also another, overlapping story to be told here that must at the very least run alongside the one of converts reproducing Islamophobic discourse. This is not meant in any way to deny the salience of the argument that converts do reproduce aspects of Islamophobic discourse and that this should be taken seriously. It is, rather, to suggest that this conclusion proceeds from a particular lens and framework of interpretation and that an alternative interpretation is warranted. Moreover, and this will be expanded in the next chapter, this alternative

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offers a more complex but potentially more productive set of challenges for converts, ‘majority society’ and born Muslim communities in how they understand and approach one another within the scope of hospitality. The broad argument for the rest of this chapter concentrates on how centralising and taking seriously the religious aspect shifts the lens and allows us to unpick the apparent paradox that Özyürek presents. Chapter 6 discussed various reasons why we should be cautious to conclude too quickly that converts undergo ‘the immigrant experience’. It highlighted that while converts’ organisational or institutional affiliations, lifestyle patterns, friendship groups and so on may change, the places where they continue to live, work, play, walk, take public transport, shop and so on usually remain the same. The difficulty, therefore, is not so much caused by a change or movement between places but is a result of the opposite, of not having moved place but to be seen to have moved in social space as a result of the change in their religious identity. This is why, for example, Kate was looking forward to moving away to university: So that’s why I chose [name of university], ‘cause nobody knows me there. So, if I go there, none of my family and my friends are there, so if they see me, they’re not gonna think ‘oh look there’s Kate, she’s a Muslim’. It’s like people I don’t know, so when they meet me, they’re gonna know that I was Muslim, they’re gonna think that I was born Muslim. So that’s less issues for me ‘cause I don’t have to explain myself.

Furthermore, we also saw how patterns of discrimination and Islamophobia are markedly different, and not just between converts and born Muslims but also between converts of different ethnic backgrounds as various aspects of geo-politics can become played out at a local level. The Islamophobia they face from non-Muslims can be different precisely because they are not undergoing the ‘immigrant experience’ and they also face discrimination from born Muslims and Muslim communities that disavows their religious subjecthood. It is these issues of Islamophobia and discrimination that the sections that follow turn to.

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Islamophobia and Convert Identities Islamophobia has been a much-debated concept ever since it gained popular currency following the Runnymede Trust report Islamophobia: A Challenge for us All (1997).1 The term has, for instance, been accused of doing nothing to dispel the homogenising distortion of there being an Islam in a way that may reduce the possibility of a distinction between constructive, dialogic criticism and discrimination in a similar way to the risk of being accused of antisemitism if critical of Israeli government policy (Halliday, 1999; c.f. Klug, 2014). Yet it does not necessarily follow that a term meant to capture the nature of discrimination, its overlapping logics entwining Islam as a faith, Muslims as ‘a people’ and ‘their’ cultural practices, automatically homogenises those discriminated against. On the contrary, the term in fact registers the homogenising tendency of the discrimination without necessarily denying diversity within Islam. Debates on the term have been much rehearsed since, and it is not my intention to reproduce them here (see Halliday, 1999; Miles & Brown, 2003; Rana, 2007; Sayyid & Vakil, 2011; Allen, 2010; Grosfoguel, 2012; Jackson, 2018). Rather, I wish to focus on one particular aspect, that of how the religious fits into the picture. Much of this contestation has centred around discrimination against Muslims having often fallen outside the purview of anti-racism protections on the basis that theirs is a religious, and therefore a chosen or ‘voluntary’ identity (see Chapter 4). The core of this objection is that it is not possible to be racist against a set of ideas and that a religion should not be protected from such criticism. Halliday (1999), for instance, in his well-known critique, argued that while it may be appropriate to characterise past forms (such as the crusades) as against Islam as a religion, contemporary discrimination is not aimed at Islam as a faith or even as a culture but at Muslims as a people. Halliday argues, therefore, that while Islamophobia may be appropriate to characterise past forms, the term ‘anti-Muslimism’ is more

1 For

earlier uses and discussions see Vakil (2011), who points to Edward Said; Rana (2007), who traces the term to the 1970s; Allen (2010) points to an early use by Modood; also Lockett & Jelen (2017), who trace its use back to 1923 and Sian (2013), who traces its first usage to 1918 in French.

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accurate to describe our present context (for historical cross overs see also Medovoi, 2012). However, in part recognising these entanglements, and in part registering the different character of Islamophobia from forms of biological racism, Islamophobia captures a form of ‘cultural racism’. The work of multiculturalists has, possibly more than any other literature (in Britain at least), done much to theorise Islamophobia and situate it within broader race/ethnicity and anti-racism frameworks and trajectories. It is no accident that the recent All Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims (APPGBM) report (2018) and updated Runnymede Trust (2017) definitions parallel those which have been put forward by multiculturalists for a number of years. The thrust of these definitions is that Islamophobia is a form of racism, important to which is not just a biological logic of ‘colourism’ but also a cultural logic through which Muslims, by dint of an essentialised view of ‘their culture’ are subject to discrimination. As such, its logic is similar and relatable to biological racism in that it sees these cultural characteristics as somehow intrinsic. In fact, Modood comments that ‘we really only begin to talk about multiculturalism when the groups in question cannot be characterized in “racial” terms only’ (2007: 40–41). By emphasising ethnicity and the cultural logic of racism, this conception has distinguished it from earlier (or current) anti-racism scholarship, the focus of which is on the racial dualism of ‘colour racism’ (Modood, 2009). A definition of Islamophobia as ‘anti-Muslim racism’ which registers these overlapping logics has come to be the most widely accepted understanding of the term in Britain, although it is still also widely contested. This points to how Islamophobia functions and produces effects in ways similar to other forms of racism (Meer & Modood, 2011). These points of cultural racism, however, have meant that religion as a ‘logic’ of Islamophobia has more often than not been side-lined on the basis of its supposed voluntariness. This side-lining becomes important not least because as part of this entanglement religion may be used to incite racial hatred (Meer, 2008; also Modood, 2007; Jackson, 2018). Recent research has noted how there has been a discursive switch in Islamophobic discourse from ‘race’ to Islam as a faith, where criticism of

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Islam as scripturally deterministic and particularly prone to backwardness and violence has emerged as an ‘acceptable’ form of anxiety about Muslims (Jones et al., 2018). Thus, in these kinds of discourses Islam as a faith is characterised as intrinsically violent, oppressive, pre- or even antimodern and so on, and people who follow Islam bear the marks of these characteristics in their values, beliefs and practices. It is this that Jones et al. argue is now structurally important to Islamophobia and serves to normalise it, indicating the religious logic of the discriminatory discourse is becoming more prominent. That is, as discriminatory discourses highlighting race have become less socially acceptable as grounds for open forms of discrimination, the discourse has switched to religion as a form which is acceptable and ‘has now passed the dinner-table test’ (Warsi, 2011; Jones et al., 2018: 14). Murad has in fact suggested the term Lahabism as a more appropriate term than Islamophobia because he sees it as a more ‘indigenously Islamic’ term (2020: 36). This is highly unlikely to catch on for a number of reasons, but his reasons for making this argument, anchoring it in Islamic history, are indicative here. For Murad, as well as for others, collapsing both discrimination Muslims face as well as claims and gains they wish to make into the secular language and pursuit of race relations and anti-racism is somewhat ‘bittersweet’, as the prominent convert Yahya Birt (2018) has put it, because it reduces and loses what is in fact distinctively religious. Matthew expresses his frustration on this point too when he says, ‘So a lot of anti-Muslim attacks would be labelled as racial, which annoys us, ‘cause it means if a white person attacks us is that a racial attack or is that a religious attack? D’you know what I mean? It, it doesn’t make sense calling it a racial attack; it’s not a racial attack’. We might add then to Modood’s ‘not racial terms only’ by saying, ‘not racial or ethnic terms only’ (for a more developed extension of this argument, see Sealy, 2021). Studies which suggest, for example, religious as well as ethnic penalties in areas such as the labour market can also be seen to suggest this aspect of context and manifestation of Islamophobia (for example, Khattab & Modood, 2015). The point here is to note that, as Taras (2013) has phrased it, ‘Islamophobia never stands still’ although attention now needs to turn to unpacking more thoroughly not just the racialisation in Islamophobia but also the religionisation. Taking

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this along with the centrality of religious subjecthood as has been argued in preceding chapters, there is a clear need for a more thorough exposition of the religious within the framework of multiculturalism as a site of negative difference, the sense converts have of their own identity, and how this may be transformed into something positive for which civic respect can be won. The attempt at a greater balance between political, sociological and religious categorisation presents an interesting dynamic following on from the discussions in previous chapters, and the following sections turn to a detailed consideration of these aspects of converts’ narratives oriented around the idea of Islamophobia. The sections begin by extending the discussion in the previous chapter by looking at how processes of decategorisation function as part of converts’ establishing their identities and positions vis-à-vis non-Muslims and born Muslim minorities. That is, how they narrate themselves in a way which separates them from these categories. On the version of the exclusionist account outlined above, converts decategorise themselves from born Muslims in order to preserve their privilege vis-à-vis and as part of the majority in ways that are (necessarily and quite simply) Islamophobic. Yet, while at times converts may appear to be reproducing certain dominant negativised views of Muslims, at other times they rail against such views from wider society. While this may seem a paradox, it must be seen in its place in the narrative. The former is part of carving out a place for themselves as belonging, as being of Islam based on nearness stemming from religiosity, and is often a response to direct experiences of its refusal. It is a claim to belong to Islam, to be a Muslim and to have an active place; not to just follow but to help shape, to be agentive and be recognized as such. The latter emerges when they are claiming cultural nearness to wider society, and in the face of its refusal. Far from the perception of converts as ‘see[ing] Islam in a very inorganic way, as a reified state of being, a static set of scriptures and teachings, in other words NOT as a living organic, culturally contextualized set of practices, identities and beliefs that inevitably change with place and time’ (Mandel, 2015: 363), it is precisely because converts do emphasise the living, the contextual, the place and time, that these challenges and their particular character exist. And it is precisely on these

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terms that these challenges can be undertaken. It is the dialectic between religion and religiosity as a dyad not a dichotomy which provokes these debates, and which converts necessarily shine a light on. The discussion that follows puts this exclusionist position under a microscope and ultimately calls it into question.

Decategorisation in Relation to Non-Muslims In relation to non-Muslims, a process of decategorisation appears in two main ways. One is when converts may feel they are being separated from the category ‘Muslim’ by non-Muslims, especially if this is based on a narrow ethno-religious perception of ‘Muslim’. The following passage from Hannah’s narrative captures this. Hannah had fostered a high number of young asylum seekers over the years and was well known at the local school. Given this long-standing relationship, although the school did not want to take any more asylum seekers, it agreed to do so for her. Here she describes taking a new boy to register at the school and expresses her frustration at the teacher’s apparent attempt to draw her back into a non-Muslim ‘us’: So erm she must have heard, the teacher must have heard that I’d converted to Islam. So, I went up to the school with the new boy, with scarf on obviously, and she came out the door, the teacher from the unit, and just went, ‘Ahhhhh, oh my! I didn’t realise you’d gone so far as to veil yourself ’. I’m, ‘What? Veil myself!’ And it was like this [gestures to scarf she’s wearing] you know, not here [gesturing her face], not nothing like that you know. I don’t wear niqab. [derisorily] Veil yourself! … She went, just to make matters worse she went, ‘Can I have a quick word? I’m going to take him. Yes, I’ll take him for you, but you do know I’ve got 13 of them?’ ‘13 of them? [Hannah replied]’ ‘13… Muslims’, she went. Okay then, Muslims, what’s that ?! And I’m sitting here. [She’s] just complained at me being ‘veiled’ and [then] she’s gone ‘Muslims’. Wow! And I’m like wow, wow what is that about?! Is she…? I almost had a sense of she was trying to get me back in her group.

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A further way in which converts may resist the disaggregation of the sociological category Muslim can be seen to reflect what Birt has referred to as a ‘community of suffering’ (Birt, 2013). This passage from Gayle captures an instance of this. She is recounting a trip to London to visit her son shortly after the 7/7 bombings in London in 2015, when, upon arriving, and under pressure from her son, she removed her headscarf in order to pass through the streets unharassed: Feeling very miserable [about having removed her scarf ] I went with my son in the tube. About four or five stops along some poor err Muslim guy got in with his dinner, obviously ‘cause you could smell it, a kebab or something, and everybody in the carriage was glaring at him. And it just was too much for me. I started to cry. And my son said, ‘What’s the matter?’ I said ‘He’s up there being who he is. I should be sat next to him getting those evil looks and I’m hiding who I am.’ (…) I said, ‘I feel I’m hiding who I am. It’s not that I need to wear this, but I choose to and I’m now, because of what’s happened in this city, hiding who I am. I’m pretending I’m not who I am. And I find that seeing somebody else getting the venom that I know would come my way makes me feel so ashamed of myself.

Following this, she did put her headscarf back on, but with the compromise for her son that she would replace it with a hood on the street where he lived to protect him from harassment; this after overhearing a vitriolic conversation from the neighbours’ garden about Muslims. In these kinds of instances converts display solidarity with suffering with and as Muslims even where they could, and should so the voluntary identity logic would tell us, disavow such solidarity. This is especially so when they could, in theory, avoid the visible display and expression of their religiousness so as not to be seen as Muslims by others. As evident in the opening of this chapter, aspects of Gayle’s interview and its telling were among the most forthright and explicit in their reproduction of aspects of Islamophobic discourse. Yet in the instance above we find her expressing a solidarity when she would appear to have a number of ways of justifying its avoidance. She is demonstrably not leaving ‘immigrant Muslims… to bear the full brunt of the racialized stigma of Islam’. In witnessing the suffering of born Muslims as a result of being Muslim,

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she forgoes the possibility of greater personal security that being an unmarked Muslim would bring and puts her headscarf back on. Important here also, in light of the discussions in Chapters 4 and 7, is that a lack of such solidarity in this instance is deeply felt as an instance of hiding ‘who she is’. ‘Who she is’ in this instance becomes quite explicitly and purposefully not just a personal matter of private religiosity but a matter of sociological and political identity. This points to an ambiguity that we can see in the following passage, also from Gayle’s narrative: There were some negatives of course. Erm, sisters who spent all the time criticising how I stood, how I walked, how I prayed, how de, de, de, de, err, you know. But still… and often the groupie attitude of some of the Muslims as well. ‘Oh, I’m a revert. Oh she’s gonna give me blessings that I need to be close to her stuff ’. But on the whole I found my position in a community and I felt very comfortable and happy doing stuff (…) the usefulness of being English, not young, a woman, confident now, ‘cause I was nowhere near what I was before, err able to speak, able to articulate, able to put things they needed into practice with City Council, with police with all kinds of err companies and forums and things like this.

Gayle, further, in another part of the interview, also reflected on how being ‘old’ and ‘white’ meant that she could get away with saying critical things to city Mayors and Lords and was happy to act as a representative of local Muslim communities—a recognition of her relative privilege and ability to use it as such, despite what she may have lost in this regard as a result of becoming Muslim. What we find is that in the face of being decategorised in relation to non-Muslims, whether by being brought into a non-Muslim ‘us’ opposed to the category of Muslims as others, as was the case with Hannah, or by having the voluntary ability to choose to self-decategorise as a result of having the potential to remain unmarked visibly, as in the case of Gayle, converts can stress their belonging to ‘Muslim’ as a superordinate category, inclusive of the sociological range in Meer and Modood’s conceptualisations. This stands in contrast to the logic of both the view of religious as a voluntary identity and the strong exclusionist account

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of how converts develop their sense of social and political identity and belonging as Muslims. When it comes to Islamophobia and social and political issues that reflect the marginalisation of Muslims and Islam in society, converts can actively embrace a socio-political identity ‘Muslim’.

Decategorisation in Relation to Muslims In certain circumstances and contexts then converts may appeal to this broader, sociological category of ‘Muslim’. The category Muslim is also more likely to be narrated in terms of ‘we’ when establishing the belongingness of religious faith in relation to the secular and the place of Islam and Muslims in Britain more generally on religious grounds. At other times, however, they will disaggregate it and stress difference rather than unity in relation to ‘Muslim’. It is important to recall at this point that the process of their conversion might well have challenged such pre-existing perceptions they held prior to coming to Islam. A number of participants talked about knowing little about Islam and Muslims prior the beginning of their ‘journey’ other than that which they heard in mainstream media and that dominates popular discourse. As was also mentioned in relation to Rosie (chapter 4), some had even formerly challenged Muslim acquaintances on their beliefs and practices based on stereotyped assumptions. Richard talked about a significant period of resistance based on his growing sense of being a Muslim along with his views and perceptions of what that meant socially, ‘I thought… I’m leaning towards Islam whether I like it or not – and I didn’t particularly like it’. It is worth bearing in mind also that for many converts, their initial contact, interest and influence in Islam came from some form of contact with and example of Muslims, whether through an individual, witnessing prayer, or experiences in a Muslim majority country. Many reference the kindness and openness they experienced in response to their early curiosity, even if ultimately they did find it necessary to ‘retreat from the community thing and just focus on learning’, as Angela put it, in order to develop their confidence. There is a clear sense of wrestling with the negative discourse that surrounds Muslims and Islam in Britain, and in Western Europe more

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generally, through the realisation that it is a negative discourse that needs to be challenged, while also reconciling this with discrimination they face from Muslims upon their conversion (see also Guimond, 2017). It is, as a result, not merely a case of acceptance and reproduction of baseless prejudicial stereotypes but rather reflects a complex dynamic of the crossing points between a negative dominant discourse, personal faith and experiences both positive and negative of interactions with Muslims leading up to and following conversion. Rachel, for instance, remembers ‘being told when I converted that women should always be quiet, they shouldn’t laugh in the presence of men, they shouldn’t smile in the presence of men’, and asks that when told these things and when barred from mosques, is it really Islamophobic to challenge it? As is also evident from the previous chapters, in some situations claims of cultural distance can be necessarily a liberational mode of empowerment that enables them to escape a loss of agency or even cycles of abuse without giving up their faith. In this way, it is the realization for some that, as Julia put it, ‘I could be a Muslim on my own’. A decategorisation in relation to Muslims appears in the narratives when the passage functions to criticize and establish the convert’s cultural distance as a simultaneous mode of opening space for religious nearness. At times, listening to the narratives it’s possible to see and feel the struggle in their reaction to the realization that the religious ideal is fraught with division and difficulty while at the same time trying to maintain that ideal in outlook; how they both stress the specificities of being a convert while striving for a universalist religious disposition. The important point here is that aspects of Islamophobic discourse are reproduced (a) following having gone some way to reconcile the tension felt between their sense of religiosity and this discourse as it colours their prior perceptions of Muslims and Islam more broadly, (b) as a reaction against exclusion and discrimination from born Muslims and (c) in the context of this experience, trying to stake a claim for belonging in Islam. This itself suggests that not only is it necessary to make the case for British converts to Islam’s religiosity in relation to wider debates about discrimination in society, but so too it is important in relation to born Muslim communities. This emphasises the intersection of how these power dynamics meet across different levels. In terms of belonging

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to a broad sociological category of ‘Muslim’ they face discrimination from wider society embedded in discourses of Islamophobia. They also face discrimination from born Muslims where they are excluded from the category ‘Muslim’. That is, the discrimination that converts face from Muslims is against their involuntary (non-Muslim) ethnic identity, which often eclipses their religiosity. In this context, converts stress the particularity of converts and the centrality of religiosity as an alternative to the broader purely sociological category. The terms religious and spiritual abuse used by a few participants of different ethnic and religious backgrounds were made in reference to this form of discrimination. It is worth recalling here also the relative position of converts vis-à-vis born Muslims when it comes to their ability to participate in the life of Muslim communities in their area. Recall from Chapter 2 that at organisational and institutional levels just 0.3% of mosques have even one convert on them or at all involved in running the mosque (Naqshbandi, 2015). Matthew, describing this situation, talked about how ‘Everything is so divided by ethnicity… every mosque in Britain nearly is divided by ethnicity and erm by political leanings’. He went on to talk about trying to find a mosque not long after he’d converted in a town nearby, ‘Xxxx was a town which I think had a population of about 150,000 people, they had about 14 mosques. The one I eventually went to was the only mosque that did an English khutba and had English speaking people there, out of 14’. Aspects of existing discourses of prejudice against Muslims, and those they may have held but displaced within their own perceptions, can resurface in these circumstances. This itself might be seen as reflective of the pervasiveness and power of the position in society of Islamophobic discourses but to conclude that it is simply a matter of converts maintaining their ethnic privilege vis-à-vis majority society is crudely dichotomous at best in its ignorance of converts structural positioning within these overlaying levels. This more strongly necessitates the need to treat more seriously, that is, not reductively, their religious identity and difference on the alternative basis of religiosity. Moreover, these lines of critique that converts can express towards born Muslims are not exclusively aimed at born Muslims. They can in fact be directed at converts as well as born Muslims. Richard, for

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example, dressed in blue jeans and a blue hoody, contrasted himself to other converts who had started wearing thawb, grown beards and adopted other aspects perceived as ‘traditional’ of Islam upon conversion. Converts who are perceived to be merely cultural (such as conversions of convenience or those who fully adopt ‘cultural’ behaviours, forms of dress and so on, perceived to be at the expense of religious reasons) come in for similar critique as born Muslims along these lines—and this is so regardless of ethnic background. We can see this in the following quote from Katarzyna, for example, and is something which chimes consistently across the narratives: Erm yeah so, there is a lot of challenges for sure being a Muslim nowadays does bring. But unless people like us, and I’m not saying just reverts, people who erm understand these, these values [universality of the religious and its separation from the cultural] and understand the importance of it, unless we really start trading the dialogue around that, you know, nothing will change.

That is to say that the ‘particular affinity’ that some people come to have stemming from social processes of interaction and differentiation that Iris Marion Young highlights as important (Young, 2011 [1990]: 172) is here to be understood in terms of religiosity. Converts as a category are of course ethnically diverse and the discourse of separation of religion and culture is consistent across the narratives here no matter the ethnic or religious background of the individual convert. In fact, where a distinction between white, black and South-Asian converts is made by converts themselves, this is to draw attention to the difference in patterns of discrimination they face from others and not to disaggregate the category ‘convert’ along ethnic lines. This difference in experience based on ethnic background is also an aspect mentioned by converts of all backgrounds. To begin to understand this we need to appreciate that converts do not experience discrimination from other converts in the way in which they frequently do in relation to Muslim communities. In fact, Zaara described how upon discovering a new Muslim circle in her earlier years of being a Muslim ‘it was wonderful. All of a sudden I could relate to

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people’. Similarly, Adele talks about finding a New Muslim group, which ‘was very comforting because it was mainly girls that were Christian that had, like that were very similar to me’. Hannah also remarks in reference to a convert friend of hers ‘we get on so well I think ‘cause she is, she was actually well, yeah, non-Muslim if you know what I mean; sort of English. She was brought up on bacon sandwiches and her mum going out and getting drunk down the pub, and things like… She has those sort of things in her as well’. Katarzyna referred to this as being ‘culturally secure’. This points to the felt, emotive aspect of belonging and complex ways in which it is more than simply ‘joining’. Adele, for instance, remarks ‘Like, I haven’t had any bad experiences that I can think of. But then I don’t feel like I’m accepted as… I dunno. I think there’s definitely something that tells you apart erm, from the Muslim community… you are definitely somebody that’s different’. The disaggregation of categories can therefore be seen as directly related to those patterns of discrimination which they face upon conversion and the balances of power in society. There are further reasons to consider this more carefully. Distinguishing between religion and culture in the ways described here is, importantly, not exclusive to converts. It is also part of the discourse of many young Muslims as they search for a way between their faith, their upbringing and lives in Britain and their different outlooks from their parents and grandparents about how these fit together (Jacobson, 1997; Gilliat-Ray, 2010; also Duderija, 2007). Many of the points on which converts challenge born Muslims, and many of the frustrations they feel in relation to belonging to Islam in Britain, reflect debates within Islam itself quite apart from the discourse of converts. The religion– culture divide itself may represent this; as Jacobson reminds us of young British Muslims ‘this contemporary construction of religious boundaries (…) is consonant with the entire history of Islam (1997: 249)’. Issues of religion such as gender equality, sexuality, the role of mosques and access to them, leadership and imams, Muslim organisations and relations with government, among others, are all historical and contemporary debates (see, Ahmed, 1992; Bulliet, 1994; Jawad, 1998; Wadud, 1999, 2008; Esposito, 2003; Ramadan, 2004; Kamrava, 2006; Duderija, 2007; Gilliat-Ray, 2010; Krämer, 2013; Hidayatullah, 2014; de Kadt,

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2018; Khan, 2018; MWNUK; Reda & Amin, 2020). The Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI)2 and a new national council are good examples of new institutional forms of religion emerging out of such debates. The difference between Bassam Tibi and Tariq Ramadan on the idea of Euro-Islam discussed in Chapter 5 is another aspect of these issues— and we might note Tibi is at continued and repeated pains throughout his work to explain why he and his position are not Islamophobic. Tibi’s exhortations to this effect draw on a few grounds, for example, ‘I reiterate not only the fact that I am a Muslim, but also that I descend from the Islamic Damascus-based nobility of Banu al-Tibi’ (2008: 181). Converts too are Muslims, even if they do not have an Islamic lineage comparable to Tibi’s (but how many do!), and are entering into and contributing to these debates, and are doing so in a contextually embedded way, but the debates themselves are certainly not specific to converts. On the one hand, then, we can trace a broader category of being ‘Muslim’ which fits in well with existing definitions of Islamophobia. This challenges cultural and anti-Muslim prejudice from non-Muslims. Here the mode of being (meaning religiosity) and mode of oppression (ethnic and cultural racism) are more sociologically separated. On the other hand, there is a category more firmly affixed to the religious where the mode of being and mode of oppression, or at least the experience and interpretation of that oppression, are closer together. Rather than seeing this as opposed to the former, a more sociologically religious aspect allows us to see these as related and in inevitable, ongoing negotiation. For these reasons, and with reference to the ‘community of suffering’, Islam as a ‘shared fund’ and the structural position of converts in Britain, we can question how ‘safe’ it is to call converts Islamophobic and racist. The effect of this exclusionist position is to separate them out from born Muslim communities and from majority society in a way in which they do not necessarily do, see or feel themselves. It also fails to account for the specificity of this discourse to converts but non-specificity of it to particular ethnic groups of converts and by so doing obscures the discrimination they face from multiple sides. It maintains an ‘us’ and ‘them’ dichotomous binary against a more pluralistic view of Islam and 2 See

http://inclusivemosqueinitiative.org/about/.

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dyadic conception of the religion–culture divide, the people who constitute or are at certain times drawn into that category, and the character of the debates going on within Islam whether converts are part of them or not. This should not be read, however, as an apology for converts’ Islamophobic discourse. It is rather to show how the version of the exclusionist account under discussion here emerges from a particular frame and obscures important dynamics and aspects of subjectivity. The point here is to show how this emerges out of more complex dynamics than may be supposed by a binary conception. It also, moreover, reflects that ‘how you view Islamophobia depends upon how you view Islam’ (Salma Yaqoob, quoted in Birt, 2013: 217).

Five tests for Islamophobia To round out the discussion of this chapter, there is a further way we might approach this issue. As outlined earlier, multiculturalists in Britain have been at the forefront of theorising Islamophobia in extension of previous anti-racism paradigms. As also mentioned, one of the core critiques of the idea of Islamophobia as a form of racism is that it serves to avoid or denounce legitimate criticism of Islam or of certain cultural practices that may stem from particular Muslim communities. The line between discrimination and legitimate criticism is fraught with difficulty and there are dangers of leaning too far in either direction. For multiculturalism more pointedly, too far in one direction risks the Scylla of undermining its anti-racist basis and underlying conceptualisation of socio-political identities, too far in the other direction risks the Charybdis of a crude communitarianism, a throwback to long abandoned connotations of the term multiculturalism that now serve the purpose of handy caricature for many of its detractors. In this vein, Modood (2020), attempting to navigate this multicultural Strait of Messina, has proposed five ‘tests’, the answers to which might indicate that a discourse is Islamophobic. To bring this chapter to a close, each of these tests is first outlined and then assessed with reference to the preceding discussions of converts’ narratives (for a parallel discussion on

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Islamophobia as a form of racism and basis for anti-racism with regard to religion more generally, see Sealy, 2021). Does it stereotype Muslims by assuming they all think the same? For this to be an indicator of Islamophobia, the answer ‘yes’ would indicate that converts’ discourse would ‘seem to suggest that all or most Muslims have this blameworthy characteristic and that this feature defines Muslims, indeed drowns out any worthy characteristics and ignores contextual factors’ (Modood, 2020: 45). As we have seen, stereotypes do appear but they certainly do not do so in a way that suggests all or most Muslims are characterised as such. The religion–culture divide serves to delineate between Muslims, not against them. As we have also seen, it certainly does not suggest that Muslims have no worthy characteristics, were this the case, it would be reasonable to assume that converts would be far fewer and contain themselves in convert enclaves. Moreover, as has been suggested, it is crude charges of Islamophobia levied at (white) converts as part of the exclusionist account that ignore contextual factors, factors which are constitutive of converts contingent positions with regard to Muslims. Is it about Muslims or a dialogue with Muslims, which they would wish to join in? The above argument has been that an important part of the criticism found in converts’ narratives is in fact bound up with converts being excluded rather than seeking to exclude. It is in fact on the grounds of Islam as pluralistic and a ‘shared fund’ providing ‘conditions of communication’ that converts seek to be conversational partners with born Muslims and within Islam. Matthew, for example, talked about possibly founding something separate from the local Muslim community in his area, but this was only following repeated difficulties in being accepted and included in the local community, mosque committee and so on. At the time of interview he was talking about giving it one last shot at getting involved before considering other avenues. Do the terms of the debate allow possible mutual learning? Again, we have to conclude that the answer here is positive. Examples of how converts position themselves as distant from majority culture on various grounds contrast with the lifestyle and framework for social life that Islam holds out to them. This is an important aspect of converts’ position as strangers.

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Is the language civil and contextually appropriate? This is perhaps the most difficult of the five tests to adjudicate based on the discussions here. At times the answer is yes, whereas at other times it has to be no. This is unsurprising perhaps when caught in the dynamics of being made strange. But it is also important to remember that narratives of the kinds gathered here are deeply felt, emotional and personal testimony of experiences—they are not part of public debate on political and moral issues. The answers in response to the previous tests, as well as other examples throughout the chapters, suggest that in public fora, the answer is more likely to be positive than negative, as suggested by the example of Gayle. Insincere criticism for ulterior motives. Here we can confidently assert that converts do care about the issues they are criticising. As Muslims, as belonging in Islam, their positions, and we must remember that they are extremely varied, are not forms of simple attack. They are at times claims to belong, and at others (or even the same time) contributions to a living and vibrant faith tradition. They, moreover, affirm a theological consciousness (c.f. Meer, 2010) constitutive of themselves as individuals and as significant for social and political relations. Meer (2012) distinguishes between faith-based, Islam, and sociological, Muslim, identities, in a move that sidelines the former from proper sociological analysis. The argument here is that religious identities qua religious can and should be a sociological category of analysis. As Ramadan has it: ‘the first and most important element of Muslim identity is faith’ (2004: 79). Tibi likewise notes that, ‘the application of a disputed concept of race, based in biology, to a religious community is not only misleading but also highly flawed’ (2008: 157). What the chapters here hope to have shown is that the fact that sociologists often forget, ignore or disavow this as significant is blinkered and serves to obscure significant understandings of identity and social and political patterns and relations, where religiosity forms a, perhaps the, important point of orientation and coalescence. There is a need for conceptual clarity between discrimination on the basis of religion and discrimination on the basis of culture (Lauwers, 2019), although the two are inevitably entangled and entwined in ways which may always ultimately resist complete clarity. A failure to interrogate these links in a way that does justice to their different parts, nevertheless, risks a type of ‘conceptual inflation’ (Miles & Brown,

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2003) that can obfuscate significant dynamics, thereby impoverishing our understanding. It can fail to appreciate important differences, struggles, experiences and ways of being in the world. As such, it can limit our ability to challenge inequalities and harmful forms of misrecognition.

References Ahmed, L. (1992). Women and gender in Islam: Modern roots of a historical debate. Yale University Press. Allen, C. (2010). Islamophobia. Ashgate. APPGBM. (2018). Islamophobia defined: Report on the inquiry into a working definition of Islamophobia / anti-Muslim hatred . https://appgbritishmuslims. org/. Last accessed 18 September 2019. Birt, J. (2013). Islamophobia in the construction of British Muslim identity politics. In P. Hopkins & R. Gale (Eds.), Muslims in Britain: Race (pp. 201– 227). Edinburgh University Press. Birt, Y. (2018). Why this new definition of Islamophobia is bitterwsweet. https://medium.com/@yahyabirt/why-this-new-definition-of-islamophobiais-bittersweet-99b7f9993d73. Last accessed 16 December 2020. Bulliet, R. W. (1994). Islam: The view from the edge. Columbia University Press. de Kadt, E. (2018). Liberal religion: Progressive versions of Judaism. Routledge. Duderija, A. (2007). Literature review: Identity construction in the context of being a minority immigrant religion: The case of western-born Muslims. Immigrants and Minorities, 25 (2), 141–162. Esposito, J. L. (2003). Islam and civil society. In J. L. Esposito & F. Burgat (Eds.), Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in Europe and the Middle East (pp. 69–100). Hurst & Company. Gilliat-Ray, S. (2010). Muslims in Britain: An introduction. Cambridge University Press. Grosfoguel, R. (2012). The multiple faces of Islamophobia. Islamophobia Studies Journal, 1(1), 9–33. Guimond, A. M. (2017). Converting to Islam: Understanding the experiences of white American females. Palgrave Macmillan. Halliday, F. (1999). ”Islamophobia” reconsidered. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 22(5), 892–902.

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Hidayattullah, A. A. (2014). Feminist edges of the Qur’an. Oxford University Press. Jackson, L. B. (2018). Islamophobia in Britain: The making of a Muslim enemy. Palgrave Macmillan. Jacobson, J. (1997). Religion and ethnicity: Dual and alternative sources of identity among young British Pakistanis. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 20 (2), 238–256. Jawad. (1998). The rights of women in Islam: An authentic approach. Macmillan. Jones, S. H., Catto, R., Kaden, T., & Elsdon-Baker, F. (2018). “That’s how Muslims are required to view the world”: Race, culture and belief in nonMuslim’s descriptions of Islam and science. The Sociological Review, 67 (1), 161–177. Kamrava, M. (ed.) (2006). The new voices of Islam: Rethinking politics and modernity. University of California Press Khan, A. (2018). ‘Britain’s black Muslims: Ignored, discriminated and resisting’, AlJazeera. https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/britainblack-muslims-discriminated-resisting-180322181443300.html. Last accessed 25 June 2018. Khattab, N., & Modood, T. (2015). Both ethnic and religious: Explaining employment penalties across 14 ethno-religious groups in the United Kingdom. Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 54 (3), 501–522. Klug, B. (2014). The limits of an analogy: Comparing Islamophobia and antisemitism. Patterns of Prejudice, 48(5), 442–459. Krämer. (2013). Modern but not secular: Religion, identity and the ordrepublic in the Arab Middle East. International Sociology, 28(6), 629–644. Lauwers, A. S. (2019). Is Islamophobia (always) racism? Critical Philosophy of Race, 7 (2), 306–332. Lockett, L. A., & Jelen, T. G. (2017). The effect of religious affiliation and religious markets on Islamophobia in four European nations. Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion, 13(10), 1–15. Mandel, R., Meer, N., Silverstein, P. A., Robbins, J., & Özyürek, E. (2015). Islamophobia, religious conversion, and belonging in Europe. History and Anthropology, 26 (3), 362–379. Medovoi, L. (2012). Dogma-line racism: Islamophobia and the second axis of race. Social Text 111, 30(2): 43–74. Meer, N. (2008). The politics of voluntary and involuntary identities: Are Muslims in Britain an ethnic, racial or religious minority? Patterns of Prejudice, 42(1), 61–81. Meer, N. (2010). Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan.

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Meer, N. (2012). Negotiating faith and politics: The emergence of Muslim consciousness in Britain. In W. I. U. Ahmad & Z. Sardar (Eds.), Muslims in Britain: Making Social and Political Space (pp. 156–170). Routledge. Meer, N., & Modood, T. (2011). The racialisation of Muslims. In S. Sayyid & A. Vakil (Eds.), Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives (pp. 69– 84). Columbia University Press. Miles, R., & Brown, M. (2003). Racism (2nd ed.). Routledge. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Polity Press. Modood, T. (2009). Muslims and the politics of difference. In P. Hopkins & R. T. Gale (Eds.), Muslims in Britain: Race (pp. 193–209). Edinburgh University Press. Modood, T. (2020). Islamophobia and normative sociology. Journal of the British Academy, 8, 29–49. Mossiere, G. (2016). The intimate and the stranger: Approaching the “Muslim question” through the eyes of female converts to Islam. Critical Research on Religion, 4 (1), 90–108. Murad, A. H. (2020). Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe. The Quilliam Press. Muslim Women’s Network (MWNUK). http://www.mwnuk.co.uk/. Naqshbandi, M. (2015). UK Mosque Statistics for 2015. http://www.muslim sinbritain.org/blog/index.php?entry=entry150923-160414. Last accessed 25 June 2018. Özyürek, E. (2015). Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe. Princeton University Press. Ramadan, T. (2004). Western Muslims and The Future of Islam. Oxford University Press. Rana, J. (2007). The story of Islamophobia. Souls, 9 (2), 148–161. Reda, N., & Amin, A. (Eds.). (2020). Islamic Interpretive Tradition and Gender Justice: Processes of Canonization Subversion and Change. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Trust, R. (1997). Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All . Runnymede Trust. Trust, R. (2017). Islamophobia: Still A Challenge for Us All . Runnymede Trust. Salih, R. (2004). The backward and the new: National, transnational and postnational Islam in Europe. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 30 (5), 995–1011. Sayyid, S., & Vakil, A. (Eds.). (2011). Thinking Through Islamophobia: Global Perspectives. Columbia University Press.

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Sealy, T. (2021). Islamophobia: With or without Islam? Religions, 12(6), 369. Sian, K. P. (2013). The politics of Sikh Islamophobia. In S. M. Behloul, S. Leuenberger, & A. Tunger-Zanetti (Eds.), Debating Islam: Negotiating Religion, Europe, and the Self (pp. 119–134). Transcript Verlag. Taras, R. (2013). ‘Islamophobia never stands still’: Race, religion, and culture. Ethnic and Racial Studies, 36 (3), 417–433. Tibi, B. (2008). Political Islam, World Politics and Europe: Democratic Peace and Euro-Islam versus Global Jihad . Routledge. Wadud, A. (1999). Qur’an and Woman: Rereading the Sacred Text from a Woman’s Perpsective. Oxford University Press. Wadud, A. (2008). Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam. Oneworld. Warsi, Baroness S. (2011, January 20). Baroness Warsi’s Stenberg Lecture Speech. https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/baroness-warsi-s-sternb erg-lecture-speech. Last accessed 6 January 2018. Young, I. M. (2011 [1990]). Justice and the politics of difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

9 Hospitable Multiculturalism

[…] But definitely it [becoming Muslim] wasn’t straightforward, at all. It still isn’t, still not straightforward. You know what it is? People complicate stuff. People complicate stuff too much; people are just as annoying as hell, my view. Which people? Aaah, okay let’s get into your multiculturalism now. That’s really what it’s about. It’s not about Islam; it’s not about the religion itself. It’s about those who practise this religion. That’s where the biggest struggles come from. Because I would say on the face of it, it might seem to most people on the outside that there is a collective community of Muslims. And there is; we, you know, we have each other’s backs most of the time you know, we all stand together when it matters, when it counts. But it doesn’t mean that we don’t have our differences. And it doesn’t mean that reverts themselves [don’t] find themselves in a very sort of difficult position. Because, like most ancient religions, it’s very much about how established you are in the religion, and that is usually determined by your lineage in the majority of situations.

Vidya’s passage, which directly references multiculturalism, shows how ‘Muslim’ can in certain circumstances be considered a superordinate © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_9

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category. Also, however, she highlights the distinctiveness of converts (reverts) seeking to reconcile their inner held faith with their social position and relations as a result of the established ethno-cultural/ethnoreligious Muslim communities. It is these established forms and how they present difficulties for converts that evoke multiculturalism for her. That is, multiculturalism comes into the picture when thinking about the very sociological concerns of groupness and its political and social contextualisation in society. It is these forms that also prompt a direct reference to multiculturalism for Matthew, who more directly points to multiculturalism as a divisive factor on the view of the institutional dominance of born Muslim communities in the UK, which consequently leaves little space for converts: Erm I mean I’m not gonna say multiculturalism is dead or multiculturalism has always been a bad thing, but I feel like our very lax position on how we’ve dealt with multiculturalism has created this problem. Erm, it’s caused many problems but specifically to me as a Muslim it’s caused this problem inside me [sic] own community, where we’re still very divided upon race erm, and language.

In their direct references to multiculturalism, they both then highlight the issue of an ethnicised view of religion and how this is problematic. Rosie, by contrast, highlights a different aspect. For her, the dominant preference when it comes to issues of integration in Britain is still essentially assimilative, and although multiculturalism has not been given enough space, it may hold out the hope of more pluralistic and inclusive thinking: But here [Britain], because you’ve got like this indigenous population that is still the majority, multiculturalism is harder to come to terms with because there is sort of an expectation that you’re going to eventually assimilate.

The challenge highlighted in all of these quotes is a challenge to broaden, to open up the way in which these issues are thought—and is a challenge

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that extends to different aspects and levels in society. Difference is liberative as far as it offers conceptual tools that see difference as positive rather than as an obstacle to be overcome. The argument for the religious in this conversation follows from recognising that ‘no one can feel at ease and retain self-esteem and self-respect if he or she is socially accepted despite being [Muslim, religious], since such acceptance would amount to a denial of significant components or elements of one’s (personal) identity’ (Galeotti, 2004: 98). The challenge is also one that can be extended to multiculturalism. Before elaborating on this, it will be helpful to recall what has been established so far. Converts to Islam in Britain have been increasing in numbers in the last couple of decades and, moreover, have been gaining attention that outstrips their absolute numbers. This in part reflects the attention Muslims have received in Britain and the focus on issues of terrorism. In part then, this attention is negative and specific to Islam and Muslims, but it also sits in a wider context of more general suspicion and caution over public religion. In this picture converts are also structurally disadvantaged within born Muslim communities and at the same time often shunned by their immediate family and friends and dislocated from the idea of the majority or a different minority community. Within this contextual picture, converts assert their religious subjectivity against conceptions that secularise or ethnicise their identity. This foregrounding of a religious subjectivity as a mode of being, what we have been referring to under the Simmelian notion of religiosity, orients in significant ways their social and political relations and forms of belonging with regard to Britain, Islam and Muslim communities. With this in mind, this chapter now more directly addresses the key issue that has been present throughout but requires more detailed discussion: the implications of the arguments so far for thinking about multiculturalism. To this end, this chapter addresses and elaborates on the relation between hospitality and recognition.

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When is Recognition not Recognition? The main premise underlying the discussions of this book is caution over too readily collapsing religion into ethnicity. Multiculturalism’s shortcomings in this light are related to its reliance on the concept of ethno-religious, where the religious becomes a mere proxy for the ethnic and thereby excludes the religious qua religious from being the central pivot for which to consider recognition. The case against this kind of collapsing of the two categories has been made empirically in relation to identity and patterns of social relations emergent from the narratives of converts to Islam in Britain, and theoretically in relation to an engagement with the concept of hospitality borrowed from political theology. The outcome is that recognition of ethno-religious identity can be a form of misrecognition of religious identity. Moreover, a result of this focus is that significant patterns of social belonging are missed. One of multiculturalism’s core aims when it comes to recognition is, as Modood states, that, ‘multiculturalism refers to the struggle, the political mobilisation but also the policy and institutional outcomes, to the forms of accommodation in which “differences” are not eliminated, are not washed away but to some extent recognised’ (Modood, 2007: 39). Recognition then requires policies and institutional arrangements which help manifest it in the public sphere. It is not merely tolerated but largely a private matter for individuals; rather, it is supported as part of the fabric of society and politics. A concern then arises with collapsing the religious into the ethnic as in ethno-religious identity over what this means for public recognition in these institutional forms. This concern is echoed when it comes to thinking about these kinds of political and policy outcomes in the following: ... while there are often clear areas of overlap between aspects of religion and aspects of ethnicity in both the self-understanding of people and in their experience of unfair treatment, disadvantage and discrimination, for an appropriately rounded understanding and approach to policy development and impact assessment it is important that the dimension of ‘religion’ should not be completely collapsed in to that of ‘ethnicity’ nor vice versa. Rather, their complex

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relationship needs to be borne in mind and teased out in each specific context that is under consideration. (Beckford et al., 2006: 8; see also Dinham, 2009)

Deriving from these concerns and following on from its limited capacity with regard to religious subjecthood, we can see that recognition of ethno-religious identities also has further limitations in contrast to hospitality, which we can begin to see by reengaging multiculturalism here with Bretherton’s political theology. The recognition of religion as a public good that multiculturalism advocates comes to reflect a position that effectively limits the church or other religious organisation (for example) with regard to developing a common and shared good in which the religious is active and contributory at a public level, other than the outcomes that emanate through individual, private motivations. There are two levels we can explore this claim at. One is at an institutional and policy level, the other is a more abstract level. These will be taken in turn. At an institutional and public policy level, Bretherton is critical of the church becoming just another interest group operating in the ‘third sector’.1 The increasing role over the last few decades faith-based organisations have played in the UK in partnering with the state are seen by multiculturalism as positive forms of recognition and of religion’s role as a public good (Modood, 2019). Bretherton too recognises that, on the one hand, this positively increases the role and visibility of faith organisations in society as part of the public good. However, he also cautions that it often means they have to mimic secular organisations through processes of ‘institutional isomorphism’ in order to enter into such partnerships with the state, and which can distort the faith groups themselves and work to depoliticise them. It is this depoliticization of religion that the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams too challenges, arguing against the ‘mortgag[ing] [of ] the Church [his direct concern is with the Anglican Church] to partnership in a rather bland global ethic’ (2001: 71). What is still lacking in these kinds of arrangements is

1The audience Bretherton addresses is as much the church itself as those that would restrict it in such ways as well as a caution over how worship can be instrumentalised for political purposes by some within the church.

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‘a crowded and argumentative public square’ in which ‘religious convictions are granted a public hearing in debate; not necessarily one in which they are privileged or regarded as beyond criticism, but one in which they are attended to as representing the considered moral foundation of the choices and priorities of citizens’ (Williams, 2006). That is, the religious aspect is restricted to the background of the culture by conditions set upon their presence, scope and activity in the public sphere such that ‘the distinctiveness of “faith” ethos in faith provision is often overlooked – or, where it is acknowledged, often treated only in a negative sense’ (Pennington, 2020: 25). This restricts the distinctive critical and constructive roles the church or other religious organisations can play in society and politics (Bretherton, 2010: 43; Dinham, 2009; see Billingham, 2019 for an argument from within liberalism for permitting religious groups to provide services ‘on their own terms’ against ‘transformative state interference’). Moreover, the structural aspect of competition in these relations can actually work against the type of cohesion, and common life, it is supposed to foster and support, something for which faith groups often take the blame; a narrative that sits neatly within post-Enlightenment and secularist critiques of religion’s divisive impact in society but ignores the structural conditions behind it (Bretherton, 2010: 43). Bretherton cautions the church about partnering with the state and calls it to interrogate the conditions of such partnerships (2010). Bretherton identifies these roles as reductive, instrumentalist and functionalist processes of ‘co-option, competition, and commodification’ (2010: 2; see also Pennington, 2020) and is critical of the church deriving its social and political role and vision from outside of its belief and practice. Rather than these three modes, ‘The public work of the church’ Bretherton says ‘is thus to be an agent of healing and repair within the political, economic, and social order, contradicting the prideful, violent, and exclusionary logics at work in the saeculum and opening it out to its fulfillment in Christ’ (2010: 210). Bretherton’s critiques then suggest that recognition is something short of a kind of hospitality-oriented politics, which would recognise religion’s critical role in sustaining social and political relations. This is not least because as an ‘outside’ notion with

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strong secular biases, recognition lacks capacity with regard to faith traditions. It is recognition as misrecognition and the consequences of this that Bretherton alerts us to. Hospitality then calls us to ask questions about recognition and what it means, what is being recognised and when forms of recognition may in fact be forms of misrecognition. One important question it provokes is on whose terms and on whose frame of reference recognition is made, what misinterpretations and misunderstandings might follow, and, moreover, what effect this has on social and political relations. It calls us to question the limits of multiculturalism and where it might be simply a ‘boutique multiculturalism’ (Fish, 1997). For such a situation can inhibit rather than promote a common politics of equal respect. That is to say that we must be able to speak and listen across difference, and different lexicons. It is, then, in creating a political space on the grounds of taking incommensurable difference seriously and of listening while simultaneously, and each in their own way, deliberating about goods in common that hospitality provides a richer and more capacious frame than recognition. This is significant for multiculturalism in its own terms, which can be seen by considering Taylor’s argument (1994: 25) that as a result of misrecognition: a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. Nonrecognition or misrecognition can inflict harm, can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.

As we have seen, a lack of recognition of their religious subjectivity does cause real harm and a reduced mode of being. Ethno-religious recognition simply will not work for all people at all times and in this sense, multiculturalism’s emphasis here and, in the writings of some of its protagonists, its active disavowal of religious identity as relevant in these two regards, produces a rather stiff category that lacks the agility to recognise religious qua religious identity. If we look at multiculturalism’s terms, it is clear that multiculturalism is oriented towards combatting such forms of misrecognition. Yet, multiculturalism in its concept of

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ethno-religious or in policies which seen as sufficiently ‘multicultural’ does misrecognise religious identities. Why is this? Firstly, as we have said, multiculturalism sees ethno-religious as a socio-political identity capturing the dialectic between the personal and the social and in its emphasis towards what is sociological it is also wary of the idea of recognising religious identities. The concern here is that recognition of religious identity entails recognition of beliefs or of religious truths, or cements religious identity as somehow involuntary, limiting freedom of conscience. That these are important concerns there is no disagreement. The disagreement comes in this being applied to religious identities in a way in which it is not applied to ethno-religious identities. For Modood, as Meer, the emphasis of multiculturalism is based in the focus on community’s based on descent rather than ‘the truth of doctrines’ (2019: 186). Caution over recognising the ‘truth of doctrines’ is appropriate, especially if we’re thinking about political recognition by the state, but it tells us nothing about why the ‘reality’ and meaningfulness of culture and ethnicity is more acceptable for recognition than applying the same logic to religion. That is, it does not explain why humans as ‘cultural beings’ (Parekh, 2006: 125) is a more ripe basis for recognition than humans as religious beings. It has also led to a position where religion-as-groupidentity is opposed to religion-as-faith without seeing the profound, and socio-political, connections between the two. The point here is not to challenge the concept of ethno-religious as such, it is sound enough sociologically and necessary to highlight and address important issues. Nevertheless, this emphasis to the neglect or disregard of religious identities produces blind spots when it comes to religious identity, and which requires specific theorising. The point here is that religious identity can be, on the one hand, the focus of ascription and discrimination while also, on the other hand, valued as a public identity by those that hold it and form the site of collective action; that is, it is both voluntary and involuntary. These are points which the previous chapters have sought to make. We have already noted Meer’s arguments about the category ‘Muslim’, and we can add at this point a critique he makes of both Tibi and Ramadan. On Meer’s account (2018), the principal failing of both their approaches is that they present too linear a conception of doctrine

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and identity and minimise the role of the social. While this caution is certainly warranted, Meer then goes too far on the other direction in reducing religiousness to the social in an over-determined way. As this book has been arguing, elevating the social to the thing to be explained loses sight of too much. Moreover, through its opposition of religiosity to religion to the exclusion of the former, there is the danger that it ‘foreshorten[s] the reality’ being studied (Taylor, 2007: 509). While the social remains both explanans and explanandum, the religious is restricted to explanandum. The argument here is that religiosity should inform our explanans as well as explanandum in certain instances (Woodhead, 2012). Indeed, Tibi suggests that a view over-determined by the social is useless (2008: 190). The point of interrogating the religion– culture divide in the way that previous chapters have is to question the assumption that these are separate, and that one reigns over the other in deterministic fashion—there is a two-way feedback loop going on here. This provides the capacity to hear both sides, to appreciate the negative experience of religious abuse in the name of ethnic and cultural conformity as well as the positive ‘fullness’ of religiosity and, moreover, how this can structure social relations. To be clear, what is to be recognised is not Islam as a definable set of ideas or religious doctrine, but the people for whom Islam (or other faith tradition) is central to their being. As has been stressed, as well as what is shared, precise scriptural interpretations, beliefs and practices vary. But the strength, depth and importance of religious identity is consistent. What we are recognising is people as co-citizens rather than a system of belief (Modood, 2007; Galeotti, 2004; Jones, 2006). This is the positive side for recognition, recognition of the reality, value and meaning for those who hold such an identity. The negative side is that its refusal or denial is a source of injustice and cause of harm. This harm can manifest in a number of ways: it can produce social barriers and exclusions that others more freely enjoy, it can also cause psycho-social harm where one is made strange. Recognition of this sort does not demand endorsement, which is neither helpful nor necessary. Recognition is not accorded on the basis of the merit of the content of Islam or any other faith (including atheism, humanism and so on) but on recognition of an individual or

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group’s rights as an equal member of the citizenry who, as such, should not face exclusions to their enjoyment of those rights. When it comes to developing bonds and relationships of co-citizens, whether legal, political or social, we would do well to have a more multireligious capacity for listening. Importantly, deep-seated religiosity carries importance quite apart from negative ascription; that is, it is more than turning an identity from a negative into a positive. Although in some ways the claims made by, for example, Muslims as a religious grouping will mirror those of other equality-seeking groups, on the basis of gender or sexuality for instance (Modood, 2019: 118), there are important ways in which their claims and criticisms in relation to the state, its structures of governance and societal and political institutions are significantly different and raise questions directly to do with secularism as such and are not just matters of extending equality. It is precisely on these issues that a critical notion of hospitality becomes useful. If multiculturalism is theologically illiterate itself, or at least unwilling to listen and allow religious language and reasoning as not properly either important for social concerns or ‘civic’ for political concerns, then it is a blind spot and multiculturalism remains limited with regard to conceiving a multireligious society. Multiculturalists too must recognise its own place in a context in which religion has become more important, but we are less religiously literate. Ironically, multiculturalism’s deafness in this regard is not just an epistemological problem, it is thoroughly sociological in so far as it is about what one does or is willing to understand and accommodate (Chaplin, 2008: 34). Yet, it requires an epistemological solution with regard to multiculturalists’ own terms. The argument being made here is for a multicultural inclusion as part of its vision of pluralist thickening, it being an additive rather than subtractive theory (Modood, 2014), but that in order to do so multiculturalism itself requires just such a thickening of its terms. This is where a critical notion of hospitality drawn from political theology comes in. As Chaplin has argued, ‘It is sheer sentimentality to deny the existence of these deep differences of belief among rival religions. The suppression of religious differences is a recipe not for tolerance but for mutual disrespect. A multiculturalism with integrity

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will not shrink from this conclusion’ (Chaplin, 2011: 52). The conclusion, Chaplin continues, ‘is clear: adherents to any religion and none need to work hard to discern the difference between legitimate cultural diversity within their (and others’) religious traditions and illegitimate deviations from what they regard as true faith. There is no escaping that hard work of mutual critique and self-critique’ (2011: 53). It is precisely these points, the inescapability of a constant negotiation along a religion–culture divide, or between religiosity and religion, and of continual self-reflection, which derives in no small measure through engagement with others, that hospitality brings to the fore. The strengths of hospitality vis-à-vis recognition then are found in its greater capacity to, perhaps ironically, recognise and remain open to religious subjecthood and the significance of theology that provides substance to it. In this, as a way of relating to others in society across difference where that difference is not seen as a problem to be overcome but a source of mutual enrichment (including critique), it is a concept more at home with addressing the ‘discursive disadvantage’ (Chaplin, 2008: 25) religious citizens, including especially religious minorities, face.

Whither Multiculturalism? So where does this leave multiculturalism? All, I think, is not lost. As I said in Chapter 3, this book is very much situated within multiculturalism and is the work of someone with strong multiculturalist sympathies; it is not a work of political theology and nor does it seek to dismantle and replace multiculturalism. Rather, it is focussed on identifying the thinking necessary in order to open up multiculturalism based on what hospitality calls us to consider and what has emerged from the empirical discussions in previous chapters. In Chapter 3 the case was made that in relation to multiculturalism the two challengers of interculturalism and everyday multiculturalism fell short. The argument to be made here in relation to hospitality is

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not so much that it falls short in the same way,2 although an aspect of this will be considered, but that in several important ways, the bases of multiculturalism allow such an opening up. It might have been noticed that in the preceding sections references to the work of multiculturalists were made both to critique them as well as in supporting the arguments being made in the book on the basis that multiculturalism’s own terms do provide openings. As it stands multiculturalism can be described as a religion-friendly approach and position, yet it misrecognises religiosity. Thus, multiculturalism requires theoretical work in order to open it out to the religious, but it does contain the seeds and resources in its own premises that make this possible. As Modood, for example, has implored, we must be ‘even-handed between the different identity formations’ (Modood, 2015 [1997]: 170), but multiculturalists must take more seriously that there is simply no reason to exclude or reduce religious identities, lest multiculturalism’s ethno-religious category become its own ‘solidaristic monism’, and good reasons to include them. This requires not that religion displaces racial and ethnic categories, religions themselves have plenty of reasons to come to terms with their own forms of racialisation and ethnicisation, but to recognise the distinctiveness of the religious, of its depth and significance for people’s sense of self, their motivations, and how this relates to the world, and its capacity to orient action in particular ways and produce its own solidarities that can work against societal inequalities. The approach of this book and its arguments are in this way in agreement with viewing ‘identity as something which explains social outcomes and is not merely explained by them’ and that is ‘sympathetic to group identities, where they express[] a sense of self and social location, and where they [are] mobilised to grow a sense of collective pride and oppose… domination’ (Modood, 2020a: 518). If these are the seeds of the approach, there are also more substantive overlapping concerns. The above does not suggest that recognition, and hospitality, are accept-all relativist positions, as well as difference they are both concerned with what is common. As political concepts, both 2 As

has already been noted, a fuller consideration of Bretherton’s political vision of democratic politics is beyond the scope of this book.

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are also concerned with, to use Bretherton’s term, ‘common life’ and how this is worked towards across difference. There are two aspects that bear elaboration: judgement and dialogue. Discussion of the relationship between recognition and hospitality here helps indicate that multiculturalism, opened up in the ways argued for throughout this book, need not be replaced as a result.

Hospitality and Recognition: Judgement With regard to recognition, Taylor is critical of positions which claim to know either that the contents of a culture are equally deserving or non-deserving as one’s own prior to investigating it (1994: 68–69). With regard to hospitality, we have already touched upon its conditionality, but can now elaborate a view that, as with recognition, places judgement at the centre of its theorising. In Chapter 2, Schilbrack was quoted as referring to hospitality as a ‘conceptual revolution in the ethics of religious diversity’ (2020: 68). In this vein, he elaborates a nested schema which places hospitality in relation to toleration for how diversity is managed. We have already seen (Chapter 2) how hospitality is conceived as superior to liberal toleration on the basis that hospitality has greater grounding in a theological framework and religious practice, and is better equipped to deal with the deep moral diversity of religious diversity and go beyond ‘mere acceptance’ in how one is to orient oneself towards strangers (Bretherton, 2016 [2006]: 125–126, 149). Toleration maintains a negative evaluation of the other’s religion as it is restricted to ‘contain[ing] and defus[ing]’ disputes (Schilbrack, 2020: 68). Hospitality, by contrast, emphasises the possibility that one can benefit and learn from other religions (ibid). In Schilbrack’s schema hospitality is superior to toleration because it is a richer moral ideal and a basis for ethical action: it ‘refers to a complex task of sorting that includes opposing what should be opposed, tolerating what deserves to be tolerated, and cultivating the attitudes of open-mindedness that let one learn from religions one does not share’ (2020: 74). If it is the case that while ‘ethnic identities are welcomed in the public space, there is much more unease about religion’ and in particular

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Muslim religious identities (Meer, 2010: 200), and if, furthermore, for converts their religiosity may also be ‘frowned upon’ from within Muslim communities, there is a need to address the issue of religiosity as part of a wider context and discussion. This might then contribute to an identified need for ‘the development of an inclusive dialogue on faith [which] would promote better relations between Muslims and the rest of society’ (Cheeseman & Khanum, 2009: 59). The kind of recognition at stake here is not merely political in an emptier and in a bare sense but the kind of mutual recognition that entails a regard for the other and their deep religious convictions that then ‘elevate[s] recognition to the political plane’ (Ricoeur, 2005: 19). In their critiques of toleration as insufficient, both recognition and hospitality bear similarities. Yet, it is in its place as an ethic that hospitality is distinct in emphasising the quality and character of social and political relations through bringing the motivations and orientations that stem from people’s deeply help faith more fully into the public sphere. This requires that multiculturalism develop a theological ear. For Modood, the public recognition of identities and beliefs is separate from and possible without their moral evaluation (2007: 66). But of course public recognition is bound up with judgements of this kind and exists within moral limits (as Modood goes on to acknowledge). Which identities will be recognised, especially when there are disputes, entails these kinds of judgements. Recognition of ethno-religious identities themselves entails a judgement about how the religious is to be treated and, as we have seen, is restrictive in this sense. This is a further way in which hospitality adds something that a bland form of recognition misses in relation to religious identity and how it orients social and political belonging and action. It actively recognises that eschewing these deep moral convictions will impoverish democratic debate in which forms of judgement play an inevitable role. The question is a matter of how that judgement operates.

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Hospitality and Recognition: Dialogue If this is the place of judgement in each concept, then how are such judgements to be made? The answer is the second aspect identified above, the place of dialogue. Taking multiculturalism first, while the Hegelian basis of recognition has been much more commented on, I want here to focus on the less elaborated upon Gadamerian aspect of the notion of recognition that Taylor presents. We might think of this as the procedural aspect of recognition, and here we can see a correlation with hospitality as a way of relating to one another across difference, which requires listening and dialogue. Taylor (1994) draws on the Gademerian concept of ‘horizons’ to form the dialogical basis of his politics of recognition. It is through an understanding of what is meant by horizons and the fusion of horizons that this dialogical basis gains its depth. Our horizons are our ‘range of vision that includes everything that can be seen from a particular vantage point’ (Gadamer, 2013 [1960]: 313). Underlying horizons are prejudices. It is important to realize here that prejudices for Gadamer can have either a positive or negative character. For Gadamer, prejudices are the fore-meanings of how ‘we understand ourselves in a self-evident way in the family, society, and state in which we live’ (2013 [1960]: 289). Crucially, understanding and accounting for these prejudices has the goal of opening us up rather than closing us off to understanding. That is, whether prejudices have a positive or negative value relates to how they open us up or restrict our ability for dialogical understanding and do not refer to ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ judgement that might be reached through dialogue. These are brought to the tasks of interpreting and understanding before other elements that may affect those tasks have been examined. This is an important part of the dialogue, and cornerstone of a multicultural dialogical approach as it recognizes the identity-richness of the dialogue partners based on a ‘presumption of value’ (Taylor, 1994: 72), that is, an attitude of openness, as the basis for deep engagement. ‘[R]eal judgments of worth’, Taylor says (1994: 70), ‘suppose that we have been transformed by the study of the other, so that we are not simply judging by our original familiar standards’.

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This is of crucial importance for recognition of religious epistemologies. In this way ‘the solution [of dialogue] is genuinely open’ and constructive of relations (Modood, 2017: 86, emphasis added)—this is its dialogical character. In fact, in a context of diversity, we might more accurately describe it as a ‘multilogue’ rather than dialogue (Modood, 2007: 127). The fusion of horizons then, means recognising ‘being-value’ (Gadamer, 2013 [1960]: 246) and investigating this situated in social and political relations and conditions of pluralism. Turning to hospitality, we can see more clearly multiculturalism’s capacity to include the concerns that hospitality has helped us raise in the preceding chapters. Hospitality too includes dialogue as central, placing an emphasis on listening (Bretherton, 2019). As ‘risky’ (Shannahan, 2017) hospitality alerts us to religious subjecthood and has the intrinsic capacity to ‘hear’ the theological in a way in which standard sociological ears are (often purposefully) deaf. This points towards an epistemic openness, an epistemic condition of and openness to difference and otherwiseness underlain by the conviction that not only can such openness help us understand others who may be strangers, but it can also enable us to renew and revivify ourselves. Hospitality as construed by Bretherton thus has a dual emphasis. It requires inward looking dialogue as well as outward looking dialogue. It is not just a matter of negotiation with another on the basis of fixed positions but is part of a process in which all parties learn from and about each other as well as themselves. We might call this the hermeneutics of hospitality. We can see then that the type of dialogical hermeneutics advocated as part of multiculturalism is akin to that of hospitality. Yet, hospitality highlights that this epistemic openness requires that multiculturalism pays attention to religious literacy within its own scope. The danger in not doing so is that multiculturalism comes to reproduce in part liberalism’s presumptions about the ‘proper place’ of religion, of religious motivations and religious reasoning, to the private sphere and thereby perpetuates the ‘discursive disadvantage’. This book has so far made the case for religious identity to be taken seriously socially and politically. It has done this on multiculturalism’s terms and addressing multiculturalism’s concerns with identifying identities in both negative as well as positive ways, and has demonstrated

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their salience. This has rested on the need to recognise deep differences while not losing sight of how common political projects might be forged. Central to this is the kind of dialogical (or multilogical) approach outlined above that is familiar to multiculturalism. Thickening this, however, in order to accommodate the specific concerns raised by considering religious difference qua religious has meant that we have argued that multiculturalism itself must develop a ‘theological ear’.

Secularity and Pluralism We can read in the extracts that opened this chapter and elsewhere in my participants’ narratives claims of belonging based in understandings of (moderate) secular pluralism and that these claims are firmly grounded in a vision of such pluralism. Moreover, most would not want to see secular pluralism undermined but rather seek full recognition and participation as part of it. In these terms, while multiculturalism requires thickening in the ways already discussed, its framework for politics remains well-positioned in general terms. This is so in two senses. The first means we can extend the discussion of multilogue that we began above in a way that will inevitably be agonistic. The second requires some further comments on secularism. In relation to dialogue, multiculturalism may be better placed as a framework to develop not just inter-faith and intra-faith dialogue, but also dialogue between faith and non-faith partners. Just as politics does not exhaust theology, neither can a Christian political theology exhaust theology. The theology of political theology for Bretherton ‘refers to reflection on the nature and form of political life in response to Jesus Christ as the revelation of God’ (2019: 21). On this basis this particular definition of political theology can only, through alerting us to difference, be one among others. The status of Jesus and Jesus as the Christ (chr¯ıstós) is of course not shared by other faiths. We have seen how the notion of hospitality similarly derives within the Islamic tradition but must necessarily be defined from different bases. This does not mean that these theological frames are therefore somehow inadequate and can or should be ignored in favour of something more secular. If nothing else, without theological frames, it will fail to be able to include modes

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of both speaking, listening, relating and being, and a discursive disadvantage for some in relation to others before dialogue has even got off the ground. Bretherton is well aware of these points, his is no insular theory and he is more than astute and compassionate enough to hear his own call, but his is (purposefully) a specifically Christian theory of politics and political engagement. This itself leads to a consideration of secularism. Bretherton is in fact in accord with multiculturalism in so far as he, eschewing secularism (understood as a form of ideological statecraft), argues for secularity as the necessary political background in which the forms of democratic politics he envisions can and should take place. This itself is in recognition of the plural, or multicultural, makeup of society; the necessity of engaging towards a common life with different others in this ‘penultimate’, ‘that which is not eternity’, time and space (2019: 231)—recall that multiculturalism is here construed theologically. Thus, what is needed, Bretherton says, is a ‘faithfully secular politics’ (2019: 237; see also Chaplin, 2011 for an excellent discussion of religious and secular reasoning in the political sphere). This highlights how, as Craig Calhoun has argued, ‘secularism is often treated as a sort of absence… We need to see secularism as a presence, as something…’ (2010: 35). And as something that excludes. The kinds of secularity advocated by Bretherton, and found to a lesser extent in the type of multiculturalised moderate secularism Modood advocates, seek to address this. Converts highlight some of the issues at stake here well, as well as point to the limitations of multiculturalism’s conception as it stands. Converts can be strange and resultantly caught in what Acheraïou has called ‘the space of the impossible’ (2011: 79), a site of alienation in which their subjectivity as British and Muslim can face a double-denial from both non-Muslims and Muslims. Converts, as a ‘minority within a minority’ (Brice, 2010), can find themselves ‘in a social position from which it is impossible to assert their characteristics as normal outside their own group’ (Galeotti, 2004: 90). Indeed, in Jensen’s study of Danish converts, one participant remarked that, ‘in the eyes of Muslims, I am the wrong kind of Muslim. In everyone’s eyes, I am a bizarre human being’ (quoted in Jensen, 2008: 401).

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This strangeness and bizarreness can then be both in relation to born Muslim communities at one level and society more widely at another. Converts are misrecognised, where that registers an asymmetrical relation in the capacity to recognise, at two levels. As a ‘minority within a minority’ converts start from a position where their ability to assert and claim positive difference in a socially effective way is severely constrained. It is again here that in relation to established Muslim communities, converts’ claims can be seen as assertions of their difference and particularity, as claims to belong and participate under a ‘shared fund’ rather than as claims to belong at the exclusion of others. This requires, however, an unsettling of the prevailing societal norms in relation to religious identity. They thus fall outside both the imaginary of Islam in so far as it is conceived on grounds tied to particular ethnic identities, and a wider secular imaginary on grounds of being religious. The task becomes, then, to think about how a space of the possible might be thought. Central for this is the link between the religious and the secular as part of the ‘social imaginary’ (Taylor, 2004). Taylor defines the social imaginary as the common understandings in ‘the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows. The expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underlie these expectations’ (2004: 23). A religiously literate multicultural imaginary thus needs to address the denial or ignorance of the presence of religious identities, the foreclosure of space and ability to contribute in the public realm, and the reducing and containment of their subjectivity in its vision of secularism. A detailed and more fully elaborated account of the implications for multiculturalised secularism are beyond the scope of this book. The point to highlight is that there are important questions that the considerations of this book bring to light. One aspect where we can say a bit more relates to dialogue and to an issue that has cropped up a couple of times, that of translation.

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Dialogue and the Challenges of Translation The idea of translation has been alluded to a few times in the course of the book so far, and it is now time to say a little more in relation to the discussion in this chapter. When thinking about religion in the public sphere and translation, one immediately thinks of Habermas’s well-known essay in which he argues that at certain political and legal levels religious language and justifications must be translated into a secular lexicon in order to be legitimate, and a more recent account along these lines is Laborde’s (2017) argument for public reason stricto sensu. This has been much commented on and Chaplin (2008, chapter 3) provides one good discussion of why this is not as straightforward as it might appear. Although vitally important debates, this particular level of theorising and debate is not what I want to focus on in relation to the issue of translation here, however. Rather, in line with how translation has arisen in previous chapters, I want to concentrate on translation as a process integral to dialogue across difference and the issue of religious literacy that it gives rise to; where the focus is not so much on the language used per se, although implications do follow, but on recognition of the prejudices and horizons at play in the process of dialogue. As such, I want to pick up on one in particular of Chaplin’s points; that, ‘liberal secularists suggest it is an epistemological question: it depends on the inner cognitive content of the reason. It isn’t. It’s a sociological question: it depends on what the audience happens to know or understand or be willing to accommodate’ (2008: 44). Laborde acknowledges this sociological aspect of public reason when she says that ‘for me, public reasons are reasons that actual (not idealized) publics find accessible” (2017: 121). One of the problems with Laborde’s position here is that certain types of reason are foreclosed prior owing to a minority status. In a predominantly secular polity such as the UK, religious reasons and language fall outside of being generally accessible. Yet, this creates a problem. Grace Davie (2015) has noted that during a period of time when religion has become more important in public and political debate, levels of religious literacy have declined. As Davie has further noted, a result of an understanding of the secular

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and religious based on opposition is a context which lacks the vocabulary to have serious conversations about religion at the same time as these questions are increasingly important for parts of the population and in public debates that have arisen as a result of Britain as multireligious, and, moreover, that this ‘paradox’ results in an ‘ill-mannered and illinformed’ debate about religion in society (2012: 283). If cross-cultural and inter-faith respect and recognition is to be genuine, however, participants in the debates must be allowed to speak in their own distinctive languages (Chaplin, 2008). Here, the notion of translation developed by Paul Ricoeur (2006) is helpful. He starts from two basic premises, that translation is inevitable and necessary, and that we need to ‘give up the ideal of the perfect translation’ (ibid: 8). From this he distinguishes between two types of translation, one of faithfulness against one of betrayal in recognition that what is being aimed for is ‘an equivalence without identity’ (ibid: 22). Rather than the impossible unconditional hospitality (à la Derrida), Ricoeur’s focus refers to what he calls linguistic hospitality in order to capture the need to become more literate across difference precisely because we must give up the idea of a perfect translation and instead focus on an imperfect but nevertheless meaningful relationship with others (Taylor, 2011). Ricoeur’s conception of translation begins with language translation, but he expands the applicability of the principles he derives to religions, where the art and ethics of hospitable translation are invaluable. For literacy this means we are better served by requiring it not as a prerequisite for engagement, which could be simply too burdensome, but as part of a desired outcome of engagement. In relation to the issue raised in this section, it shifts the emphasis from a focus on language and the expression of reasons, to how one approaches another in dialogue. That is, it promotes a hospitable form of social and political engagement that encourages literacy developed through engagement with others rather than forecloses it prior to engagement. It, furthermore, speaks to the discussions throughout this and the previous chapters and sets up a series of challenges. The first challenge, given the focus of the book as a whole, is for multiculturalism, or that branch of multiculturalism that has been characterised as the Bristol School of Multiculturalism. Oriented by a deep

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religious formative force, what we have been calling religiosity, converts’ patterns of social relations and relating to others socially and politically, cannot be captured by identities reliant on ethnicity. Bringing this type of linguistic hospitality to bear on multicultural multilogue, therefore, requires a theological ear on the part of multiculturalism; that multiculturalism itself become more agile and literate in relation to the religious; that multiculturalism itself does not become a force that places all of the burden of translation on those of faith. Further challenges relate to how converts are approached in dialogue by a non-Muslim majority society as well as by born Muslims. Here the challenge is how to approach the stranger, one who is both alike and unlike, near and far, and on this basis to not exclude a priori. Again, it is one of hospitality, of accepting converts in good faith across religious and ethnic lines. On the one hand, it involves a picture of Britain that is inclusive along multicultural and multireligious lines. This is the kind of picture the report of the Commission on the Future of MultiEthnic Britain (CMEB, 2000) outlined and that Modood (2020b) has recently articulated as ‘multicultural nationalism’. The CMEB report asked the question, ‘will [Britain] seize the opportunity to create a more flexible, inclusive, cosmopolitan image of itself?’ (2000: 15), a question which retains continued relevance two decades later. The report paid particular attention to the narrative of Britain and how its historical, social and political imaginary can be either constructive and inclusive or limiting and restrictive, and this question bears directly on the issues raised throughout this book and which are signally important to the kind of dialogue discussed here. On another hand, it also addresses similar issues with regard to the capacity of Islam as a ‘shared fund’ and the category ‘Muslim’ as such, in both the eyes of multiculturalism as well as born Muslims. As far as Islam and Muslim remain ethnic categories, they remain exclusive on the basis of religion. Just as Chapter 4 addressed the importance of personal narratives for processes of self-making and self-becoming, these levels of narratives are no less significant for an inclusive society that is sufficiently capacious ‘to flourish as a community of citizens and communities’ (ibid: xx). If these are dialogic challenges converts might be seen to provoke, there are also challenges for converts under hospitality also, and whereas

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the above highlight the need for a theological ear, here a more sociological ear is required. It has been argued in reference to reculturation that converts must translate, and in relation to the discussion of Islamophobia in the previous chapter, we can say that they do so in a way that is faithful rather than a betrayal. Yet, we have also seen how aspects of converts’ narratives can and do reproduce aspects of Islamophobic discourses. There is a danger then that converts might slip into something akin to the exclusivist account of the previous chapter. In this sense converts must be attentive to both religious as well as sociological capacities of the notion ‘Muslim’. These challenges matter because the way we approach dialogue with our fellow citizens matters not least as it already tells us something about how we view co-citizens and the idea of what is a citizen itself. It also, moreover, tells us about who, as a society, we are willing to become.

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Chaplin, J. (2008). Talking God: The Legitimacy of Religious Public Reasoning. Theos. Chaplin, J. (2011). Multiculturalism: A Christian Revival . Theos. Cheeseman, D., & Khanum, N. (2009). “Soft” segregation: Muslim identity, British secularism. In A. Dinham, R. Furbey & V. Lowndes (Eds.), Faith in the Public Realm: Controversies, Policies and Practices. The Policy Press. Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain (CMEB). (2000). The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. Profile Books. Davie, G. (2012). Thinking sociologically about religion: Implications for faith communities. Review of Religious Research, 54 (3), 273–289. Davie, G. (2015). Religion in Britain: A Persistent Paradox (2nd ed.). Blackwell. Dinham, A. (2009). Faiths, Public Policy and Civil Society: Problems, Policies, Controversies. Palgrave. Fish, S. (1997). Multiculturalism, or why liberals are incapable of thinking about hate speech. Critical Inquiry, 23(2), 378–395. Gadamer, H. G. (2013 [1960]). Truth and Method . Bloomsbury. Galeotti, A. E. (2004). Toleration as Recognition. Cambridge University Press. Jensen, T. G. (2008). To be “Danish”, becoming “Muslim”: Contestations of national identity? Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 34 (3), 389–409. Jones, P. (2006). Equality, recognition and difference. Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 9 (1), 23–46. Laborde, C. (2017). Liberalism’s Religion. Harvard University Press. Meer, N. (2010). Citizenship. Palgrave Macmillan. Meer, N. (2018). Misrecognising Muslim consciousness in Europe. In A. Yaqin, P. Morey & A. Soliman (Eds.), Muslims, Trust and Multiculturalism (pp. 97– 122). Palgrave. Modood, T. (2007). Multiculturalism: A Civic Idea. Polity Press. Modood, T. (2014). “We don’t do God”? Secularism and the accommodation of Muslims in western Europe. The Political Studies Association. https:// www.psa.ac.uk/insight-plus/blog/%E2%80%98we-don%E2%80%99tdo-god%E2%80%99-secularism-and-accommodation-muslims-westerneurope. Last accessed 25 June 2018. Modood, T. (2015 [1997]). ”Difference”, cultural racism and anti-racism. In T. Modood & P. Werbner (Eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 154–172). Zed Books. Modood, T. (2017). Intercultural public intellectual engagement. In F. Mansouri (Ed.), Interculturalism at the Crossroads: Comparative Perspectives on Concepts (pp. 83–103). UNESCO Publishing.

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10 Conclusion

Gauri Viswanathan, in a wonderful study of conversion in India, argued that conversion can ‘unsettle the boundaries which selfhood, citizenship, nationhood, and community are defined, exposing these permeable borders’ (Viswanathan, 1998: 16). The focus of her study was quite different from the present one and was concerned with showing how conversion to mainstream religion does this. Nevertheless, here we have seen something of how conversion to a minority religion also produces these unsettling processes through considering the case of multiculturalism and converts to Islam in Britain. Fundamental to the unsettling that forms the focus of this book is an alternative orientation towards thinking about religious identity based in what has been referred to as, drawing from Simmel, religiosity, and the book has presented several interrelated and mutually constitutive arguments to outline how and why this is important. The theoretical focus of this discussion has come through considering the relationship between multiculturalism, with its core concepts of ethno-religious identity and recognition, alongside religiosity and the notion of hospitality derived from political theology. Bringing the notions of religiosity and hospitality into the discussion of multiculturalism, it has been argued, brings © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2_10

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into view and allows us to address conceptual inadequacies in the literature of multiculturalism and of conversion to Islam and the effects, even where unintended, that result. Hospitality opened up the need and possibility of foregrounding the religious in thinking about identity and social relations, especially relations with ‘others’ where difference is highly significant. Religiosity and its twin notion, religion, provided an alternative basis of understanding and analytically approaching religious identity and belonging and the processes and dynamics that operate between and mutually constitute the personal and the social. While critically oriented towards multiculturalism, the arguments have also been offered as a contribution to multiculturalism, working from within and taking their lead from certain bases of multiculturalism’s own internal logic and terms of reference; that is, a way of offering arguments which ‘accept what is important to people… [and to] be even-handed between the different identity formations’ (Modood, 2015 [1997]: 170, emphasis in original). The book has also probed the dialectic between the negative and positive, and ascribed and claimed dimensions of identity. Although thereby building a position consistent in certain ways with a multiculturalist approach, bringing these methodological terms to bear in relation to religious identity has involved interrogating some of multiculturalism’s conceptual bases with a view to making them more hospitable to the religious. Multiculturalism, this book has suggested, misses something and this something is necessary in relation to understanding and addressing experiences, often negative and bewildering, that converts face from multiple directions. Whether based in their perceived contravention of the assumptions of secularism in being religious at all, or of adopting a non-Christian faith, or of becoming a ‘cultural’ ‘other’, converts are often and easily seen to be crossing boundaries perceived as either wrong or at least weird to be crossing. But just as important is the positive basis of identity here which, although inevitably bound up with these negative aspects, does not in an ultimate sense rely on or require them. The something that multiculturalism is missing in this regard is an appreciation of religiosity. Multiculturalism’s approach to identity, based on an ethno-religious conception where the emphasis is very much on the ethno-, has too little capacity to fully appreciate the difference that

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converts shine a light on or to encompass them in its terms. It has been the task of the previous chapters to argue both why this is so, why it should not necessarily be so, and to begin to say something about how it need not necessarily be so. To do this, the book argued for a theoretical shift that brought religious identity to the centre of analysis in a way that did not a priori view it as oppositional or antagonistic, or as something to be avoided, explained away or bracketed off. By taking religious identity seriously, converts to Islam can begin to unsettle the borders on which converts’ exclusions as religious subjects from both secular understandings and born Muslim communities rest. This represents a qualitative epistemological shift in understanding that allows us to hold the inarticulable element of religiosity together with the articulable religion, including, significantly, the dissonance, process and dynamics between the two. This, thus, prompts and allows us to foreground religiosity rather than background it. A significant aspect of this was a conversation between sociology and theological principles as mutually enriching based on a methodologically agnostic approach. This involved drawing on insights and concepts from political theology, most notably the notion of hospitality derived from the work of Luke Bretherton, and bringing a ‘theological ear’ to the analysis. This brought an alternative basis of difference into view, as well as of multiculturalism, that oriented from (rather than away from) religious subjecthood. To make this move sociologically in relation to the narratives that form the empirical basis of the book and its arguments, I drew on Simmel’s notions of religiosity and religion and in turn the dyad of religion and culture. Exploring the dynamic between these notions calls us to see religiousness as about the interplay between belief and practice where religion is ‘living’ but not to reduce or simply lose belief to practice or identity claims. One of the issues probed with regard to multiculturalism was that in offshoring religiosity it misses important strands of religion’s difference and significance when it comes to identity, social and political relations and the implications for debates about the position and role of religion in the public sphere. Religion, as Song reminds us, is a source of normative moral authority quite distinct from culture (Song, 2009: 179). As such,

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this book has argued that foregrounding religion is important and has explored why this is so and why it matters. Multiculturalism, it has been argued, needs to be more literate and hospitable towards religion in this regard. In chapter 4 we saw how aspects of change and continuity were managed through processes of meaning-making in relation to a pastoriented sense of self, which established being in relation to a recontextualised continuity and religiosity, and a future-oriented sense of self, which concerned becoming in relation to this being. Looking at the relationship between continuity and change, furthermore, established how they are mutually constitutive as part of a dynamic and dyadic relationship. It is the interaction and dynamics between them that is fundamentally important. In this regard, I argued the concept of congruity shifts the analytical lens away from concentrating on continuity or change and towards the dynamics between them and how these dynamics can produce an evolving, processual sense of wholeness. This is also found in the theological concept of fitrah, which registers the betweenness of the personal and divine. The other significant dyad that this book dealt with was that of the religion-culture divide prominent in converts’ discourse, where the focus was on aspects of belonging, and which also developed a discussion from this of a perspective on Islamophobia. Through the analytical lens of the stranger and particularly the ideas of nearness and distance, for which I again drew on Simmel, we saw how British converts to Islam position themselves as both of Britain and Islam, and, importantly, as critical friends, strange and familiar, of both. The stranger here provided language through which to articulate belonging in a way that attended to both positive and negative aspects, an approach consistent with multiculturalism, but also in a way that allowed the religious to emerge into the foreground. It is along these lines that converts’ positioning as stranger facilitates a ‘positive and specific kind of participation’ (Simmel, 1950: 404), one found in the tensions, inevitable and inexorable, at the heart of these dynamics. As far as belonging is understood along racial and ethnic lines to the exclusion of the religious, its view remains narrow and trapped within racial binaries that serve to a priori exclude converts. An important general trend to come out of this discussion, notwithstanding

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the need for greater nuance and complexity, was converts’ positioning as religiously near with regard to Islam but culturally far in relation to Muslim communities, while culturally near but religiously far from society more widely. This discussion also highlighted that such negotiations and grappling along these lines of religion and culture are in no way specific to converts. It is a feature that has been found in studies on young born Muslims, can be seen quite clearly in the writings of many Muslim scholars, and also evident in the outputs of Muslim organisations of different types. (And it is of course a feature of all religions now as throughout history.) Assertions that by engaging in religion-culture divide type discourse converts are therefore automatically Islamophobic are, then, extremely problematic, not least in having a rather thin perspective on religion and a reductive view of religiousness as simple sites of assertion and struggle over privilege and cultural power. The move made in this book is one away from ethnicising religious and cultural forms in a static and parochial way, where the focus becomes one of assimilation and conformity. This is not to suggest that specific cultural forms and formulations are not inevitable or important, but that religion and religiosity cannot be reduced to them—this is its dynamic character. In relation to multiculturalism and Islamophobia this produced several implications. Religion and ethnicity operate and interact in ways both overlapping but also as distinct, and it is this distinction that has been the focus of analytical interrogation here as it is this relationship that has been hitherto under-discussed in multiculturalism scholarship. We have also, however, not just drawn religion and ethnicity apart for analytical purposes, but also put them back together again to say something about their form of interaction and overlap. Such attempts are vital to develop a more nuanced and complex picture of how people live their lives and their selves of society. Doing this pulling apart and putting back together raised the need to adopt a multi-level analysis with an appreciation of the structural and historical position of Muslims, Islam and converts in British society. Viewed from this perspective, converts’ reproducing of aspects of Islamophobic discourses can be seen to represent the meeting point of dominant discourses, recognition of a ‘community of suffering’, and

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discrimination they face from born Muslims, along with their sense of religiosity, theological principles of unity and plurality, and their attempts to carve open space as strangers (relatedly, see Ahmad, 2017). To disconnect and over-simplify one of these, or at least not to reconnect it, risks its own forms of essentialism and marginalising converts through treating their conversion and the struggles they experience as religious subjects in bad faith. The value of the complexity here is its ability to argue for a greater level of openness and inclusion. To be clear, religion cannot ignore issues of race and ethnicity, racism and racialisation. Anthony Reddie’s recently updated book, from the perspective of Christian black theology, Is God Colour-blind? (2020 [2010]), provides an example of perspectives that are vital for understanding how religions do not always live up to their own claims of universality, and how, we might say, they can and must multiculturalise. But the orientation and focus of the argument for this book has been that neither can anti-racism, especially in its multicultural form, ignore or reduce religion. A multi-level perspective then draws our attention to a series of challenges that stem from claims for belonging and inclusion based on pluralism. In wider terms, these challenges centre around the conception of difference and how religious subjects are to be included more fully in the ‘social imaginary’. Significantly, if dialogical moves fail to address religious epistemologies, they are unlikely to fully succeed. There are challenges here for born Muslims and Muslim communities in how they relate to and include converts as agentive under the ‘shared fund’ of Islam, and these challenges equally and similarly extend to converts under this ‘shared fund’. The implicit challenge here for converts as well as born Muslims is not to over-emphasise and prescribe their own ethnic norms or ethno-religious identity in ways that are exclusive and exclusionary. Just as converts can be excluded by a Bangladeshi Islam or Pakistani Islam, for instance, a British Islam must avoid becoming an ethno-religion if it is to be inclusive and hold out the promise of hospitality and a genuinely (hospitable) multicultural view of citizenship. Part of this will undoubtedly involve an open questioning of

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how the ‘religious’ is understood, being cautious of operationalising it as a unitary term. Despite the critical position towards multiculturalism, the overall position of the book has been additive and contributory to multiculturalism rather than subtractive and dismissive. Multiculturalism holds out the promise of being able to positively include these considerations as part of its additive pluralisation, but as should be clear by now, this requires theoretical wrangling. On this basis, the argument has been for a sociological approach to the religious that does not lose religiosity as part of the analysis. The hope of this is that it may contribute to opening up space for inclusions that as it stands fall outside the scope of multiculturalism’s concepts if not the ethos of its terms. The first theoretical contribution to multiculturalism was to argue that religiosity is a necessary site on which to think about difference. Following this, it is religiosity as the basis of difference that requires recognition if the promise of multiculturalism’s positions with regard to social equality and social justice are to be realised with respect to religious subjects. Being conceived on purely sociological modes of reasoning, such subjectivities have so far been under-represented and under-theorised in multiculturalism and, as we saw, would fall outside the scope of its arguments for who is a Muslim and why. It was argued that a sociology with a ‘theological ear’ and religiosity as the site of difference addresses this shortcoming. Consistent with multiculturalism, such recognition does not entail endorsement, whether of beliefs or practices, but is rather concerned with recognising ‘being-value’ of co-citizens as part of a view of what equal citizenship is and entails. This would in turn require certain extensions of multicultural thought and multicultural positions in existing debates. The importance of dialogue for multiculturalism has been noted, for instance, but this remains an area where more needs to be said; what of religious reasons, language (Habermas’s view on translation) and so on in public debate? The point of the type of multicultural dialogue discussed in chapter 9 is not to necessarily lead to more agreement, but to be able to disagree better, not to dissolve difference as a problem, but to able to live better with difference. Recognising this as the basis for dialogue is important in order not to create a priori exclusions. The emphasis on

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listening that hospitality brings to these forms of dialogue is one that is active not just in better understanding others but also in enriching our understanding of ourselves as well as understandings of a broader, collective ‘we’—developing the kind of multicultural nationalism that Modood (2019) has recently outlined through what we might call a narrative hospitality. Whereas Shannahan’s conception of ‘risky’ hospitality highlights aspects of how this might result in a sense of loss or at least vulnerability, the emphasis of hospitality is very much on the positive gains to be had through such a process. There is more too to be said about state–religion connections on the basis of the criticisms of how these operate in the previous chapter. There are then also implications for thinking about the relationship between the secular and the religious provoked by the discussions of the previous chapters. The view of pluralism that emerges from the narratives here, one that sees the religious and secular as distinct yet intertwined, is one attached to, not separate from, religiosity. Religiosity activates the kind of person and society envisioned and striven for; ‘the question of how to live is intimately linked to the question of who we are’ (Meretoja, 2017: 15). Here, multiculturalism’s moderate secularism is able to keep a view of such pluralism, albeit that it requires a more hospitable approach towards the religious in the public sphere if it is not to simply reinforce secularised and ethnicised forms. Difficult discussions and debates follow but these are necessary if a multicultural vision is to be realised. There is not scope to explore these issues here, but the engagement with multiculturalism and arguments presented in this book suggest that there is still much fruitful work in this area. Ultimately, this has been about the stories we tell to as well as of ourselves as individuals, as groups and as societies. The importance of these stories is that at the personal level they are significant sites of meaning-making and of self-making, for how we feel about ourselves as individuals and how we feel about ourselves as part of the society in which we live. The stories discussed throughout this book are in so many important ways and with various dynamics and patterns, attempts to ‘weave the [Islamic religious] life into the fabric of the social’ (Plummer, 1995: 87), not least because ‘struggles over narrative agency are struggles over the possible’ (Meretoja, 2017: 299).

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Converts to Islam in Britain, indeed in Europe, have been attracting increasing scholarly as well as media attention but there is a lack when it comes to frameworks and ways of being able to understand their senses of identity and belonging. Existing frameworks that secularise or ethnicise religious identity and belonging never quite manage to grasp some of what is it stake and of real importance to people and how we might understand them and their lives. We can see the frequent invocation of the phrase ‘coming out’, typically used in relation to sexuality, that converts use to talk about telling their families as registering the lack of space; the lack of a community to hear these stories, the meaning they have for those who tell them, and the struggles that they are going through to have their stories ‘out’, accepted, heard, and which can develop into new communal forms of being and belonging. It registers the spaces that are closed to such identities and routes to belonging and the struggle to find a language and register through which to begin to open them up to what will undoubtedly, in time, take on a different analogous expression.

References Ahmad, A. (2017). Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work, and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait. Duke University Press. Meretoja, H. (2017). The Ethics of Storytelling: Narrative Hermeneutics, History, and the Possible. Oxford University Press. Modood, T. (2015 [1997]). ”Difference”, cultural racism and anti-racism. In T. Modood & P. Werbner (Eds.), Debating Cultural Hybridity: Multicultural identities and the politics of anti-racism (pp. 154–172). Zed Books. Modood, T. (2019). A multicultural nationalism? Brown Journal of World Affairs. Spring-Summer Issue. Plummer, K. (1995). Telling Sexual Stories: Power. Routledge. Reddie, R. (2020 [2010]). Is God Colour-Blind?. SPCK Publishing. Simmel, G. (1950). The stranger. In K. H. Wolff (ed. and trans.), The Sociology of Georg Simmel (pp. 402–408). London: The Free Press.

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Song, S. (2009). The subject of multiculturalism: Culture, religion, language, ethnicity, nationality, and race? In B. de Bruin & C. Zurn (Eds.), New waves in political philosophy (pp. 177–197). Palgrave Macmillan. Viswanathan, G. (1998). Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity, and Belief . Princeton University Press.

Index

62, 63, 66–68, 88, 91, 97, 103–105, 115, 118, 120, 121, 131, 143, 148, 158, 161, 177, 181, 183, 184, 186, 190, 195, 197, 198, 201, 204–206, 209, 211, 213, 214, 222, 223, 226, 227

B

Bretherton, Luke 3, 50, 57–60, 62, 63, 65, 67, 69, 112, 113, 116, 199, 200, 206, 207, 210–212, 223

C

Cobbold, Lady Evelyn 29–31 converts in the media 8, 29, 33 in the Victorian era 12, 28

D

deculturation 102, 103, 172 dialogue 39, 64, 162, 164, 184, 188, 207–211, 213–217, 227 difference 2, 6, 10–13, 31, 35, 38–40, 43, 44, 50–57, 59, 60,

E

elastic orthodoxy 150, 164 ethnicisation 68, 206 ethnicity 2, 3, 8, 9, 11, 13, 20, 36, 39, 41, 68, 76, 78, 96, 106, 115, 126, 134, 136, 138, 143, 149, 150, 163–165, 171, 175, 183, 198, 202, 216, 225, 226 ethnicization 112, 134 Euro-Islam 107, 110–112, 186

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021 T. Sealy, Religiosity and Recognition, Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-75127-2

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232

Index

everyday multiculturalism 50, 53, 54, 205

multiculturalism Bristol School of 50, 215 Murad, Abdal Hakim 31, 44, 106, 107, 111, 113, 115, 158, 176

F

fitrah 82, 224 N H

hospitality and toleration 207, 208 I

identity ethno-religious 2, 9–11, 50–52, 61, 67, 76, 78, 198, 199, 201, 202, 208, 221, 226 interculturalism 50, 53, 55, 56 narrative 2, 12, 14, 16, 94 religious 2, 6, 9–12, 35, 37, 50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 61, 68, 69, 75–77, 97, 108, 158, 171, 173, 183, 189, 198, 201–203, 206, 208, 210, 213, 221–223, 229 Islamophobia 11, 51, 77, 132, 133, 136, 170, 173–176, 181, 183, 186–188, 217, 224, 225

narrative 2, 12, 14, 15, 17, 19, 28, 32, 35, 39, 59, 76–81, 83, 85, 86, 88, 90, 92, 94, 101, 114, 116, 121, 127, 129, 136, 137, 140, 141, 147, 148, 150–152, 155, 156, 161, 162, 167, 170, 172, 177, 178, 182, 184, 187–189, 198, 200, 211, 216, 217, 223, 228 New Muslims Project 39, 40, 44 P

political theology 2, 3, 10, 50, 57–59, 61, 69, 198, 199, 204, 205, 211, 221, 223 Q

Quilliam, Abdullah 29, 30, 33, 39, 43 Qur’an 30, 64, 65, 87, 142, 157, 158, 161, 166

M

methodological agnosticism 13, 14 methodological atheism 13 misrecognition 68, 78, 143, 148, 198, 201 Modood, Tariq 8, 11, 37, 38, 50, 52, 53, 58, 60, 76, 78, 126, 149, 175, 176, 188, 198, 202, 203, 206, 208, 210, 222

R

‘race’ 8, 11, 13, 18, 20, 36, 37, 62, 76, 141, 143, 148, 175, 176, 189, 196, 226 racialisation 13, 134, 170, 176 Ramadan, Tariq 33, 65, 93, 94, 106–109, 111–116, 185, 189, 202

Index

recognition 2, 9–11, 44, 45, 50, 52, 57, 60–62, 66, 68, 69, 87, 97, 104, 118, 133, 143, 148, 161, 180, 198–203, 205–212, 214, 215, 221, 225, 227 reculturation 103, 105, 108, 118, 172, 217 religion 2, 3, 5–8, 10, 11, 13, 19, 32, 34–37, 39–42, 45, 50, 51, 55, 56, 68, 69, 76, 79, 82, 84, 85, 87, 91, 93, 94, 97, 101, 102, 104–109, 114, 119, 134, 136, 138, 143, 144, 147, 149–151, 153, 155–158, 161–166, 170, 171, 174, 175, 178, 184–186, 189, 195–200, 202–204, 206, 207, 210, 214–216, 221–223, 225, 226 religion–culture divide as dyad 178, 223, 224 religiosity 3, 6, 68, 75, 76, 79, 80, 83–85, 87, 88, 93, 94, 97, 101, 102, 104, 105, 119, 143, 144, 148–153, 156, 158, 161–165, 167, 171, 177, 178, 182, 183, 189, 197, 203–206, 208, 216, 221–224, 226–228 revert 82, 96, 121, 136, 138, 140, 180, 184, 195 S

Salafi 43, 161, 162 secular 4–6, 10, 35, 45, 58, 60, 92, 103, 104, 107, 110, 113, 114, 151, 154, 158, 176, 181, 199, 201, 211–214, 223, 228

233

secularism moderate 6, 212, 228 procedural 6 programmatic 6, 69, 153 radical 6, 153 secularity 4, 5, 45, 110, 154, 211, 212 shahada 31, 87, 91, 96, 109, 111, 139, 161, 171 Simmel, Georg 83, 84, 97, 102, 116, 118–121, 148, 149, 221, 223, 224 stranger as belonging 167, 177, 189 as estrangement 127, 129, 134 functionalized 139, 140 refused 139, 140, 142

T

tawhid 151 Taylor, Charles 4, 5, 9, 13, 51, 52, 60, 96, 143, 162, 201, 203, 207, 209, 213, 215 theological ear 76, 79, 83, 87, 95, 172, 208, 211, 216, 217, 223, 227 Tibi, Bassam 106–108, 110–115, 186, 189, 202 translation 1, 30, 64, 84, 115, 213–216, 227

U

urf 44, 114, 164