Seán McLoughlin

Mosques and the Public Space: Conflict and Cooperation in Bradford

While there is still some evidence of conflict over the planning and building of mosques in Britain, in this article I demonstrate that this is not currently the case in Bradford. Having first considered issues relating to the status and significance of mosques in Britain, and then the institutionalisation of Islam in Bradford, I suggest that this absence of mosque conflict has much to do with the social and political implications of a densely populated ‘Muslim’ inner city. However, the absence of conflict over mosques in Bradford does not mean that the pervasive Islamisation of the inner city is not an issue; quite the reverse. After riots involving youth of Pakistani–Muslim heritage, a dominant discourse has emerged focusing on ethnic and religious ‘self-segregation’ and the need for ‘community cohesion’. Moreover, commentators have identified mosques, and the religious leadership and education they provide, as a part of the problem. My article examines why this might be so and the extent to which Bradford Council for Mosques, and one particular mosque in Bradford, have been able to engage Muslims in cooperative relationships with the public space.

Islam(s) in context: Orientalism and the anthropology of Muslim societies and cultures

This article begins to fill a gap in recent discussions of the future of Islamic studies with an account of the nature and significance of Anthropological and Ethnographic contributions to the study of Islam and Muslims. Drawing attention to both the problem of essence in Orientalism and the dissolution of Islam’s significance for Muslims in Said’s (1978) anti‐Orientalism, the article examines how shifts between essence and silence have been played out in the short history of Anthropology, from colonial ethnography through functionalism to the relationship between so‐called Great and Little Traditions, the fresh impetus of Geertz’s (1968) Islam Observed and subsequent debates about Islam and plural islams. My account culminates with discussion of an increasingly specialised and interdisciplinary body of work on the reproduction and transmission of Islamic discursive traditions published mainly in American Anthropology since the 1970s and 1980s. I contend that such literature suggests a theoretical starting point for ‘Muslim studies’ which allows for the configuring power of social structure and the efficacy of history/tradition as Muslim habitus, as well as the contextual improvisations of human agents with diverse social positions and cultural capitals. Ultimately, my argument is that although this concern for structure, tradition and agency can be combined and emphasised in different ways, attentiveness to both similarity and difference, continuity and change, suggests one way forward beyond the essence/silence impasse in Orientalist/anti‐Orientalist thinking about Muslim cultures and societies.

Locating Muslim diasporas: multi-locality, multi-disciplinarity and performativity

ABSTRACT The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration produces one of our most detailed anatomies of a “TranslAsian” time-space location. It juxtaposes the ways that multiple migrations and diasporas have been locally, multi-locally and trans-temporally configured, and so re-orientates attention beyond a Eurocentric focus on the West. In an ambitious move towards multi-disciplinary holism that reflexively acknowledges the “pieced-together” nature of its own representations “here and now” social relations and juxtaposed with thicker descriptions of memorialized “origins and causes”. In this regard The Bengal Diaspora can be said to map “religion”-based dimensions of Muslim diasporas in terms of three distinctive spatial scales. However, while “Muslim” identifications are rightly conceived as contextual performances by migrants with divergent social capitals in specific social settings, I suggest that the unstable reproduction of Islamic tradition as a more or less enduring part of social structure is a part of Muslim performativity too.

Writing British Asian cities

This article reports in brief on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Diasporas, Migrations and Identities (DMI) programme funded network, ‘Writing British-Asian Cities’, which ran between 2006 and 2009. It contends that the diverse local configuration of Asian Britain has to a large extent remained unexamined in the literature. Having organised community-based events in five English cities, an indication is given of how Londons East End, Bradford, Manchester, Birmingham and Leicester have all been ‘written’ and represented across a variety of genres since the 1960s. Bringing the perspectives of the social sciences into conversation with the arts and humanities, the network also prioritised further reflection on certain disciplinary perspectives and cross-cutting themes: history; literary/cultural production; religion; gender. Various working papers and other resources which report in more detail on the project are lodged on an interactive website, while a research group of the British Association of South Asian Studies (BASAS) has also been recently established.