The hostile environment,Brexit, and ‘reactive‐’ or ‘protective transnationalism’

The ‘reactive transnationalism hypothesis’ posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two context‐specific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Bangladesh‐origin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how anti‐Asian and anti‐Muslim racism have been conflated with intensified anti‐migrant racism in the context of ‘hostile environment’ immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its non‐white bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property ‘back home'. While this represents an example of ‘reactive transnationalism', we argue that ‘protective transnationalism’ might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work.     

Negotiating space with family and kin in identity construction: the narratives of British non‐heterosexual Muslims1

This paper highlights significant moments, strategies, and themes in British nonheterosexual Muslims’ management of familial and kin relations. Significant socio‐cultural and religious factors constitute the framework within which they negotiate such relations. These factors are: the strict religious censure of non‐heterosexuality (specifically homosexuality) based on various Islamic written sources, the pervasive cultural censure of homosexuality as a ‘western disease’, the expectation of marriage as a cultural and religious obligation, the respect for parents, and the maintenance of family honour (izzat) particularly in the close‐knit kinship network. These factors, which significantly inform the participants’ responses and experiences, also reflect the social position of this religious and ethnic minority in British society. Specifically, the participants highlighted the complexity of secrecy, silence and discretion in balancing individualism (ie expression of sexuality) and socio‐ religious obligations. In general, the data demonstrate the intricate inter‐relatedness of structure and agency, and the cultural embeddedness of the production and management of identity and social relations.     

Perception of Western governments’ hostility to Islam among European Muslims before and after ISIS: the important roles of residential segregation and education

Perception of Western governments’ hostility to Islam is one of the indicating features of Islamic fundamentalism and, in some cases, is serving as a pull to join extremist groups. In this paper, using data from two waves of a cross‐national survey, we investigate what affects European Muslims’ opinions about Western governments. We find that residential segregation is associated with perceived hostility of Western governments to Islam. Further, we find that Muslims living in segregated neighbourhoods and enclaves have a higher probability of believing that Western governments are hostile to Islam. National origins of Muslim immigrants have a significant impact, with people from African countries measuring less perceived hostility than others. We also find that education is associated with perceived hostility of Western governments to Islam in a non‐linear way. People with the highest and lowest levels of education tend to be less likely to believe that Western governments are hostile to Islam, relative to people with mid‐level education. This non‐linear effect is best explained by education’s differential effects on perceptions of key world events. During the time between 2011 – before ISIS’s announcement of its Caliphate in Iraq and Syria – and 2013, subsequent to that announcement, we see a sharp decrease in perception of Western governments’ hostility to Islam, particularly among more educated European Muslims. We make the case that this decrease can be attributed, in some ways, to the emergence of ISIS. We discuss our findings in terms of theoretical and policy implications.     

The Cost of Not Being Christian: Hindus,Sikhs and Muslims in Britain and Canada

This article compares foreign born Hindus, Sikhs and Muslims to native born white Christians on four economic outcomes in two nations: Britain and Canada. For Canada, our data come from the 1991 Census, for Britain from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities (1994). Theory and research lead us to predict that, ceteris paribus, non‐Christians will fare better in Canada on three of the four outcomes. In the main, however, this expectation does not hold up. Compared to their British counterparts, Canada's Muslims fare less well on labor force participation and Canada's Hindus and Sikhs less well on unemployment. Compared to their Canadian counterparts, British Muslims fare less well on unemployment. On occupation and earnings, we detect no cross‐national differences. To explain the paucity of cross‐national disparities, we draw on Reitz's argument that Canada's reputation as an attractive immigrant destination has been exaggerated. To explain the few differences we do find, we emphasize cross‐national differences in religious discrimination and our inability to control adequately for differences in sending countries.     

Loving America and Longing for Home: Isma'il al-Faruqi and the Emergence of the Muslim Diaspora in North America

In this paper, I weave the experience of an emerging community of Muslim diaspora around a biographical narrative of the Muslim activist and scholar Isma'il al‐Faruqi. Through this narrative, I illustrate that the diasporic experience begins in the place of origin and it does not inevitably lead toward a perpetual hybridization. The latter point is particularly significant because notions of diaspora and hybridity are conceptually linked and are often understood as a unidirectional cutting and mixing between the West and the East, or between the modern and the traditional. Al‐Faruqi's experience shows that, in a Fanonian sense of colonialism, diasporic experience conveys living as a “stranger”, at and away from home. The postcolonial condition has made it possible for ethnically diverse communities of Muslims to reside in the West, but maintain strong connections with their place of origin. Adopting the allegory of the Prophet's migration or hijra, al‐Faruqi constructed a fantastic notion of the ummah and a normative homo islamicus subject. Although he was profoundly influenced by the diversity of the Muslim Student Associations' constituency, al‐Faruqi encouraged Muslims to transcend their differences and sought to conceive a discursively homogenous ummah. Ultimately, however, his project failed because it did not correspond to real life experiences of Muslims of the West. Historically, Muslim communities have negotiated the boundaries of Muslimhood and the social responsibilities it entails, both in their homelands and in their new home in the West — a new home that increasingly becomes hostile to their presence, and thereby further complicates their triangular diaspora/host society/homeland relationship.     

Producing ‘internal suspect bodies’: divisive effects of UK counter‐terrorism measures on Muslim communities in Leeds and Bradford

Research on UK government counter‐terrorism measures has claimed that Muslims are treated as a ‘suspect community’. However, there is limited research exploring the divisive effects that membership of a ‘suspect community’ has on relations within Muslim communities. Drawing from interviews with British Muslims living in Leeds or Bradford, I address this gap by explicating how co‐option of Muslim community members to counter extremism fractures relations within Muslim communities. I reveal how community members internalize fears of state targeting which precipitates internal disciplinary measures. I contribute the category of ‘internal suspect body’ which is materialized through two intersecting conditions within preventative counter‐terrorism: the suspected extremist for Muslims to look out for and suspected informer who might report fellow Muslims. I argue that the suspect community operates through a network of relations by which terrors of counter‐terrorism are reproduced within Muslim communities with divisive effects.     

Death of a migrant: transnational death rituals and gender among British Sylhetis

In this article I discuss transnational burial rituals carried out in London and Sylhet. While collective identity and reaffirming social ties are important issues in discussing the burial of migrants in Sylhet, the main focus of the article is on gender. The analysis of what happens when Londonis die reveals a great deal about the differential effects of living between two places on men and women. While transnationalism may in some contexts be understood as potentially subversive, for the majority of Sylhetis in Britain movement between places is highly constrained by poverty and British immigration controls, as well as by particular gender and household relations. These in turn impact on men and women’s experiences of bereavement, as well as on their access to and relationship with the British state.     

Is ethnic prejudice declining in Britain? Change in social distance attitudes among ethnic majority and minority Britons

Most literature on racial prejudice deals with the racial attitudes of the ethnic majority and ethnic minorities separately. This paper breaks this tradition. We examine the social distance attitudes of white and non‐white British residents to test if these attitudes follow the same trends over time, whether they are driven by the same social processes and whether they are inter‐related. We have three main findings. Firstly, social distance from other ethnic groups has declined over time for both white and ethnic minority Britons. For the white majority there are both period and cohort elements to this decline. Secondly, we see some evidence that social distance between the majority and minority groups is reciprocal. Specifically, minorities who experience rejection by the white British feel a greater sense of distance from them. Thirdly, we find that all groups share the perception of the same ethnic hierarchy. We see evidence of particularly widespread hostility towards Muslim Britons from all ethnic groups suggesting that Muslims are singled out for negative attention from many British residents of all other backgrounds, including a large number who do not express hostility to other groups.     

Reactive transnationalism: homeland involvement in the face of discrimination

In this article we examine whether migrants' perceived discrimination in the country of settlement leads to an increase of their transnational involvement. So far, this so‐called ‘reactive transnationalism’ has not been studied extensively. Based on literature on discrimination and transnationalism, reactive transnationalism is expected to be most prominent among socioeconomically successful migrants, particularly among males and those who consider themselves Muslims. Our research among middle‐class migrants in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, indeed shows that the more respondents experienced discrimination, the more transnationally involved they are, both regarding transnational identifications and transnational activities. While no gender difference was found regarding reactive transnational activities, for women perceived discrimination proves to lead to stronger instead of weaker transnational identifications than for men. The fact that no difference was found between Muslim and non‐Muslim respondents regarding reactive transnationalism suggests that, despite heated public debates about ‘Islam’, in the Netherlands, ethnic divides – being considered as ‘Dutch’ or ‘non‐Dutch’ – are even more prominent than religious ones.     

Muslim Political Activism or Political Activism by Muslims? Secular and Religious Identities Amongst Muslim Arab Activists in the United States and United Kingdom

Scholarship on Muslim political mobilisation in the West has developed as an important counterpoint to public discourse, which has tended to cast Muslims as a threat to social cohesion, liberal democracy, and national security. But even as scholarly literature has shed light on civic participation among Muslims, it has sidelined the diversity of political identities and values that motivate them. Most, if not all, Muslims in the West find their identities politicised in some way, but the question of whether this leads to a consensus amongst Muslims about the role of religion in public life often remains unexamined. In this article we draw on interviews with seventy-eight activists in Britain and the United States who are both Muslim and Arab to complicate ideas about the political mobilisation of Muslims in the West. Respondents, we show, are far from unified in their views on religion as a basis for political action and mobilisation. Some are keen to place Islam squarely in mainstream political spaces; most, however, are insistent that Islam should remain a private faith and identity and that political mobilisation should take place under the aegis of Arabness or other ‘secular’ identities. Using theoretical perspectives on the public sphere, we explain the complexity of our respondents' political identities and activism. Our overall aim is to broaden perspectives on the ways in which people from Muslim backgrounds participate in public, political life in Western contexts.     

Transnational queer sociological analysis of sexual identity and civic‐political activism in Hong Kong,Taiwan and mainland China

The sociology of homosexuality lacks engagement with queer theory and postcolonialism and focuses primarily on the global metropoles, thus failing to provide a plausible account of non‐Western non‐normative sexual identities. This research adopts the author’s newly proposed transnational queer sociology to address these deficiencies. First, it critiques the Western model of sexual identity predominantly employed to elucidate non‐Western, non‐normative sexualities. It does so by examining not only the queer flows between West and non‐West but also those among and within non‐Western contexts to produce translocally shared and mutually referenced experiences. Second, the proposed approach combines sociology with queer theory by emphasizing the significant role of material, as well as discursive, analyses in shaping queer identities, desires and practices. This article employs the approach to examine young gay male identities, as revealed in 90 in‐depth interviews conducted in Hong Kong (n = 30), Taiwan (Taipei, n = 30) and mainland China (Shanghai, n = 30) between 2017 and 2019. More specifically, it highlights the interplay between the state and identity by investigating the intersection and intertwining effects of these young men’s sexual and cultural/national identities, revealing three different forms of civic‐political activism. The article both demonstrates the way in which sexuality and the state are mutually constituted and provides nuanced analysis of the heterogeneity of contemporary homosexualities in Hong Kong, Taiwan and mainland China. In applying a new sociological approach to understanding sexuality, this research joins the growing body of scholarship within sociology that is decentring the Western formation of universal knowledge.     

Recalling the ‘Islam of the parents’ liberal and secular Muslims redefining the contours of religious authenticity

Scholarship on Islam in Europe has largely invested in examining the generational dynamics in the lived religious experiences of Muslims. Within this perspective, the idea of a generation gap, which revolves around a distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’, has figured as an important account in assessing some of these religious transformations. Drawing on fieldwork with Belgian Muslims of Moroccan origin, this paper seeks to nuance this perspective by exploring accounts wherein this ‘traditional’ Islam of the parents is actively reclaimed. This was especially the case for respondents who were quite critical of Islamic revivalist trends. In many of these stories, the parents’ Islam was understood as tolerant and open, in a way that was consonant with ‘tradition’. By focusing on these narratives, a first aim of the paper is to understand how genealogy and ancestry figure as distinct criteria in determining the ‘real Islam’. A second aim is to complicate the understanding of the liberal and modern self, and its relationship to the past.     

A Therapist’s Mandate?: Integrating an Ethics of Care into Custody Law by Recognising and Responding to Post‐separation Parental Loss of Connection with Children

In 1999 Smart and Neale published their seminal book Family Fragments, arguing for the replacement of the ethics of justice that currently informs custody law and practice with an ethics of care. Recognising loss is one of four principles they identify as being key to care‐based processes for managing post‐separation parenting arrangements. Here they had in mind the non‐resident fathers in their study, who were often anxious, angry, and resentful about their diminished fatherhood. Yet gender‐neutral custody laws and the greater prominence given to shared care across the West means that increasing numbers of separated mothers are also experiencing diminished connections to their children, either by becoming non‐resident parents or through shared care arrangements. Research into post‐separation fathers’ and mothers’ experiences of loss and grief in relation to their children is sparse and largely consists of small‐scale qualitative studies focusing either on fathers or mothers. Nonetheless, these studies show that the grief talk of post‐separated parents is strikingly similar, except that mothers who become non‐resident parents commonly talk about a sense of stigma and shame, while fathers are more likely than mothers to resort to the language of anger and rights. Despite Smart and Neale's call roughly 20 years ago, custody law systems across the West continue to neglect parents’ need for recognition and support. This paper seeks to rectify this social neglect through describing a dual program of therapeutically informed interventions with separated mothers and fathers. This is designed to recognise and respond to parental loss and grief experiences, whilst simultaneously fostering personal self‐reflexivity and transformation. The latter is no easy task but is frequently an essential basis for workable co‐parenting post‐separation.     

Exploring How National Politics Influences the Outcome of Intergroup Contact among Muslim Minority Members

This article adds to the existing research in intergroup contact among ethnic minority members by hypothesizing that national political debate has the capacity to enhance the positive outcomes of cross‐group interaction. Analyses show that the capacity of intergroup contact to reduce prejudice toward majority members is disproportionately stronger among Muslims than among non‐Muslim minority members. Specifically, at the time of data collection, the two categories—Muslims and majority members—were highly salient in the public debate, whereas the non‐Muslim minority member category was not primed as a contrast to the majority culture. The political debate most likely stimulated Muslims to generalize their positive contact experiences to the entire majority group. The analysis contributes to the theoretical refinement of the so‐called categorization model by focusing on politically induced reactions among contacted ethnic minority members toward majority members. The analysis utilizes a tailor‐made national sample (fielded during the Mohammad Cartoon Crisis in 2006) among ethnic minority members in Denmark (N  = 3,272).     

Between Two Cultures? Muslim Children in a Western Liberal Society

SUMMARY: The experiences of Muslim children in Britain highlight some, of the complexities in the nation of cultural development. Their main problem is often described in terms of being trapped between the traditional Islamic values of their parents and the liberal and often secular values of the school. Multicultural education has not been able to resolve this problem fully, but as young Muslims themselves seek far creative ways of combining full British citizenship with their own distinctive religious commitments, there are signs that a new British Muslim cultural identity is gradually emerging.     

John Porter Book Prize Lecture: Bringing the Social Back In—On the Integration of Muslim Immigrants and the Jurisprudence of Muslim Minorities

In much of the academic debate on the integration of Muslims into Western liberal democracies, Islam is often treated as one or the sole independent variable in the lives of Muslims. Offering to view Islam—or the understanding of Islam among Muslims—as the dependent variable, The Muslim Question in Canada discusses the influence of socioeconomic forces in shaping the Muslim immigrants’ opinions, modes of thinking, and even interpretations of their faith. Drawing on this general approach, which is introduced and developed in the book using a variety of both quantitative and qualitative data, this article focuses on a school of thought within the Islamic jurisprudence known as fiqh al‐aqalliyyat al‐Muslema (the jurisprudence of Muslim minorities). The premise of the jurisprudence of Muslim minorities is that the lived realities of Muslims who reside in non‐Muslim countries are so fundamentally different from those of the Muslim‐majority nations that traditional Islamic jurisprudence cannot offer meaningful solutions for their problems. Therefore, there is a need to establish an entirely different jurisprudential approach centered around the lives of the Muslim minorities. The purpose of the bulk of jurisprudential theorization efforts in this line of reasoning is to facilitate the lives of the Muslim minorities; as well, they aim to create a foundation for the moral obligations of Muslims toward non‐Muslims in such environments. I argue that a crucial element that triggers such a development is the existence of a positive relationship between Muslims and non‐Muslims in immigrant‐receiving countries. Souvent au sein des débats sur l'intégration des Musulmans dans des démocraties libérales de l'Ouest, l'Islam est traité comme un ou le seul enjeu dans la vie des fidèles. The Muslim Question in Canada examine l'Islam ou la compréhension de l'Islam chez les Musulmans comme un enjeu dépendent et aborde l'influence des forces socio‐économiques sur les opinons des immigrants musulmans ainsi que sur leurs modes de pensée et même sur la manière dont ils interprètent leur foi. Inspiré par cette approche, que l'on présente et développe dans le livre, et qui se sert de données à la fois quantitatives et qualitatives, cet article se concentre sur une école de pensée à l'intérieur de la jurisprudence islamique, connue sous le nom de fiqh al aqalliyyat al‐Muslema (la jurisprudence des minorités musulmanes). La prémisse de la jurisprudence des minorités musulmanes est que les réalités vécues par les Musulmans qui vivent dans des pays non‐musulmans sont au fond tellement différentes de celles de la majorité musulmane que la jurisprudence traditionnelle ne présente pas de solutions pertinentes pour résoudre leurs problèmes. Ainsi, il faut établir une approche jurisprudentielle totalement différente, axée sur la vie des minorités musulmanes. L'objectif de la plupart des efforts au niveau de la théorisation de la jurisprudence qui adoptent cette vision est de rendre la vie des minorités musulmanes plus facile. Ces efforts tentent aussi de faire en sorte que les Musulmans ressentent une certaine obligation morale envers les non‐Musulmans dans ces environnements. J'avance ici que l'aspect qui déclenche un tel développement est le rapport positif entre les Musulmans et les non‐Musulmans dans les pays qui reçoivent des immigrants.     

Criminality and violence in intra‐ and extra‐familial child sex abusers in a 2‐year cohort of convicted perpetrators

Men convicted of sexual abuse against children are an important but understudied population. In this study, based upon lifetime police records, of the criminality of convicted child sex abusers, we undertake the first British comparative analysis of the criminality of intra‐ and extra‐familial abusers. In a cohort of 374 convicted male child sex abusers, 50% had convictions for ‘sex only’ crimes; 26% for ‘sex and other’ offences; and 24% for ‘sex, other and violent’ crimes. There were three ‘relationship‐to‐victim’ subgroups: ‘biological relatives’, consisting of fathers and other biological relatives (18%); ‘non‐biological relatives’ — cohabitees or stepfathers (10%); and 72% who were ‘extra‐familial’ offenders, having no family relationship to the child. This atypical pattern of abusers indicates a filtering process, in which intra‐familial abusers are less likely to be prosecuted than extra‐familial offenders. The main findings were: (i) biological relatives were more often ‘sex only’ offenders, but averaged more sexual offences than the other groups; (ii) non‐biological abusers has more ‘other’ criminal and convictions for violence, and were more similar to the extra‐familial offenders than biologically related abusers; (iii) extra‐familial abusers consisted of more ‘other’ criminal and violent offenders than the non‐biological abusers; (iv) non‐biological offenders, however, had a pattern of criminality more like the extra‐familial group than the other intra‐familial abusers. The violent men, often with long histories of both sexual and non‐sexual offending, pose particular problems for the criminal justice and child protection services. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Identities in the third space? Solidity,elasticity and resilience amongst young British Pakistani Muslims

Over the last decade the issue of identity has been prevalent in discussions about British Muslims, with the events of 9/11 serving as a touchstone for media debates about religious, national and cultural affiliations. The 7/7 terrorist attacks in the UK led to young British Pakistanis being subjected to intense public and institutional scrutiny and wider political concerns being expressed about the failure of multiculturalism. Young British Pakistanis have thus had to negotiate and maintain their identities in an environment in which they have been defined as a threat to national security whilst simultaneously being pressurized to align with 'core British values'. Within this context, we convey the findings of a qualitative study involving British Pakistanis living in the North-west of England. In presenting the experiences and perspectives of participants, three interconnected processes salient to the maintenance of identity are delineated: solidity, elasticity and resilience. Having unpacked these processes, we draw upon Bhabha's third space thesis to explore the political potentiality of and the limits to hybridic identities.     

Internalising and externalising children's behaviour problems in Britain and the US: relationships to family resources1

A large sample of British children (n=994) of varying ages (7–18 years) and a large sample of American children (n=886) of varying ages (7–16 years) were rated by their mothers using respectively the Rutter Child Scale A and the Behaviour Problems Index both of which cover a variety of behavioural problems. Factor analysis of the behavioural scales distinguished externalising and internalising dimensions of behaviour in both countries. We examined whether children's experiences of family change, cognitive ability and family adversity including economic deprivation were associated with differences in the prevalence of the behavioural dimensions. Mean cognitive scores decreased significantly with increasing level of externalising behavioural problems in British and American children but showed no significant relationship to levels of internalising behaviour problems in either sample. Among American children internalising and externalising behavioural problems were related to experience of non‐intact family structures and measures of family adversity. Externalising behavioural problems were related to measures of family adversity among British boys and girls but were only related to experience of non‐intact family structures in the sample of British girls. Among British girls, internalising behavioural problems were also related to non‐intact family structures. The associations between non‐intact family structures and behavioural problems were independent of measures of economic deprivation in both samples of children. This study documents some of the background factors which affect children's behavioural and cognitive outcomes. Unlike children's family structure economic deprivation can be influenced through policy intervention, and the analysis supports the view that relieving economic deprivation would help improve children's behavioural outcomes. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Stigmatized Identities: Too Muslim to Be American,Too American to Be Muslim

In the United States today, Muslim identity is highly stigmatized. Much of this can be attributed to an increasing climate of Islamophobia. The current study finds that some Muslim Americans are confronted with another source of stigma: other Muslims. Using interview data with 23 Muslim Americans in and around Houston, TX, this study examines the intersection of religious out‐group and in‐group stigma in the lives of Muslim Americans. Findings suggest that stigma comes not only from non‐Muslims, but also from other Muslims. Some Muslim Americans are especially vulnerable to religious in‐group stigma. Those who are most acculturated to non‐Muslim, Western culture often face criticism from Muslim communities, be they inside or outside the United States. These Muslim Americans find that they are not perceived as fully Muslim or fully American, and therefore denied the full benefits of either status while simultaneously bearing the burden of both. This paper articulates the multiple dimensions of stigma faced by Muslims in America.