British Muslim Politics

The political mobilisation of British citizens as Muslims has been highly impactful and controversial in equal measure since the late 1980s. Under review is a recent monograph that looks at this mobilisation with respect to Britain’s largest Muslim ethnic minority; at the last Census in 2011, there were just over one million Muslim Pakistanis in England and Wales, which makes up 38% of the British Muslim community as a whole. While the British Pakistani communities have their own distinctive political causes and forms of mobilisation, it is also reasonable to ask, given their demographic preponderance, how much they shape and typify British Muslim identity politics as a whole, despite its ethnic diversity. And with the youngest profile of any faith group (48% under 25) and with the politics of equality and recognition still unsettled, the story of this mobilisation is far from over, so the work under review here may be characterised as an interim report. Parveen Akhtar, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Bristol, has undertaken an ‘insider’ account of British Pakistani politics and offers a ‘critical reappraisal’ of British Muslim politics as a whole. Using interviews conducted between 2001 and 2013, Akhtar’s research focuses on the Kashmiri or Mirpuri community of Birmingham (about 65% of the city’s Pakistani Muslim community) with a profile of two community organisations, a women’s group Sahel and a radio station, Unity FM. Despite her insider status as a local Muslim, she notes that the atmosphere of suspicion and distrust after 7/7 has made academic research more difficult. She moves away from a ‘thin’ structuralist sociological approach to consider how cultural norms shape political participation, noting that voting rates and political party membership is generally high among British Asians.