European Social Movements and Muslim Activism and Muslims and Political Participation in Britain

The theoretically-informed study of Muslim political agency in Britain is still relatively underdeveloped. Once largely the preserve of sociologists, anthropologists and religious studies specialists, the study of Muslims qua Muslims in political science has received relatively little attention, but given their heightened visibility in national debates on race, secularism, security and national identity today, they are being more widely written about outside of the disciplines that have traditionally dominated academic study of them in the post-war period. As such these two volumes, by the political scientist Timothy Peace, a lecturer in Comparative European Politics at the University of Stirling, are to be welcomed as part of this widening disciplinary interest, the first based on his doctoral thesis and the second being an edited collection of essays.