Snapshots of British Islam

Islamic Framework and Ordinary Ethics

My focus on the ambivalences and inconsistencies of everyday life is informed by a concern with the ways in which recent anthropological accounts of the global “Islamic revival” have tended to depict Muslims as actors mainly guided by religious motivations. This new trend in the anthropology of Islam has mostly focused on actors directly involved in Islamist movements and has led to an important body of literature on ethics, piety, and the cultivation of moral affects (Mahmood 2005; Hirschkind 2006; Agrama 2010). Building on Talal Asad’s definition of Islam as a “discursive tradition” (Asad 1986), these studies have been concerned with explaining how this tradition is maintained through ethical disciplining and knowledge practices. The representation that comes out of them is problematic for reasons mentioned by Samuli Schielke (2010), namely, that they tend to present Islam as the only source of moral guidance and Muslim subjectivities as primarily shaped by religion.

If morality is a central component of subjectivity, Muslims—like anyone else—are not cut off from the various effects and influences of globalization. If Islam is an important and increasingly compelling source of inspiration for many Muslims around the world, it is certainly not the only one to impact on otherwise complex and imperfect lives. Other influences, such as neoliberal policies, knowledge technologies, and global social movements (Maddanu 2013; Id Yassine 2011), have deeply affected Muslims’ moral imaginaries and on their relationship to the “good ethical life.”

In addition, Islamic morality in a secular age is not an anachronistic relic of the past. On the contrary, it is deeply anchored in the everyday experience of modernity. According to Taylor (1989), our modern conceptualization of the self is linked to morality. Morality means not simply a set of claims about what one ought to do or not do to be moral; rather, it means what one ought to be or not be. The “making of the modern identity” follows inescapable frameworks that constitute backdrops upon which the “good and meaningful life” is defined. In his attempt to explore “the background picture lying behind our moral and spiritual intuitions” (1989, 8), Taylor identifies a transition from an external sense of the self where meaning is found in extraordinary deeds to an interior sense of the self where meaning is located in everyday actions. Morality, in a secular age, is primarily immanent. It is not a function of rules and obligations imposed through institutions but rather, it is the product of human sociality and language (Lambek 2010). In this sense, moral inclinations are less derived from religious prescriptions than they are produced through experience, practices, and interactions. “The ordinary implies an ethics that is relatively tacit, grounded in agreement rather than rule, in practice rather than knowledge or belief, and happening without calling undue attention to itself” (Lambek 2010, 2).

One could argue that Islam provides a new framework for leading a moral life, a framework that is both emancipated from Western modernity but that nevertheless remains contemporaneous to it. Indeed, the new Muslim actors sketched out in this article testify of subjectivities oriented toward “moral life.” Their postures are both inward and outward looking: their command of Islamic knowledge is a source of self-empowerment, a form of “care of the self” (Agrama 2010) that nurtures a sense of distinction. However, in their quest for self-betterment, they do not passively reproduce a traditional lifestyle but they rather project a view of what ethical living ought to be. This personalized form of religiosity goes hand in hand with a desire to improve the world around them. In this sense, religiosity sets the condition of possibility for broader political action.

Salvatore and Eickleman (2004) argue that when moving from the condition of “migrants” to the status of “citizens,” Muslims develop their own interpretation of the “common good.” It is this modern translation of Islam that best characterizes modern Muslim subjectivities with their orientation toward civility, public virtue, justice, and pluralism. Indeed, Muslims’ reappropriation of Islamic norms in their encounter and interaction with Western modernity opens up a space for creative iteration. British Muslims can therefore be compared to translators, in the sense developed by Walter Benjamin (1968). In the same way as a translator “seeks to release in his own language that pure language which is under the spell of another, to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in the re-creation of that work” (1968, 80), British Muslims are equally involved in an exercise that combines literalness and freedom. Their translation follows a specific aesthetics that illustrates and maintains their distinction. Their cultural productions are the result of the sedimentation of multiple cultural capitals acquired within the movement of globalization. Their public performances challenge hegemonic cultural narratives of modernity as the sole property of the West and simultaneously disentangle Islam from a clear geographic origin.

However, the creative iterations highlighted in this series of snapshots tell a slightly different story from the metanarrative of modernity with which we are familiar, namely, that “modernity” would necessarily involve fundamental ruptures and discontinuities and that it would entail a totally different notion of personhood oriented toward individualism (Englund and Leach 2000). If elements of ruptures and discontinuities can be traced, the everyday social practices of actors interacting within the British Islamic field also participate in the making of a “community of sentiment” (Appadurai 1996) and a “community of practice” (Wenger 1998) in which the work of imagination is transformed for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Indeed, the postcolonial critique of the Western project of modernity that the actors described in these snapshots are trying to formulate also bears unstable traces of the liberal ethos.

A Note on Methods

The snapshots that form the core of this article were collected during successive periods of fieldworks conducted between 2009 and 2014 ¹ in British cities with a significant presence of Muslims. Since I first set about researching the Islamic culture of Britain, my centers of interest have continuously evolved. Because controversies around Islam in the United Kingdom have mainly crystallized around ill-defined notions of “shariah law,” from the Rushdie affair and the fatwa of Ayatollah Khomeini to more recent debates around halal food and community-based dispute resolution mechanisms commonly called “shariah councils,” I decided to explore sites where something like an Islamic legal culture of Britain was taking root.

The most evident places from which to observe these dynamics were the mosques where “shariah councils” operate. In 2012, I spent three months in one of them located in East London, reading its archives, attending shariah classes, and discussing with ulemas. ² I visited a few others, conducted interviews with councilors, and observed hearings at the Birmingham shariah council. I quickly realized that “shariah councils” encompassed a very broad diversity of realities as more and more of them had moved away from the premises of the mosques from which they had originally emerged in the 1980s to gradually develop a life of their own (Billaud 2014). I also understood that the term “shariah,” in spite of obvious overlaps with Western conceptions of the “law,” primarily entailed for my informants a “way of life,” a series of moral principles instead of a fixed set of directly applicable laws. The social imaginaries that the word “shariah” triggered could not be fully seized through exclusive research in formal religious settings.

To add up to these complexities, Islam in Britain is not solely in the hands of Muslim-born citizens following the tradition of their migrant ancestors, but is also shaped and fashioned by people who have come to it for personal and/or political reasons: converts, artists, moral entrepreneurs, and politicians. In order to grasp the complex nature of these entanglements, I gradually broadened my field of investigation to incorporate places and actors whose interactions captured the dynamics of cultural transformations that I was interested in exploring.

Instead of following a classic model of ethnographic inquiry by conducting fieldwork in one single site, it seemed to me more relevant for the purpose of my research to move in the different forums where Islamic norms were mobilized and discussed. The informants who became part of this research where recruited mostly through snowballing techniques: one informant directing me to the next. I secured access and gained trust through their recommendations. My knowledge of other Muslim cultures acquired through long periods of fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan in the context of my doctoral research, and in various European countries (France, Denmark, Austria) in the context of my postdoctoral researches, also played an important role in building trustworthy relationships.

Like Siegfried Kracauer’s flâneries in a secret Europe of the 1930s that inspired his Streets of Berlin and Elsewhere, or in Benjamin’s studies of the Parisian passageways (1999, 2003), I see these fragments as peculiar illustrations of the contemporary moment. Kracauer and Benjamin used “miniatures” as part of a constantly escaping whole they sought to describe and study. Kracauer’s vignettes of cinemas, cabarets, and offices in Berlin offer an important anthropological insight into the political forces at stake in the last years of the Weimar Republic and during the emergence of the National Socialist Party (Vassort 2012). Likewise, Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1999) can be read as a massive collection of historical “fieldnotes” aiming at documenting Parisian city life at the end of the nineteenth century.

This article does not pretend to achieve the literary sophistication of the collage techniques that these authors so elegantly mastered. However, it draws inspiration from their scrupulously attentive gaze on the minutiae of our contemporary time and place—the modern metropolis—while attempting to reveal the innermost tendencies and possibilities of contemporary cultural forms and practices. As Nilüfer Göle suggests building on Georg Simmel’s notion of “momentary images,” “snapshots are a methodological gateway for reproducing the significance of the ocular and the corporal, telling a different version of a story of Islamism and its asymmetrical reproductions of modernity” (2000, 115).

Each snapshot documents one distinctive aspect of British Islam by sketching out a site where it has become visibly present: an intercultural art center, a street of Birmingham used as a stage for artistic performance, a seminary of the Midlands located in a converted hospital that used to care for injured coal miners. These sites are described at a moment of transition when the ubiquitous presence of Islam triggers uncertainties, surprises, and tensions. It is precisely in these moments of opening and closing up of the public that I want to trace patterns of cultural transformation, which in my view carry creative potential for the diversification of democratic life in Western societies, in spite of the neoliberal ethos they simultaneously incorporate.

Of Conversion and Islamic Hip-Hop

I spit this verse from the wings of birds, sprint with buffalo herds to get my voice heard. I hear the symphonies, angelic trumpets in the breeze, they no say play say judgment day aint far away,

the wicked dance upon the graves of the innocently slayed under the anti-terror masquerade, But still we pray, five times a day, and still we pray, five times a day.

No More War—Poetic Pilgrimage

10 October 2009. I have left Birmingham’s commercial city center to attend a screening of the controversial documentary Deen ³ Tight at The Drum, an intercultural art center located in Aston and dedicated to the promotion of British African, Asian, and Caribbean art. Here, like in many other British cities, one’s social position is a matter of postcodes. The Drum is on the border between B19 and B6, between Aston and Lozells, that is to say on the border of two neighborhoods controlled by gangs with names that seem to be directly inspired from thriller movies: The Burger Bar Boys and the Johnson Crew. The art center has been established in order to provide communities caught in the middle of this increasingly violent drugs-related gang war with a space to meet up and enjoy cultural entertainment. I am sitting in the lounge bar, waiting for the doors to open. And while I observe the crowd that gradually fills in the room, flocking in a myriad of colorful and glamorous hijabs, I recall the conversation I have had with the Drum’s director, Mukhtar Dar, a few days ago.

Mukhtar felt quite ambivalent toward the new public visibility of Islam to which his art center directly contributed. His own personal history had been marked by the political notion of “blackness” in which religion had little appeal. In the late 1980s, he had been a member of the Asian Youth Movement (AYM) in Sheffield, where his parents had established themselves as “migrant workers.” The movement, which took its inspiration from the civil rights movement in the United States, was created by second-generation British Asians less prepared to tolerate the discrimination that their parents had suffered. Their mottos: “Here to Stay! Here to Fight!” and “Self-Defense Is No Offense” were a direct reaction to the “Paki bashing” game that had taken deeper roots as the extreme-right National Front reached the peak of its popularity upon a backdrop of economic recession in the late 1970s and Thatcher’s neoliberal policies. In a bar of the city center where I met him, Mukhtar talked with nostalgia of the early years of antiracist politics in the United Kingdom, recounting with great excitement the sense of pride and empowerment that he and his fellow AYM comrades had developed as they organized in order to fight racism, police harassment, and discrimination. “Our fight was about dignity. What united us was the fact that we were non-White: all of us had experienced racism,” he explained. The movement mobilized black politics and a version of secularism as unifying forces between different religious and ethnic communities (Ramamurthy 2006). With a deep consciousness of the structural nature of inequalities, the AYM joined hands with other social and political struggles for emancipation, from miners whose jobs were threatened by Thatcher’s privatization policies to Irish nationalists’ demands for the autonomy of Northern Ireland.

But with “multiculturalism” in the hands of the state, the days of interethnic solidarities are long gone. Since the Rushdie Affair and the new wave of islamophobia post 9/11 and the 7/7 London bombings, Islam has become the new mobilizing force (Modood 1994). Even The Drum, which Mukhtar wants to present as a center that promotes “black” art (in the political sense of the term), cannot totally escape from these dynamics and I wonder, while observing the colorful hijabs that pour in the auditorium, if this spontaneous Islamic fashion show could have found public venues in the 1870s and 1980s.

In Birmingham, the antiterror strategy of the government—the “Preventing Violent Extremism (PVE)” programme—has resulted in an increased visibility of Islam in the urban landscape, directly related to the availability of state funding in Muslim-dominated areas (Thomas 2010). Indeed, the PVE program has exclusively focused on Muslims, a population identified “at risk” and, therefore, requesting close state surveillance. Instead of an approach informed by deeper analysis of structural inequalities, this “value-based” approach to counterextremism has relied on the state’s direct intervention in order to shape religious practice and promote new types of community leadership within Muslim communities. As Birt explains (2009), designers of the PVE interpret increased religious practices among second- and third-generation Muslims as a sign of radicalization, leading to a need to promote and develop a more “moderate and progressive” British Islam through the funding of specific programs targeting segments of the Muslim population perceived as the most vulnerable, namely, Muslim women and young people.

To a certain extent, the category “Muslim” has been imposed from above (Abbas 2004). The creation of new groups that can be distinguished from “the rest” has historically been the standard “divide and rule” strategy of the colonial state (Chandra 1981). “I have never thought of myself as a Muslim before even though I am not an atheist either,” Mukhtar told me while explaining how economic necessity in the arts made it difficult for him to ignore the state-sponsored financial boon for projects aiming to promote “moderate Islam.” It is only recently, he admits, that he grew an interest in Sufism.

The documentary that is screened tonight, Deen Tight, is perhaps another illustration of this recent liberal endeavor: part of the disciplinary machine designed for “moralizing” young Muslims through “feel good” leisure. Directed by Mustafa Davis, a black American convert to Islam who studied Arabic and Islamic sciences in Yemen, and funded by the Tabah Foundation, a research and advocacy institute located in Abu Dhabi, the film is a good illustration of the cultural assemblages fostered by globalization. The messages of peace and freedom that Muslim Hip Hoppers convey could be read as joyful invitations to join the “good version of Islam” promoted by the state, while remaining faithful to its neoliberal ethos according to which the individual bears primary responsibility for her own redemption (Lentin and Titley 2011, 168).

In the meantime, the film unpacks the ambiguities and tensions that emerge when Islam becomes the framework for voicing greater concerns about injustice in the world. The film indeed focuses on the perceived conflict between “traditional” religious ideals and Western conceptions of modernity and explores the positive and negative effects of pop culture on todays’ Muslim youth. Music, considered taboo practice for more rigorous Muslims, has also become one of the most prominent methods for young Muslims to share their faith and denounce Western imperialism. Some Muslim rappers consider their art as an instrument of “dawa,” ⁴ an invitation for non-Muslims to listen to the message of Allah as well as a medium for raising political consciousness in their community. They conceive their artistic practice as an extension of key Islamic texts. Others have eliminated from their lives beats often associated with “gangster culture” (i.e., consumerism, violence, and misogyny) as they entered the Deen. Many of the artists featured in the documentary, such as spoken-word artist Amir Soleiman, Slam poet Liza Garza, DJ Raichous, and Hip Hop beat maker Fanatik are all American converts to Islam, trying to reconcile the pop culture they were born into with their newly discovered faith. As members of the “transglobal Hip-Hop Umma” (Alim 2006) bearing the double stigma of race and religion, their words act as poetic weapons to resist the multifarious forms of oppression in global societies.

These characters have undertaken a sort of “poetic pilgrimage”—to use the name of the two British Jamaican sisters converts and Hip Hop singers whose song I quote in the beginning of this section. ⁵ Their presence in public, as Muslim women and as politically engaged black Hip Hop artists, deeply challenges the tenets of both Islamic and Hip Hop traditions. Indeed, as Muslim artists, their visibility triggers tensions between the cultivation of virtue so central to the Muslim way of life and entertainment, perceived as distracting believers from this greater goal. As Muslim women, their colorful hijabs and dresses disrupt common understandings of Islamic modesty. And finally, as female Hip Hop singers, their charismatic presence on stage questions the domination of men in popular art. Ironically, it is their identification with Islam, their mobilization of an Islamic repertoire (“And we still pray, five times a day . . . ”) and their use of kinship metaphors that legitimize their public presence (Karim 2006). It is through their renunciation to “purity,” ⁶ through the cross fertilization of both traditions, that Poetic Pilgrimage creatively opens room for an autonomous feminine political and cultural expression to take shape (Dwyer 1999, 2000).

Crossing Invisible Borders: Of Redemption and Shariah Law

The day after the screening, I cross the border to Lozells to visit the Inner City Guidance program run by a former Johnson Crew member who converted to Islam in prison. His name is Bilal Davis but in the community, he is known by the name of Abu Hakeem. A tall black man with golden teeth, in his mid-thirties, he is wearing a strict “sunnah” ⁷ dress that contrasts with the body language of street culture detectable in each of his moves. I tell him about the documentary Deen Tight I have just watched at The Drum, and his response is precise like the hammer blow of the judge after the pronouncement of the court’s final verdict: “haram” ⁸ !

We have been put in touch through a young British Pakistani woman in charge of the Prevent program at the City Council. The Inner City Guidance is indeed part of the “de-radicalization” business engineered by the state following the 7/7 bombings. The police, unable to reach “youths at risk,” have delegated this task to Bilal’s organization, which aims to provide an alternative role model to the one offered by gangs. Like any other project supported by the PVE, the dominant logic is purely managerial. The ultimate goal is not to tackle the root causes of poverty and injustice that have led the youth to engage in criminal activities but to ensure that the mainstream society remains protected from its “internal enemies.” The project functions as “a necessary corrective to the individual failure to be or become autonomous,” editing out “socio-political analysis that would unveil neoliberalism as a racial formation” (Lentin and Titley 2011, 169). This neoliberal form of containment built on a “parallel security state” (Lentin and Titley 2011, 165) is part of the securitarian response to “9/11.”

We meet on the parking lot of the train station, where Bilal picks me up with his silver saloon to drive me to the place “where the events all started.” Bilal refers to the riots of 2005, explained in the press as the result of racial tensions between the Pakistani and the Afro-Caribbean community, which left one man dead and up to thirty-five others needing hospital treatment. In fact, the riots were not about race but rather the expression of those who have to endure the everyday violence of economic deprivation, political marginalization, and racism. Violence in Lozells powerfully illustrates the “failure of power” (Arendt 1969) among the disenchanted youths whose vision of the future is limited to the invisible walls of the ghetto.

After his release from prison, Bilal lived in Saudi Arabia for ten years to study Salafi Islam at the University of Medina. Because Islam originated from this region, he believes that the knowledge he received is more authentic than the one provided at Al-Ahzar, an institution whose authority he denigrates because it is “full of Sufis.” He recently returned to his native Lozells with the view of bringing back “good morals” in the streets of the neighborhood. The premises of the Inner City Guidance are a recreation ground that offers free Internet access, a milk shake bar, giant play stations, pool tables, and counseling “Salafi style.” Here, the aesthetics of new technologies unexpectedly mixes with the one of orthodox Islam. Above the Internet café, decorated with graffiti, a small library offers classic Islamic leather-bound books as well as Salafi literature. Three other staff, from Pakistani and Afro-Caribbean backgrounds, have been recruited to provide Islamic guidance in-site as well as in the nearby schools and prisons. Compared to the white middle- and working-class neighborhoods, multiculturalism is part of the lived everyday experience of the inner city’s inhabitants. The Inner City Guidance has set its clock on the contemporary moment of “religion without culture” (Roy 2008), with Islam answering the need for a new moral “framework” (Taylor 1989) for guiding the youth and the socially excluded.

As the founding father of the original gang Hinch-Hi that later on split into two competing gangs, Bilal, who also preaches at the nearby Salafi mosque on Fridays, is a well-respected figure with an embodied knowledge of street culture and a desire to be perceived as a kind of local Malcolm X. “Because Islam saved me, I believe it can save the youths here too,” he tells me as we walk Lozells Road lined with its characteristic semidetached red brick houses. Since the last “clean up” operation undertaken by the police, which ended up in massive arrests and incarcerations, the gangs have not disappeared but have started to recruit among the youngest segments of the population. “Kids as young as 12 are now owning guns,” he says.

The prison and the ghetto, Loïc Waquant suggests, form a continuum: “for both belong to the same class of organizations, namely, institutions of forced confinement: the ghetto is a manner of ‘social prison’ while the prison functions as a ‘judicial ghetto.’ Both are entrusted with enclosing a stigmatised population so as to neutralise the material and/or symbolic threat that it poses for the broader society from which it has been extruded” (Wacquant 2006, 319). And as Bilal shakes hands and exchanges “Salamalaykum” with the people we come across, I wonder to which extent his ideology of self-salvation can make up for the scars that have become deeper with each new riot and police repression that sustains the violent system of race and class segregation.

Bilal’s rhetoric of “redemption” somehow feeds hegemonic psychosocial explanations for the failure of black and Asian youths to climb the social ladder. To a great extent, he has internalized the idea that poverty is the fate of individuals with dysfunctional psychopathologies, not the result of structural inequality. “What our youth is lacking is moral and spiritual guidance. The solutions to our problems are within each of us,” he insists. His adherence to a version of Islam that focuses on morality, piety, and conduct is certainly in line with the neoliberal ideology that guides government policies toward the poor, the excluded, and the socially marginalized, encouraging them to take their future into their own hands since “there’s no such thing as society,” as Margaret Thatcher once famously phrased it.

In the meantime, interpreting the new “moral economy” (Fassin 2009) that is taking roots in Lozells solely as a reflection of neoliberalism—conceived here “not as a system but as a migratory set of practices and technology of governing” (Ong 2007)—would be an oversimplification. Indeed, Bilal’s project testifies of the hybridization processes at stake when Islam mixes with popular street culture. There is something performative and somewhat ostentatious in the way he wants to present himself to the world, something that contradicts the Islamic ideal of self-containment. He voluntarily admits that his sunnah appearance is a means to distinguish himself, an expressive tool to trigger “respect” and offer an alternative “role model” to the dominant one exhibited by drug dealers. The form of emancipation he promotes relies on self-assertion through public exhibition of piety instead of gangster bling (expensive cars, jewelry, women). This “search for respect” (Bourgois 2003) through the invocation of an Islamic ethics is a “world-making project,” in the sense described by Michael Warner (2002), namely, a movement that seeks to counter dominant representations through self-transformation. The Salafi version of Islam Bilal promotes offers a possibility to negate cultural or ethnic forms of belonging in order to bring the collective social imaginary closer to the “global,” beyond the invisible walls of Lozells.

Of Pink Chador and Black Niqab: Identity Performance and Self-Distinction

In the inner city, women’s absent presence asserts itself through the increased popularity of niqabs. I recall now this fully covered woman called Aisha whom I met at the Brighton mosque. She wanted to teach me how to pray and guided me to the women’s section, where she could privately show me the moves of “salat” (Islamic prayer). From behind her facial veil, I had noticed her distinctive working-class accent but I could barely hide my astonishment when she eventually uncovered her face to reveal piercings of various shapes and colors. “I have done many bad things in my life . . . you know . . . very bad things . . . but now I pray Allah and seek his forgiveness. He is the most merciful, the most compassionate!” she had told me as if wanting to excuse herself for my puzzlement at this unexpected vision of Taqwacore ⁹ (Knight 2004). She had married a Moroccan man some years ago and had come to Islam through him. As we went to collect our shoes prior to leaving the mosque, I saw her pick up a pair of heavy boots with metal lining, the typical attire of British punks. My disorientation was now total.

Sonia, another young woman in her twenties I met at a course on shariah at the Muslim College in West London, was on her way to adopt that dress too. Arrived from Pakistan with her family at the age of ten, she obtained an A-level in History and Philosophy from a London University. Her parents were divorced and she now lived in a small house in Barnet with her six siblings and her mother, who struggled to make ends meet. She admitted that her family was not very religious and watched episodes of Eastenders at weekends, “like most Brits do.” It was her dissatisfaction with the type of knowledge she had received at University, in particular, philosophical discussions around the Enlightenment and the “death of God,” that made her feel like knowing more about Islam. She was enrolled in various courses, at her local mosque, at the Muslim College, and in private women’s circles, and worked part-time in a retail fashion store. As much as she was aware that wearing the niqab would make her life more complicated, she had gained enough self-confidence in the process of rediscovering her faith to make this ultimate step. And as she tried to explain her choice to me, I found myself amazed by her determination:

I’m not denying the complexity that’s there. That’s a given, anyone can see that. But I don’t need permission from a person to know what I need to do, what I can do and what I can’t do because if I’m doing something within the boundaries of the Shariah, and I’m not harming other people then that should be fine. I’m doing it for the sake of God and why would that be a problem? Why would I need the whole ijma ¹⁰ from everyone? Because not everyone will agree on this topic anyway. Everyone is bound to have his or her own opinion. (personal communication with the author, March 2012)

Deciphering the radical sartorial choices of these fully veiled women was not an easy task. If all of them claimed their entire submission to no one else but Allah, they did not share the same language when talking about their dress. Aisha’s conversion had come at a moment when she was looking for an alternative lifestyle away from “bad societal influences”: in her view, the niqab was a means of self-purification, a means to become closer to Allah and to make a statement against the commodification of women’s bodies. Her discourse reinforced certain stereotypes about Western women as victims of patriarchy, their revealing clothes making them, in her view, the objects of constant masculine attention (Tarlo 2005). I felt quite awkward and uncomfortable listening to this exaggerated depiction of the plight of Western women coming from the mouth of a White convert whose face was covered with piercings and who talked as if she had changed ethnicity in the process of discovering Islam. To which extent did I qualify as the “oppressed other” she wanted to liberate? As for Sonia, she mobilized notions of diversity and tolerance, values she considered as inherently British. She insisted on wanting to be judged for her capacities and not for the way she looked. There was a certain irony in this given the excessive attention she attracted as she walked the streets of London with me, dressed in her black jilbab. But in spite of their contrasted postures, their “metamorphosis” (Tarlo 2007b) through closing had deeply changed their relations to others and, to a great extent, their clothes testified of their exposure to a cosmopolitan and multicultural urban environment, where the panel of possibilities was vast and varied (Tarlo 2007a).

In contrast with the black color of inner city niqabs, Birmingham city center exhibits a rainbow of hijabs and the latest trends of Islamic fashion. Even international brands of prêt-à-porter, like Zara and H&M, seem to have been influenced by the global Islamic revival. In the shop windows, an extravaganza of colorful headgears, cagoules, and hoods of various designs are displayed.

Mitra Mermazia, a British Iranian artist, captures the transformations of public life in her city with humor and poetry. Born in England from secular Iranian parents, Mitra does not wear a hijab and does not present herself as a Muslim artist. It is only with the rise of Islamophobia in the West post 9/11 that she felt she had to take a stand against stereotypes affecting Muslim women’s lives. She explained:

As an artist of Iranian descent, having studied the historical rise and fall of the Hijab in Iranian history, as well as the wider political and cultural powers of this significant cloth, I felt propelled to infiltrate the public’s perception and imagination once more.

In one of her recent performances entitled “Who’s afraid?” in reference to the popular 1930s song written by Frank Churchill “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf,” she walked the streets of the Bullring, in Birmingham city center, perched on stilts and dressed with an all covering silky bright pink chador. Her silent strolling amidst the crowd, towering over passers-by, looking at the distance or at the tops of buildings as if preparing to fly, was meant to convey surrealistic impressions. Her phantom appearance triggered mixed reactions: some took pictures, as if confronted by an entertaining clown, while others simply pretended that she did not exist. But altogether, this poetic apparition under the flashy fabric joyfully challenged mainstream perceptions of Islam as a threat to public order, interrogating with humor the machinery of truth that shapes public perceptions with clear-cut certainties.

This impromptu catwalk highlights the power of the public sphere to stage ambiguous identitarian performances. Indeed, the public space is primarily a space in which social actors play social roles and present themselves to others (Goffman 1969). Because of the democratic lack that has marked British politics since the 1980s, the public has become an important site of popular expression. The vibrant avant-garde rock scene, the British taste for costume (as the urban tribes exhibiting their exuberant attires remind us), the giant demonstrations against the war in Iraq in 2003, and more recently mass demonstrations against austerity measures (especially in the education sector) all testify of the vitality of the public for voicing popular contestation.

Because the public is a space in which social actors play public roles and present themselves to others, where political forces and market rationality converge, opportunities to experience sameness and difference are most likely to occur in public. It is also through the encounter with difference that a political consciousness emerges. The visible presence of Islam in public questions the taken for granted telos of modernity because in Western political tradition modern citizen-making has traditionally been thought as deriving from the withdrawal of religion in the private realm. Yet, a closer look at young British Muslims’ practices demonstrates that the voluntary adoption of “symbols of stigma” (Göle 2003) such as the veil for women or beards for men is less a sign of communitarian withdrawal than a means to assert a political identity or refuse victimization. The ways Aisha, Mitra, and Sonia present themselves to the world, either through radical sartorial devices such as jilbabs and niqabs or through playful reinterpretation of the chador, are inherently performative in the sense that they trigger a series of effects and open up a malleable space in which symbols can be inflected in different directions. They use their bodies as blackboards to convey political, religious, moral, and biographical messages whose multiple meanings remain fundamentally ambivalent. Sometimes flirting with the grotesque and the extravagant, their public appearance can be understood as a hidden critique of dominant cultural politics.

In the last snapshot, I provide another illustration of these dynamics by describing a project of spiritual revival carried out in a town of the Midlands that once was the beating heart of the industrial revolution in Great Britain. The state of permanent crisis in which the city has been left since the 1980s has made it possible for Islam to find renewed position of societal relevance. However, the “good ethical life” that this project seeks to promote involves both elements of assimilation and differentiation with mainstream forms of governance. While presenting itself as an “enchanted modern” (Deeb 2006), it also builds on moral sentiments close to neoliberal values.

Spiritual Revival in a Midlands Postindustrial Town

Nuneaton, twenty miles East of Birmingham, is a small town of about seventy thousand inhabitants. Its name originates from a twelfth-century Benedictine Nunnery around which most of the town grew. The size of the city gradually expanded from the seventeenth-century onwards, because of its position at the center of the Warwickshire coalfields. During the industrial revolution, Nuneaton developed a large textile and manufacturing industry. As many other British postindustrial cities, Nuneaton’s urban landscape—the birthplace of film director Ken Loach and certainly an important source of inspiration for his world-renowned social dramas—bears witness of the state of abandonment in which the city has been kept for the past three decades. Streets are empty and many shops have closed down. In a teashop I enter in this late afternoon, the owner, a Belgian of Moroccan origin who arrived in England six years ago, tells me that he may well be the next business to go bust if clients do not reappear soon.

I have come to Nuneaton to meet Pir Faiz-ul-Aqtab Siddiqi, the founder of Hijaz college and the chairman of the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (two among the many other titles he holds). Hijaz is an Islamic boarding school for boys, which was created in 1994. Its premises are located on sixty-two acres of land, in a former rehabilitation center for miners who were victims of accident at work. The college is the extension and formalization of a Naqshbandi seminary Shaykh Siddiqi’s father (Shaykh Abdul Wahab Siddiqi, the founder of the Hijazi branch of the Naqshbandi Sufi order in Pakistan) had established upon his arrival in Coventry in the early 1970s. In the alley leading to the college, I pass by a small group of students, all dressed with thobes, knitted Islamic caps, and the traditional jacket of British public schools with their distinctive escutcheon.

Since the death of his father, Shaykh Siddiqi has dedicated his life keeping his legacy alive and expanding his vision. Hijaz’s educational philosophy remains the same as the one developed at the time of the Coventry seminary: that is, the preservation of an equal balance between the “deen” (religion) and the “dunia” (world). Students are therefore requested to learn both secular disciplines (in local schools) and the religious ones offered at the College. The Shaykh himself teaches Hadith sciences at the college but he is also a Barrister in English law.

Siddiqi was introduced to Islam by his father and graduated from Al Azhar University in Cairo. His mastery of both Islamic law and British law naturally led him to create the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal (MAT), an institution under the 1996 Arbitration Act that provides an alternative to the court for parties in conflict seeking mediation. Such alternative dispute resolution (ADR) mechanisms have existed for a long time in England, since the common law provides room for individuals to appoint a private arbitrator to mediate their disputes. However, the MAT distinguishes itself by the fact that the repertoire of principles and rules mobilized in mediation proceedings borrows primarily from both secular and religious laws.

I am directed towards the “Blessed Seat,” where Shaykh Siddiqi welcomes believers once a week to offer spiritual guidance. Pictures of him and his departed father are hanging on the walls. His office, equipped with flat screens and computers, also contains a large library displaying classic Islamic texts, as well as legal, philosophical, and sociological literature. “The blessed Seat” is part of a broader program of social regeneration Shaykh Siddiqi has designed in order to implement the moral philosophy that guides his legal practice. The program aims at providing solutions to locally identified problems (antisocial behavior, the breakdown of the family, drug abuse, alcoholism, self-harm, etc.) through mentoring and individual counseling.

In Siddiqi’s opinion, shariah is best suited for providing adequate answers to societal problems because it brings a spiritual dimension that is often lacking in secular laws. The role of the qadi, according to him, is radically different from the one of the British judge, who is there to give a sentence. He explains:

In Islamic justice, the qadi, the judge, was not only there to give a sentence and off you go! The judge was a counsellor, a role model, a guide. His role was to go inside a person to find true justice. Judges in this country find that very refreshing but they don’t do it because they are not told to do it. . . . Yes, it’s about developing humanity. It’s about developing the individual, whether it is through the legal system or through the social system. . . . Our duty is to humanity. This is what we are trying to advance here as a philosophy because it is just missing, in the government, in the public sector, in the NGOs. . . . There are many people coming here, Muslims and non-Muslims and we look at everyone, through the common heritage of Adam and Eve. . . . Unless we don’t start thinking about developing the society and developing people, we are going to become poorer and poorer. . . . Governments are stuck, thinkers are stuck, think-tanks are bankrupt with ideas. But if you go back to the purpose of man being on this planet, there is only one. By serving his creation, he finds the creator. That’s the purpose. (interview with Shaykh Faiz Siddiqi, May 28, 2009)

Shariah in a secular context is therefore not to be understood as a set of directly applicable rules but rather as an ethico-normative framework (Id Yassine 2011) that asserts its legitimacy through the personal appropriation of religious norms. The term “spiritual” that Siddiqi often evokes during our discussion highlights his desire to transcend the secular–religious divide by reenchanting the “dunia” ¹¹ through meaningful and personalized engagement with society. Speaking from within the “immanent frame,” ¹² Siddiqi offers “spirituality” as a middle-ground disposition with the power to reenchant the world.

It is the spirit that guided premodern legal practices, before the law became an instrument in the hands of the political power that informs Siddiqi’s vision of the distinct social role shariah could play in the British context. Indeed, premodern legal practices aimed at finding informal solution to conflicts emerging within the local community and, therefore, the authority of mufti’s judgments mainly derived from popular morality and social ethics (Hallaq 2009, 57).

I think the problem of Islamic countries is that they are ruled by very un-Islamic people. So they don’t really apply Islamic law. For instance in this country, we apply Islamic law. We educate people on what this law is all about rather than just say: “this is the law. You either take it or leave it.” I think it’s easier to apply Islamic law in this country because here, it does not have all the politics that goes with it. . . . Because here, Islamic law is not meant to punish man. It’s not meant to regiment man. It’s meant to develop mankind. (interview with Shaykh Faiz Siddiqi, May 28, 2009)

By underlining the emancipatory power of the shariah, Siddiqi departs from liberal understanding of the law as an instrument of compulsion that aims to regiment human behavior. In his view, the shariah serves to develop human capacities by emulating virtuous conduct and nurturing one’s ethical Self-disposition. However, the ideology of “self-discipline” that guides his actions is in line with the normative metanarrative of neoliberal governance that insists on the formation of autonomous, rational, nonconflictual subjects. The entire persona of the Shaykh seems to embody all these ambivalences: his entrepreneurial endeavors conflate together elements of psychology, personal development, new-age spirituality, and Islamic morality. How does “Islamic counseling” differ from other forms of counseling if it equally relies on self-management to cure societal ills? Is “self-help” all that is left in “Big Society” ethics when the welfare state has been privatized? The Islamic modernity he embodies seems to rely on a refashioning of the self whereby duty to others and to Allah is increasingly framed by a morality that draws from entrepreneurial ethics.

At the end of our conversation, Shaykh Siddiqi invites me to visit the tomb of his father, whose lineage goes back to the companion of the Prophet Hazrat Abu Bakr Siddiq. The tomb is located at the entrance of the college. It is the only one of this kind to be found in the United Kingdom, and like elsewhere in the Muslim world, followers of the Shaykh’s order regularly come to visit and pay respect to the Saint. Some of them, Siddiqi tells me, even make the journey from Pakistan. “He wanted to be buried here because he felt very British and he did not feel Pakistan was for him,” he adds.

As we walk into the mausoleum decorated with carpets and engraved stones, images of Afghan “ziarat” (shrines) come to my mind. Some of these shrines are important sites of religious practice and sociability, especially for women who are not allowed in mosques and have few opportunities to meet one another outside of family circles (Billaud 2015). In the small village of Samar Khel, thirty kilometers away from Jalalabad, on the Eastern border of Afghanistan, the Mia Ali Baba shrine is run by descendants of the Saint whose reputation for curing sicknesses attracts many people from the region. Using talismans and verses of the Koran, the Mias chase away the Jinns that have entered women’s bodies, made more vulnerable to spirits’ attacks after marriage or the delivery of a child. But most importantly, the ziarat plays a culturally relevant social function. Mias often play the role of mediators, advising families whose daughters-in-law have been brought for “treatment” to release the pressure they put on them. The “diseases” that Mias cure are therefore as much social as they are biological.

In Nuneaton like in Samar Khel, the tomb of the Saint can be seen as a metaphor of the broader social healing project that his descendants are striving to implement. Indeed, pilgrims coming to visit the shrine of the Saint who insisted on being buried in a non-Muslim country that he nevertheless considered part of the Dar-ul Islam, ¹³ participate in the reenchantment of a world that still bears the scars of the state’s privatization policies. The shrine is not solely a place of worship: it is also a place where the ills of society can be cured. When, in the West, the liberal project of modernity, as it developed from the Enlightenment onwards, has entailed a culturally specific separation of immanence and transcendence, relegating the former to the sphere of the profane (politics, the law) and the latter to the sphere of the sacred (religion), ¹⁴ Islam in the West appears as a force that disturbs such clear-cut distinctions.

Conclusion

The fragments of reality presented in this essay highlight fundamental transformations in the structures of everyday experience triggered by the ubiquitous presence of Islam in public. By anchoring my descriptions in the topography of modern cosmopolitan life, my aim was to provide insight into the surprising and unexpected moral assemblages born out of the encounter of global forces such as neoliberalism and Islamic revivalism. The structures of experience and consciousness that emerge combine together contradictory elements: while Islam appears as a distinct framework of reference for promoting the “good ethical life,” the way it manifests itself in specific projects of spiritual revival carries unstable traces of the neoliberal self-enterprising and self-disciplining ethos.

These snapshots also highlight the fundamentally relational, embodied, and discursive dimensions of ethics. Indeed, the moral universe of Muslim actors inhabiting the global cosmopolitan megalopolis, far from mirroring religious prescriptions and norms, is shaped dialogically, through ordinary encounters where the work of judgment and recognition participates in contradictory and ambivalent ways to self-fashioning (Lambek 2010). As Orsi (2012) argues, “religion situates practitioners in webs of relationships between heaven and earth, living and dead, and in rounds of stories” (151) and “religion in everyday life is abundantly intersubjective and relational” (157). The emergence in public of Muslim Hip-Hop singers, convert ulema, Muslim artists, and jurists disturbs traditional normative conceptions of Islam and contributes to the formation of a new community of practice (Wenger 1998). In accessing the public through their mediation, Islamic prescriptions take on different meanings, shape new practices and subjectivities, and form creative assemblages through cross-fertilization with other norms and institutions available in the immediate environment. The shifting space of religious claims to authentic living embedded within Islam takes hybrid forms in projects of moral regeneration inspired by Islamic epistemologies. The Inner City Guidance project in Birmingham as well as Shaykh Siddiqi’s Hijaz community are good illustrations of the new social imaginaries ¹⁵ that have emerged as a result of the circulation of Islamic norms within the moral order of modernity.

Instead of seeing in such projects the threat of “Islamic fundamentalism,” one could sense in the goals they aim to achieve an attempt at counter balancing the spiritual thinness that marks Western modernity. The creativity with which Muslims have transformed British public life, offering alternative models of emancipation encoded with sets of cultural presuppositions that neither strictly follow the liberal model of individual rights, nor the one of an “authentic” Islamic tradition, powerfully illuminates the regenerative potential of the public when it remains open to critique and difference. Discourses that leave Muslims with only two alternatives, namely to assimilate or to remain in a state of eternal marginality, fail to recognize that only our ability to think outside our own moral assumptions can keep this potential alive.

Finally, against essentializing representations of Muslims’ moral universe as primarily guided by religion, these snapshots illustrate the multiple and at time contradictory ways in which actors form judgment about the “good life.” In their everyday religion (Schielke and Debevec 2012), Muslims relate to each other, the divine, saints, their ancestors, and religious institutions. In this sense, they uphold, transmit, and contest their religious traditions, and in doing so, they attempt to come to terms with their existential issues, hopes, and expectations. These snapshots therefore invite us to reassess our established analytical dichotomies—sacred/profane and presence/absence of the divine—and acknowledge the “alter-modernity” of contemporary religious subjectivities.