There are nearly 2000 mosques in Britain by some estimates, however there is yet to develop a vocabulary to describe their diversity, akin to the common terms used to describe Christian places of worship (chapel, church, cathedral). I outline here the typology of the interspatial mosque to provide a coherent theorisation of how mosques operate, their priorities, and the ways in which they situate themselves as what are sometimes called “multipurpose” or “multifunctional mosques”. In order to pin the abstract typology to the empirical, I use several case studies, but contend that the findings can be generalised across Britain, with implications for research on mosques in other locations. The article argues mosques can be divided into three tiers, the fard, which focuses on the daily prayers, the fard kifaya, which hosts communal activities, and the sunna, which aims to recreate the prophetic example in the modern period in various ways.
The researcher, in carrying the name of the institution, is bound to an ethical standard of behaviour; standards which are maintained through ethical approval that researchers must obtain from their departments before conducting research. There exists another form of ethical approval a fieldworker must obtain, that of their research participants. This Other Ethical Approval is often related to access; a participant must consider the researcher to have integrity in order to allow them the privileged insight into their own lives and behaviours. The article outlines and explores this secondary ethical approval derived from the author’s experience of conducting research as a doctoral student. It is argued that being attentive and conscious of the ethical standards of the research field can only improve the quality and rigour of the research, and is increasingly important in spaces where access is not easily obtained. After outlining the research project, there follows a statement of ethics as the author encountered and negotiated it in the field. It is expressed through statements derived from Islamic sacred texts, structured in a similar way to statements of ethics produced by scholarly associations such as the American Anthropological Association. This reflexive account will be of value to researchers interested in British Muslim studies, as well as to scholars researching contemporary religious communities more generally, who need ethical approval from their research participants.
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