‘From cricket lover to terror suspect’ – challenging representations of young British Muslim men

Abstract

In contemporary media and policy debates young British Muslim men are frequently described as experiencing cultural conflict, as alienated, deviant, underachieving, and as potential terrorists. In this article we seek to convey the everyday negotiations, struggles and structural constraints that shape the lives of young British Pakistani Muslim men in particular. We draw on interviews with British Pakistani Muslim men aged between 16 and 27 in Slough and Bradford. These are from a broader project, which focused on the link between education and ethnicity, and analysed the ways in which values and norms related to education, jobs and career advancement are accommodated, negotiated or resisted in the context of their families, communities and the wider society. A range of masculinities emerge in our data and we argue that these gender identities are defined in relational terms, to other ways of being Pakistani men and to being men in general, as well as to Pakistani femininities. While we recognise the fluidity, instability and situatedness of social identities, we also illustrate the ways in which masculinities are negotiated at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, age and place and enacted within contexts which are themselves subjected to racialised and gendered processes. Our findings offer a varied and contextual understanding of British Pakistani masculinities.

Challenging the discursive positioning of young British Muslims through the multilingual performance of devotional song and poetry

“…Rampton (1995) and Harris (2006), in non-religious contexts but with young people from similar language backgrounds, have reported on how language-mixing or code-switching, together with other translingual communicative acts such as 'styling' (Rampton, 1999), among British Asian young people can contribute to newer secular youth identities. This article reveals the under-reported and unmarked alternatives to recently described more popular and marked constructions of identity amongst British-Muslim young people (Abbas, 2005;Archer, 2001;Dwyer et al, 2008).…”

“…For example, selecting 'British-Muslim' represents a slightly different stance to 'British and Muslim'. For example, this question may indicate the growing acceptance of bifurcated identities as argued for by Bhabha (1990) and others (Dwyer et al, 2008;Saeed et al, 1999) and its accompanying term. An ancillary purpose of this question was to prepare respondents for the question that followed on primary affiliations.…”

“…Cultural theorists such as Bhabha (1990) have theorised notions of hybrid identities as migrant generations give way to the born here generation. This has led to notions of 'hyphenated' or 'bicultural' (Saeed, Blain, & Forbes, 1999) or 'compound' or 'diasporic' (Dwyer, Shah, & Sanghera, 2008) identities. These bifurcated identities draw on cultural characteristics and competences coming from competing and complementing directions and, whilst recognising that even in more stable settings transmission is never preservation, in the dislocation and disjuncture of translocalities, cultural transmission is inevitably fractured and unstable, and therefore always quite ripe for hybridity.…”

Ethnic Deviant Labels within a Terror-Panic Context: Excusing White Deviance

“…Meer and Modood (2010) suggest a number of reasons for this, including prominence of the view that protections from racism are afforded to conventionally, involuntarily conceived, racial minorities and should not be extended to those (Muslims) who voluntarily choose their religious identity, especially if, as is often envisaged in Christian thought, that religion is viewed as an oppressive one which requires members to be disloyal or associated with terrorism (Meer and Modood 2010, p. 124). This perception leads to brown bodies no longer just being seen as insular problem communities, but more-so now being considered as posing a wider security concern for Western societies (Dwyer et al 2008). Thus we have a 'new national security agenda based on counter-terrorism with a specific focus on Islamic fundamentalism' (Brown 2008, p. 472).…”

“…Recent work has focused on the mass media's mis-representation of brown bodies, and in particular how this has served to sustain Islamophobic sentiments and anti-Muslim racism, so much so that it is now a common feature of contemporary society -see for instance the work of Ahmad (2006); Khiabany and Williamson (2008); Moore et al (2008); Poole (2002); Poole and Richardson (2006); Richardson (2004);and Saeed (2007). The presentation of brown bodies 'through images of danger, violence and anger' (Alexander 2005, p. 200), are further embodied and re-imagined within the context of 'the enemy within', itself linked to debates about 'community cohesion' (Alexander 2005;Dwyer et al 2008), and steeped in 'domestic repression, carried out in the name of national security' (Mathur 2006, p. 34). This process of stigmatising has occurred alongside the government's 'community cohesion' agenda, both as they resonate with older racist arguments about assimilation (Worley 2005) and as they intersect with the trajectories of wars against immigrants, asylum seekers and terrorism (Sivanandan 2006).…”