Orthodox Fraternities and Contingent Equalities

Common difference: Conceptualising simultaneity and racial sincerity in Jewish-Muslim relations in the United Kingdom

“…On a wider theoretical plane, building upon the insights offered in recent scholarship on Jewish-Muslim interactions (Everett and Gidley, 2022;Klug, 2014;Sheldon, 2022a;2022b;Kasstan, 2022) and research highlighting the flexibility and plurality in human actants' analytical thinking (Glick Schiller, Darieva, Gruner Domic, 2011;Heywood, 2020;Mathur, 2020;Stasch, 2009), I proposed a framework that underscores the agentive power of minoritised groups. This framework invites us to pay closer attention to the way racialised communities develop and express their ethnic, racial and religious selfunderstandings, as well as define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and other minorities in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations and emphasise the simultaneity of similarity and difference.…”

“…Ben Gidley and Sami Everett point out that while in Europe the liberal democratic state positions itself as a supposedly neutral arbiter between Jewish and Muslim populations, it could be best understood as a 'secular-Christian formation', which relegates the two communities to a subaltern position and often either pitches them against each other or constructs them as the illiberal other of the West. The latter narrative becomes particularly strong when applied to the 'Orthodox' parts of the minority populations, whose purportedly conservative practices are contrasted with 'normative Christianity's invisibility as liberal common-sense' (Gidley and Everett, 2022: 7; see also Kasstan, 2022).…”

“…The UK presents an important site for the study of Jewish and Muslim populations and of their interactions mediated by the state and the wider society (Van Esdonk and Wiegers, 2019; Van Esdonk, 2020; Kasstan, 2022). According to the Census data of 2021, the total number of people who recorded as Jewish in England and Wales under the question on religion was 271,327, comprising 0.46% of the population of England and Wales.…”

“…Jewish communities have been shaped by a number of waves of migration and today include Jewish groups of Ashkenazi, Mizrahi and Sephardi descent, with the main centres of Jewish life being located in London, Manchester, Leeds and Gateshead. The majority of the Muslim population in the UK derive from the colonial and postcolonial waves of migration, with many tracing descent to India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (Kasstan, 2022: 251-252). The main centres of Muslim population comprise Bradford, Birmingham, Manchester and London, though recent census data suggest that Muslim communities have started spreading out from these major urban locales.…”

“…Similarly to many other European countries, 7 British Muslim groups have been subjected to stereotyping, which collectively associates them with terrorism and illiberal values. This equation has found expression in public policy interventions aimed at managing Muslim citizens in the aftermath of the attacks on 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005 (Kasstan, 2022: 253). At the same time, the Jewish population has been portrayed as a ‘model minority’ (Kasstan, 2022; Sheldon, 2016; Meer and Noorani, 2008), though, importantly, narratives of the perceived ‘success’ that Jewish communities had achieved in integrating into British society have contained clear anti-Semitic tropes (Egorova, 2022).…”