Muslims in Britain: Change of Generation?

Abstract

It is over ten years since Mark Johnson, in a review of the Church of England report Faith in the City, remarked that ‘it is time that those involved in race relations should take religion as seriously as religionists are taking race’ (Johnson, 1986, p. 101). In this complaint he echoed what was already then a long-standing dissatisfaction among the Muslim community leadership. They felt that the structures of white British society were, at best, blind to the existence of a Muslim community in this country or, at worst, deliberately ignoring it by insisting on what are, from a Muslim point of view, divisive concepts of ethnicity or assimilationist concepts of race. So, it was felt, Muslims were either viewed as Pakistani or black, both views which contradict the Muslim ideal of one Muslim community, the ummah.