The Construction of Criminality and Disorder among British Muslim Young People

Abstract

When serious public disorder exploded onto the streets of Bradford, West Yorkshire in June 1995, involving mostly ‘Muslim’ and some white and black young men, the cause was identified as a widening cultural and generation gap within the Asian community. Keith Hellawell, then Chief Constable of West Yorkshire Police, stated that ‘Cultural and religious leaders have been worried for the past ten years or so that the younger generation don’t follow their teachings and feel that they have great difficulty in controlling them’ (quoted in the Independent 12 June 95). The notion of an intergenerational crisis within the British Muslim community has taken hold ever since and has been returned to again and again. As if on cue, the serious public disorders, again mostly involving Muslim and some white young men, in Bradford, Oldham and Burnley – all former textile towns in Northern England – in the spring and summer of 2001, spectacularly compounded suspicion of crisis and disaffection. Almost immediately the drama was eclipsed by the epoch-making but wholly unrelated terrorist attacks in the United States. Worries about disorder and disaffection were displaced by fear of terrorist attack as the UK joined the US’s ‘asymmetrical’ ‘war on terror’. The war was brought home with a vengeance by the bomb attacks in London (2005) and Glasgow (2007), the two failed shoe bombers (2001 and 2010) and the 2003 bombing in Tel Aviv, carried out by British-born ‘Islamic political terrorists’ (Abbas 2007). Taking its cue from the response to the earlier disorders, the government launched its action plan ‘Preventing violent extremism: winning hearts and minds’ in April 2007, to support community cohesion and strengthen the role of faith institutions and leaders in resisting violent extremism. This religious inflection clearly targeted the British Muslim community as the main harbingers of cohesion and security.