Sean McLoughlin

University of Leeds · Department of Theology and Religious Studies

The Bengal Diaspora: Rethinking Muslim Migration produces one of our most detailed anatomies of a “TranslAsian” time-space location. It juxtaposes the ways that multiple migrations and diasporas have been locally, multi-locally and trans-temporally configured, and so re-orientates attention beyond a Eurocentric focus on the West. In an ambitious mo...

‘Islam in Europe’ and ‘Islamophobia’ are subjects of vital global importance which currently preoccupy policy-makers and academics alike. Through the examination of various European Muslim groups and institutions that have branched off from Islamic movements - including the Muslim Brotherhood, Hizb ut-Tahrir and Jama’at-i Islami - this book outline...

In 1962, the Commonwealth Immigrants Act hastened the process of South Asian migration to postcolonial Britain. Half a decade later, now is an opportune moment to revisit the accumulated writing about the diasporas formed through subsequent settlement, and to probe the ways in which the South Asian diaspora can be re-conceptualised. Writing the Cit...

This chapter considers how religion and religions have been studied in relation to diaspora and transnationalism, loosely adapting Robin Cohen's mapping of scholarship in diaspora studies to organize the discussion. Drawing upon the examples of Judaism and the religions of the black Atlantic, the chapter begins with reflections on the paradigm of d...

Introduction Taking a cue from Eade and Sallnow's (1991) key work in the anthropology of Christian pilgrimage, the present chapter is a study of the normative and contested accounts of sacred journeys to the holy places of Makkah and Madinah reported by Pakistani heritage Muslims in the UK diaspora. Following the likes of Durkheim (1912) and Turner...

This article reports in brief on an Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Diasporas, Migrations and Identities (DMI) programme funded network, ‘Writing British-Asian Cities’, which ran between 2006 and 2009. It contends that the diverse local configuration of Asian Britain has to a large extent remained unexamined in the literature. Having or...

Against the context of work in the anthropology of pilgrimage on contesting the sacred (Eade and Sallnow, 1991; Coleman and Eade, 2004), the account here is of the changing dynamics of British-Pakistanis’ experiences of deciding to embark upon pilgrimage to Makkah and Madinah. Such decisions are set in the context of socio-economic and cultural shi...

This report considers the academic approach of selected countries (including the UK) to the study of Islamic studies in higher education. The objectives of the desk-based research, commissioned by HEFCE, were to: *map different approaches to Islamic studies *understand how publicly funded universities and colleges relate to private institutions tha...

This article begins to fill a gap in recent discussions of the future of Islamic studies with an account of the nature and significance of Anthropological and Ethnographic contributions to the study of Islam and Muslims. Drawing attention to both the problem of essence in Orientalism and the dissolution of Islam’s significance for Muslims in Said’s...

The organic ‘Asianisation’ of geographical, social, economic and political spaces within postcolonial Britain has been described and analysed most often in terms of a shifting but dominant discourse of ethnic, racial, cultural and religious difference. In this chapter, I explore a case study of how Asianised Britain has been ‘written’ in this way,...

This report contains a literature review of Arts and Humanities research on the roots, practices and consequences of terrorism with an annotated bibliography. The literature review was carried out for the Home Office by a team at the University of Leeds between March and October 2006.

Against current debates about the gradual ‘Islamisation’ of South Asia by Sufi cults, and the shifting ambiguity and fixity of religious boundaries in colonial India, this article is an account of the cult of the Qadiriyya-Qalandariyya saints in the Mirpur district of Pakistan-administered Kashmir. Mirpur is perhaps best known in Pakistan for its d...

While there is still some evidence of conflict over the planning and building of mosques in Britain, in this article I demonstrate that this is not currently the case in Bradford. Having first considered issues relating to the status and significance of mosques in Britain, and then the institutionalisation of Islam in Bradford, I suggest that this...

In this short paper I want to trace the emergence and maturation of a Muslim identity politics in Britain during the 1980s and 1990s. I begin, before the events of the Rushdie Affair in 1989, with an examination of the first crystallisation of Muslim assertiveness on the local level, with special reference to the city of Bradford in West Yorkshire....

This paper examines the case of an independent Muslim girls’ school which applied for funding from the state in May 1994. Established in 1984, Feversham College struggles to survive on the limited finance forthcoming from parents’ fees and the support of Muslim benefactors. The failure of even a single Muslim school in Britain to win state funding...