There seems to be quite a distinction in current commentary concerning the view that British Muslims are at a particular juncture in their history. One view suggests that they are at a precipice, about to fall into an oblivion from which there may be no way back. There is also the concern, however, that Muslims are here to stay, that they are making a fundamental contribution to society, and that they are part of the social, cultural, economic and political landscape of Britain from which there is definitively no return. The evidence is inevitably mixed, leading to concerns that the situation is either doom and gloom or broadly positive, with a few patches that need fixing.
Let us start with education. Muslims are now doing rather well in education, and there is no doubt that they are overrepresented in universities in relation to their population proportions, given the fact that they are indeed a young population. However, their graduate employment rates are much worse than they should be, and employment retention, promotion and income-growth trajectories are far poorer than they ought to be, given their skills, qualifications and experience. This seems to be a persistent issue that has remained in play since perhaps the 1960s.
In terms of wider indices concerning poverty and disadvantage, half of the Muslims in Britain, around two million people, live in 20 per cent of the poorest parts of the country. Some of these Muslims, including those who would ordinarily be seen as Pakistani but are in fact Kashmiri, have lived in some of the most isolated, residentially segregated and poorest housing areas, with implications for education, health and labour markets for the better part of seven decades. These areas have often been defined as no-go areas or sharia zones, but they are in fact deep pockets of poverty and disadvantage.
Even if there are multiple generations within households, where there may be no housing costs and some savings from income, irrespective of low employment rates and underemployment in general, this does not mean that they are doing well or are better off. It means that they are surviving. Crucially, they do so in light of the ethnic, social, religious and cultural capital that they accumulate, sustain, revitalise and re-energise in places that are rather locked in, not wholly locked out, which is how wider society would often perceive them.
So, while education, socio-economic disadvantage, exclusion and residential clustering provide a particular perspective on a particular proportion of Muslims, there is also the other side of this dynamic: a highly educated, professionally successful, socially upwardly mobile Muslim professional-salaried class, which is making some gains in terms of social mobility and cultural integration in the eyes of many. This inevitably affects the overall picture because we simply do not have the detailed ethnic characteristics to work out what I have stated above.
As a result, we often rely on the proxy of “Muslim”, which has implications because it undermines what is essentially a class analysis and replaces it with a religious analysis, thereby distorting the picture. This tells us something about Muslims from the inside out, but what about majority perspectives? Recent research that I published suggests that the friends Muslims have are not necessarily people from other religious backgrounds, specifically Christian backgrounds, but rather secular individuals and communities who understand racism, Islamophobia, exclusion and the wider picture.
The more difficult conversations are with people who hold strong doctrinal views themselves and who tend to hold onto views about the Muslim other that are problematic, regressive and in line with some of the mainstream ideas presented by far-right populist authoritarian leaders. These leaders are essentially using problems of class structure and division as problems of certain individual communities somehow lacking the means of integration and incorporation into society. What this also does is encourage a general view among poorer segments of majority society that governments speaking out against immigration and minorities are looking after their interests.
It encourages the white working class, poorer classes and lower middle classes to feel that they can support their government because they believe these governments are defending them. Inevitably, focus groups and political data held by mainstream political parties are aware of this and mobilise it accordingly. We see this in full play in relation to parties such as Reform, Restore, and other variations, but also among mainstream parties in the past, such as New Labour, when Gordon Brown talked about British jobs for British workers.
We also saw it under Keir Starmer, who talked about an island of strangers, as well as in the Conservative Party’s repeated tendency to utilise the racialisation of others as a way of propping up the interests of the party, which has always been the interests of the wealthier classes, where one-nation conservatism has essentially disappeared. This is the landscape in which the ethnic, cultural, social, economic and religious picture becomes muddied through the weaponisation of division in social media.
This process is led in part by global Californian tech entrepreneurs who have particularly problematic ideas about how all of this works, which is well documented elsewhere. It is also clear that we are talking about a few very powerful people whose ideological convictions border on eugenicism and the great replacement theory, mobilising far-right actors in places such as Germany, France, the UK and right across Europe. This is the greatest macro-dynamic concern because there is no regulation, and there is no stopping people getting their information from social media in terms of news and analysis.
Even mainstream news channels have tilted to the right in order to maintain their audience spaces because they too operate in a neoliberal market for customers and consumers, who are arguably anxious between various news clips in the hope of keeping them hooked, literally, which is the entire mantra of television news anyway. News is like baked beans: it comes in 57 varieties. Twenty years ago, there was no such problem in relation to social media, but with millions of Britons getting their daily news from Twitter/X alone, this points to a very difficult situation.
People are getting their news in isolated bubbles, conforming to particular echoes that reinforce specific narratives, where social contact between people is unnecessary and can be completely avoided in light of current human reliance on the internet for education, information, production, consumption, distribution and exchange. The stark realisation is that individuals have become serfs in a feudalistic system run by tech oligarchs with global reach into everyone’s homes, rendering them subservient, obedient and ultimately unthinking.
The original question here was inspired by an article by Yasmin Alibhai-Brown in The Independent yesterday, in which she fears that Islam and Muslims are facing the most difficult time in their history in the British landscape in the post-war era. While some aspects of this are true, others are arguably overstated. The problems that she is alluding to are no less visible throughout Western Europe at present, and for reasons that are similar in design and outcome. Yet there is no better place in terms of the representation of Muslims in politics, society, culture, media and the economy than Britain, which is something to celebrate and build upon.
But there are also acute levels of poverty, disadvantage, alienation and marginalisation that impact at least half of all British Muslims, which is a real problem. At the same time, when we say “British Muslims”, we are not talking about one set of people. This is something I am very interested in trying to identify, although it is very difficult because we only have proxies of ethnicities based on approximations. The differences within the Muslim category in terms of various outcomes are arguably far greater than the differences between the Muslim category and everybody else in society.
Because there is limited data, it is difficult to come to this conclusion firmly. However, I am on the case. I am working on a book project that looks at Muslim class dynamics in the UK context. I have also written a paper with colleagues trying to estimate the Kashmiri population and to intersect those estimates with local indicators in relation to health, housing, education and income. These are definitively proving that we are talking about certain poor Muslims from particular backgrounds who are hugely impacted by these social forces but are invisible in terms of the Office for National Statistics measures of ethnic categories, namely British Kashmiris.
This invisibility persists despite various attempts to lobby and push in this area ever since 1991, when the first set of ethnic categories was introduced in the Census. The class dynamics affecting British Muslims are peculiar because of their origins in the pre-war and imperial periods, in relation to their incorporation into the British Empire as low-paid workers who shaped the nature of the merchant navy in some respects, but also the British Army. Today, because these individuals and communities arrived in the UK context from the 1940s onwards under the rubric of first Indian and then later Pakistani, we need a deeper sociological understanding of the British Kashmiri diaspora, which is over one million in size, and yet nobody knows them or sees them for who they truly are and represent. It is time to change the dial on this, now more than ever.