Fragmented realities: the ‘sectarianisation’ of space among Iraqi Shias in London Abstract How do the spaces we inhabit shape our lived experiences? And how do those lived experiences in turn come to shape and influence our political subjectivity? Such questions are rendered all the more important in studies of migrant or diaspora populations who, by definition, conduct their daily lives in spaces and places that were initially alien to them. The way in which migrants interact with the spaces around them can tell us much about the social, political, and religious engagements they invest in, as well as the very real way in which they experience their local milieu. Through a detailed study of Iraqi Shiis living in London, specifically in the north-western borough of Brent, this article will seek to trace the ways in which religious institutions have carved up the physical and social landscape of north-west London in ways that have enduring effect on the communities with which they engage. The increasing diversification of different religious establishments, I argue, has led to a fragmentation of the city-as-lived, in which the vast majority of practising Iraqi Shiis engage with only small isolated pockets of the urban environment on a daily basis. Moreover, the growing number of specifically Shia schools, charities, mosques, community centres and other such institutions has resulted in what I call a ‘sectarianisation’ of space in Brent, in which individuals hailing from different branches of Islam inhabit different spaces within the city despite often living within metres of each other. Drawing on a mixture of interviews, participant observation, and mapping techniques, I bring together theory and practice in order to sketch out the ways migrant lives can come to be localised in certain spaces, and what that can ultimately mean in terms of their political subjectivity and engagement.

Twelver Shia in Edinburgh: marking Muharram, mourning Husayn Abstract Research on the Shia in Scotland and of their spaces of worship and gathering continues to be under-represented in the research field of Muslims in Britain. According to the 2011 census, there are just under 77,000 Muslims in Scotland, with Edinburgh, its capital, home to about 12,400. This article aims to fill in some of these gaps by focusing on a Muharram procession emerging out of a Twelver Shia imambargah in Edinburgh. Drawing from fieldwork conducted from 2011 to 2013, the article provides an ethnographic account of this annual jaloos (ritual procession) in Leith district, examines its evolution, and analyses the jaloos’s signage and related proclamations in English and Urdu. In juxtaposing these elements, I argue that even as the procession is a normative means to commemorate and transmit the core values of the Twelver Shia through the events of Karbala, it actively engages with and responds to stereotypes about Muslims in the West and thus serves simultaneously as a wider public presentation on, and defence of, Islam. By closely examining these Muslims’ public performance of Islam, this article offers a case study of an alternative narrative of Muslims in Britain and sheds new light on the rituals and experience of the Twelver Shia in Scotland.

Integration, class and secularism: the marginalization of Shia identities in the UK Iranian diaspora Abstract Despite ongoing debates about the nature and role of multiculturalism in the UK, the idea of integration remains significant in British immigration policies and community relations, and it orients itself towards second and third-generation diasporans as well as recent arrivals. Drawing on original data from the UK Iranian diaspora, this paper aims to complicate extant debates by exploring the cultural dimensions of integration mainly at the intra-diasporic level. Particularly among secular middle-class UK Iranians, ‘integration’ acts as an idiom for being a ‘good’, ‘successful’, ‘proper’ Iranian, and a failure to integrate is often described as unacceptable and even shameful. Integration in this sense mirrors dominant neo-liberal attitudes and puts huge pressure on Iranians to constantly ‘do better’ in cultural and economic terms to justify their presence in the UK. Crucially, these processes are predicated on a critique and/or rejection of Iranian Shiism and Islam in general, thus helping to marginalize Iranian Shia identities in representations of Iranian-ness in the British mainstream. We argue, therefore, that dominant policies and discourses of integration, regardless of their stated intention, intersect with the multiple and competing realities that exist in a diasporic community to produce particular social and cultural relations which may exclude identities protected under UK law. However, we also draw comparison with the US to suggest that these dynamics might begin to change in the near future.

Living a piety-led life beyond Muharram: becoming or being a South Asian Shia Muslim in the UK Abstract Reformist British South Asian Twelver Shia Muslims emphasise practising Shia Islam in daily life beyond the month of Muharram by living a piety-led life; they encourage their followers to ‘become’ a Shia Muslim rather than just ‘being’ one. The reformist British South Asian Shia ulama, mostly trained in Shia seminaries based in Qom and Najaf, advocate the adoption of an Islamic life-style compatible with the economic, political and social challenges British Muslims face. Many British South Asian Shia Muslims view these piety narratives with contempt. They consider that the narratives on living a piety-led life privilege Islamic lifestyle like praying and reciting the Qur’an daily over Muharram ritual commemorations. These Shia Muslims see the growing popularity of piety-narrative as an apologetic response by Shia reformists to the growing influence of Salafis and the Tablighi Jamaat in Sunni Muslim public spheres. This paper is based on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork among British South Asian Twelver Shia Muslims in London, Birmingham and Bradford. The centrality of commemorating Muharram rituals in Shia Islam becomes contested when reformist Shia Muslims extend the piety-led lifestyle beyond the month of Muharram. This article revisits the anthropological lens of iltizam (commitment) in available studies on piety among Muslim communities. Thus, iltizam for the reformists and religiously upwardly mobile Shia Muslims means subscribing to a globally standardised interpretation of practising Shia Islam that compliments the aspirations of Iran-based Shia religious establishment. For other Shia Muslims, iltizam with Shia Islam is in (i) reenacting the continuity of South Asian ways of commemorating Muharram ritual in Britain and, (ii) opposing the Wahhabi trends in Shia Islam that are endorsed and encouraged by reformist British South Asian Shia Muslims.

Editorial

Being a young British Iraqi Shii in London: exploring diasporic cultural and religious identities between Britain and Iraq Abstract Relying on an ethnographic research conducted both in the UK and Iraq, this article explores issues of cultural and religious identities among London-based young British Iraqi Shiis. Using Stuart Hall’s notions of ‘articulation’ and ‘new ethnicities’, I analyse how different realities and experiences of space and class shape young British Iraqi Shiis self-identification in relation to socio-political, religious and ethnic belongings.

A minority within a minority?: the complexity and multilocality of transnational Twelver Shia networks in Britain Abstract Academic scholarship on Shia Muslim minorities in the West has described them as ‘a minority within a minority’ (Sachedina 1994: 3) or as ‘the other within the other’ (Takim 2009: 143), referring to a certain sense of double-marginalization of Shia Muslims in non-Muslim societal contexts. They need to undertake particular efforts to maintain both an Islamic as well as particular Shia identity in terms of communal activities and practices and public perception and recognition, responding to the rise of Islamophobia more generally and anti-Shia sectarianism more specifically. This article problematizes this notion of a double-marginalization of Shia minorities in the West as too simplistic. The article investigates the dynamics around the creation of transnational Shia communal spaces in north-west London, the public representation of Shia Muslim identities by networks and organizations based there to illustrate their multilocal connectivities and internal heterogeneity. The article is based on research in the borough of Brent, north-west London, and presents novel insights into Shia spaces in Britain and thereby makes an important contribution to complexifying academic discourse on Muslims in Britain which has focussed on Sunni Muslims almost exclusively. The ethnographic data is contextualized by providing background information on the historical and social formations of the networks and the centres examined in the article. To analyze the multilocal spatial manifestations and connections of these network, the article utilizes Werbner’s notion of ‘complex diasporas’ (2002, 2004, 2010) and recent contributions to the development of a spatial methodology in Religious Studies (Knott 2005; Vásquez 2010; Tweed 2006; McLoughlin and Zavos 2014). The article thereby constitutes the very first attempt to apply recent contributions on the nature of diasporic religions and their spatial multilocality to the case study of Twelver Shia networks based in London.

Who pioneered Islamic banking in Malaysia? The background of the pioneers of Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad Abstract This study investigates the background of the pioneers of Bank Islam Malaysia Berhad (BIMB) and their perception of Islamic banking to explore the influence that their background had on the practices of BIMB, which have been criticized for being too similar to those of conventional banking. Accordingly, this study opts to explore this topic using interviews with the pioneers, complemented by archival research. Results of the research into the pioneers’ background and their perception of Islamic banking show that most came from a conventional banking background as part of the strong network of the founder of the bank, Abdul Halim Ismail. Furthermore, to fulfill the government’s expectations, they intended to make conventional banking Islamically acceptable rather than simply implementing the profit-and-loss sharing envisaged as ideal by Islamic economists, so they could provide modern banking facilities to economically underrepresented Malay Muslims. The findings reaffirm the significance of the intermediary role of practitioners, their background and philosophy in the development of products and services. In addition, the findings suggest the need for a reevaluation of the research of social scientists exploring whether Islamic banking offers an alternative to conventional global banking, as the pioneers of BIMB did not deny the value of conventional banking, but rather sought to learn from conventional banking to provide competitive banking products in a workable Islamic way.

The Izala effect: unintended consequences of Salafi radicalism in Indonesia and Nigeria Abstract Salafism is a revivalist current in Sunni Islam rooted in the teachings of the fourteenth century Hanbalite jurist Taqi ad-Din Ahmad ibn Taymiyyah and the eighteenth century Arabian reformer Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab. Salafis condemn Sufism (Islamic Mysticism) and most forms of popular Muslim piety, including music, as shirk (polytheism) and unbelief. The Wahhabi variant of Salafism is the only form of Islam permissible in Saudi Arabia and the ideology underlying ISIS and other violent extremist movements. This essay shows that despite the expenditure of vast sums by the Saudi and Kuwaiti governments and NGOs efforts to promote Salafi teachings and armed struggles by ISIS and others to impose them, Salafism has a very limited popular appeal. It is based on textual, ethnographic and survey data from two of the most populous Muslim countries, Indonesia and Nigeria. It also shows that efforts to promote Salafism have led to a resurgence of traditional Sufi oriented piety, especially devotional music traditions.

Da’wa and politics: lived experiences of the female Islamists in Indonesia Abstract Stories about women activism in the Tarbiyah movement in Indonesia has gained scholarly attention. The existing literatures, however, tend to focus on the official discourses. This article discusses female members’ everyday experiences within the the liqo activity, as part of the Tarbiyah movement (circle of religious teaching). It examines the extent to which liqo members experience, receive, and practice the da’wa ideology designed by the Tarbiyah movement. It focuses on cadres’ stories about the lived experiences they have had through joining the liqo, with special reference to the female liqo group in Jakarta. Using ethnographic approach, data were collected through in-depth interviews with 26 female liqo members from a total of 45 interviewees and 15 observations of the liqo sessions. The study concludes that although the official form of religiosity, piety and political identity have been promoted by the Tarbiyah movement and its leaders, the experiences and practices of women revealed a heterogeneity and complexity of meanings of being in the liqo. This study attempts to contribute to the existing analysis of the da’wa (Islamic preaching and mission) and politics of a contemporary female Islamist movement with a case study of the Indonesian Tarbiyah movement.