Ashraf Hoque - Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton

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First published in 2019 by

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Text Ashraf Hoque, 2019

Ashraf Hoque has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as author of this work.

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Hoque, A. 2019. Being Young, Male and Muslim in Luton. London, UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787351349

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787351349

This book has been in process for some time, and would not have been concluded without the generous support of so many. I will be forever grateful to all of them. In particular, I would like to thank my PhD supervisor, Parvathi Raman, for her ceaseless encouragement, wisdom, and patience. I would also like to thank my teachers at SOAS Anthropology and History. Specifically, William Gervais Clarence-Smith, John Parker, Magnus Marsden, Richard Fardon, Jakob Klein, Dolores Martinez, Kostas Retiskas, Caroline Osella, George Kunnath, Christopher Davis, Kevin Latham, David Mosse, Harry West, Gabriele vom Bruck, Trevor Marchand, Edward Simpson, Paul Francois-Tremlett and Cosimo Zene from the Study of Religions department. At UCL, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to Lucia Michelutti, Michael Stewart, Martin Holbraad, Allen Abramson, Charles Stewart, Lewis Daly, Alison Macdonald, Guiherme Heurich, and Dalia Iskander for their selfless guidance and blind faith throughout the final stages. Lastly, to Arild Ruud for gently pushing me off the plank.

This work was conceived, somewhat naively, with the help of my two dear friends, Hasan Al-Khoee and Igor Cherstich. I would like to thank them, along with the Brotherhood of Truth and Justice [and Gratitude] (you know who you are). A huge thank you to the people of Bury Park for their boundless hospitality, insight, and humour. Most notably, my friends at the MSP for hiring, hosting, and educating me. A work like this is so difficult to do justice to, especially given the duty to represent friends and interlocutors with necessary sensitivity and accuracy. Even so, errors never announce themselves. It thus goes without saying, as ever, that all such mistakes are my own alone.

Finally, I would like to extend my eternal gratitude to my family for their unconditional support throughout my life. My wife, Rosie, was a great source of relentless kindness and sustenance, for which I can never really reimburse her. Most profoundly, however, I would like to acknowledge my late parents. Principally, the tireless efforts of my mother in raising me against all odds, and demonstrating that anything is possible.

This book will seek to provide an anthropological account of the lives of young British-born Muslim men of South Asian origin in the English town of Luton. Luton is a satellite town in close proximity to London, situated around thirty miles to the north of the city. It is an important town. Many of its inhabitants work in London, which is a convenient forty minutes train journey away. Luton also boasts an international airport that plays a significant part in providing air-travel needs for most of southern and central England. The town is further served by the M1 motorway, which connects London with Leeds in the previously industrial north of the country. In a previous life, Luton was an industrial town in its own right: famed for its manufacture of hats and, later, commercial and domestic motor vehicles. Since the turn of the century, however, these industries have all but vanished with the manufacturing industry being steadily replaced by the services sector a phenomenon consistent with national trends. Historically speaking then, Luton is not a remote town. Its sophisticated transport links, coupled with once thriving industry, has encouraged people from up and down the country to pass through, work and settle in its environs. Among these settlers is a substantial Muslim community around 19% of the overall population of the town which is approximately 200,000 people. These Muslims predominantly reside in a concentrated neighbourhood situated in and around the Bury Park area of the town. Like many of the towns inhabitants, they were attracted to Luton during its industrial zenith, taking up employment in the Vauxhall Motor Company, its brickyards and engineering factories. Over the years, Muslim residents have burgeoned into a sizeable settled community where new generations, who were born and raised in the town, now call it their home. My fieldwork was conducted in this post-industrial landscape among this new generation of Britons. The bulk of it was conducted between 2008 and 2010, with further observational visits undertaken in the years since.

The chief concern of this book is to demonstrate, through observations of their everyday lives, the various ways British-born Muslim men in Luton develop understandings of themselves that transcend the monolithic contemporary image of British Muslim communities. I suggest that young Muslims in Luton are developing hybridised forms of Islam in an attempt to find alternatives to the culturally exclusive state narratives of nationality and citizenship. I argue that the syncretic experiences within the habitus of the South Asian Muslim home, coupled with influential interactions with mainstream British society, has led to the rejection of both points of reference. Rather, young British Muslims are looking to Islam its glorious past and the international Muslim community (ummah) as a means of reconciling both the alienating cultural practices of the home and the perceived Islamophobia and defilement of society beyond. By resorting to an abstract re-articulation of Islam, young Muslims are re-adapting their communal affiliations to suit the social and cultural terrain of Britain, while simultaneously creating a counter-discourse to accepted notions of Britishness and national belonging. Although a substantial and credible corpus of sociological and anthropological literature has emerged in recent decades seeking to situate and problematise British Muslim communities, this study will further illuminate the inherent complexities and resultant messiness of this task. Furthermore, I aim to provide an analysis of Muslims in Britain that attempts to depart from certain conceptions that view diaspora Muslims as a separate cultural bloc, and move towards an understanding that identities are historically fluid, constantly in flux and continuously shifting social categories and markers.