Endorsements

Media and policy discourse in Britain and Europe around British Muslims have often been dominated around Muslim women and their sartorial choices, particularly the hijab and niqab. This book takes a different angle and focuses on Muslim men, and how the global war on terror and other outside factors influenced and changed their sartorial choices and how they use language in the everyday. The book denaturalises the ubiquitous and deeply problematic security lens through which knowledge of Muslims have been produced in the past two decades. While this lens has been mediated by the national (dominant) discourse, the book offers an alternative reading of the communities and how their political subjectivities emerge. Drawing on historical events, field research and existing academic work, the book aims to address the multiple ways British Bangladeshi Muslim men and women create their relationship with dress and language. This is the first book to examine how dress and language shape the identities of British Bangladeshi Muslims in the East End that is empirically grounded, using in-depth analysis useful for anyone interested in the study of British Muslims broadly. Whilst the book empirically focuses on a specific Muslim community, the emerging themes demonstrate the interconnectedness of Muslims locally and globally and how they manifest their identities via dress and language. The broader contribution will inform contemporary debates around Muslims living as a minority in the Western hemisphere where such debates are ongoing within multiple spheres, including most potently, in the political arena.