south asian islam in britain

South Asian Islam in Britain

PETER VAN DER VEER

University of Amsterdam,The Netherlands

Pnina WerbnerImagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performanceof Transnational Identity PoliticsOxford: James Currey; Santa Fe: School of American Research Press,2002.320 pp. ISBN 0–85255–920–8 (pbk)

Pnina WerbnerPilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi CultLondon: Hurst (in press)

Yoginder SikandThe Origins and Development of the Tablighi-Jama’at (1920–2000).A Cross-country Comparative StudyDelhi: Orient Longman, 2002. 310 pp. ISBN: 81–250–2298–8 (hbk)

It is not pleasant to study Islam these days. One is constantly interrogatedby the media, by one’s students, by intellectuals from right to left to explainthe ‘backward’, ‘aggressive’, ‘unpleasant’ religion Muslims are supposed tohave. If such explanations are felt to be somewhat sympathetic to the plightof Muslims they are often considered to be unduly apologetic. As long asMuslims lived ‘unreformed’ lives in the colonies under the benign rule ofwestern powers the cosmopolitan intellectual could be pleasantly mystifiedby the oriental mystique of the seraglio, of sultans and nabobs. Afterde-colonization, however, these former colonies have become independentnation-states whose despotism has to be kept in check by the advancedstates. Moreover, the poor economic conditions in Muslim majority states

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have turned some of their citizens into cheap, footloose labour in theformer metropolises. Islam was, for centuries, an obsession of colonialrulers, but now the problem of national governance within Europe hasreplaced that of colonial governance. The latest phase in this world-historical process has been the collapse of the post World War II worldorder by what Samuel Huntington has identified as ‘a clash of civilizations’(1996)1. Instead of the end of history we see a continuity of history in theways in which Muslim populations form an obsession of liberal governance.

Scholars who are asked to comment on these developments often pointat parallel processes of ‘politicization of religion’ in a number of differentsocieties with a number of different religions. The American MacArthurFoundation funded a large comparative project on Fundamentalism in thelate 1980s in which a number of Hindu, Buddhist, Jewish, and Christianmovements were shown to have radical, political messages and complicatedrelations with their respective nation-states similar to some Islamic move-ments. Such movements were, generally, interpreted as ‘reactionary’ inresponse to processes of modernization. Nevertheless, despite his admira-tion for the project, Huntington reduced its findings quickly to an antagon-ism between Islam and the West. After September 11 this has become thehegemonic framework for understanding the position of Muslims in theWest as well as that of Islam in the world.

The moral panic that has beset western societies today resembles theearlier one that resulted from the so-called ‘Rushdie Affair’ of the 1990s,especially in Britain. Khomeiny’s fatwa calling for the killing of the novelistSalman Rushdie has been a crucial step in the revival of Islamophobia inthe West. The attention the liberal media had previously given to anti-racism in debates surrounding Muslim immigration into Europe nowshifted to debates about the threat Islam posed to liberal democracy. Inparticular, the sight of British Muslims asking for the punishment of theauthor while burning his novel did much harm to ethnic relations in Britain.Further demonstrations of un-national disloyalty could be perceived inBritish Muslim protests against the Gulf War and the recent war inAfghanistan. Added to this is the constant televising of the Israeli–Pales-tinian conflict in which the image of the frustrated suicide-bomber hasbecome almost iconic for Islamic fanaticism. Against this background it hasbecome almost impossible to study Muslims in Britain with a scholarly anddetached attitude.

The great merit of Pnina Werbner’s wonderful contribution to the studyof Muslims in Britain is that she continues to do the almost impossibleagainst all these odds. Her work addresses the problem of the limits andpossibilities of the anthropological project in these circumstances acutelyand admirably. In the Imagined Diasporas Acknowledgements she thanksthe Pakistani Muslim community for the respect with which she was treatedas a woman and as a Jew. However, the Rushdie Affair was not only a

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watershed in ethnic relations in Britain, but also in Werbner’s relationswith the Pakistani community she studied. Her Pakistani friends met herargument that The Satanic Verses was ‘a serious book written from ahumanist perspective about Islam as a great religion’ (Imagined Diasporas,p. 148) with great hostility. The usual ethnographic empathy was apparentlyhard to maintain and created such a dissonance that Werbner for a moment‘decided never to study Muslims again’. I wonder whether such a passion-ate response to differences of opinion would have come forward if Werbnerhad studied people far away from her hometown. The dilemmas of ethno-graphic fieldwork seem to be sharper when there is not a comfortablespatial distance between ethnographer and the people studied. In the endWerbner responded to the situation not by abandoning the topic but byengaging it in a truly intellectual fashion. She decided to write an anthropo-logical analysis of The Satanic Verses in order to engage in dialogue withBritish Muslims about the interpretation of the novel. However sympath-etic such a move is, it is somehow also strangely intellectualist for an anthro-pologist, since Werbner offers little to no evidence that her informantswanted such a dialogue and her complex, structuralist understanding of thenovel hardly provides a basis for it.

Very important in Werbner’s work is that she writes firmly within theanthropological tradition while studying Pakistani immigrants in England.Many studies of immigrants in the West seem to be merely descriptive andmeant for policy use only. This is not at all the case with Werbner. Herethnographic project, sustained over a long period, has been extremelysuccessful and deserves full admiration. She develops the theme of ethnicpolitics by using Fredrik Barth’s study of the Swat Pathan and the studiesof the Zambian Copperbelt by the Manchester School. This implies a closeattention to leadership and to the internal dynamics of factionalism. Theproblem with this kind of detailed work, however, was and is that it doesnot sufficiently take the framework of the nation-state and of globaldevelopments into account. In short, by taking these theories as her modelWerbner’s Imagined Diasporas tends to emphasize the local and theinternal processes. In his path-breaking work Gerd Baumann (1996) hasdemonstrated, quite convincingly, that the provisions of the British welfarestate have framed and even produced these processes to a considerableextent. His arguments are close to the one put forward in B.S. Cohn’s (1987)study of the Indian Census that the colonial state not merely describeddivisions in Indian society but produced them by description, an argumentthat has inspired many anthropologists of South Asia. The anthropology ofthe state is only marginally present in Werbner’s work. Also, in ImaginedDiasporas she pays, in my view, insufficient attention to the ways in whichtransnational networks affect local politics in Manchester. In fact, only theRushdie Affair forced her to abandon her exclusive focus on local politics,since the national and the global became so crucial in it. In Pilgrims of Love

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she has moved away from her localism to a more transnational perspectiveon a Sufi cult in Pakistan which has a substantial following in England.

Two chapters in Imagined Diasporas are devoted to the Rushdie Affairand The Satanic Verses. These issues have been subject to many commen-taries from many disciplinary angles, but the major critical analysis from thediscipline of anthropology has been by Talal Asad (1993). Werbner explic-itly takes issue with Asad’s analysis. Her argument is that Rushdie’s workstands in a Kantian tradition of critical inquiry into the nature of religiousbelief. In her view the central project of the book is ‘to reclaim Islam forsecular Muslims, a new breed, as an ethical religion’. In fact, this is close toAsad’s understanding of Rushdie’s project, but Asad is concerned with thenature of the Kantian project, its possibilities and limits much more thanWerbner. Such has to be understood within the context of state power and,again, Werbner seems to give little attention to the resistance of Muslimimmigrants to the totalizing cultural project of the liberal nation-state. Toreduce Asad’s thoughtful analysis to ‘an attempt to deflect attention fromMuslim support for the Ayatollah’s death sentence’ and to call Asad a‘secular Marxist Muslim intellectual’ (pp. 115–16) makes a mockery ofacademic polemics. According to Werbner ‘no-one has understood the bookitself’ (p. 131, italics in original) and, after rejecting Asad’s fragmentaryanalysis (p. 143), she proceeds to read the book as ‘a structuralist’s dream’of an integrated whole without paying much attention to the critique ofstructuralism in textual studies. In my view these are courageous, but flawedattempts to resurrect a certain kind of anthropology of ‘culture’ in the faceof major transformations of the liberal state that necessitate new under-standings of the concepts of culture and multiculturalism.

What Werbner is really good at is the ethnography of Pakistani popularculture in Britain. When one focuses only on local politics and the arenasof ethnic competition one finds mostly male elders, but when one alsoexamines the hugely important popular culture one finds the young menand the women. The young men are involved in the cricket scene and thepolitics of masculinity connected to that scene. The women are into thegiving of gifts at weddings, the topic of Werbner’s (1990) previous book onManchester Pakistanis. An alternative to the Islamic austerity of themosque this is the world of fun, invested with images from popular cinema.It is also a creative space for Pakistani satire that is tapped in shows likeGoodness Gracious Me on British television. Moreover, women play asignificant role in the transformation of Pakistani identity politics bysuccessfully claiming a voice in the public sphere.

Another alternative to the austerity of the mosque is Sufism, a religioussphere that bridges the gap between popular culture and religion. InPilgrims of Love Werbner writes eloquently about a Naqshbandi order,founded by a living saint, Zindapir whose central lodge is in the North WestFrontier province of Pakistan. This order has expanded into Britain, the

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Middle East and Southern Africa. It has many followers in Britain wherethe saint has a deputy who is based in Birmingham. This study has many ofthe same strengths and weaknesses of Imagined Diasporas. Again, Werbneracknowledges that she experienced strongly the contradictions in herethnographic project between sceptical detachment and her desire to havedialogical interactions with the Sufi community. Again, her theoreticalfocus is very much influenced by the Manchester School. She attempts tounderstand Sufi pilgrimage by connecting Trimingham’s writings on thehistory of Sufi cults with a model of regional cults developed by RichardWerbner. This is a good idea, but one has to move beyond this by analysinghow Sufism is tied into the development of Pakistan’s economy and statestructure by channelling transnational remittances. If power is so central toSufism’s discursive traditions (as indeed it is) one might develop a moresustained understanding of the ways in which transnational movementproduces new power as well as new understandings of it. Werbner givesmuch attention to the Weberian notion of charisma but it is doubtfulwhether that helps us in understanding the impact of transnationalism onreligious notions. The book is a good essay in symbolic anthropology, butfails to connect the themes developed in Imagined Diasporas with theinterpretation of this Sufi cult.

It is striking that in Werbner’s two books on Pakistani Muslims in Britainand their diasporic identities there is hardly any mention of the mostimportant transnational movement among Pakistani Muslims: the Tablighi-Jama’at. We are therefore fortunate to have Yoginder Sikand’s wonderfulcomparative study that devotes substantial attention to the movement inBritain. Adding to Khalid Masud’s (2000) important collection Sikand’sbook offers us a wide-ranging historical and ethnographic perspective onthis movement that is simultaneously devoted to missionary activity amongMuslims and distance from non-Muslims. The Tablighi-Jama’at is aninternal missionary movement among Muslims, founded in north India inthe 1920s. It is associated with the famous seminary of Deoband (withwhich the Taliban are also associated), but much less focused on learningand much more on simple preaching. Its origins are only understandable inthe colonial context in which politics of numbers and communalcompetition made it essential for both Hindu and Muslim movements tostrengthen their ranks and numbers. Hindu purification (shuddhi) move-ments tried to ‘invite back’ and re-convert Muslim communities that hadrecognizable Hindu customs. Movements like the Tablighi-Jama’at tried tocounteract this by asking such communities to reform their practices andbecome ‘good Muslims’. Like the Jehova’s Witnesses they go in smallgroups from community to community ‘to invite’ Muslims to join them andperform the simplest Islamic tasks such as going regularly to the mosqueand read the Qur’an. There are annual gatherings, some of which, such asthe ones in Raiwind in Pakistan and Tong in Bangladesh, are the largest

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gatherings of Muslims (some two million) in the world outside the hajj.Three important elements in the Tablighi-Jama’at are highlighted inSikand’s discussion: attitude towards media, attitude towards politics, andcreation of a transnational space.

Research on the Tablighis is difficult because in contrast to many Islamistmovements its members put no value on media like books, pamphlets andcertainly not in video or audio tapes to spread their message. They havesome officious publications, such as transcripts of lectures delivered byleading Tablighis, mostly containing simple short, edifying stories. Thereare also some hagiographies of the founder of the movement, MuhammadIlyas, and other leading figures. This kind of literature is fundamentallyanti-historical. Like the stories of the behaviour of the Prophet and hiscompanions these stories only have value as models for behaviour. AsSikand observes, history is a worldly (duniyavi) pursuit and simply distractsfrom religious observance (din). The message is spread through going ingroups to Muslims and speaking to them. The focus is not on reading, buton ritual observance. Also communication between Tablighi activists islargely oral and letters are destroyed after being read. The movement isdefinitely secretive in the way it communicates its way of organizing.

Despite the turn away from reading, the Tablighis remind Sikand of theearly Protestants: ‘Like the early Protestants, Tablighi leaders call for sternself-control, hard work, thrift, a simple life-style, abstinence from excessivewordly indulgence, the giving up of wasteful customs and ceremoniesinvolving great expenditure not sanctioned by the shari’at and proper,measured use of time-all ingredients of an inner-wordly asceticism of theProtestant sort that Weber has described’ (p. 260). What is indeed strikingis the focus on individual, behavioural change connected with a creation ofan unmediated public sphere of huge gatherings (ijtima) and taking timeoff to go in groups (jama’at). It is a kind of pietistic quietism that wants tochange the world (and make it a place controlled by Islamic Law) by trans-forming the Self.

Although the ideal-typical comparison with Protestantism offers anumber of important parallels with the history of other religions such asIslam and Hinduism, it is crucial to recognize that the place of scripturalauthority and the nature of scripture is quite different in these diversereligions and thus cannot be easily compared. If we can show that the auth-ority of scripture becomes more important in a kind of Protestant revol-ution that occurs in a number of religions in the modern period, it does notimply that therefore the construction of scriptural authority has the sameor even similar religious and political effects. Not only the text is different,but also the context. The Protestant Revolution is a 16th-centuryphenomenon in Europe, which is not easily comparable to 19th- or 20th-century developments elsewhere.

To what extent does the Tablighi-Jama’at belong to civil society and

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provide a space for criticism of the state? The answer is ambiguous, sincethe Tablighis explicitly do not want to be of this world and explicitly do notwant to be political. Still, the movement’s stress on personal matters suchas ‘Islamic’ dress and education brings it into direct confrontation with theagenda of the secular nation-state which cannot refrain from intervening inthe ways communities organize their lives. When Tablighis immigrate intowestern societies they cannot but come into conflict with secular arrange-ments in schools and so on. Integration into secular societies is the oppositeof what this movement wants to achieve. Their personal jihad may be lessovertly political than the jihad of Islamist groups, but within the conditionsof modern state formation it is still of great political significance.

The Tablighi-Jama’at is the largest transnational Islamic movement inthe world. Thanks to its universalist message it can escape from the claimsof national societies and play a significant role in providing models formigrant communities. By being in a transnational space these migrants cancreate a sphere of their own that is relatively independent of their dailybreadwinning activities. This sphere offers them a dignity and routine thatis unavailable in the leisure activities offered by the host societies. Theimportant thing here is that it allows for a moral condemnation of the statewithout taking any political responsibility.

Especially after the assault on the USA of 11 September 2001 thetendency to see Islam as a threat to western societies has been reinforcedin the USA and in Western Europe. The fact that many immigrants inwestern society have a religious identity and that transnational religiousmovements are active among these immigrants, however, is not specific toIslam. Under conditions of globalization people, ideas and images are nolonger in any way spatially confined, but are increasingly spread across theglobe. Transnational religious movements can be found among Hindus,Christians and Jews, as well as Muslims, and they share certain generalfeatures in their responses to the governmentality of western societies, theordering of the public sphere and of civil society. In principle, they carryout alternative, utopian projects with which they want to engage thechanging world that confronts them. These projects are by no means alwaysaggressive, intolerant, and ‘backward-looking’, although some religiousmovements do give specific extremist answers to western hegemony incertain regions of the world. It continues to be important to analyse howtransnational religious projects that emerge from specific colonial and post-colonial histories offer migrants complex understandings of, and answersto, the often contradictory demands of nation-states of origin as well as ofimmigration.

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Notes

1 See for a critique: Peter van der Veer, ‘Political Religion in the Twenty-firstCentury’ (van der Veer, 1999).

2 See also: Peter van der Veer, ‘Religion in South Asia’ (van der Veer 2002)

References

Asad, T. (1993) Genealogies of Religion. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University.Baumann, G. (1996) Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-Ethnic

London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Cohn, B.S. (1987) An Anthropologist Among Historians. Delhi: Oxford University

Press.Huntington, S. (1996) The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.

New York: Simon and Schuster.Masud, M.K., ed. (2000) Travellers in Faith; Studies of the Tablighi-Jama’at as a

Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal. Leiden: Brill.van der Veer (1999) ‘Political Religion in the Twenty-first Century’, in T.V. Paul and

John A. Hall (eds) International Order and the Future of World Politics,pp. 311–28 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

van der Veer, P. (2002) ‘Religion in South Asia’, Annual Review of Anthropology,31: 173–87.

Werbner, P. (1990) The Migration Process; Capital, Gifts, and Offerings amongBritish Pakistanis. Oxford: Berg.

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PETER VAN DER VEER is Professor of Comparative Religion at theUniversity of Amsterdam. His books include Gods on Earth (London:Athlone, 1988), Religious Nationalism (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1994), and Imperial Encounters (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2001) as well as several edited volumes. He is currently working ontransnational networks of Indian software engineers. Address: Director ofReligion and Society, University of Amsterdam, OZ Achterburgwal 185,1012 DK Amsterdam. [email: [email protected]]



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State and civil society in the context ofmigrationA reply to Peter van der Veer

PNINA WERBNER

Keele University, UK

In his review article Peter van der Veer hints at an important issue whichpreoccupies both my recent books, and which I want to address here –namely, the relationship between state and civil society in the context ofmigration. In Imagined Diasporas among Manchester Muslims: The PublicPerformance of Transnational Identity Politics I look at the invisible subter-ranean spaces which Pakistanis create for themselves in the diaspora, andwhich surface periodically into the public domain in the form of socialmovements in response to national or global crises: the ‘Rushdie affair’, theGulf War, September 11, etc. These diasporic spaces of identity are notsimply discursive constructions of the state, since they are producedthrough the efforts and investments of local activists. In this sense suchspaces are potentially resistive, as the Muslim response to global crisesaffecting the community in Britain highlighted. Pakistanis, I show, enunci-ate three different modes of being a community – moral, aesthetic, and ofsuffering – and each of these is embodied, gendered, and constitutedmaterially through gestures of giving and bodily empowerment. The otherpoint I make about these communal diasporic spaces is that they are bothcontested and kept discrete, in disjunction. The spaces of high Islam aredemarcated as sacred, while the spaces of South Asian popular culture and‘fun’ are celebrated outside and beyond these moments of high cultural andreligious solemnity. Other set-apart spaces narrate a story of human rightsand/or women’s rights, and of Pakistani nationalism. This is embodied insupport for the national cricket team and its player-heroes, and articulatedin commemorative ceremonials in which Pakistanis in the diaspora reflectupon the condition of postcoloniality. Yet while these identity spaces arekept apart in some situations, in others, such as political contests betweenlocal community leaders, the same people fuse their complex identities asBritons, Punjabis, Muslims, South Asians, Pakistanis and black immigrantsto create hybrid narratives which reach the sentiments of their audiencesand mobilize support.

This raises the question of how such identity spaces may be related tothe state – in Britain, the local state or the welfare state? According toArmando Salvatore, the rise of a Muslim public sphere at the end of the19th-century in the Muslim world was associated with increasing transcul-tural communication (Salvatore, 1997: 45). Salvatore argues that for the

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first time there was open debate beyond the confines of the ‘ulama. Heproposes that the emergent field of discourse was marked by a reificationof keywords such as Shari’a, umma, or Islam, as these words came to bestandardized and subordinated to the rules of public communication (1997:46–7). In somewhat similar vein others have also noted the public reifica-tion of communal and ethnic and religious labels in the rhetoric of locallevel politics in Britain although, unlike Salvatore, this reification is all toooften explained in instrumental terms. Most recently, Baumann (1996:ch. 7), for example, has argued that dominant discourses of culture andcommunity are self-serving responses by minority leaders claimingresources from the state and local state, or by state bureaucrats attemptingto define an administrative order. Culture and identity as discretephenomenon are, according to these sorts of interpretation, the product ofmodernity and its reificatory discourses and modes of control.

Imagined Diasporas attempts to argue throughout the book quite explic-itly against the limitations of such a reductive interpretation (see alsoWerbner and Anwar, 1991; Modood and Werbner, 1997). The public playof ethnic labels and counter-labels disguises, I demonstrate in the book, acomplex, hidden world of sited subjectivities and subject positions; a worldof political passion grounded in compelling cultural imaginaries aboutcommunity, honour and morality, not simply as discursive reifications, butas desired and experientially lived realities. The very detachment of thediasporic public sphere from wider realms of power, I argue, makes it adialogical space of meroscopic visions and open debate. It is also a space ofaesthetic production: speeches have to be carefully planned and eloquentlyand dramatically delivered. Compared to most ordinary citizens, then,Pakistani settlers have achieved a kind of centrality in their own eyes andin the eyes of their followers. The moral drama they enact is a universalfable of friends and foes, good and evil. What is often disguised, however,by this globalizing rhetoric are local issues of racism, inequality and povertyfor which speakers have no immediate solution.

Pilgrims of Love is a study of civil society in Pakistan and Britain as seenfrom the perspective of transnational migrants who are all followers of aliving saint known as Zindapir, whose lodge is located in the North WestFrontier province. The postcolonial state is for these migrants – and for thecult itself – a constant presence. Contemporary Pakistan, a postcolonialsociety characterized by uneven development and marked differences instatus and wealth, recruits migrants to serve in its armed forces andgovernment ministries, and exports labour to the Gulf and to Britain. It isin these settings that fraternities of contemporary Sufis create civil society:voluntary organizations that cut across traditional village and kin ties,ethnic and social divisions, regions and provinces. The relations of amityand networks of useful contacts between Sufi sister- or brother-disciples areembedded in modern settings – factories, work places, the army, the police,

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Pakistan International Airlines. So too in Britain and the Gulf, Sufi frater-nities thrive in the companionship created on building sites, in factories andin immigrant neighbourhoods.

In a period when the North West Frontier province of Pakistan has cometo be better known as the recruiting ground for the Taliban, Zindapir’s cultrepresents an important reminder of the existence of a peaceful, tolerantIslam in South Asia. The Frontier may be a place of fundamentalist madras-sas whose sole purpose is to train young men for martyrdom, in a struggleagainst all things western, but it is also a place renowned for its pirs, aliveand dead. Among Zindapir’s disciples are Afghani refugees, Pathans,Punjabis, Sindhis and Kashmiris, peasants and urbanites, rich and poor.Against the puritanical strictures of the Deobandis, Zindapir’s reformSufism espouses a spirit of openness and generosity, which encouragesfollowers to aspire to worldly success and prosperity, while envisioning autopian world of nurture, tranquility and selfless giving.

The rise of Zindapir’s regional cult points to the fact that Sufism as amovement is alive, vibrant and intensely fulfilling for its followers. Againsta sceptical view of charisma as irrelevant to postcolonial or globalizationtheory, one may argue that transnational communication has enhanced thestatus of religious charismatic figures and their organizational reach. Osamabin Laden, one such figure, constructed his persona in the classic image ofa Sufi world renouncer; a man who had abandoned his wealth to live in thedesert for the sake of Islam. By contrast, Pilgrims of Love discloses theprocesses leading to the emergence of a more classical charismatic figure,living oppositionally on the margins of the postcolonial world. Unlike BinLaden, Zindapir was opposed to violence (and, indeed, to the Deobandisand Taliban). The book shows the moral discourses he articulated whilepragmatically negotiating his cult’s expansion through the minefields ofPakistani bureaucracy and politics.

Zindapir’s charisma is not to be grasped as out of place and time. On thecontrary, it is deeply embedded both socially and culturally in present-dayPakistani society and its global extensions. His constant negotiations withpoliticians and ‘ulama which the book documents, show how ordinarypeople organize themselves in relation to, and vis-à-vis, the postcolonialstate. For Pakistani settlers in Britain, membership in this Sufi order withits extensive transnational connections is also inflected by negotiations withthe local state. So, too, when Pakistani immigrant settlers in Britain orateabout global issues in the diasporic public sphere they themselves havecreated, they position themselves as citizens in Britain as a modern state.Hence, state and civil society cannot be seen apart from each other both inPakistan and in Britain. Each has its own autonomous spaces and culturalagendas. The interaction between state and civil society is thus necessarilyalways dialectical – it is never simply an imposition of the state, seen as thesole centre of power.

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References

Baumann, Gerd (1996) Contesting Culture: Discourses of Identity in Multi-EthnicLondon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Modood, Tariq and Pnina Werbner (1997) The Politics of Multiculturalism in theNew Europe. London: Zed Books.

Salvatore, Armando (1997) Islam and the Political Discourse of Modernity. London:Ithaca Press.

Werbner, Pnina and Muhammad Anwar (1991) Black and Ethnic Leaderships inBritain: The Cultural Dimensions of Political Action. London: Routledge. E-book available 2003: [http://www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk]

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PNINA WERBNER is Professor of Social Anthropology at KeeleUniversity, UK and Research Administrator of the International Centre forContemporary Cultural Research (ICCCR) at the Universities of Manches-ter and Keele, UK. She is the author of ‘The Manchester Migration Trilogy’which includes The Migration Process: Capital, Gifts and Offerings amongBritish Pakistanis (Berg, 1990 and 2002), Imagined Diasporas amongManchester Muslims: the Public Performance of Transnational IdentityPolitics (James Currey and School of American Research Press, 2002) andPilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sufi Cult (Hurst Publishersand Indiana University Press, 2003). Address: School of Social Relations,Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK. [email: [email protected]]



south asian islam in britain

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