‘From cricket lover to terror suspect’ – challenging representations of young British Muslim men

Abstract

In contemporary media and policy debates young British Muslim men are frequently described as experiencing cultural conflict, as alienated, deviant, underachieving, and as potential terrorists. In this article we seek to convey the everyday negotiations, struggles and structural constraints that shape the lives of young British Pakistani Muslim men in particular. We draw on interviews with British Pakistani Muslim men aged between 16 and 27 in Slough and Bradford. These are from a broader project, which focused on the link between education and ethnicity, and analysed the ways in which values and norms related to education, jobs and career advancement are accommodated, negotiated or resisted in the context of their families, communities and the wider society. A range of masculinities emerge in our data and we argue that these gender identities are defined in relational terms, to other ways of being Pakistani men and to being men in general, as well as to Pakistani femininities. While we recognise the fluidity, instability and situatedness of social identities, we also illustrate the ways in which masculinities are negotiated at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, age and place and enacted within contexts which are themselves subjected to racialised and gendered processes. Our findings offer a varied and contextual understanding of British Pakistani masculinities.

En los debates contemporáneos en los medios de comunicación y la política, los hombres jóvenes musulmanes en Gran Bretaña se describen frecuentemente como sufriendo de conflicto cultural, como alienados, desviados, con bajos niveles de capacidad, y como terroristas potenciales. En éste artículo discutimos en detalle las negociaciones cotidianas, las luchas y las restricciones estructurales que forman las vidas de estos jóvenes musulmanes paquistaníes en Gran Bretaña. Hacemos uso de entrevistas con estos jóvenes entre las edades de dieciséis y veintisiete años en las comunidades de Slough y Bradford. Éstas entrevistas son parte de un proyecto más amplio, que se centró en el vínculo entre la educación y lo étnico, y analizó las maneras en que los valores y las normas relacionados con la educación, el trabajo y el adelanto de la carrera se acomodan, se negocian o se resisten en el contexto de sus familias, sus comunidades y su sociedad de forma más amplia. Una gama de masculinidades emerge en nuestros datos y sostenemos que éstas identidades de género de definen en términos relacionales: a otras maneras de ser hombres paquistaníes y a ser hombres en general, así como a feminidades paquistaníes. Mientras que reconocemos la fluidez, la inestabilidad y el ‘situatedness’ de identidades sociales, también ilustramos las maneras en que los masculinidades se negocian en la intersección del género, la identidad étnica, el clase, la religión, la edad y el lugar, y representado dentro de contextos que son asimismo parte de procesos racializados y de género. Nuestros resultados ofrecen una comprensión variada y contextual de masculinidades paquistaníes británicos.

Keywords:

• masculinities
• British Pakistani
• Muslim
• education
• employment

Keywords:

• masculinidades
• pakistaníes británicos
• musulmanes
• educación
• empleo

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to all the young men who gave up their time to be interviewed for this research and to the many people and agencies who facilitated access to these interviewees. We are also grateful for the support and advice of our co-researchers Tariq Modood and Suruchi Thapar- Björkert and the Leverhulme Trust which financed the wider research project. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association, York, March 2005; at a workshop on ‘Researching Muslim Masculinities’ at the Department of Geography, University College London, July 2005; at the Annual Conference of the Royal Geographical Society and the Institute of British Geographers, London, August 2005; at the Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers, Chicago, March 2006; and at a seminar at the geography department, University of Leeds, March 2006. We would like to thank Linda McDowell, Louise Archer and Michael Keith for very helpful discussant comments and the input from audiences at all of these talks and the two anonymous reviewers and Deborah Dixon for their thorough comments all of which have been helpful in developing this paper.

Notes

 1. Following Foucault (1972), we understand ‘discourse’ to refer to a set of ‘taken-for-granted’ practices or ideas which shape understanding or representation of a group or concept in society.

 2. The title of this article is paraphrased from an article headlined ‘From cricket-lover who enjoyed a laugh to terror suspect’, The Guardian, July 13 2005, which depicted the life of one of the young men believed to have planted a bomb in London on 7th July 2005. In describing his ‘unremarkable’ life The Guardian article seems to leave implicitly open to question the lives of other ordinary young Pakistani Muslim men.

 3. See for example, From London to Leeds, a chasm between young and old is raising tensions in Muslim communities. The Guardian, July 16, 2005.

 4. Young Muslim men have the highest male unemployment rate in Great Britain, 28% of young Muslim men aged under 25 are unemployed compared to 11% of young ‘Christian’ men (National Statistics Online, February 21, 2006. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/cci/nugget.asp?id = 979 (accessed June 21, 2006).

 5. The project, Gender, Social Capital and Differential Qualifications, is part of the Bristol-UCL Leverhulme Programme on Migration and Ethnicity funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The research emerged from an analysis of educational statistics which emphasised the significant presence of ethnic minority groups, including Pakistani Muslims, in higher education (Modood et al. 1997; Modood 2004) alongside the continuing under-achievement of Pakistani boys at school. Research sought to explore the diversity of educational experiences and employment outcomes for young Pakistani men and women, and how these processes were gendered as well as racialised (see Dwyer and Shah Forthcoming). Although it is not an explicit focus of this paper, in the broader project one of the questions we raised was whether or not the disadvantages of class could be mediated by alternative forms of ‘ethnic social capital’ as suggested in some other studies of minority ethnic groups and education (Archer and Francis 2006; Crozier and Davies 2006; Zhou 2005; see Dwyer et al. 2005 for a discussion of preliminary findings). In addition to the authors the other researchers involved in the project were Tariq Modood and Suruchi Thapur-Bjorkert. Further details are available at http://www.bris.ac.uk/Depts/Sociology/leverhulme.

 6. Other work by geographers interested in Muslim masculinities include Patricia Ehrkamp's study of Turkish men in Germany, which considers the importance of public space in the performance of Turkish masculinities (Ehrkamp 2006), Holly Hapke's (2006) study of ways in which the transnational migration to the Gulf is shaping new Muslim masculinities in South India and Farhang Rouhani's (2006) discussion of the negotiations of gay Muslim masculinities in the US (see also Ouzgane 2006).

 7. Figures from July 2005- June 2006, Government National Statistics. http://www.nomisweb.co.uk/reports/lop/la (accessed June 27, 2007).

 8. While this representation conjures up an image of the dangers of the ‘enemy within’, which might be compared with dominant media portrayals of Bradford, it also ignores a history of inter-ethnic conflict, particularly between young Muslim and Sikh men in Slough (The Evening Standard (London), May, 22 1997).

 9. For the purposes of the larger research project we adopted dominant notions of educational success, that of direct movement through school, further/higher education leading to an occupation requiring a high level of skills or professional qualifications. However, as we discuss in this article, many young Pakistani Muslim men reject this dominant definition of success (see also Shah and Dwyer 2005).

10. All interviews were coded in relation to a coding frame first generated by the theoretical concerns of the project and the interview questionnaire, and then developed through themes which emerged from the analysis itself. This process of analysis, or ‘grounded theory’ (Strauss and Corbin 1999) is well described by Jackson (2001).

11. Shah is female and Sanghera is male.

12. Shah (field notes August 3, 2004) describes an interview with a young men, ‘Iqbal’ who is a reluctant interviewee, repeatedly taking calls on his mobile phone and answering only a few questions before explaining he has to leave.

13. All quotes are anonymised with full agreement of participants.

14. None of these young men agreed to be interviewed for this project and we did not encounter any young men who held this position in our research in Slough. We acknowledge that this is an identification which is not represented in this article and this may reflect the focus of our research project which sought educational and training sites as loci for recruitment rather than mosques or madrassas.

15. We are mindful that immigrant groups like Pakistanis do not fit easily into existing models of social class by occupation but may nonetheless mobilise resources associated with class-based identities (Archer and Francis 2006).

16. See McDowell (2003) for a discussion of how young working-class men are disadvantaged in gendered labour markets in the new service economy and Bowlby et al. (2004) for a discussion of the racialised gendering of youth labour markets.

17. General certificate of Secondary Education. Public examinations taken in Year 11, the final year of compulsory education.

18. National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) are work-related, competence-based qualifications.

19. Our discussions were confined only to heterosexual gender relations and none of our respondents discussed other kinds of sexual relations with us. For a discussion of masculinity and sexuality which draws on the identities of homosexual British Asians see Yip (2004).