Adding to the “cohort” or “generational effect” was the fact that all Muslim Heritage (MH) respondents cited the significance of ‘9/11’ as part of the search for Salafism in their conversion narratives. This was particularly so for all three of my French MH respondents, who were young adults when France joined the West’s War on Terror, a reminder that “cultural context shapes the expectations of age-related behaviour” (Roberts and Yamane 2016:112).[1] For example, the pressure of living through ever-present racism and increasing Islamophobia during this period only compounded the identity crisis that Rabia was going through at the time. She explained how this pushed her to think more about her religion and appearance as part of her self-identity, even though she described herself as a non-visible Muslim who closely resembled the indigenous French population:
After ‘9/11’ I had to know if my religion was responsible because people were looking at me like I was one ‘them’ (a terrorist). I knew I wasn’t like Bin Laden so there must be different paths within Islam. That’s when I started searching. So yes, racism and terrorism made me look for answers.
For Saba, who was already wearing a hijab, her visible presence as a Muslim post-’9/11’ transformed her into an internal security threat (Zempi and Awan 2019:266-268). This heightened her sense of religious identity and caused her to practise her religion with even more fervour, demonstrating how the “emotional components of people’s constructions of themselves and their identities become more central the more threatened and less secure they become” (Yuval-Davis 2011:15). Other global political events that seem to have affected the identity-formation process of British MH respondents who were slightly older than their French MH counterparts were the Gulf wars and the Bosnian Crisis. Nasreen described how she was affected by travelling close to Bosnia to deliver aid during the Civil War as a university student during the 1990s:
Having an experience like going to Bosnia opens your eyes, your mind and your heart to a lot of the suffering that’s going on in the world, and it makes you ponder on life.
[1] In his paper “The Problem of Generations”, Karl Mannheim (1927) “long ago stressed the importance of understanding how shared formative experiences forge in a collection of individuals particular worldviews that they carry with them for the rest of their lives” (Mannheim 1927, cited in Roberts and Yamane 2016:112).
[2] Image: Author unknown – Grandfather of YouTube User Aviation Michael Source: https://www.youtube.com/post/UgkxyaUfvTnMabprm8jXdDOglNTZEE2WAlME
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