Like their African-Caribbean Non-Muslim Heritage and French Muslim-Heritage (MH) respondents, British MH respondents also felt a sense of exclusion and a lack of belonging. Fatima, who grew up in a tiny minority Bangladeshi community in a remote northern town, expressed this as a yearning for a missing culture:
I was crazy about Bollywood, but now I can’t stand it! It was because we didn’t have the culture around us, so we yearned for it. For our weekly shopping and Eid shopping we travelled for 45 minutes to a neighbouring city to collect halāl meat and food.
For Nasreen, a second-generation Ugandan-Pakistani refugee who emigrated to Britain with her family, the experience of ‘something missing’ or of feeling ‘lost’ was expressed as a physical sensation in the wake of difficulties incurred during the settlement period.:
My heart didn’t feel settled. I felt anxious all the time. There was something missing … I was four years old when we came here because of the civil war in Uganda. Idi Amin was perpetrating a lot of atrocities against Asians so our parents packed up what they could and left the rest behind—belongings, money, jewellery, everything, and they saved themselves. We came here just before the killings.
Nasreen’s conversion narrative highlights how feelings of anxiety and a sense of ‘something missing’ may have been linked to the strong sense of displacement and loss of belonging she and her family suffered after escaping the tyranny of a civil war. Inge (2017) found the long-term effects of this to be a factor that encouraged the Somali respondents in her study to worship God from an early age as a form of relief and support following the trauma of forced migration (Inge 2017:64). During their settlement period in the 1970s, Nasreen’s family not only suffered social exclusion and racism, but rapid downward social mobility, since unlike other “Asians who came directly from the Indian subcontinent as single men, most East African Asians … were also educated, spoke good English and had commercial, professional or business experience before entering Britain” (Anwar 1998:6):
We all lived in one room. I remember the room vaguely which had a table, a chair and a bed we all slept in. The landlady would turn off the electricity and gas because she wasn’t nice. Even though Mum paid for everything with the meters, she still turned things off. There was a lot of hardship in the beginning. It was a long settling period, and my father who was a teacher in Uganda had to become a factory labourer because they wouldn’t accept his qualifications.
In the years to come, Nasreen and other second-generation adolescent South Asians whose parents had arrived in Britain as economic migrants would face the difficulty of being caught between two (or more) cultures (Jacobsen 2003). During this time in their lives, many South Asians felt as although they were almost living a double life—one inside the home, and another outside it that their traditional, often uneducated parents failed to comprehend. Contemplating their ethnic origins in this way became a “key identity quest” for British South Asian and British African-Caribbean respondents, especially during adolescence; it was a burden the majority white English-heritage youth did not have to bear, since the cultural values they learnt at home generally resembled those of mainstream society (Rotheram-Borus 1993, cited in Kroger 2010:126). Often, this tension, or the “psychological weight” of being a second-generation “daughter who typically pick[s] up the work of commuting among cultures; making and re-making culture in the quiet conversations, and arguments, with parents, strangers, teachers, peers, the media and their inner souls” (Zaal et al 2007:165), was one of the main drivers towards the search for an alternative identity for the majority of British MH respondents.
This was evidently the case for Saima, a British-Pakistani in her thirties who described herself as approaching “chaos fast”. Much of this chaos centred on the cultural conflict between her parents’ expectations of Saima and her desire to choose her own way—a type of confusion noted to occur within ethnic minority groups, where young people in these groups are able to identify with a variety of alternative role models in broader mainstream culture (Phinney & Rosenthal 1992, cited in Kroger 2010:127). Here, the emergence of Salafism as a third space also points to the “the heavy cultural entrance fee” (Weedon 2004:43) demanded of Saima, and others like her, by wider society. Evidently, neither assimilation nor inclusion were feasible payment options which their ill-fated French counterparts had already paid in France, only to remain outsiders.
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