The growing availability of literature on Islam in the English language, alongside the increasing pressures of living with the “weight” of a hyphenated identity (Zaal et al. 2007:164), began impelling second-generation British Muslim youth to search for valid Islamic proofs for religio-cultural practices such as visiting shrines or celebrating Shab-e-barat, which they were taught by their parents. This type of enquiry on behalf of British Muslim youth shows the significance of individuals’ reflexive awareness in their day-to-day activities and is reflected in the case of Ruqayyah, a second-generation British Bangladeshi in her late thirties—she spoke with disdain at being made to participate in bid’ah while growing up:
Our parents taught us how to pray … and do khatams and stay awake all night for Shab-e-barat, which isn’t even from Islam—it’s a bid’ah! But it did teach us how to connect with our Creator … so, we had some spirituality and that comes back and forth in life.
Ruqayyah was not alone in attempting to decipher what constituted ‘authentic’ Islam—many Muslim-heritage (MH) respondents eventually realised the lack of scriptural evidence for many of the religious practices they had learnt, and that many of these practices were the complete antithesis to their newfound belief in Tawheed. Respondents found out that much of what they had been taught in the name of Islam was actually no more than a sacralisation of the Hindu or Sikh cultural practices of their peers. For many respondents, this discovery prompted them to construct a set of ‘religious boundaries’ to distinguish themselves as Muslims, distinct from an ethnic or, more broadly, ‘Asian’ identity category (Jacobsen 2003:4).
Franks (2001) notes that this process was largely attributable to the English education system, which had taught them “to analyse and to argue” (Franks 2001:15). Fatima, a second-generation British Bangladeshi woman in her late twenties and an internal migrant to Birmingham from within the UK, discussed her exposure to the religious practices of other Muslims at university:
It was at [university] that I realised everything I had been taught was not authentic. Then I thought, what have I been learning these past 18 years?
Respondents who had converted to Salafism from non-Muslim heritage (NMH) backgrounds also benefitted greatly from the availability of Islamic literature in their native languages, since Islam was a completely new religion for them—for example, Hafsa explained that it was not until she read about the miracles described in the Qur’an that were subsequently backed by science so many hundreds of years later that she was convinced to convert to Islam, as her husband had already:
I started reading about the miracles in the Qur’an where Allah describes the human embryo resembling a chewed piece of flesh … and how between the two seas, one sweet and the other salty, there is a barrier where they meet and part. Even how iron is not found in the earth naturally, rather it came down with a meteorite. I thought: “Wow—that’s amazing for someone [Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ)] who was illiterate to be speaking about all these things hundreds of years ago!”
Geertz (1958) describes this tendency to seek a “factual basis for [religious] commitments” as “practically universal”; Roberts and Yamane (2016) note that its importance is because “a moral code may not seem compelling to people if it is enforced by nothing more than social tradition” (Roberts and Yamane 2016:58). Since “one of the most important functions of most religions … is to provide a metaphysical basis for the moral order of the social group and to reinforce obedience to norms” (Roberts and Yamane 2016:58), this could explain why MH respondents from Britain were not alone in their search for religious clarity—the quest of other respondents from similar backgrounds in places such as France also led to a questioning of the ‘pristine’ cultures of the “traditional” past were reconstructed by their first-generation immigrant parents (Roy 2006:22).
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