Hope and Fear in Response to Religious Diversity

Overview

Hope and Fear in Response to Religious Diversity: Contesting Security, Identity and Diversity in London.

Tobias Müller (Woolf Institute)
Emanuelle Degli Esposti (Centre for Islamic Studies, University of Cambridge)
John Dunn (King's College and POLIS)
Chair: Richard Bourke (King's College and Faculty of History)

The territorial expansion and proliferation of the world's largest religions has always and necessarily been intrinsically both global and local in constitution and causation. Failing to capture either dimension means failing to grasp what has been going on. Over the last three decades especially, the movement of Islam across Western Europe and the United States and its effects on migration, religious exploration and adaptation, and cultural, and economic inter-action, has been challenged by a proliferating global crisis of terror and state fission. This has posed fresh challenges to states and communities and presented Muslims with novel options, religious, economic, social, and political. We wish to explore, on the basis of Tobias's and Emanuelle's research, the character of state and communal responses in Europe to the ways in which Muslims at the grassroots level have taken up these options by focusing one highly religiously diverse part of the UK, the London Borough of Brent. In particular, we will draw on both of our fieldwork in Brent to highlight the ways in which contested spaces become implicated in political and religious identities; as well as discussing how government is dealing with conflicting imperatives at both the local and national level regarding security, identity and diversity. By combining a top-down assessment of policy with a sensitivity to bottom-up grassroots politics, we wish to interrogate the entanglement and potential aggravation of certain religious, social, and political divisions.

For further information please contact Tobias Müller.

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