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SOPHIE GILLIAT-RAY
Introduction
The 1950s and 1960s is a period of great significance for the Muslim community in Britain. It witnessed the arrival of large numbers of Muslims into the country and ever since a number of issues have arisen concerning the British Muslim community. Some of these relate to concrete matters, such as the provision of voluntary-aided status schools, or planning permission for building mosques. However, there are other and perhaps more subtle substantive issues which face the community as well. One of these is the question of identity, specifically, religious identity among the younger generations. The parents and grandparents of the up-and-coming third generation of British Muslims have enduring concerns about the place of Islam in the lives of their young. They look around at the wider society and face the reality that Muslims are but one faith community among others, and realize that they must find a place for themselves amid a number of other religious and ethnic groups within the larger society. Additionally, they find that this society often fails to support an Islamic worldview. In fact, the plurality of competing secular ideologies has the potential to relativize the absolutes of Islam, and draw young Muslims away from the values and traditions their parents have nurtured into them.
From the point of view of the younger generation, their identity concerns are bound up with questions of belonging, and the extent to which others will accept their participation in the wider society. In view of the multicultural and religiously diverse society in which they live, how are young Muslims affirming, altering, or abandoning their identity? What is the effect on their identity of living in a society such as Britain where they constitute a minority group? It is this specific question of identity and social diversity in relation to young British Muslims that is the focus of this paper.
Identity Defined
Among the early psychologists who studied identity, often in conjunction with other disciplines such as philosophy, 'identity' was a term referring to a sense of sameness and continuity as a person: `either as a subjective phenomenon or as an objective deliverance, as a feeling, or as a truth. This sense of personal identity is the sense of a sameness perceived by...