The Infidel Within

Abstract

While written from a solid historical methodological approach, Ansari’s The Infidel Within will surely appeal across disciplines to professors and students of Islam in the West, the social sciences, colonial and postcolonial studies, and ethnic and minority studies. This work is encyclopedic with regard to its many references to well-known and obscure pockets of Muslim communities that thrived and/or disappeared since Islam began to take root in Britain. Therefore, it will be an important tool for future advanced research and very helpful for the beginning student. This work combines astute social analysis with primary and secondary sources, including early Muslim newspapers in Britain, political speeches, and firstperson narratives. Perhaps one of the book’s greatest contributions is its dense quotations from first-person historical sources, which give the reader an authentic sense of what it must have been like to be a Muslim in Britain struggling with various cultural and religious issues. The underlying question of this book is, simply put, considering the many waves of Muslim immigration, intermarriage, and evidence of indigenous conversion: Can there be a single British Muslim identity? Throughout the work, we are introduced to the many individuals who contributed to British Muslim heritage: poor immigrant seamen from every corner of the British Empire, high-ranking South Asian Muslims who intermingled with British high society, the more eccentric members of Muslim countries who came to Britain as visitors and became enduring caricatures in the popular British press, English converts who tried to universalize Islam along Unitarian theological lines, as well as the many charismatic Muslim leaders from various ethnic groups who promulgated Islam according to their own rejection of and/or adherence to their particular culture’s manifestation of the Islamic experience. Ansari’s central premise is that understanding a community’s development cannot occur without understanding the many cultural, class, ethnic, racial, and economic forces that are simultaneously at work within that community. From such a standpoint, the author traces the path of various Muslim communities as they took root throughout Britain at different class and ethnic levels. Furthermore, Ansari refuses to settle for any easy model ...