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The Grenfell fire catapulted North Kensington into the spotlight, an area both synonymous with immigration and social policy innovation for over a century. However, it remains under examined how this extraordinary event re‐defined the discursive landscape around British Muslims and how they have been situated in the national landscape. To do this it analyses the twitter activity in the 96 hours after the fire and also the victim profiles published in the Guardian Newspaper. It finds that the narratives that emerge blur British Muslim social boundaries through narratives both around the exceptional and banal narratives which emerged during and after the fire. This constructs British Muslims as both saviours during Grenfell, and also as a super‐diverse population that resists topologizing as pre‐dominantly South Asain. This article also raises broader questions about the not only the role that social media has in the creation of vernacular memory, and also that in this case twitter was importantly not a conduit for the fake news and hate speech created against British Muslims during Grenfell. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative framing of the image of Muslims, especially after 9/11, has caused numerous Muslim communities to become apprehensive about the way their identity is presented in the mass media. One such community being affected by negative representations based on Islamophobia and other gender‐related stereotypes is Pakistan. As a result, these misunderstandings are being addressed through the construction of alternative and contrasting online identities by Pakistani vloggers through digital media. This paper excavates the diversified constructions of vloggers' online identities using two theoretical approaches to explaining identity construction: micro‐hegemonies and the investment model. Nineteen Pakistani vloggers were purposively selected for the study, who were observed over a period of two years using online observations, interviews, and email conversations, adopting a digital ethnographic approach. The investigation found that the vloggers choose to portray their religious practices, Pakistani identity, and local culture and norms while simultaneously utilizing Western norms to indicate their modernity. Moreover, they regularly emphasize that they are normal, regular human beings. Hence, the paper contributes to understanding how Pakistanis present a complex, hybrid identity which counters the dominant narratives in the media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the gendered nature of Hindu and Buddhist nationalism in India and Sri Lanka. Nationalist movements have become increasingly prevalent in both countries and frequently rely upon Islamophobic discourse centred around a fear of Muslim expansionism. Specifically, nationalists in each country frame their concerns through a gendered lens concerning Muslim fertility vis‐à‐vis Hindus and Buddhists, religious intermarriage of Muslim men with Hindu/Buddhist women, and the securitization of Muslim women's clothing choices. Femonationalist rhetoric has also increasingly been utilized by Hindu and Buddhist nationalists to frame Muslim women as victims of Islam's patriarchal structures and in need of saving by Hindus and Buddhists. This article draws upon original field research in India and Sri Lanka, including interviews with Hindu and Buddhist nationalist groups, their leaders, and Muslim minorities and organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The protection of the 'European way of life' has come at the expense of protecting the human rights of migrants. This trade‐off has occurred at border crossings and in host countries, and has left third‐country nationals, including Muslim refugee women, in grey areas of protection. How can we explain these limited protections across the EU? I argue that the limited protections of Muslim refugee women can be explained through a combination of the EU's fragmented non‐discrimination framework and surging nationalist dynamics. By using Germany as my case study and by drawing on ethnographic research, I propose that Muslim refugee women have been securitized through three distinct but connected 'threat logics': refugees as threat, Muslims and Islam as threat, and Muslim women as threat. All three threat logics have been employed by nationalist and right‐wing groups to simultaneously target migration and Islam qua Muslim refugee women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In August 1964, the semi-centenary of the First World War's onset coincided with uncertainty about Britain's future: decolonization had resulted in a diminished role in the international sphere, and migration had begun to alter the dominant ethnic and religious character of the metropolis. Britons increasingly confronted the question of what it meant to belong to the postcolonial nation. In this context, First World War commemorations served a twofold purpose: first, they revised prior representations of colonial subjects in the war, in light of contemporary realities; and second, they served as an outlet for imperial nostalgia. This article considers the relationship between race, nation, and collective memory by analysing representations of Muslim colonial subjects in the 1964 BBC documentary, The Great War. A content analysis aims to explain how Britain's evolving collective memory reveals its dominant national identity and, by extension, its willingness to accommodate postcolonial newcomers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research and theories of nationalisms have underscored how national imaginaries are significantly shaped by collective identity claims-making, as well as how national imaginaries are mobilized to make claims of both inclusion and exclusion by groups in the nation. However, there has been less focus on how within a given categorical group in a nation national imaginaries are interpreted, contested, and mobilized. Just as inter-group contests have been shown to impact on national narratives, I propose that intra-group contests have implications for national narratives as well. This article utilizes the literature on identity politics and multiculturalism to explore how Muslim Canadians are attempting to shape the national narratives of the religious in Canada. Utilizing interviews, editorials written by Muslim Canadians in the mass media, as well as Muslim organizational documents from the 2000-2008 period, this article analyses the claims and counter-claims within the Muslim- Canadian community about how they imagine the Canadian nation and the place of the religious in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Upon decolonisation, nationalist leaders in two North African countries, Algeria and Sudan, promoted a policy called Arabisation ( ta'rib), which sought to impose standard literary Arabic at the expense of English (in Sudan), French (in Algeria), and other local languages (in both places). This language policy reflected the worldview of Muslim leaders, who hoped to break from the colonial past and start afresh while forging alliances with Arab Islamic states. Arabisation succeeded in expanding the use of literary Arabic in Sudanese and Algerian government bureaus as well as in schools and universities. However, in some circles it helped to stimulate oppositional identities that rejected pan- Arabism as a focal point for national pride and that challenged the cultural foundations of national cohesion. Taking a comparative approach, this study argues that Arabic language policy in Algeria and Sudan featured strongly in postcolonial nationalism and civil conflict. It concludes by considering the status of language cultures and policies today in Algeria, the Republic of the Sudan, and the newly independent Republic of South Sudan, and contends that state-led efforts at 'language rationalisation' have not eliminated multilingualism in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines whether Europe's migrants are a potential resource and discusses Bassam Tibi's views on the issue of integration facing Muslim migrants in Western Europe. According to the author, Tibi argues that Europe's Muslims should abandon their steadfast adherence to the Islamic "umma" and adopt Western political values, particularly pluralism. The author argues that Europe needs to manage its relationship with a culturally and racialised Other in a world that is globalised.

The article examines the allure of the politicisation of religion and the need for its empirical justification. The author discusses Bassam Tibi's argument against the transformation and reduction of the category of "Muslim" from a faith-based appellation into something almost synonymous with a political expression of an ideology. The author believes that in problematising Muslim communities and Islam, Tibi could add to the discourse that holds back the integration of Muslims into Europe.

This feature article acknowledges the fact that neither Islam, understood as the umma community, nor the modern civic European nations, are ethnic identities. Why then are both related to the notion of ‘ethnicity’ in the present article? Why does the analysis of the Muslim diaspora in Europe prompt an alert of an ‘ethnicity of fear’? In order to answer these questions the analysis departs from the supposition of an ongoing ethnicization process that results in an ethnic conflict. The question and the supposition furnish the subject matter of the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Second generation Australians from a Muslim background have appeared on the political radar recently as a group at risk of disengagement due to their potentially split allegiances. For these young Australians, the traditional tension over diasporic allegiances between the homeland and the country in which they live is further complicated by religious identity. This paper offers two case studies of the second generation of two mainly Islamic, but otherwise very different, ethnonational communities in Australia, Turkish and Iranian. It examines the responses of these groups to the rising essentialisation and ethnicisation of Islam, at the expense of ethnic and sociocultural difference. In particular, the paper focuses on the way secular practice and religious identity converge into ‘cultural Islam’. We use the term cultural Islam as a way of describing those, particularly of the second and third generations in Australia, who proudly claim their Islamic heritage while choosing not to participate actively in religious life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper utilises the case study of the recent Miss Chechen Beauty pageant in order to discuss the ways in which gendered discourses and practices have affected the situation of women in the post-war Chechen Republic. Although, on the surface, they appear to have little in common, the paper draws on connections between women's bodies and nation-states in order examine practices such as beauty pageants, honor killings, and government-enforced modesty campaigns that are currently taking place in the republic. Ultimately, the paper argues that beauty contests and modesty campaigns share in common the fact that they are being utilised by the state to relegate women to private spaces and to re-enforce gender hierarchies in the aftermath of two brutal conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Danish cartoon controversy raises questions about the inclusiveness of Western European civic nationalism. The controversy highlighted a harsh, exclusivist brand of Danish civic nationalism that cast Muslim migrants as outsiders. The controversy also saw a broader group of cartoon supporters from across Europe fault Muslims for failing to respect liberal traditions of freedom of speech and secularism, traditions now explicitly labeled ‘European’. However, others pushed the debate in a more open direction by defending the Jyllands Posten's freedom of expression in ethnically neutral terms and explicitly challenging the contrast between an enlightened Europe and an intolerant Muslim other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses how the Singapore government attempted to (re)imagine the Muslim identity in Singapore based on the crisis of the Jemaah Islamiah (JI) arrests in 2002. The paper argues that the government sought to resolve and manage the crisis using the combined apparatuses of the mass media, education and administrative regulations. The paper further analyses the constraints and challenges faced by the government in the process of (re)constructing and sustaining the Singapore Muslim identity. The attempt by the Singapore government provides a useful example of how the government of a multi-ethnic, multi-religious and multi-lingual country has responded to internal terrorist threats by (re)imagining the Muslim identity, and the problems and controversies such a (re)imaging process generates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]