Convergent and divergent trends in British Islamic youth activism

• Main Author: Hamid, Sadek
• Published: University of Liverpool 2012
• Subjects: 305.6
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.631573

This thesis argues that in the 1990s, British Muslim young people who wanted to take their religion seriously and participate in collective religious activism could choose between four distinct influential revivalist currents, The Young Muslims UK, radical pan-Islamist movement Hizb ut-Tahrir, Salafi oriented JIMAS organisation and the neo-Sufi "Traditional Islam" network, were national trends that became indigenised adaptations of orientations rooted in the Middle East or Indian sub-continent. These trends had a paradigmatic influence upon second and third generation Muslim youth and were instrumental in wider re-Islamisation processes in British Muslim communities. My core research questions are to examine how these trends emerged, how they functioned, how they recruited, how they evolved and what affect they had on forms of Islamic activism today. This research provides an integrated history and analysis of these underesearched trends from their beginnings in the mid-1980s to the end of the first decade of the 21 st century, demonstrating their continuity and change, illustrating their convergences, divergences and their contribution to the growth of an acculturated "British Islam"