the making of Muslim dissent: hybridized discourses, lay preachers, and radical rhetoric among British Pakistanis

The rise of a British Islamic radicalism stressing a heterodox combination of civil rights rhetoric and Islamic values is considered as a form of “magical” religious dissent, rooted in the predicaments of migration and the peculiar structural features of South Asian Sufi orders as regional cults. Drawing on Dumont's work, I extend recent discussions of the sited production of authoritative Islamic knowledge by exploring the dialectical interaction of ideas about ascetic practice, “worldly” orientation, and moral personhood in different South Asian religious movements and their extension into Britain. [Sufism, political Islam, ethnicity, religious movements, Britain, Pakistan]