Teaching the Study of Muslim Minorities in Higher Education in the United Kingdom

In this paper, I reflect on my experiences of teaching sociology of Islam atan elite British university: the University of Birmingham. As a trained economistwith postgraduate degrees in social science and sociology and as a formerWhitehall civil servant, my foray into the world of Islamic studies hasonly been recent. Indeed, it was the events relating to British Muslimminorities between 1999 and 2001 (namely, the arrests, trial, and sentencingin relation to the mostly Birmingham-born “Seven in Yemen” in 1999; the9/11 attacks in New York and Washington, DC; and the urban disturbancesin northern England 2001) that propelled me to interact with this vast andrich field of learning and scholarship. These three events compounded mattersin relation to identity politics, Islamism, and international political economy.Having already researched and written on matters related to educationand class,1 entrepreneurship and culture,2 and Islamophobia and the printnews,3 my new focus on Muslim minority issues stemmed precisely frommy existing interests in ethnicity, culture, and multiculturalism.4Upon joining the University of Birmingham in 2003, I spent my first twoyears concentrating on teaching a specialized course, “Ethnic Relations inBritain,” to finalists. In 2005, I began to teach a new course, “Islam, Multiculturalism,and the State” to finalists. In this article, I discuss the resultinginsight into teaching to a largely non-Muslim audience issues relating toIslam and Muslim minorities ...