Innes Bowen is a Radio 4 producer on current affairs who has spent much of the last eight years doing some serious journalism in her free time. What she has come up with is not sensational, but is enormously important. Her little book on British Islam, Medina in Birmingham, Najaf in Brent, lays out for the first time in terms accessible to a lay audience something of the inner structures and dynamics of Islam in Britain.
For most people who are not Muslims, and certainly for most consumers and producers of the media, “Islam” is a largely undifferentiated set of beliefs, with Muslims being all more or less the same sort of people spread out along a spectrum from “extremist” to “normal”.
This isn’t an anthropology of believers – that would be a work of ages. But it is still a huge advance on what has been before. Bowen has produced a mapping of the adaptations – and maladaptations – that various forms of institutional Islam have made to British society, and their continuing closeness to the societies and histories from which the original immigrants came. You can’t understand today’s Britain without reading this.
