Muslims professionals and organizations

As the British Muslim population has grown in size, it has developed a wide range of infrastructures that support religious identity and practice. At the local level, this has involved establishing mosques, Islamic bookshops and publishing houses, food stores, travel agents, colleges and schools, charity shops, and so on.

Muslims are now very well-represented among the professions that support these local community enterprises. A glance at the pages of the Muslim Directory, a kind of ‘yellow pages’ for Islamic organisations and services in Britain, reflects the dynamism and entrepreneurialism to be found in many communities. But these Muslim professionals often play a dual role by connecting local Islamic organisations and networks, to national-level structures.

Despite the internal religious diversity within British Muslim communities, there is recognition of a need to represent the needs and interests of Muslims in public life, especially in relation to local and national government. This need for national representation for Muslims became particularly apparent in the wake of the so-called ‘Rushdie Affair’ in the late 1980s. The publication of The Satanic Verses exposed the relative lack of mobilising power in Muslim communities, and a consequent need to establish a platform to coordinate a response to the book’s publication. More positively, there was recognition of the need to articulate the distinctive social policy needs of British Muslims. It was argued that this could only be done through the establishment of a national level body to which Government departments could turn for advice and consultation.

Modelled along the same lines as the Board of Deputies of British Jews, and with support from both Conservative and New Labour Governments, the Muslim Council of Britain was formally established in November 1997. Although its so-called ‘representative’ role is sometimes disputed and contested, the MCB has nevertheless lobbied effectively on behalf of a wide range of British Muslim interests. For example, the inclusion of a new question on ‘religion’ in the national Census of 2001 was a direct outcome of campaigning efforts by the MCB. They recognised that British Muslims had distinctive social policy needs in relation to schooling, housing, employment, and so on, and that it was only through detailed analysis of Census data that these issues and challenges might be addressed.

Where Muslim men have largely dominated professional religious networks and organisations in Britain, in recent years promising steps have been taken to enable Muslim women to take up elected positions of leadership in a number of civil society organisations. Most recently, this includes the new President of the Islamic Society of Britain, Sughra Ahmed. And as we will see, chaplaincy is providing an important avenue for Muslim women to take up professional religious roles.

Alongside national religious organisations, Muslim professionals are contributing to British public life as lawyers, doctors, dentists, teachers, chaplains, charity workers, and businesspeople, to name just a few professions. They are increasingly well-networked via professional associations and umbrella bodies, such as the Association of Muslim Schools established in 1992, and the Muslim Charities Forum, established in 2007.