The Infidel Within Muslims in Britain since 1800 by Humayun Ansari (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2004. 406 pages.

Abstract

While written from a solid historical methodological approach, Ansari’s
The Infidel Within will surely appeal across disciplines to professors and
students of Islam in the West, the social sciences, colonial and postcolonial
studies, and ethnic and minority studies. This work is encyclopedic with
regard to its many references to well-known and obscure pockets of
Muslim communities that thrived and/or disappeared since Islam began to
take root in Britain. Therefore, it will be an important tool for future
advanced research and very helpful for the beginning student. This work
combines astute social analysis with primary and secondary sources,
including early Muslim newspapers in Britain, political speeches, and firstperson
narratives. Perhaps one of the book’s greatest contributions is its
dense quotations from first-person historical sources, which give the reader
an authentic sense of what it must have been like to be a Muslim in
Britain struggling with various cultural and religious issues.
The underlying question of this book is, simply put, considering the
many waves of Muslim immigration, intermarriage, and evidence of indigenous
conversion: Can there be a single British Muslim identity? Throughout
the work, we are introduced to the many individuals who contributed to
British Muslim heritage: poor immigrant seamen from every corner of the
British Empire, high-ranking South Asian Muslims who intermingled with
British high society, the more eccentric members of Muslim countries who
came to Britain as visitors and became enduring caricatures in the popular
British press, English converts who tried to universalize Islam along
Unitarian theological lines, as well as the many charismatic Muslim leaders
from various ethnic groups who promulgated Islam according to their own
rejection of and/or adherence to their particular culture’s manifestation of the
Islamic experience.
Ansari’s central premise is that understanding a community’s development
cannot occur without understanding the many cultural, class, ethnic,
racial, and economic forces that are simultaneously at work within that
community. From such a standpoint, the author traces the path of various
Muslim communities as they took root throughout Britain at different class
and ethnic levels. Furthermore, Ansari refuses to settle for any easy model ...