Abstract:
An emerging consensus amongst scholars of Muslim political and social identity
suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity
construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison
of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the
perceptions of working class Muslim men. While the results indeed re-affirm
respondents’ concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview
content demonstrates that subjects’ multiplicity is complicated by their desire to
meet—not reject—the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms
discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred
characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals’ responses suggest
that they are trying to fulfill perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention
helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims’ expressed and well-documented
“identity crisis,” suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more
broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation.
