INTRODUCTION

A range of major religious reform movements that emerged in South Asia in the nineteenth century influence many Muslims in contemporary Britain. These movements in part evolved as responses to colonialism, and have been characterized as ‘the reformist Deobandīs, the quietist and revivalist Tablīghī Jamā‘at, the conservative and populist Barelwīs, the Islamist Jamā‘at-i Islāmī and the modernists’ (Lewis 1994: 36). These broad schools of thought still shape the character of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, and consequently they remain prevalent among British Muslims also. Not surprisingly, this diversity has significant consequences when it comes to the representation of Muslim interests in the public sphere, and towards the end of this chapter some of the issues and tensions surrounding ‘representative’ organizations, at both the local and the national level, are considered.

The political and military domination of the British in nineteenth-century South Asia was the outcome of economic activity and trade links that had begun a century earlier, under the auspices of the East India Company. Secular European powers were successfully capturing Muslim territory owing to their superior technological, military and economic capacity. This provoked a profound sense of crisis and self-reflection as Muslims questioned why divine guidance was no longer protecting the Islamic ummah (Cantwell Smith 1961). There was broad agreement about the need to reform and reinvigorate Muslim civilization, but also much disagreement about how this should be accomplished. A defining moment was the Indian uprising of 1857, which saw civilians and Indian army soldiers challenging British domination.