At its heart, social research involves exploring topics and themes, some of which are more pressing than others. In some areas there sit tension, ambiguity and even a stark sense of threat, danger or insecurity for the researcher and those being researched. Regardless, in most cases, researchers mine their participants for data, from which analysis, diagnosis and, on occasion, recommendation flows. There are examples of researchers going beyond this, but the premise dictating the nature of the relationships is that of power dynamics: some approaches aim to harmonise balance between researchers and the researched, whereas in others, this is not a concern. However, for some of us, research is personal and political in terms of our connection with the subject matter, the people who fill in the frames and what we hope the research might achieve. Moreover, every aspect of a research process calls for a decision to be made, and this too can have political dimensions: who does the research, how, why and with whom are all elements of a larger whole in which power and its impacts are present.

This book tries to account for this research context, not only by working through the intersections of ethnicity, class and taste, but also because the normative readings of identities are grounded in the fabric of day-to-day life in which some groups become rendered subjects and objects of debate. In British society, in common with many parts of the West, there has been a rising and falling of problematic Muslim identities throughout the centuries. Today, and once again, British Muslims have been prioritised as a subject of scrutiny, research and remedy: sexual predators, radical terrorists or terrorist sympathisers, particularly passive victims of patriarchy, social and spatial segregationists, not to mention chronic underachievers in the fields of education, employment and culture. There are a host of other markers through which Muslim identity is rehearsed as challenging, particularly and increasingly through political discourse and mass media. In a process underpinned by ‘evidence’, Muslim identity is shaped by limited, often ideologically grounded and pre-existing narratives that seem to do little more than perpetuate notions of danger, difference and threat.