Segregated Britain. Farhaan Wali
However, with the emergence of ethnic enclaves, similar aspects of labour exploitation have resurfaced within the enclave. Not surprisingly, immigrants enter the labour market at the bottom; those who chose to compete in the free labour market have the potential to obtain social mobility.
In contrast, those who elect to remain in the ethnic enclave are often forced to work under substandard conditions and have minimal social mobility opportunities. Jobs in the enclave are poorly paid, as they require minim skill and experience. As a result, those newly arriving migrants are confined to the bottom of the enclave labour market, binding them to the economic and cultural forces of the enclave.
These two perspectives related to how ethnic enclaves form are restricted to a distinct historical frame, and thus this does not necessarily match the social reality of British Muslim enclaves. Therefore, a situationally ←13 | 14→based perspective also needs to be reflected upon, which draws on the unique properties of the British Muslim social experience within the so-called Muslim enclave. Trying to conceptualise and locate Muslim enclaves in Britain is difficult. At one level, the physical evidence shows that distinct areas across the UK contain a high concentration of Muslims. Is this clustering a consequence of discrimination and exclusion practised by the host society? Alternatively, is this concentration sufficient evidence to constitute a distinctly Muslim enclave? As mentioned above, the literature breaks down these types of problems into the Labour Market and Assimilation Models (Park, 1950; Birkelund, 2013; Egbert and Esser, 2007). The latter asserts Muslim enclaves are places of migrant employment, while the former sees Muslims enclaves as a place of migrant residence (Wong and Rigg, 2010). Both these perspectives tend to overly focus on the first-generation migrant, ignoring second- and third-generation shifts in labour and assimilative practices. This distinction is essential, as the second- and third-generation British Muslims are not newly arriving migrants that are entering the UK labour market for the first time; preferably, they are British-born. In theory, this means they do not have to acquire the necessary social skills required to navigate the labour market or integrate into British culture. Despite these apparent advantages, second- and third-generation British-born Muslims remain at the lower tier of the labour market (Anwar, 2002).
Muslim Enclaves in Britain
During my early academic career, I became enthralled by the writings of twentieth-century Muslim reformers. In particular, I recall being perplexed by Rashid Rida’s famous declaration that Muslims were jughrafiyun [geographical]. What did he mean by this statement? I pondered its significance for many years. Eventually, I came to understand that it related to symbolic attachment to faith and land. In other words, Rida argued that religiosity was an outcome of living in an Islamic environment. This ←14 | 15→meant that people only practise their faith because they live and grow up in a Muslim country. What about British Muslims? If social space dictates attachment, then enclaves might be a reaction to marginalisation. Enclaves create separate spaces, giving the inhabitants the opportunity to preserve their faith. These enclaves are not physical spaces, separated by walls; instead, they are symbolic manifestations of separation and difference.
Unfortunately, British Muslims often occupy the bottom of the economic ladder, suffering from high unemployment and limited education (Wali, 2016). However, this does not mean Muslim enclaves should be seen as an economic dichotomy between power and resources, as this argument assumes an overriding economic imperative for ethno-religious communities to compete for depleting social resources. Historically, government policy has viewed ghettos and enclaves as an urbanisation problem, and consequently, social clustering is a natural by-product of the economic condition (Kanyenze and Kondo, 2011). This approach frames enclave formation within the restrictive scope of urban housing and spatial stratification. Early immigrants were denied access to public housing, forcing them to look within the private sector. This perspective is somewhat problematic because enclave formation does not exclusively occur due to inner-city proximity. Instead, as Rex (cited in Peach et al., 1981, p. 25) argues, immigrant enclaves in the United Kingdom arose from ‘racial discrimination’.
At this stage, I am partially contesting the existence of Muslim enclaves in modern Britain, because population clustering cannot be seen as the primary determinant of an enclave. According to Turner (2007), enclaves are often insulated spaces, operating under separate systems of control and culture. This view suggests a movement away from assimilation theory as an adequate explanation of the process of immigrant adaptation to a host country.
From a primordial perspective, the ethno-religious attachments of British Muslims are exceedingly entangled and cannot be easily removed. For most Muslims, in contemporary Britain, Islam forms a significant source of identity. It has been reported that two-thirds of Pakistanis aged 16–34 stated that religion is ‘very important’ to the way they live their lives (Jacobson, 2006, p. 28). This implies deep-rooted primordial linkages to ←15 | 16→kin and religion (Bellah, 2011). If these attachments genuinely exist, as permanent features of human identity, then early Muslim migrants would have imported them from their places of origin (Geerz, 1973). In theory, a sense of belonging is reinforced amongst community members and provides a means to conceive of their identity through sharing a common ethno-religious past. It is somewhat difficult to actualise the primordial approach in totality since it degrades the social context. For instance, the importation of cultural attachments into a host country needs to be merged with the national identity. The process of synchronising identities can be highly problematic as it is dependent on the actors themselves. Thus, despite some residual linkages to kin and country of origin, religious community identity is a fluid and mobile construct. In other words, religious identification becomes active within a given context. Saeed (1999) discovered that younger Muslims preferred to be recognised through multiple identity-types, namely Scottish-Muslim. However, when asked to place these hyphenated formations in order of preference, 81 per cent regarded themselves Muslim first. This statistic, though important, slightly underplays Muslim youth identity formation, which as I assert in Chapter 2, is a far more complicated process: one that is constructed through negotiation during different periods of socialisation.
To start with, as Kyoso (2017) contends, immigrant identity construction is not merely an individualistic process since it is reliant on family networks, ethnic and racial group membership. These interconnected social threads are significant, as Geertz (2017) stipulates because attachments stem from a tradition of learnt rules of conduct. Jacobson’s (2006) study of second-generation British Muslims in the London Borough of Waltham Forest revealed that many young British-born Pakistanis hold religion as a strong element of their identity. As she states: ‘I have suggested that Islam survives as a source of meaning in the respondents lives partly because the content of its messages is accessible and appealing to the young people’ (2006, p. 126). This rather simplistic observation greatly underplays the complexities of identity negotiation through various stages of the life cycle. In reality, socialisation provides a way for young people to learn about their religious heritage, enabling them to become active members of their community and thus perpetuating religious affiliation for newer generations ←16 | 17→(Sedgwick, 2014). Therefore, socialisation becomes an essential element in the process of identity and community formation, as the process of upgrading and differentiating take place, gradually shaping specific characteristics through the complexities of the life cycle (Parsons, 1964). About second-generation Muslims, the complex nature of the upgrading process is greatly amplified since they emerge from two diverse social worlds. This makes it extremely difficult for them to adjust their identity to different social settings. Children of immigrants in Britain, Cockburn (2012) explained, are exposed to dual socialisation processes: in the home, they form primary identification with their parents’ cultural mores; while at school they encounter an opposing culture. In most cases, young Muslims struggle to overcome conflicts with elements that are perceived to be incompatible with their ethno-religious home-based identities. These situations are often exacerbated by the fact that second-generation Muslims are born and raised in Britain, and thus see their parents’ country of origin as foreign (Hoque, 2019).
Trying to frame Muslim enclaves within a discreet and essentialist framework is hugely problematic, as identity construction is repeatedly negotiated within different periods of the life cycle. Identity negotiation is firmly embedded within the process of socialisation, which may result in the centralisation of identity