M. A. Kevin Brice

University of Sunderland

The existence and size of the White British Muslim ethno-religious group is of interest as this group seems to directly challenge the received binaries of West versus Islam and White versus Muslim, both of which inform the majority of popular and even academic discussion of the Muslim population of England and Wales. However, neither academic nor p...

Conversion to Islam is a subject that has attracted a great deal of attention in the media, but has produced very little in the way of reliable quantitative analysis.There is also growing interest in conversion away from Islam, but there appears to be no quantitative analysis of this phenomenon at all. This paper identifies a possible source of dat...

In discussing converts to Islam, two different types of converts are often identified based on the reason for conversion: converts of convenience and converts of conviction. The common view is that in most (if not all) cases, conversion to Islam in Indonesia by Westerners is about facilitating marriage and so the converts should be classified as co...

Due to the nature of the question asked in the Census for England and Wales about religion in both the 2001 and the 2011 Census, it is not possible to investigate the phenomenon of change of religion from Census data alone. Scotland's Census 2001 asked questions about both current religion and religion of upbringing and by cross-referencing answers...

In the wake of bombings in New York, Madrid and London, and in the context of the so-called war on terror, the Muslim community in the United Kingdom has come under increased scrutiny and suspicion. The visible “otherness” of the Muslim community,expressed through their ethnicity and culture, is highlighted and Islam is often linked with extremism...

In the wake of bombings in New York, Madrid and London, and in the context of the so-called war on terror, the debate on the integration of Muslims into European society has further intensified both at European and national levels. This chapter examines relationships between residential and broader social integration among British Muslims.

According to the 2001 Census some 60,000 people of White British ethnicity declared themselves Muslims in England. It may be claimed by some that this figure shows that large numbers of English (White British) people are converting to Islam. However, this figure has been challenged by various commentators as being artificially inflated by 'white’ i...

In September 2005 Trevor Phillips, Chair of the Commission for Racial Equality delivered a speech in Manchester entitled “After 7/7: Sleepwalking to Segregation”. In this speech Phillips claimed that Britons were “becoming strangers to each other, and … leaving communities to be marooned outside the mainstream”. British Muslims are often held up as...