Paper short abstract:

This paper explores criminology as a discipline of modernity, with secular underpinnings, and examines the difficulties that this poses if wanting to document Muslims' experiences of crime and victimisation. This paper suggests that the emergence of Muslim identities heralds new areas of research.

Paper long abstract:

Within Criminology, work focusing upon minority groups' experiences of crime, victimisation and criminal justice has traditionally been carried out through the lens of race and/or ethnicity, so that faith identities in general, and Muslim identities in particular, have been either almost totally ignored or only briefly mentioned in passing. The focus upon race and ethnicity, as opposed to religious identity, is perhaps unsurprising when considering the broader context to criminological research, since the criminal justice sector in Britain has generally approached equality and diversity issues from a secular, race relations perspective which views minority groups according to their racial and/or ethnic identities rather than their faith identities. This can be seen most clearly in the monitoring procedures used by agencies of the criminal justice system to record suspects', offenders', victims' and employees' identities, whereby racial and/or ethnic (rather than faith) categories have traditionally been used, with only the Prison Service systematically recording prisoners' religious identities. As such, faith identities have rarely featured in the policies and practices implemented by agencies of the criminal justice system when trying to dismantle the inequalities and prejudices faced by minority groups.

The following paper has two broad aims. Firstly, to explore the subject discipline of Criminology as a discipline of modernity, with secular underpinnings, and to examine the difficulties that this poses if wanting to document Muslims' experiences of crime and victimisation. Secondly, this paper focuses upon the criminal justice system in Britain and highlights the difficulties of including notions of religiosity and spirituality into policies and practices. This article suggests that in the same way that work arising from, and being constituted within, the race equality and feminist movements has significantly shaped criminological discourse and criminal justice policy and practice, the emergence of Muslim political activism and the expression of Muslim identities potentially heralds new areas of research within Criminology and novel ways of carrying out research.