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Paper short abstract

Second-generation women in Britain's first convert Muslim community, excavate inherited whiteness, aristocratic hierarchy and Protestant moral grammar within their faith, "doing archaeology on the deen" to relocate authority and reimagine Islam as relational, embodied and reflexive.

Paper long abstract

For many Muslims born in Britain, profound intergenerational, socio-economic and demographic shifts are reshaping religious life and belonging. Yet dominant public and scholarly discourses continue to frame Islam and "British values" as incompatible, while British convert Muslims and, especially, their British-born children remain largely absent from debates on contemporary Muslim identity. This paper examines how second-generation women raised within the Murabitun, Britain's first intentionally indigenous convert Muslim community, critically interrogate the religious, cultural and racial inheritances they received.

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Norfolk, UK, I argue that the Murabitun's attempt to build a British Islam, forged through a synthesis of Sufism, Western philosophy and counter-cultural politics, also reproduced inherited structures of whiteness, aristocratic hierarchy, elitism and Euro-Christian moral grammars that became embedded within religious authority, gender relations and everyday community life.

Building on Sara Ahmed's phenomenology of whiteness and al-Ghazali's concept of the dihliz, or threshold, I theorise second-generation women as occupying a liminal position from which they undertake what participants themselves describe as "doing archaeology on the deen": an ongoing excavation of inherited belief and practice, distinguishing Islam's ethical core from the historical and racialised forms through which it was transmitted. Rather than abandoning their faith, participants relocate religious authority, embrace embodied healing practices, digital platforms and the reclamation of the Divine Feminine, reimagining faith as relational, embodied and reflexive. The paper thereby contributes to debates on whiteness, lived religion and contemporary British Islam, showing how religious communities can simultaneously reproduce and unsettle racial hierarchies across generations.