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Paper short abstract

This paper analyses whiteness in Britain’s first indigenous Muslim community, showing how racialised hierarchies and elitism were reproduced through religious practice and identity. It examines how second-generation members deconstruct these legacies to reimagine faith, belonging, and agency.

Paper long abstract

For many Muslims born in Britain, profound intergenerational, socio-economic, and demographic shifts are underway. Yet dominant public and scholarly discourses continue to frame Islam and “British values” as incompatible, with convert Muslims and their post-convert families occupying a particularly racialised position within these debates. This paper examines how whiteness operates within Britain’s first indigenous Muslim community, the Murabitun, shaping religious authority, belonging, and racial hierarchy.

Drawing on the concept of liminality, or dihliz (Al-Ghazali), the paper explores processes of self-formation among second-generation convert Muslim women who inhabit the threshold between Muslim and Western traditions. The Murabitun emerged through a synthesis of Sufi cosmology and Western philosophy; however, rather than producing integration, this formation reproduced inherited structures of whiteness, aristocratic hierarchy, elitism, and Protestant Christian moral grammars. These dynamics became embedded within community organisation, embodied practice, education, and normative gendered ideals of marriage and family life, generating a corporeal and affective schema through which authority and legitimacy were racialised.

The paper argues that second-generation members are actively deconstructing and decolonising these inherited formations. Through questioning community belonging, prioritising gender justice, and redefining faith practice via work, social media, and alternative spiritual repertoires, they disrupt racialised and patriarchal modes of authority. This process of self-formation reimagines faith as an ethical, reflexive, and relational practice rather than an inherited hierarchy. By centring lived experience and affect, the paper contributes to critical debates on whiteness, religion, and racial formation, demonstrating how religious spaces can both reproduce and unsettle racial hierarchies in contemporary Britain.