Seeing like a Muslim

In recent decades, a number of controversies have fuelled a tendency to perceive Muslims as unruly, unassimilable and outsiders. These situate Muslims against the nation and its supposed values in a politics of threat. While this citizenship experience has received public attention, very little can be discerned about how Muslims imagine themselves given such binaries. Here, I consider a number of ways that Muslims, in the UK’s second city, Birmingham, allude to this precarious citizenship experience through engagements with institutions, different publics. These make it difficult to represent Muslims and to anticipate a British Muslim disposition, which has the effect of fuelling uncertainty and fear about what Muslims actually represent. Muslims, therefore, find themselves in a double bind, caught between regimes of representation and repression, while also facing potentialities for alternative action presented by their normative location as a sizeable and sometimes defining community in the “Muslim” city.