Rehana Ahmed’s Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism offers an excellent analysis of the Muslim minority in Britain, connecting literary representations of this faith group with the material conditions of working-class Muslims. In this way, rather than studying religion in isolation, the author takes the wider view that class and religion are “not mutually exclusive but intersected and overlapped” (35), linking class consciousness with religious solidarity. Ahmed’s introduction traces the history of the displaced Muslim back to the 1930s; this reach helps her contextualize a series of social and economic policies that have impeded Muslim integration, impelling them to form monocultural and often highly conservative ghettos. Ahmed argues that these segregated neighborhoods generated a type of postracial cohesion based on Islam, which was gradually transformed into pseudopolitical action—as seen in a series of mass protests around the nation in the ensuing years (the Rushdie affair, the Bradford riots, etc.).

Chapter 2 follows up on that assertion, arguing that far from being a direct response to literary creativity, the Rushdie demonstrations articulated a much deeper sense of victimization based on an exclusion from a “secular-liberal anti-racist politics.” Chapter 3 concentrates on a series of works penned by Hanif Kureishi; Ahmed contends that Kureishi’s subtle allusions to Islamic identity—and, often, the absence of religious identity—problematize the normalization of whiteness in enunciating a “new way of being British” while also reinforcing an artificial binary between private religion and public secularism. Chapter 4 contextualizes the reception of Brick Lane by the inhabitants of the same area; echoing her earlier sentiments about Muslim mobilization, Ahmed insists that protests against Ali’s novel were less about censorship and more about inequality and prejudice fostered by top-down multiculturalism. Chapter 5 further investigates the juxtaposition of creativity with religious belief in Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers, which promotes Muslim inclusion as a form of humanism (exemplified in this case by Qawwali aesthetics). The book ends with an analysis of a series of memoirs that function as “double agents,” in that they both advocate dialogue between different constituents and also obfuscate the behaviors and power structures that allow for cultural exchange.

What Ahmed does best is to relate literary representation to the social conditions that shape Muslim consciousness by materially contextualizing the texts: she divulges local histories (providing a localized reading of Brickhall in The Satanic Verses), links news clips with plot development (explaining the court case of Heshnu Yones as inspiration for Maps for Lost Lovers), and informs readers about the reception of these works by the Muslim public, specifically the working-class Muslim community (i.e., focusing on the reaction of the Sylheti Bangladeshis in London). She successfully presents the texts as “sites of struggle” that exhibit Muslim life beyond a simplistic binary of religious dogmatism and secular liberalism. At the same time, she offers a compelling critique of the limits of liberalism, suggesting that its valorization of individualism can fail to account for collective movements.

A possible weakness in this study is Ahmed’s eagerness to idealize the protestors she describes, which can cast a shadow over other (and stronger) arguments in the book. Although one can agree that parochial media coverage was too quick to label the protestors as thugs and dismiss them as a simple-minded minority within a minority, Ahmed’s portrait of the marchers as a politically cohesive group unified by a desire for social justice comes across as a stretch. Furthermore, while Ahmed recognizes that faith-based communities were instrumental in providing support and dignity for various minority groups, she seems reluctant to spend time on repressive collective norms present in those communities that occasionally sabotage integration. An implied argument in the book is the failure of hybridity—a condition resisted by both class and religion. But it remains implied: Ahmed, despite her subversive problematizing of Nazneen’s hybridity in Brick Lane, says very little on the subject. In sum, Ahmed’s emphasis on material conditions on occasion feels like an overextended justification of conservative Islamist activism, which ultimately disregards individual agency for the sake of religious solidarity. Yet these shortcomings do not get in the way of Ahmed’s serious engagement with social justice for minority culture. This is a useful book, one which scholars in the field will find informative and rewarding.