Muslims Making British Media: Popular Culture, Performance and Public Religion

Abstract

Carl Morris draws on original fieldwork to examine Muslim cultural production in Britain, with a focus on the performance-based entertainment industries: music, comedy, film, television and theatre. It is a seminal study that charts the growing agency and involvement of British Muslims in cultural production over the last two decades. Morris sets this discussion within the context of wider religious, social and cultural change, with important insights concerning the sociological profile, religious lives and public visibility of Muslims in contemporary Britain.

Morris draws on theoretical considerations concerning the mediatization of religion and cosmopolitanisation in a globally-connected world. He argues that a new generation of media-savvy and internationalist Muslim cultural producers in Britain are constructing counternarratives in the public sphere and are reshaping everyday religious lives within their own communities. This is having a profound impact upon areas that range from Islamic authority and religious practice, through to political and public debate, and understandings of Muslim identity and belonging.

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