Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims

The Manchester Muslim diaspora features an intense local micro-politics of honor and shame, debated in the globalized language of world affairs and dramatically enacted through public performance. Pnina Werbner reveals that Manchester Pakistanis occupy a locally created public space that appropriates and combines traveling ideas and images from a variety of sources into meaningful moral allegories. Living in the diaspora requires them constantly to negotiate the boundaries of minority citizenship. For Brisish Muslims this process--usually peaceful--has lurched from one confrontation to another: from the Rushdie affair to the Gulf War to the post-September 11 crisis. Each crisis has signaled a more mature grasp by diasporic Muslims of what it means to be a Brisish citizen in a global world.