This chapter focuses on particular moments of Muslim space-claiming, controversy and cultural resistance in early twentieth-century Britain. It offers a brief sketch of Muslim agency through the period of heightened racial tension that followed the Second World War, and up until the beginning of the Satanic Verses controversy of 1988-89. In doing so, the chapter seeks to historicise and thereby add complexity and nuance to understandings of tensions involving Muslims in contemporary multicultural Britain that form a context to the readings of literary texts that follow. The description of Eid at the Shah Jahan Mosque, Working, from a 1934 article in the Islamic Review, reproduced as an epigraph to the chapter, captures the way in which Islam had begun to shape British space in small but significant ways in the early twentieth century.

In the scholarly literature on the post-Restoration period, ‘conformity’ typically denotes membership of the established Church and adherence to its liturgy, rites, and episcopal polity. Post-Restoration conformity is thus depicted primarily in ecclesiological and liturgical terms, rather than denoting doctrinal conformity to the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles, and particularly its soteriological articles, which define doctrines such as justification by faith alone and eternal predestination. After all, many post-Restoration clergy desired to shed the Reformed soteriology which the Church had inherited from the Edwardian, Elizabethan, and early Stuart periods. Yet there remained many post-Restoration clergy who regarded the Thirty-nine Articles as authoritative articles of faith, and as stipulating the Church’s officially established orthodoxy. Many of these churchmen considered subscription to the Articles as including a confessional commitment to Reformed soteriological orthodoxy on the doctrines of grace, election, and justification. For these post-Restoration Reformed conformists, Reformed orthodoxy was integral to their notion of conformity to the established Church, and a number of them were quite troubled by what they perceived as the nonconformity to the Church’s soteriological articles among many of their clerical brethren. Along with ecclesiology, liturgy, and church polity, another dimension of conformity can therefore be identified in the writings of many post-Restoration churchmen, namely doctrinal conformity, which took the form of adherence to Reformed orthodoxy and the Church of England’s Reformation heritage. This chapter will explore how post-Restoration Reformed conformists understood Reformed orthodoxy to be synonymous with doctrinal conformity to the Church of England.

Thomas Hobbes was a theologian. The scholarship of the past generation has established that fact, wresting him from the presumption that his Leviathan was atheistic and marked a radical secular break with the Christian religion. But what kind of theologian was he? This chapter takes a late work for its case study, An Answer to Dr Bramhall (1668), in which Hobbes positions himself within the tradition of Reformed and magisterial Protestantism and attacks an eminent Arminian and Laudian bishop. Hobbes wrote his treatise in the midst of a crisis in Restoration England in which the newly re-established Church of England, and its regime of uncompromising conformity in worship and doctrine, were coming under scrutiny and attack. Theology therefore abutted upon ecclesiastical politics. The chapter explores Bramhall’s charges against Hobbes and the latter’s rebuttals; Restoration critiques of the episcopate; Hobbes’s substantive theology and his efforts to provide historical credentials for his heterodox positions; and his ‘sociology’ of the priestly perversion of religion. Finally, the chapter assesses the extent to which Hobbes’s claims to Protestant orthodoxy were plausible.

While Thatcher's politics combined an exclusionary, racialised British nationalism with an economic neoliberalism, New Labour integrated multiculturalism into a neoliberal economy, and cultural difference and hybridity became exploitable commodities in a globalised marketplace. This chapter begins with an exploration of Kureishi's treatment of racial difference in a selection of his short stories and intimacy, focusing particularly on its frequently elliptical, coded presence. It discusses whether Kureishi's protagonists' autonomy from minority culture and community functions as a politicised critique of these prescriptive codes for living, or whether, by contrast, the subversion of conventional codes and categories tends towards an individualism that actually operates comfortably within exclusionary liberal social formations. The discussion illuminates the more focused consideration of Kureishi's engagement with Islam in The Black Album as well as the short story and screenplay versions of 'My son the fanatic' and his semi-autobiographical work My Ear at his Heart: Reading my Father.

Like many of his contemporaries among the magisterial reformers, both in England and on the continent, Richard Hooker’s moral theology is inseparable from his theology of grace. Justifying grace is for Hooker the source of the theological virtues, without which there can be no attainment to moral fulfilment – beatitude. The chief theological concern of the Reformation is the formulation of the principles of soteriology, and it is within the frame of this task that discussion of the virtues is undertaken by the reformers. While Hooker emphatically embraces ‘virtue ethics’ he none the less does so in a manner comparable to other magisterial reformers, and consistently with Article XII of the Articles of Religion (1563/71). This chapter will attempt to distinguish between ‘justifying faith’ and ‘faith as a theological virtue’ in the thought of Richard Hooker with a view to demonstrating his adherence to the Reformed mainstream.

The Satanic Verses controversy has been described as a transitional event for Britain's South Asian Muslim minority. This chapter illuminates Samad's description of the anger of Bradford's Mirpuri youth at the publication of The Satanic Verses in the wake of the Honeyford affair. It sheds light on the dialectical relationship between class, race and religious affiliation. Samad argues that if it was the local history of Bradford which led to the heightened tensions there at the time of the Rushdie affair, the local politics was also partly symptomatic of structures of disadvantage that operated on a much broader scale. Toynbee's stark polarisation of 'race' and 'beliefs' is predicated on an erroneous and outdated understanding of racism as focused uniquely on colour rather than culture. Her flawed attempt to maintain this distinction is necessitated by a liberalism that requires a problematic combination of anti-racism with a valorisation of the individual.

Monica Ali's 2003 debut novel, Brick Lane, was published to considerable acclaim. While its story opens in Bangladesh, with the birth of the protagonist Nazneen, the majority of the novel is situated in the 'enclaved' East End Bangladeshi community. Nazneen's physical, transcontinental journey underpins the novel, but it is her journey of self-development as a Muslim Bangladeshi woman negotiating the challenges of working-class immigrant life within the confines of a Tower Hamlets council estate that forms its focus. No less surprising, this chapter suggests, was the impact of its publication, as well as its adaptation into film, on some Tower Hamlets Bangladeshis who read the novel as a representation of their already beleaguered community that had entered the public domain at a time of particular vulnerability and scrutiny by government, media and the majority public.

This chapter addresses one of the most pressing dilemmas for the godly after the re-establishment of the Book of Common Prayer at the Restoration: the question of the proper approach to take to the parochial worship of the Restoration Church. The chapter uses a little noticed 1662–63 printed debate initiated by the ejected presbyterian Zachary Crofton, as well as government intelligence reports of presbyterian ‘conventicles’ contained in the State Papers. The debate concerned the extent to which both godly laity and recently ejected ministers were obliged to attend and conform to parish services in the Church of England. The chapter therefore addresses the issues of conformity, nonconformity, and partial conformity among those who had, in the previous two decades, been committed to a national church but who found themselves disaffected with the Restoration settlement. Drawing on recent work by scholars such as Michael Winship, Mark Goldie, Ann Hughes, and Neil Keeble, the chapter will seek to complicate the historiographical picture of presbyterian nonconformists developing a potentially ‘separatist’ position late in the 1660s and early 1670s. Some presbyterians developed principles of partial conformity and even ‘situational separatism’ almost immediately after the ‘Great Ejection’ of August 1662. The result of such partial conformity was an internal debate which questioned the boundaries and legitimacy of such partial conformity. This debate drew on potentially contradictory sources such as the pre-Civil War traditions of nonconformity and anti-separatism, the casuistry surrounding the Solemn League and Covenant and the presbyterian ecclesiology developed during the 1640s and 1650s.

While Salman Rushdie's hardline, myopic perspective may be shaped by harrowing personal experiences, the views of the liberal intelligentsia more generally do not seem to have progressed since the late 1980s. This book shows that the responses on the part of the cultural elite and the media to subsequent controversies, including those surrounding Brick Lane, Behzti, The Jewel of Medina and religious hatred legislation, suggest a kind of stasis, in thinking about freedom of expression and religious minority offence in Britain. Moreover, the impact of the Rushdie affair extends beyond the political and social domains into that of cultural, and literary, production. The texts discussed illuminate the uncomfortable fit of Muslims within a secular liberal Britain that cannot tolerate communitarian faith-based identities. The rise of the New Atheist movement has hardened the construction of Islam as the enemy of art as well as of science and all rational thought.

This chapter analyses three collections of sermons, preached during the reign of Charles I in 1636/37 in prominent pulpits by Daniel Featley, Griffith Williams, and John Prideaux as powerful statements on the pre-Laudian status quo ante, a version of Jacobean Reformed orthodoxy. Their publication coincided with the renewed prospect of Charles I re-entering the Thirty Years War. If war forced Charles to seek parliamentary supply, then in order to appease parliament a new ecclesiastical establishment might very well be required. Since Williams was very close to his kinsman Bishop John Williams, who had been positioning himself as the moderate Calvinist alternative to Laud since the late 1620s, and Featley had been George Abbot’s chaplain and a long-standing adversary of Arminianism, and Prideaux was the Regius Professor of Divinity and Rector of Exeter College, Oxford, their three volumes of sermons can be read as advertisements for what such an establishment might look like. All three were explicitly anti-Catholic, apologists for iure divino episcopacy and the Prayer Book, and employed the hypothetical universalist position on predestination to oppose what they termed Pelagian or Arminian error. They were also resolutely anti-puritan, although on terms very different from those espoused by the Laudians. Aggressively conformist, all three nevertheless distanced themselves from the Laudian ideal of the beauty of holiness. These massive tomes thus represent a detailed evocation of what had passed for Reformed orthodoxy under James I, an account now rendered newly relevant by the shifting political circumstances of the later 1630s.

Edward Reynolds (1599–1676), once vice-chancellor of the University of Oxford (1648–50) and later Bishop of Norwich (1661–76), has been largely neglected by scholarship and, consequently, is often misunderstood. Due to Reynolds’s conformity, some have labelled him a Laudian, a description he would have found absurd. Others, as early as the ultra-royalist historian Anthony Wood, have portrayed Reynolds as an opportunistic presbyterian and his return to episcopacy in 1660 as a self-seeking pursuit of power. The reality is, Reynolds’s career defies the old puritan or conformist dichotomy and instead demonstrates how godly sentiments and advocacy for presbyterianism did not necessarily make individuals anti-episcopalian or anti-royalist. Reynolds’s conscious pursuit of moderation neither fitted the political climate of his day nor satisfies the scholarly urge to taxonomise clear ideological divides in early modern England. This chapter explores Reynolds’s career leading up to his acceptance of the bishopric of Norwich. It starts with his puritan leadership in Northamptonshire before 1642, focusing on how his godly concerns and criticisms of the Laudian reform are frequently misread by scholars. The chapter then demonstrates how Reynolds’s support of iure divino presbyterianism in the 1640s, his accommodation of independent concerns, and even his political alliance with conservative Cromwellians in the late 1650s all foreshadowed his return to episcopacy in 1660. Reynolds’s tactics and changes of alliance revealed a consistent and distinctively English presbyterian commitment to a national, unified government that maintained mainstream Protestant beliefs, which eventually enabled him to re-embrace the Stuart monarchy and episcopacy.

This chapter explores disputes over adiaphora or ‘matters indifferent’ to reflect on several paradoxical aspects of conformity in English Protestantism. These practices of worship, left unspecified in the Bible, seemed to operate in an area of potential compromise and contact between Reformed groups, and yet proved intractable, causing bitter conflicts over the right to exercise authority over these matters and the content of what was imposed. Yet the topic also linked to wider debates in which Protestants participated, and a core theme of the chapter is the revealing parallels between apparently dissociated quarrels, religious and temporal. Considering first the comparable and sometimes interwoven disputes over academic dress in mid-seventeenth-century Oxford, it shows both how such conflicts were impossible to avoid in daily life and how they became ensnared in issues of authority. Second, it turns to an example of how commentaries on Catholicism could also become entangled with the question of Reformed conformity. Finally, the chapter reflects on the complexities of the relationship between the theory and practice of religious co-existence. The interplay of official orders about how to worship, attempts to negotiate flexibility formally, and daily forbearance meant that Reformed conformity in early modern England had constantly fluctuating and porous boundaries.

This chapter focuses on five recent examples of popular autobiographical memoirs to explore the ways in which they intervene in Muslim-majority relations and mediate cross-cultural understanding in multicultural Britain: Ed Husain's The Islamist (2007), Sarfraz Manzoor's Greetings from Bury Park: Race, Religion and Rock 'n' Roll (2007), Yasmin Hai's The Making of Mr Hai's Daughter: Becoming British (2008), Zaiba Malik's We are a Muslim, Please (2010) and Shelina Zahra Janmahomed's Love in a Headscarf (2009). It considers the 'double agency' of the memoirs; their ability to 'work in very different interests and constituencies at one and the same time', to facilitate dialogue across cultures while also, at times, obscuring the power relations that underpin that dialogue and, potentially, serving to exclude from it those who are too 'different'.