With every crisis that has involved the Muslim Ummah in recent years, some British Muslims have exerted their exclusive identity by expressing their opinion over the issue. British Muslim identity politics had been activated by the Satanic Verses affair in 1989. It was a crisis that led many to identify themselves as ‘Muslims’ for the first time in a public way (Lewis 2002; Werbner 2002: 124–5; Werbner 2004b: 905; Modood 2007: 136). Some scholars (Werbner 2002: 162–3; Cressey 2006: 106) observed that during the First Gulf War (1990–1), even if Saddam Hussein was considered an ‘evil tyrant’ by the West, some Muslims considered him to be a hero. Even after 9/11 (2001) there were divided loyalties in regard to Osama bin Laden, whose image, at best, was constructed as a devout ‘desert’ Muslim sacrificing his millionaire Westernised lifestyle for the cause of Islam (Geaves 2005: 71–5), and there also prevailed conspiracy theories that exonerated bin Laden. Geaves (2005: 73) considered that ‘Stop the War’ protests by the Muslims (along with many non-Muslims) who believed it was an ‘illegal occupation’ during the Second Gulf War also gave the Muslims an opportunity to assert their Muslim identity and British citizenship. Some scholars (Werbner 2002; Ahsan 2003) believed that the British Muslims' alternative views should be seen as a legitimate demonstration of their democratic rights, rather than a questioning of their loyalties.

After the 7/7 London bombings, British Muslims were considered to be the ‘Other’ by some media (discussed in Chapter 5). This viewpoint impacted on some British Muslims so much that they started announcing their Muslim identity publicly, rather than keeping it private.