Young people, Islam and the significance of religious identities in British society

Despite the proliferation of ‘sensationalistic images of British Muslims as threatening radicals, we still have relatively little in-depth information about the vast majority of British Muslim young people’ (Song, 2011:143). There have been calls for more research on young people’s sense of religious identification and belonging (Jeldtoft, 2011). Engaging with calls for further insight, this chapter focuses not on processes of ‘racialisation’ or ‘Islamophobia’ (Meer, 2013) per se, but rather on how young people construct, contest and narrate their identities against the background of these broader processes and contexts.1