Being Muslim for dummies, or how not to be a threat 101: embodied performances of race and religion after the Manchester attack

ABSTRACT

Performances of Muslimness are often performances of the body. Such performances surfacing after the May 2017 attack on Manchester Arena demonstrate British Muslims’ negotiations of the sociopolitical narrative equating the Muslim and terrorist bodies. Drawing on two such performances, I argue that post-attack performances of Muslimness as innocence do more than play into “with us” vs. “against us” narratives: they also enable British Muslims to survive the trauma of the British state’s vilification of Islam and Muslims. These performances are thus a damning indictment of the hostile environment that the British state, public, and media have created for British Muslims.

KEYWORDS:

• Performance
• Manchester attack
• body
• Muslimness
• Asianness

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Portions of this essay can also be found in my book Making Muslimness: Race, Religion, and Performance in Contemporary Manchester, forthcoming with Routledge. I’m grateful for the publisher’s permission to reproduce the relevant sections in this essay. I am also grateful to Les Gray for their feedback on this work, as well as the two anonymous peer reviewers who sharpened this essay.

2 Weed is illegal for recreational use in the UK.

3 Of course, such performances did not originate with the Arena attack, as discussed below.

4 Aiming to prevent people from being drawn into terrorist activity, Prevent depends on public sector employees in health, education, and social services to refer individuals whom they suspect of extremist mentality or activity to Prevent’s deradicalization program. Referrals have disproportionately targeted Muslims and communities of color (O’Toole et al.). Prevent has thus been characterized as “demonising Muslim schoolchildren” (Khaleeli) and lacking a scientific evidence base (“Anti-Radicalisation Strategy”). After an independent review in 2019 and the release of updated guidance in 2021, Prevent’s disproportionate focus on “Islamic extremists” rather than “the white supremacist ideology of extreme right-wing groups” is firmly ensconced in policy (Home Office), despite British police reporting that the UK’s “fastest growing terror threat” is from “the far Right” (“Anti-Terrorism Statistics”).

5 The British press is particularly bad. A voluminous critical discourse analysis of all articles published in British newspapers from 2000 to 2009 demonstrated that the British media routinely portrays Islam and its adherents “as causes for concern, if not sources of threat” (Baker et al. 65).

6 I take a broad view of performance, by which I mean digital or embodied enactments that incorporate one or multiple audiences, performers, and spaces. Other performances by Muslims responding to the Arena attack include hosting interfaith iftars during Ramadan, the Islamic holy month of fasting (Wood); refusing to hold funeral prayers for Abedi (Rose); attending counterprotests against far-right demonstrators (BBC News); and performing spoken word poetry (Manzoor-Khan).

7 Muslims of all backgrounds greet one another with salaam, which is understood to be universal. In the Qur’an, this greeting is also described as the one that angels will offer to righteous souls entering heaven (16:32; 39:73).

8 I make this claim based on my work with the Royal Exchange, which included conversations with various staff members while being commissioned during my fieldwork to write a monologue commemorating the 70th anniversary of Partition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the School of Fine Arts at the University of Connecticut.