‘The Journeying Self’ – An ethnography of ethics and change amongst young British-born Muslim women in Norfolk

Goodall, Qudra (2025) ‘The Journeying Self’ – An ethnography of ethics and change amongst young British-born Muslim women in Norfolk. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

For the majority of British Muslims born in Britain profound inter-generational, socio-economic, and demographic shifts are occurring. Yet, ideas of belonging, citizenship and Islam’s compatibility with “British values” often leave British Muslims caught in an unenviable position between identities often considered in conflict. The children of convert Muslims or second- generation converts inhabit a liminal positionality demonstrating the push-pull factors they experience, learning to sidestep and negotiate preconditioned and binary ideas, as to who they are and how they present themselves in the world. This study is the first of its kind with privileged access to a relatively hard-to-reach convert Sufi Muslim community, in Norwich, the Murabitun; the first indigenous Muslim community in Britain rooted in both Islamic and Western traditions, imbricated with Sufi cosmology and ideologies of whiteness. The producing of an ethnographic and feminist case study reveals the ways that the next generation of convert Muslim women are deconstructing and decolonizing their particular inherited culture and practice. It is a processual journey marking how an individual becomes a fully responsible and autonomous subject in their own right, allowing long-term participation, life-history interviews, collective memory work and social media analysis to reinstate Muslim women as storytellers of their own journey. Tracing life trajectories from community belonging, through gender justice and experiences of marriage, to representation and work choices reveals how the values of ethics and change are catalysts for re- claiming faith, practice and agency. This process of self-formation seeks to problematise and reimagine reifying, patriarchal and imperialist ideas in order to elicit new meanings and accommodate a full spectrum of emotions. Social relations are shown to be imbued with layers of power and by highlighting the often ambivalent and morally fraught accounts of individual subjectivities, self-realisation and modes of agency provide a necessary theoretical perspective for the way women resist, co-opt or re-articulate religious discourses and practices to their own ends. While case-studies have a limited applicability, they also have the potential to provide significant insight into larger implications and reveal a more intricate tapestry of contemporary British Islam.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Global Development (formerly School of International Development)
Depositing User:	Chris White
Date Deposited:	29 Jan 2026 15:05
Last Modified:	29 Jan 2026 15:32
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/101796
DOI:

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