ABSTRACT
About a decade ago, while teaching in London, I came to know of the difficulties that a few Muslim students on campus experienced in the Muslim prayer room. It appeared that some Muslim students were making it clear that other Muslim students were not welcome. Some Sunni Muslims had decided, following politically motivated practice in Pakistan, that Ahmadi Muslims were not really Muslim at all and so had no place in the university’s Muslim prayer room. At this time my fieldwork in Rajasthan with a Hindu community had come to an end, my work and family in London made extended research visits to India impossible, and I was looking for a new research topic to keep in touch with South Asia, even if in the very different world of the South Asian diaspora in Britain. The context was post-9/11. Islamophobia was evident in the media, and the diverse student body to whom I taught such subjects as the anthropology of religion motivated me to learn about local forms of Islam ethnographically to help me better understand not only the background to the inter-Muslim tensions on campus but also those in the local area where I lived and worked. Below I explain how I came to do this and what I learnt.
