ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the changes in Muslim communities since 9/11 and the changing nature of urban identities, as young Muslim men and women define themselves in more religious terms. This involves questioning traditions of secular rationalism that have shaped ideas of secularisation and the transitions from faith to reason. These assumptions have accompanied ideas of industrialisation and the progress from tradition to modernity, as well as the process of integration of migrant communities. Traditionally, migrants into the West are assumed to have come from more religious cultures that would often be deemed to be traditional and implicitly defined as ‘backward’. From the perspectives of secular traditions of social theory that tend to identify history, progress and freedom, these cultures from which they migrate are yet to fully benefit from the advances of modernity and industrialisation that are so often figured within the terms of a Western Enlightenment rationalism. As diasporic communities settle in the West, it had generally been assumed that, if not the migrants themselves, at least their children would make the transition from ‘religious faith’ to secular beliefs.1
