ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows how some aspects of crime among different ethnic groups forming various British Muslim communities have been, often arbitrarily, linked to international terrorism or ‘Islamic fundamentalism’, and how religion, thus, is substituting ethnicity in the analysis of crime. The myth of Asian Muslims as low crime and law-abiding community was, therefore, shattered. Yet, as readers have seen, the mass media, social services, police and many social scientists interpreted the issues as an effect of a generation gap. Maybe a fear of the ‘ordinary’ as far as religion is concerned, and particularly in case of Islam and Muslims, has kept anthropologists distant from prisons as well as from discussing criminality within, for instance, UK Asian communities. Maybe a fear of the ‘ordinary’ as far as religion is concerned, and particularly in case of Islam and Muslims, has kept anthropologists distant from the prisons as well as from discussing criminality within, for instance, United Kingdom Asian communities.
