Imagined Diasporas Among Manchester Muslims: The Public Performance of Pakistani Transnational Identity Politics

The Manchester Muslim diaspora features an intense local micro-politics of honor and shame, debated in the globalized language of world affairs and dramatically enacted through public performance. Pnina Werbner reveals that Manchester Pakistanis occupy a locally created public space that appropriates and combines traveling ideas and images from a variety of sources into meaningful moral allegories. Living in the diaspora requires them constantly to negotiate the boundaries of minority citizenship. For Brisish Muslims this process–usually peaceful–has lurched from one confrontation to another: from the Rushdie affair to the Gulf War to the post-September 11 crisis. Each crisis has signaled a more mature grasp by diasporic Muslims of what it means to be a Brisish citizen in a global world.