The politics of being Muslim and being British in the British Christian print media

Abstract

There have been a significant number of published studies in recent years on the British media representation of Muslims. These studies have tended to focus only on the British mainstream media, and to my knowledge, there is no significant research on the discursive construction of British Muslims in alternative media outlets. This paper attempts to fill this gap, focusing on the representations of British Muslims in the British Christian print media. Drawing on empirical data relating to four British Christian print media, Church Times, The Tablet, Evangelicals Now and Evangelical Times, this paper investigates how the questions of being Muslim and being British are dealt with in the British Christian print media, and the extent to which the politics of being Muslim and being British inform us about identity formation and affirmation.