Britain’s rural Muslims

Immigration has long been associated with the urban landscape, from accounts of inner-city racial tension and discrimination during the 1960s and 1970s and studies of minority communities of the 1980s and 1990s, to the increased focus on cities amongst contemporary scholars of migration and diaspora. Though cities have long provided the geographical frameworks within which a significant share of post-war migration has taken place, Sarah Hackett argues that that there has long existed a rural dimension to Muslim integration in Britain.

This book offers the first comprehensive study of Muslim migrant integration in rural Britain across the post-1960s period, examining the previously unexplored relationship between Muslim integration and rurality by using the county of Wiltshire in the South West of England as a case study. Drawing upon a range of archival material and oral histories, it challenges the long-held assumption that local authorities in more rural areas have been inactive, and even disinterested, in devising and implementing migration, integration and diversity policies, and sheds light on smaller and more dispersed Muslim communities that have traditionally been written out of Britain’s immigration history.