Britain's 'islamic Republic'?: State and Media Influences on Muslim Politics in the East End of London

No area of London – with the inevitable exception of Westminster – has been subject to more frequent public controversies than the East End borough of Tower Hamlets.  Home to the largest concentration of Muslims in the UK, Tower Hamlets has been the focus of sustained media and government attention for more than a decade.  In this paper I will review major developments in the borough since 2007, when the first projects of the counter-terrorism Prevent Strategy were underway and Ed Husain's divisive book The Islamist was released.  The paper will be based on three kinds of data collected from different projects in this period: in-depth interviews with young Muslim Bangladeshis (2007-2009), research with public figures on local and national Muslim-government relations (2010-2013), and a corpus of news articles, books, and other media collected from 2007 to present.  The paper will describe the ways Tower Hamlets has been, unhelpfully, treated by the UK government and various media commentators as a microcosm of security and integration issues across Britain.  The intense focus on the borough tends to 'scale up' small controversies into seemingly national predicaments, resulting in erroneous generalisations about the position of Muslims in Britain and feelings among local Muslims that they are embattled.  Using case examples of particular controversies, I will argue that contemporary political and media attention on the borough goes well beyond public scrutiny to the point that it undermines governability.