About the Podcast:
- What happens when a community feels present in Britain but absent from the public story of British Islam?
- What is being said when Shi’a Muslims insist, “we’re not that kind of Muslim”?
- And how does a minority identity built around justice and belonging risk creating new boundaries of its own?
In this episode of Thinking Islam, we explore what it means to be Shi’a in Britain today with Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti. Drawing on her ethnographic research into Shi’a Muslim communities in the UK, Dr Degli Esposti examines questions of diaspora, minority identity, sectarianism, and belonging. The conversation begins with her own route into the field — from learning Arabic in Paris and reporting on the Arab Spring to marrying into an Iraqi Shi’a family and discovering a community that was largely absent from the academic and public accounts of British Islam she had encountered.
We trace the emergence of a specifically British Shi’a identity among a generation that increasingly meets across Iraqi, Pakistani, Khoja, and Lebanese lines, finding forms of shared belonging their parents did not necessarily possess. The discussion explores how British multiculturalism helped make religion a public marker of identity; how Najaf and Karbala came to carry greater emotional and symbolic weight than Baghdad for some younger Shi’a; and how the Karbala paradigm was reworked into a language of justice that now intersects with movements such as Black Lives Matter and Me Too. Along the way, we consider university campuses as spaces of identity formation, the commercialisation of belonging through hoodies, hashtags, and symbols, and Dr Degli Esposti’s provocative idea of “ethical sectarianism”: that constructing a positive minority identity can also produce an implied counter-identity.
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Learn More About Our Guest:
Dr Emanuelle Degli Esposti is an independent researcher who holds a PhD and MSc from SOAS, University of London, and a BA from the University of Oxford. Her research explores Shi’a diaspora, ritual, activism, sectarianism, and belonging, and is developed at length in her forthcoming book Not That Kind of Muslim: Sectarian Belongings and the Making of British Shi’ism.
Read More of Her Insights:
Degli Esposti, E. (2018) ‘The aesthetics of ritual — contested identities and conflicting performances in the Iraqi Shi’a diaspora: Ritual, performance and identity change’, Politics, 38(1), pp. 68–83. Available at: https://independent.academia.edu/DrEmanuelleDegliEsposti
Degli Esposti, E. (2021) ‘Finding a “Shi’a voice” in Europe: minority representation and the unsettling of secular humanitarianism in the discourse of “Shi’a rights”‘, Religion, State & Society. Available at: https://independent.academia.edu/DrEmanuelleDegliEsposti
Corboz, E. and Degli Esposti, E. (2023) ‘From the Margins to the Centre: Shi’a-Led Grassroots Organisations and the Shaping of an Inclusive Muslim Identity in Britain’, Journal of Muslims in Europe, 12(1), pp. 98–117. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1163/22117954-bja10053
Degli Esposti, E. (2019) ‘Sectarianising the Shi’a Subject: Identity, Ideology, and Diaspora among Iraqi Shi’a Muslims in London’. PhD thesis, SOAS, University of London. Available at: https://soas-repository.worktribe.com/preview/379558/4558_Esposti.pdf
Degli Esposti, E. (forthcoming) Not That Kind of Muslim: Sectarian Belongings and the Making of British Shi’ism.
