Religious and ethnic identity among young Muslim women in Bradford

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Abstract
This article explores the relationship between aspects of religious and ethnic identity for a group of young Muslim women from a school in Bradford. Previous work has tended to give a thematic account of such young women's attitudes to home, education, work, religion, marriage and relationships, and has often concluded that they are either ‘betwixt and between’ or the synthesisers of two distinct cultures. This article discusses then calls into question previous models by adopting a perceptual map which enables young women's testimonies to be analysed in terms of religious and ethnic orientation rather than the two cultures of home and school. As well as a general account of four religio‐ethnic orientations, the experiences of four young women are described. The authors do not see this approach as static, but as expressing the young women's negotiations of religious and ethnic factors at a particular point in time, their place on the perceptual map changing with time as their values and attitudes alter. It is also seen as having a potential role in the comparative analysis of those from different ethnic and religious communities.