Infidel Within

Humayun Ansari is the Director of the Centre for Ethnic Minority Studies and Equal Opportunities, and a Senior Lecturer in the Department of History, at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is co-author of Managing Cultural Diversity at Work. In 2002 he was awarded the OBE for his work in race relations.

'Striking diversity is the most distinctive feature of the Muslim community in Britain. Yet, as Ansari argues in this history of Islam in Britain, British Muslims have consistently been portrayed as denizens of a monolithic and undifferentiated world, ill at ease with modernity, secularism and democracy. Through painstaking research, and an inspired exploration of the issues of identity, Ansari sets out to dispel this absurd, but widely held, myth.'— The Independent; '[Humayun Ansari does] an excellent job of providing a historical and country-wide account which is not only descriptive but analytical. It is fluently written and easily accessible to a wide range of readers and has the potential of becoming the initial reference text for people starting research in the area as well as a required text for university courses.' — Jorgen S. Nielsen, Professor of Islamic Studies, University of Birmingham