Creating a Shared Moral Community: The Building of a Mosque Congregation in London (Routledge Advances in Sociology)

This book explores the religious, educational, and social practice of a Muslim congregation and the moral world it generated within a mosque in UK.

The life of the mosque is described through religious practice, communal activities and informal encounters and the history and ideas that shaped the moral world and thinking of the Indo-Guyanese who built it. Marked by a double diaspora experience with its implication of loss and re-imagining, the congregation’s conception of living a Muslim life is embodied in both ritual and in styles of comportment and socializing while religious concerns are voiced in sermons, in religious classes and in responses to everyday situations. Links are made between anthropology and developmental and psychoanalytic understandings of embodied experience and the emergence of ethical capacity.

This account contributes to the literature on Muslim communities in Europe and ‘ordinary ethics.’ As such, the book will be of interest to sociologists and anthropologists, to those involved in religious and psycho-social studies, and to clinicians working with Muslim communities.

Judy Shuttleworth has worked as a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist in community and hospital settings in the National Health Service, in the UK. Her previous publications are in the field of clinical work and infant observation. Her interest in the social and cultural context of mental health services led to an MSc in medical anthropology (University College London) and the PhD from the London School of Economics on which this book is based.