books available
An introduction...
Dr Tahir Abbas FRSA, social scientist, and one of the UK's foremost experts on ethnic and Muslim minority research and policy analysis.
He has fifteen years of policy-orientated research, teaching and project management experience. Publications are in the areas of sociology of 'race', ethnicity, multiculturalism, and Islam and Muslims in Britain and Western Europe. A graduate of the Universities of London, Birmingham and Warwick, Abbas was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2006.
Dr Abbas has held numerous research grants, and engages with government departments and civil society organisations throughout Asia, Europe and North America. He sits on various national steering groups and boards.
Previously, Dr Abbas was the Founding Director of the Birmingham University Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Culture and Reader in Sociology (2003-2009) and Senior Researcher at the Home Office and the Lord Chancellor's Department in London (2001-2003).
Dr Tahir Abbas FRSA is author of Islamophobia, Multiculturalism and the State (2011, forthcoming), Islamic Radicalism and Multicultural Politics (2010, in press), The Education of British South Asians (2004), editor of Islam and Education (2010, in press), Muslim Britain (2005) and Islamic Political Radicalism (2007), and co-editor of Honour Violence Women and Islam (with MM Idriss, 2010) and Immigration and Race Relations (2007, with F Reeves).
I specialise in the area of economic, educational and political sociology of ethnic and Muslim minorities in Western Europe and the comparative experiences of different groups, in particular South Asians. More recently, I have been working on projects to build peace and reconciliation as well improve inter-faith relations between people of the Abrahmic faiths in Muslim diaspora and Muslim majority countries.
I have published around fifty journal articles and book chapters, and a similar number of book reviews and opinion-editorials, with peer-reviewed articles found in theoretical, conceptual, methodological, empirical, business and policy-related research journals, collections and editions.
My recent writing has focused on ideas of integration and multiculturalism, and questions in relation to the radicalisation of Muslim minority youth. I also have a special interest in theoretical, philosophical and historical questions in relation to cultural cohesion and the social relations between minorities and majorities in different Western nation-states, in particular the relations between Muslim and non-Muslims in Western European societies.
I have led, trained and managed others in the use of both qualitative and quantitative research methods – from ethnographic research to predictive modelling and secondary analyses of large national surveys.
I have just completed a monograph which explores the notion of ‘Radical British Islam’, analysing the role of economic, social and political forces in the context of changing national (multi-) cultural discourses in the pre- and post-‘war on terror’ period, and to be published by Routledge in 2010. I am also finalising a book on the the development of ‘British Muslimness’, to be published later in early 2011.
Over the next two years, I am working on a book on the history of modern sociological thinking from time of Ibn Khaldun in the fifteenth century to be published by Oxford University Press; a book on the history, migration and settlement of Mirpuris in Britain; and a co-authored book on the European Muslim disapora based on case study interviews and observations.
I am currently Co-Chair of the HRH Prince of Wales Mosaic West Midlands Regional Leadership Group.
Email me here for further information. Last updated 28 July 2010.
