Dissonant belongings: The evolving spatial identities of young Muslim men in the UK

Since 2001, a number of controversial and sometimes violent events in the UK and elsewhere have raised anxieties around British Muslim male identities. The problematisation of those identities is now framed around the supposed conflict between Britishness and Muslim-ness. Yet these discourses of the belonging of young Muslim identities often underplay or fail to consider the increasing importance of local, British spaces in ethnically diverse towns and cities, shaping and creating new dynamics of identification. This study draws upon extensive ethnographic research and mobile interviews to provide a comprehensive study of these evolving spatial identities of British young Muslim men. It uses Birmingham as a case study area, a city in which more than a fifth of the population describe themselves as holding to a Muslim faith. The study contrasts how the everyday experiences that underpin Muslim identity stand in stark contrast to less tangible notions of Britishness. The article concludes by positing that young Muslim male identities are characterised by a dissonance between the emotional place-belongingness that evokes for them a sense of inclusion, and the politics of belonging that marks out their exclusion.


Introduction
Since 2001, a number of events in the UK and abroad have helped draw Muslims as a problematic group in North America and Western Europe (Allen, 2010). Acts of terrorism including events in New York in 2001, London in 2005 and Paris in 2015 have given rise to scrutiny of the lives of Muslims living in the 'West'. Additionally, as Phillips (2006) has discussed, riots in British cities in the summer of 2001 involving British-Asians have been used to construct discourses of Muslims in the UK living apparently separate, parallel lives from fellow citizens (see also Community Cohesion Review Team, 2001).
Furthermore, cultural conflicts between religious practice and secular ideals have led to the formation of ideological boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims (Fetzer and Soper, 2003;Modood, 2009;Savage, 2004). The result of these episodes and discourses has been increased societal anxiety around the place of Muslims in Britain and Europe (Parekh, 2008).
The political and popular discourses that draw Muslims as dangerous, segregated and disillusioned have profound implications for the identities and belonging of British Muslims. Crucially for this article, these implications for identity are also heavily spatialised and it is with this recognition that geographers have recently begun to respond to the more divisive discourses. Hopkins (2007Hopkins ( , 2009 in his research with young Muslim men in Scotland in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks has produced a more nuanced set of discourses about their strength of belonging at different scales. Phillips (2006) and Gale (2013) have challenged the notion that Muslims are deliberately self-segregating and thus constructing the conditions for social and civil unrest. In Birmingham, the site of this study, Mohammad (2013) has explored the fluid identities of Pakistani women and the modes through which their identities are understood and performed. Indeed Birmingham is a significant location; Muslims comprise over 21% of the population of the second largest British city (ONS, 2011), and its local authority was in 2007 given more money than any other to tackle radicalisation of Muslims as part of the 'Prevent' programme (Thomas, 2010). Birmingham has also been the site of prominent counter-terrorism operations and controversial counter-terrorist surveillance schemes (Isakjee and Allen, 2013).
It is within such an atmosphere of unease that this extensive research project on young Muslim identity in the city took place between 2008 and 2012. The findings suggest that the identities of young Muslim men in Birmingham were not explained by a conflict between 'Britishness' and the Muslim faith. Instead, their sense of belonging was characterised by a contrast between their everyday lives, which are underpinned by attachments to local spaces and emphasise their inclusion, and the divisive political discourses that they encountered, which marked out the potential for their exclusion.
This article utilises sociological and geographical theories of belonging with an emphasis on scale and spatiality to investigate the struggle over what Yuval-Davis (2006) and Antonsich (2010) would term the belonging and the 'politics of belonging' of young Muslim men in Birmingham. It begins by reviewing literatures of belonging and providing a methodological overview before going through the empirical data, exploring the way in which the politics of belonging plays out in relation to young Muslims' feelings of Britishness. These political belongings are contrasted with a more personal sense of belonging and feeling 'at home' to uncover the importance of local neighbourhood spaces in constructing British Muslim male identities in Birmingham. The article concludes by reflecting on the dissonance between participants' contested politics of belonging as British Muslims, and their deepening ties to local spaces as focal points for their identity.

Identity and belonging of Muslim men
Identity is fundamentally intertwined with space and place; it is difficult to answer questions about who we are without reference to where we are from. Global migration and modernity, rather than reducing the significance of place, have provided an impetus to study the new fluid dimensions of spatial identity, as exemplified by the significant body of literatures on diasporas and place-attachment (Bloomfield, 2006, Lewicka, 2011. Place-attachment however, is usually utilised by researchers in dealing with neighbourhood, local and regional scales. Although Lewicka (2011) in her review on place-attachment literature has identified seven different sites or scales of place-attachment, with some notable exceptions (Laczko, 2005;Tuan, 1974), studies utilising place-attachment as a theoretical tool have tended not to investigate competing attachments to places on a range of different scales concurrently.
Yet 'belonging' can be conceptualised by these very contradictions of identities, between different places and on different scales. The word 'belonging' brings together the aformentioned feelings towards place on different scales, allowing us to look at these attachments through the same lens. Furthermore, the conceptual value of 'belonging' over 'place-attachment' is its ability to incorporate both the emotional and political dimensions of place-identity, through Yuval-Davis' (2007) conceptualisation of 'belonging' and the 'politics of belonging'. Taking the first notion, belonging is about feeling safe and 'at home' (Hedetoft and Hjort, 2002;Ignatieff, 1994). 'Home' is not necessarily just a physical space in this instance; as some feminist authors have uncovered, homes in the physical sense can be spaces of violence or fear (Blunt and Dowling, 2006;Blunt and Varley, 2004). Instead, the sense of being 'at home' in the context of belonging to a place is to be understood as a psychological attachment, imagined and felt. Antonsich (2010: 647-648), in a concerted attempt to define 'belonging', identifies five factors which contribute to the emotional feeling of being 'at home'. First, he cites autobiographical factors; experiences, memories, proximity to family members and the places where a person might have spent their childhood are all included in this category. Secondly, relational factors are noted as the social and personal connections that people have with others that might tie people to given places. Thirdly, are cultural factors; a familiar language, cultural traditions and expressions might all serve to imbue a person to a sense of intimacy with particular surroundings. Fourthly, economic factors play a part in creating a sense of home; being tied into an economy, Antonsich claims, is necessary for place-belongingness due to the material advantages and social benefits of economic embeddedness. Lastly, legal factors are cited: the provision of security as well as access to healthcare, education and social security.
Yet the emotional attachments constitute only one component of belonging. The second component of belonging is what Yuval-Davis (2006) referred to as the 'politics of belonging'. The 'politics of belonging' refers to a set of potentially exclusionary political discourses that seek to shape notions of who does belong -and crucially who does not. Thus, Crowley (1999) defined the politics of belonging as the dirty work of boundary maintenance, and in this way it can be considered to be specifically about un-belonging. It draws the focus of debate towards political struggle to influence the attachments, affection, dependency or lack thereof, felt by people towards a group. The questions that the politics of belonging seek to influence are about how we define who is 'us' and who is 'them', and what one has to do to be included in the group or excluded from it. Research into the politics of belonging typically explores the politics of migrant's belonging in the framework of diasporas (Westwood and Phizackela, 2000). The two dimensions of belonging, however, are also linked; the politics of belonging can be used to exclude or include groups, which in turn will have an effect on their feelings of belonging to a place. Similarly, collectively held feelings of attachment can be harnessed for political action. Yuval-Davis (2006 emphasises that the politics of belonging are situated temporally, intersectionally and spatially. Specific agendas at any point in time, such as counter-terrorism fears around Muslims, can shift the dynamics of belonging. Intersectionality remains significant as the politics of belonging does not act evenly on members of a group (Nash, 2008;Yuval-Davis, 2007). For instance, a professional Muslim woman in a wealthy suburb might have a very different experience of those politics in comparison with a young Muslim man from a deprived inner-city neighbourhood. Similarly, Yuval-Davis (2006) refers to globalisation's structural forces that produce migrations and movements and which bring issues of belonging to the fore. But as geographers often note, spaces themselves are being shaped and reshaped through the performance and actions of those who interact with them (Bhabha, 1994;de Certeau, 1984). For Cresswell (2003) space itself is a process, and that being so, place is understood best as meaning being imbued onto spaces. This meaning, which is brought to bear on spaces, consequently shifts behaviours within them, and attitudes towards them, including feelings of belonging. The implications are that belonging needs to be interrogated critically and politically to understand the multiple identities, conflicts, emotions and securities of those who reside within them (Jones and Jackson 2014).
In this vein, geographers and sociologists have explored complex Muslim identities through lenses of politics, place and gender. Drawing in particular upon qualitative research with Pakistani Muslim women's activism in the UK, Werbner (2000) argued that pitting of nation-state and religious loyalties was insufficient to understand the complexity of evolving Muslim identities. Werbner (2000) stresses the importance of spaces of protest and political acceptance for Muslim activists; this is also recognised by Gale and O'Toole (Gale and O'Toole, 2009;O'Toole and Gale, 2010) in their studies of political engagement of young British ethnic minority activists. Although O'Toole and Gale's (2010) sampling of participants goes beyond young British Muslims, it shares this article's interest in identities over scale; specifically, they draw out how young respondents made connections and saw a continuum between community assistance in their local British neighbourhoods including Birmingham as well as protests against global transgressions in Iraq or Palestine.
Other studies exploring British Muslim identities have placed gender and place at the fore. Hopkins (2006Hopkins ( , 2007aHopkins ( , 2007bHopkins ( , 2009) has produced a comprehensive set of literatures on young Muslim masculinities in Scotland. These have produced valuable insights into how masculinities are performed in relation to ethics, femininities, sexuality and localities. Particularly relevant to this article, and drawing upon research carried out in 2001, Hopkins (2008: 190) has also suggested the possibility that experiences of stigmatisation and discrimination may have the effect of strengthening place-attachments in the Pollokshields area in Edinburgh. Dwyer et al. (2008) have also written on the masculinities of rebellion and religion and class of British Pakistanis in Slough and Bradford. Specifically, their observation that Muslim male identities were underpinned by performance and ritual are also echoed in this article.
This study builds upon this existing scholarship, and uses the aforementioned framework of belonging and the politics of belonging, to explore how belongings are being experienced and constructed for young Muslim men in Birmingham.

Methodology and positionality
The methods used for this study were a combination of ethnography and participatory walked interviews (Evans and Jones, 2010) with Muslim men aged between 18 and 30. All interviews were recorded on a dictaphone; in walked interviews these were attached to a lanyard and worn by interviewees. The interviews were transcribed, and all participants were given pseudonyms to protect their identity. All interview transcripts and ethnographic fieldnotes were coded manually, using an inductive approach to draw out important themes from the data.
The research took place in inner-city suburbs of Birmingham between 2008 and 2012. The study was originally designed to collect data via traditional 'static' interviews on the subject of identity and belonging with young Muslim men in the city. However, following five pilot interviews and series of workshops on identities with fifty young British Muslims, two problems were identified. Firstly, it became apparent through preliminary research that many aspects of Muslim identity and belonging would be tied to local sights and spaces, important to the respondents, yet not always familiar to the researcher. Secondly, it was feared that younger participants, and particularly those unfamiliar with academic research, might not feel comfortable enough in a traditional interview setting to express themselves about the sometimes deeply personal issues of identity.
For these reasons a walked interview method was devised alongside the ethnographic research, whereby participants would choose to walk through parts of Birmingham which held meaning for them, whilst discussing broader national and global issues around belonging and identity. These semi-structured interviews were designed to explore the identity of participants and their feelings of belonging in relation to their nationality and religion, and in relation to the local, national and global communities that they might see themselves as being part of. The interviews also gave room for participants to talk about their biography and the history of their lives to draw these out these themes. In all, 20 such interviews were conducted with participants. All but one of the walking interviewees chose to conduct the walks in their immediate local neighbourhoods. In their typology of walking interviews, Evans and Jones (2010: 850) described this particular type of method, with the route chosen by the participant as a 'participatory walking interview'. The method proved to be successful; with participants literally directing the interview, they became more confident as well as comfortable in articulating themselves, even if expressing difficult or emotional sentiments . It also introduced a performative element to the study as the researcher and participants were able to engage in some everyday social practices, bringing the researcher closer to lived experiences that shaped the identities of participants (Kusenbach, 2003). Furthermore, the method allowed for the capture of what de Certeau (1984: 83) described as the intertwining of participants' movements, their memories, histories and imaginations, which may have eluded capture through relatively traditional interview methods.
A criticism of this approach might be that in ascertaining the tropes of identity and senses of belonging, by providing the stimuli of local place, the conversation would tend towards the local as opposed to national or transnational aspects of identity and belonging. I would counter this with two points; first this study's turn towards integrating local belongings was partly a response to the pilot work conducted, which suggested that Muslim identities needed to be understood beyond the British/Muslim binary. Secondly, the walked interviews were part of a wider set of methods that helped deliver a comprehensive set of qualitative data on belongings across various scales. Workshops on British and Muslim identities and the focussed explorations on Britishness and Muslim-ness in interviews and throughout the ethnographic research ensured that those facets of belonging would not be pre-emptively sidelined. Furthermore, interviews with youth workers seeking their perspectives on these issues were also used to contextualise findings.
As someone who had grown up within a Muslim family in Birmingham, living alongside largely Indian and Pakistani Muslim communities, I was able to draw upon knowledge of local Muslim communities from my own lived experiences -and I could more easily access youth clubs, mosques and community organisations from where to conduct ethnographic research or to source interviewees. As Shah and Saghera (Dwyer et al., 2008) found, being considered an 'Asian Muslim' was likely an advantage in establishing trust with interviewees and community organisations to recruit participants. Despite being non-religious, I found myself easing back into previously familiar ways of talking: my voice and my accent would change and I found myself inter-dispersing sentences with the religious linguistic ticks 1 that I hear when speaking with family members or religious friends. For Mohammad's (2001) research with Muslim women, being seen as an outsider helped interviewees feel confident that data given to her would remain confidential. For this study however, slipping into an easy familiarity with participants generally allowed them to feel comfortable, and allowed for sensitive and emotional conversations on identity to take place.
I cannot however claim to wholly be an 'insider'. There is an extent to which younger participants in particular may have perceived me as a bit of a curiosity -someone who didn't quite sound or dress like them or their peers, someone who never talked too explicitly about their own religious views or practices and who now lived in a student-dominated part of the city that few of the younger interviewees would be familiar with. This note of my own positionality as an ethnographic researcher is not intended as an attempt to 'solve' problems of positionality but to provide an understanding of how the research and subsequent production of knowledge is situated in the context of this study (Rose, 1997).

Britishness, Islam and the politics of belonging
Binary categorisations of identity such as Islam/Britishness can often obscure the nuanced reality of hybrid identities of British Muslims. To make matters more complicated still, Britishness is not easily defined, as national identities are both imagined and constructed (Anderson 1991). Colley (1992) in a reflection of Britishness through the last 250 years suggests that the idea of the British nation has always been used to distinguish Britain from the 'Other'. Colley (1992) suggests that in the post-war era, with a lack of any external threat, the 'Other' has become somewhat of an internal threat, helping to define what is not 'British'. Similarly, Robins (1997) and Wallwork and Dixon (2004) detail in their studies the socially constructed, imagined and often exclusionary nature of nationhood, with specific reference to Britishness. An overarching theme of all these studies is that 'Britishness' is a manifestation of what Yuval-Davis (2006) described as the 'politics of belonging'. For Yuval-Davis (2006), there exists a space between legalistic notions of citizenship and the emotional component of 'belonging' which can be exploited by arguing or inferring that there are 'others' within the nation-state who do are not authentic, proper or normative enough to truly belong.
Given the politically loaded nature of the term then, it is perhaps unsurprising that during interviews for this project the subject of Britishness was one which would draw out the difficulties of defining nationality for our participants. Asking participants about their sense of Britishness often elicited responses characterised by ambivalence. All of the participants expressed a sense of their being British and the strength of those assertions varied. However, participants also struggled to come to explain what being British meant for them: I wouldn't say I belong to Britain. But I wouldn't see where else I belong. (Abuzar, Interview) I think I belong here in Britain. In Birmingham -in Sparkhill. Well I live here right? (Idris, Interview) The participants were mostly third-generation citizens in the UK, and when the discussions moved towards comparing belonging in Britain with any attachments they had to nations in South Asia or the Middle East, the sense of Britishness seemed to become a little more clear: The references to Pakistan above are significant. Although several of the respondents spoke about a limited degree of emotional attachment to their diasporal homelands, when asked where respondents felt they belonged, these homelands were usually omitted from any answer. The very mention of diasporal homelands had to be elicited by the interviewer. This tells us that being 'Pakistani', 'Bangladeshi' or 'Indian' may no longer be as significant a component of identity for third-generation Muslims as it may have been for their parents. Furthermore, young Muslims in this study did not make clear distinctions between separate English and British identities, as exemplified in Imran's interview excerpt above. The words 'British' and 'English' were often used interchangeably to denote feelings of a Britishness; this is in stark contrast to the findings of Hopkins (2007b), where young Scottish Muslims referred to a Scottishness that was distinct and apart from British identity.
However, when it came to defining what the nature of that Britishness was, rather than reflecting on romantic attachments to an imagined 'Britain', respondents pointed to the simple physical locations of their lives. When asked about identity or whether or not respondents felt British, the answers and discussions tended to revolve around the UK as the geographical and social context for friendship and familial networks and related everyday experiences. The question evoked 'place-belongingness' as Antonsich (2010) describes it, rather than the potentially exclusionary 'politics of belonging'.
However, there is an interesting caveat. Despite this rather practically and pragmatic attitude towards national identity, if the Britishness of participants was questioned or threatened, Britishness was much more strongly and emotionally asserted by them, to demonstrate that they have a right to belong. To demonstrate, Zaahid during his interview touched upon the spectre of racism and xenophobia he experienced as a young man walking through less diverse areas of the city, referring to being thought of not as a British person but as a 'Paki'. It is then that he makes the following observation: When I went over to Pakistan they was friendly,. . .But you go there and they call you 'unglesee' 2 -you come here and they call you Paki. It's a bit like being hit like a tennis ball from one place to another -you don't know where you belong. People say a dog can be born in a barn but doesn't make it a horse you know. I would say though I belong in England, in Lozells. (Zaahid, Interview) Similarly, Anwar, is a young Yemeni interviewee who had previously defined Britishness as 'only having a passport'. Later, in his interview he was narrating an incident he experienced whilst working in a nearby predominantly white neighbourhood as a pizza-delivery driver. He was warned by his employer for whom he delivered fast food, that his Muslim dress and appearance might not be appreciated by his customers: . . . and I was thinking, what the fuck is that about! Screw you man. I don't need to be white to be British. I'm just paying tax, and if my moneys good enough for it . . . I should be good enough to be called British. I am British. (Anwar, Interview) In the interview excerpts above, identity is called into question by outsiders but is countered with a strong passionate assertion of British identity. It is in this space that the emotional aspects of belonging and the politics of belonging collide. Britishness might be an altogether 'woolly' concept, but it suddenly seems more concrete when an actor moves to exclude someone who they believe does not conform. Britishness in this instance becomes an identity cemented through exclusion both for those who seek to exclude and those who resist that exclusion. Through this intersection between personal identity and the politics of location (Antonsich 2010;Hooks, 1991: 145;Yuval-Davis, 2007), counter-hegemonic discourse begins to take form. This is something that Nasser, a youth worker from Aston is aware of, and encourages: We've done many workshops and one was about the army and in World War 2. Many from the Asian subcontinent and with Bangladeshis Gujaratis and Indians (were) on the front . . . people don't know that. So when people say ''fuck off to your own country'' -they can answer and say listen, I am part of this country, this is my history and this is the role my forefathers played -and I am part of it. (Nasser, Interview) As far as feelings of belonging to Britain are concerned, the participants communicated a dynamic set of emotions that adapted to suit different contexts. But what of the 'Muslim' aspect of identity that is potentially not constrained by citizenship, language, by physical boundaries of land, or the imaginary boundaries drawn between nation-states? All but one of the young Muslims who were spoken to expressed some form of Muslim identity and many participants encountered during the ethnographic research went beyond that and suggested that they belong to a wider Muslim 'community', in addition to other nonfaith-based communities. As Dwyer et al. (2008) had suggested, the Muslim aspects of their identity were not only immersed and intertwined with other facets of identity, but crucially they were played out and practiced consciously in the realm of the 'everyday'. Eating and drinking according to the laws of their faith or fasting in Ramadan for instance demonstrated the conscious everyday performance of faith as an embodied practice which regulated the body itself. Similarly, attending the mosque with varying degrees of regularity to take part in the rituals of bowing and kneeling before God reinforced that Muslim identity through embodied ritual. Tellingly, no participant projected the idea of a conflict between their Islamic beliefs, Muslim identities and 'Britishness'. Nonetheless, Muslim identity resonated and held deep meaning for them, as typified in this statement made during an interview with Bilal: I'm a Muslim. I'm proud of being a Muslim. It comes first. Its my religion -what I'm brought up with. We don't practice it 100% but we are still Muslims and we pray and it means something. We believe. (Bilal, Interview) Such sentiments were echoed by two youth workers in separate interviews who made the following claim: (Young Muslims) couldn't hold onto nationality; they were only ever two questions away from having their Britishness questioned: Where are you from? Birmingham. No, I mean where are you really from? But their faith is beyond question: 'I'm a Muslim.' (Kamran, Interview) For some youth-workers, the fragility of young Muslims' Britishness in this way amounted to a crisis of identity, yet most participants throughout the ethnographic research expressed their comfort with their hybrid identities, except when they felt discrimination, unfair treatment or when the notion of Britishness was used to exclude them. As McLoughlin (1996) has suggested, not only do British Muslims have an array of different identities, but those different aspects of identity can come to the fore depending on any specific context or situation. Any 'crisis' of Muslim men in resolving dual identities of Muslimness and Britishness were not manifest in interviews among most of the young Muslims interviewed for this project.
Ultimately, Muslim identity might be easier to hold onto for young Muslim men than Britishness due to the fact that values and everyday behaviour are consciously influenced by religious belief. For participants of this study, it influenced how often they prayed, how and with whom they had romantic relationships, what they ate and how they socialised outside of work and the home. Their Muslim identity was constructed by and embedded in everyday action: not only ideological but also performed. However, there is another dimension and location of belonging and identity that was significant for the participants yet seldom recognised; a dimension characterised by attachments to local spaces in inner-city neighbourhoods of Birmingham.

Emotional belonging: Local spaces and everyday life
In stark contrast to the discussions on Britishness, participants did not require prompting to elucidate upon their attachments and affinity towards the local spaces around which they had grown up. During the ethnographic and preliminary parts of the research, participants spoke passionately of attachment to local spaces -and the subsequent walked interviews allowed those voices to be amplified. The rich experiences that underpinned those feelings of local belonging have been coded into three categories: firstly, memories and narratives of belonging from personal history; secondly, the use of local spaces as sites of social interaction; and thirdly, the businesses and services that mark the economic embeddedness of Muslims in parts of inner-city Birmingham.

Narratives of belonging from personal history
I walked this road for many years . . . So it's a case of these roads (being) special to me. Every road I look at I've seen them develop. I've seen them change. It's part of my personal history. (Naheed, Interview) Everyday practices and routines play an important role in shaping space and attachment towards it. Over a long period of time individual experiences build up to a narrative of a resident's life: identity intertwined with space. This is why identity was often expressed by participants as if retelling a personal drama -a measured yet evolving script, being updated and adjusted in a bid to retain the thread upon which identity hangs (explored in Bauman, 1996;Gubrium and Holstein, 1998). And this thread inevitably involved the very physical structures that make up their respective neighbourhoods. For those with longer histories in neighbourhoods of the city, a feeling of comfort and belonging became stronger (Lewicka, 2005: 392). Corcoran (2002) posits that the physical environment can itself come to represent the very security and comfort that a person feels living within those spaces, reproducing feelings of place-attachment. But the narratives provided as part of this study also demonstrate that security and resistance are also built up through local knowledge of potential threats, and the development of tactics to be shielded from such threats. Samir gives the following story about being mugged as a teenager, but being saved by using the name of a feared 'gangster' in the neighbourhood: [Samir disrupts the conversation to point into a passing car] . . . that was a local gangster named Yunus . . . I don't talk to him much thankfully. I remember once actually, I was on the bus [with] my brother. We were 12-13 at the time. And my brother had a Nokia [phone] . . . and this guy says, 'give us your phone' . . . And we . . . got off the bus just up there [pointing to bus stop on Stratford Road] and they followed us, started chasing us.
[After catching up with us] . . . they started pushing us. And then we said ''We know Yunus'' and he was like, ''You know Yunus? Ah ok''. And that was it! So it kind of helps to know these people [laughs]. (Samir, Interview) Samir cuts a slight figure, at no more than five feet and six inches in height, friendly and far from intimidating in his mannerisms. However, so confident is he in his use of tactics to counter threats that just seconds after narrating this story he insists that Sparkhill was the, . . . kind of environment where it's relatively safe. Even though it's quite worn . . . You can send your 10 year old son to go down to the chippy, get some food for ya. Without any problems. Without any problems. (Samir, Interview) Another interviewee and participant Osman similarly described the 'cruel world' of parts of Small Heath, at one point arguing that residents needed to move out of the neighbourhood to escape social problems that he perceived to be prevalent, but he too simultaneously asserted his contentedness living in the neighbourhood. One may ask what lies behind these seeming contradictions. Billig (2006: 251-252) in a review of place-attachment and risk perception cites a number of psychological studies which show that attitudes towards risk are socially constructed rather than entirely rational.
However something else is also at play; that is these sort of narratives from participants which also include being chased by dogs, being hit by a freak tornado and playing up the dangers of crime some spaces all play a part in exploring the types of experiences which can accumulate to create a knowledge and sense of place of a neighbourhood unique to residents as insiders. They can also be read as an assertion of the masculinity of these young men: their intimate knowledge of local place allows them to negotiate danger or even confront it. This observation chimes with Hopkins' (2006: 346) work on youthful Muslim masculinities in Glasgow in which he suggests some participants might have been asserting dominant masculine identities to challenge perceptions of weak Asian masculinity compared with Black-British counterparts. Although this study could not reach that specific conclusion, participants were clearly able to see a richness of meaning in spaces that was invisible to outsiders.
Part of this richness lies in the memories formed through the youthful and childhood use of informal social spaces, which then become significant contributors towards place identity (Fenster, 2005: 221;Hooks, 1991). Identification with childhood experiences serve not only as markers of important events, but also as a reflection of one's life. Leach (2005: 300) compares the act of walking in a familiar place to that of a child expressing joy at seeing their own reflection in a mirror. In the series of interviews conducted there was a great emphasis placed upon the role of childhood play spaces, particularly on the feelings of attachment to local areas. The following quote is a typical recollection from a participant: We used to play near the garages. There was a lot of grass but there was a hill here -might have been soil dumped from a few places which created a small hill. It was council owned but we still played here. We played cricket on this side of the bump on the flat part and it wasn't tarred like it is now . . . it was bubbly but it was good fun. (Naheed, Interview) For other residents too such spaces held significance. For instance, few of the residents of Witton would have access to an open space in their back yards, so boys were allowed out by parents into open spaces on derelict land between rows of garages situated behind houses; here they could play football, using trees as goalposts and milk crates as wickets ( Figure 1). Abdullah, a participant from Sparkhill, talks nostalgically about games of football in the park after religious classes on weekday evenings. Similarly, Adam from Balsall Heath talks about playing in what the young people referred to as the 'Arena', a former football and basketball court along the Highgate dual-carriageway. But just as these places were sites of play for participants as young children, similar nearby spaces continue to be the focal points of social interaction as they grow older.

Belonging in spaces of social interaction
The thing is where would you move to that gives you a community? The houses might be nicer in the suburbs, the streets cleaner, but that's not all that makes a place. It's ultimately people that make the place. (Ahmad, Interview) The most significant advantage of the walked interview method was in discovering how important social everyday experiences were intrinsically tied to local spaces, which then become significant sites of belonging. On average during a walked interview which would last a little under an hour, a participant would meet three people, and stop to talk to them. These incidents (rather than 'interruptions', for they play a crucial role in the interview itself), were the starkest examples of how social connections, interaction and contact was fundamental to establishing a sense of place-identity and belonging for participants.
A prime example of this occurrence is an interview which was conducted with the participant Zaahid, which lasted for a little less than an hour. Less than five minutes into the interview Zaahid received a phone-call from a friend asking if he could organise a game of football in a nearby sports centre. He agreed, and by chance less than ten minutes afterwards some other young men passing by in a car stopped to talk to Zaahid and were invited to play. Thirty minutes after that he met another group chatting on a street corner, from whom two agreed to take part in the game, (but not before asking what the strange device is dangling from his neck and recording the conversation). After joking that he was a spy or 'informant' he summarised who was attending the game so far: Listen, we got football at 9[pm] -you know Asad. We're gonna play [against] some of his lads. Me you, Baja, Asad, Spektor, Chief . . . . (Zaahid, interview) It was then he turned to me and reflected on this interaction and what it demonstrated: This is the community thing -this is what brings me back here. Funny innit . . . I've been to Alum Rock, I've been to Aston but they haven't got that community. Next door neighbours are talking but it's not the same. (Zaahid, interview) However, it is not necessarily that Aston has any more or less of a strong feeling of community. It is simply that Zaahid's networks, or perhaps the lack of them in Aston, would mean that cannot feel as 'at home' as he does here. Zaahid's strength of connections in Lozells is already such that through a walk along just a handful of streets he can arrange for a football team to take part in a match that very evening. As Dourish (2006: 7) has described, the bounded spaces of Lozells for the participant become legible, understandable, practical and navigable through these everyday encounters.

Belonging through economy and services
Asian businesses are regarded as significant in studies of developing local economies and entrepreneurship in the UK. Existing literature tends to focus on how ethnic minority identities and social networks are utilised for economic purposes (Ram and Basu and Altinay, 2002). Businesses, however, are not only sites of entrepreneurship but can attain a collective critical mass that allows them to shape representations of surrounding areas. These representations too can become focal points for belonging and identity for the young Muslim participants in this study.
Most interviewees for this project were third-generation immigrants whose grandparents arrived from the Indian subcontinent. Stories of how older members of their family adapted to life in the UK have been told and re-told within families, as part of a narrative of belonging. These stories of migration were often narrated in interviews in conversationand they typically included descriptions of how Asian businesses began to find a foothold in local communities. On walked interviews that took place near the high streets of Stratford Road in Sparkhill, Coventry Road in Small Heath, Alum Rock Road in Washwood Heath and Witton Road in Aston, interviewees elaborated upon the importance of the array of Asian businesses, including fast food outlets, sheesha cafes, dessert cafes, snooker halls, Asian fashion outlets and travel agencies. These local 'high-streets', have become representations of those neighbourhoods: to the visitor, Coventry Road is Small Heath, and Alum Rock Road is Washwood Heath.
On several of the recorded interviews the sound of Asian music and Islamic nasheeds (spiritual hymns) can be heard. You can hear passers-by conversing loudly in Punjabi, and hear stall-owners marketing international phone-cards and fried sweet-corn using urdu slogans. As Ip (2005) suggests in his study of a 'Chinatown' suburb of Brisbane in Australia, places such as these are indications of both economic capital and socio-cultural capital being imported into an area by immigrants. As Figure 2 demonstrates, the streetscape is transformed both physically and by cultural practice. Antonsich (2010) in his deconstruction of 'belonging' includes economic relationships as a key component of feelings of belonging. Although he talks separately about social and personal ties that bind people to place, the two can be linked; culturally specific businesses also serve as sites of social interaction. Not only are they integral in the creation of mundane patterns of economic activity, but culturally specific businesses can also provide alternative culture and nightlife for young Muslim men whose avoidance of alcohol would make them unlikely to socialise in bars and nightclubs. These spaces in provide a potential focal point for an evening's social activities and for some participants were integral spaces for their regular social activities: This last statement demonstrates the ways in which businesses can not only help focus identity and place-attachment, but in turn can reflect values. The avoidance of alcohol is usually a religious practice and for many Muslims this avoidance is also extended to establishments at which alcohol is served. Valentine et al. (2010) suggested that this abstention filters Muslims from certain public spaces, and in response young Muslims can create their own oppositional leisure spaces. In Birmingham such oppositional spaces include the take-away outlets adapted with extra seating areas for those who want a cheap meal on a night out, as well as the sheesha lounges and dessert-cafes that offer a halal (religiously lawful) alternative 'night out'. These establishments are often found in innersuburbs of Birmingham with high numbers of Muslims, creating spaces that are ethnically distinct and religiously shaped. Gale (2004) has written on the ways in which mosques in Birmingham were architectural manifestation of religion -and this can be extended to new sites of religious consumption. The character of high-streets and neighbourhoods change as Muslim stores, sounds, food and fashion appear to congregate and dominate the landscape. These spaces consequently become more than merely sites of cultural activity, but powerful social and cultural symbols in their own right. In turn, these symbolic spaces can reinforce the personal feelings of belongings of inhabitants and visitors who use them.

Conclusions: Dissonant belongings of politics and place
Between the post-war period and the 1990s, the politics of belonging for Muslim migrants had pitted their allegiances to the UK against their attachments to diasporal homelands in South Asia. Since the Rushdie affair 3 however, the identity conflict oft-assumed is that between a sense of Britishness and a Muslim identity. This binary too is a false one. This paper has demonstrated that there are indeed disparities and complexities between dimensions of belongings for young Muslim men in Birmingham. These are not characterised by a crisis between Muslim-ness and Britishness, but by the dissonance between the deeply held and often emotional sense of belonging which ties young Muslims to local, indeed British spaces -and the potentially divisive politics of belonging around national identity which acts to polarise Muslim loyalties between their Muslim identities and British citizenship.
The everyday lives of participants in the study were based largely in inner-city Birmingham neighbourhoods, among large numbers of other second and third generation migrants, many of whom are Muslim. The very streets here are part of the process of the construction of a young Muslim male identity: they are important sites of social interactions and are the focal point for a range of culturally and faith-specific services. All these processes lend spaces in inner-city East and South Birmingham a 'Muslim' character, projecting powerful representations which re-shape the politics of place (Cresswell, 2003). For Mohammad (2013) this character is what lent areas of inner-city Birmingham the moniker of 'Little Pakistan', but our participants routinely identified them as 'Muslim areas'. But they are also British spaces, and ones which, for participants, evoked the placebelongingness and the ease of feeling 'at home'.
Britishness as a national identity and ideal, in contrast, is seen in more practical terms as a consequence of participants' residency, their citizenship and their rights. Yet this does not mean young Muslims never strongly and emotionally espouse a sense of national identity; indeed interviewees would strongly assert their sense of belonging to Britain if it was challenged by encounters with exclusion and racism. These aggressions or challenges against belonging must then be negotiated by young Muslim's, who seek to re-assert a British national identity that hitherto such incidents can appear vague.
This article points towards the dangers of discriminatory practice and stigmatisation, not just in relation to Muslim 'others' but to othered spaces which are increasingly focal-points for young Muslim male identity. Inner-city Birmingham neighbourhoods are, as Dudrah (2002) suggested, products and constructs of British post-colonial's history. The study has demonstrated how the city's Muslim inhabitants are re-making and co-constructing those spaces as part of a distinctively British geography.