Where did Shia communities in Britain actually come from, and why has their history remained largely unrecorded?
In this episode of Thinking Islam, we explore the untold history of Shia Muslim settlement in Britain with Dr Jaffer Mirza. Focusing on the period 1950 to 1980, Jaffer explains why he moved away from the three dominant lenses used to study Shia Islam in Britain — sectarianism, diaspora, and institutional history — arguing that each can obscure more than it reveals. Instead, he turns to ritual as a grassroots, micro-level framework for understanding how communities were actually built.
We discuss what ritual is and why it matters for migration studies, and push back on whether a micro-level approach risks ignoring the wider political and structural forces at play. The conversation moves through the idea of "translocal" Shia practice — a third space shaped by both transnational connections and local British context — and uncovers the largely unrecorded role women played in founding Shia communities across cities like Birmingham, Glasgow, and Newport, often invisible in institutional archives. We also examine how geopolitical events, from the Iranian Revolution to Saddam Hussein's Iraq, shaped Shia visibility and self-censorship in Britain, and the challenges of doing oral history with a community whose memory is contested and gendered. The episode closes on the contested idea of "British Shia Islam" and where the field needs to go next.
Dr Jaffer Mirza is a researcher whose work explores the history of Shia settlement in Britain, ritual, migration, community formation, and freedom of religion or belief. Drawing on oral history and fieldwork across nine British cities, his research brings overlooked voices and everyday practices into the study of Islam in Britain.
Audio Chapters:
0:00 – Highlights
2:16 – From Karachi to Recovering Britain's Shia History
6:22 – Beyond Sectarianism, Diaspora and Institutional History
13:30 – What Is a Ritual?
17:35 – Why Ritual Matters in Migration
21:06 – Can Micro-History Ignore Power and Politics?
26:46 – From Transnational to 'Translocal' Shia Practice
30:15 – Women Built Britain's Early Shia Communities
37:24 – How Geopolitics Made Shia Islam Visible
42:49 – Gender, Fieldwork and the Limits of Oral History
57:38 – Is There a 'British Shia Islam'?
1:07:49 – Building the Future of Shia Communities