The political engagement of young Muslims in Scotland has undergone significant changes over the past decade, shaped by both local and global developments.
Sharing insights from research conducted in 2016 and a follow up study in 2024, Professor Peter Hopkins from our School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, reflects on what has changed.
The 2016 report: active engagement, social movements, and challenges
In 2016, I co-authored a report that explored the ways in which young Muslims participate in politics in Scotland. This report was written in collaboration with Dr Robin Finlay, now at the University of Sunderland, and Professor Gurchathen Sanghera from the University of St Andrews. We conducted focus groups and interviews with 34 young Muslims, most of whom lived in Glasgow with smaller numbers of participants from Edinburgh and Dundee.
We found that young Muslims tended to take an active engagement in politics, including engaging in conventional electoral politics. The independence referendum of 2014 had captured the interests of many young Muslims with many showing a lot of interest in Scottish nationalism and the SNP.
Added to this interest in electoral politics, many young Muslims also engaged in social movements, activist initiatives, and other forms of charity and volunteering work. Some of these activities focused on local communities but many had a national or international focus.
There were also some challenges when it came to engaging in politics. Racism and Islamophobia discouraged some from taking an active role, and many were disheartened by negative media representations of Muslims and problematic government policies like Prevent that operate to position all Muslims as potential suspects. Gendered stereotypes – particularly of Muslim women - were also a challenge.
We felt it would be useful to undertake a follow-up study about the political interest of Muslim youth in Scotland given the many changes since our earlier work.
New research: what might have changed for Muslim youth?
Dr Robin Finlay, Dr Joel White and I conducted a follow up study about the political participation of Muslim young people in Scotland.
We wanted to explore what might have changed for Muslim youth especially given that there had been important social and political developments including the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, the Covid-19 pandemic, and the cost-of-living crisis, to name only a few.
For this new report, we worked with 29 young Muslims aged 14-18 in focus groups and interviews, all of whom lived in the Glasgow area.
In late November 2024, the Community Policy Forum hosted a launch of the report with contributions from Linsay Taylor, Chair of Interfaith Scotland and Trustee of the Muslim Council of Scotland, and Dr Zubir Ahmed, MP for Glasgow South West.
Global political issues
Although Muslim youth were reasonably interested in global political issues in our earlier research, they now demonstrate a keen interest, and this is largely due to the ongoing situation in Palestine. Muslim youth demonstrated a wide-ranging and informed understanding of global political events. In doing so, they often critiqued mainstream media coverage, relying instead on sources such as TikTok, Instagram, and Reddit.
'I’ve heard the quote that one death is a tragedy, one million deaths is a statistic. When you see someone, you meet someone, like my friend here that’s actually affected by the war, that’s lived through it, you really see the humanity and the real side of it and not the statistics.' - Ali
Global political issues were an important feature of young Muslims’ everyday lives as they expressed concern for friends who had migrated from Syria, anxieties about the situation in Ukraine, and frustrations about what they saw as the racist ways in which these issues were represented in the mainstream media.
Engagement with Scottish politics
Muslim youth were very engaged in mainstream formal politics in our earlier research. This was partly due to the hope offered by the possibility of Scottish independence. However, in our more recent work, this interest had declined somewhat.
At the time of conducting this research, Scotland was in the unique position of having a Muslim First Minister, Humza Yousaf and a Muslim leader of the Scottish Labour Party, Anas Sarwar. Some young Muslims pointed out that meeting with and being able to contact such politicians had inspired them to continue engaging with politics. Likewise, some pointed out that it demonstrated to them that there were opportunities available to them as Muslims:
'I think it gives Muslims hope that that they could be somewhere, that they do have opportunities, and not everyone is going to shut you out.' - Owais
However, others did not share this view. Some were ambivalent about the situation and articulated a dislike for those in power and queried what they had achieved in their roles. Some also declared a lack of interest in the identity of political leaders arguing that the only important thing is that they do the job well.
Involvement in activism in their local communities and at school
The engagement of young Muslims in local politics and in different forms of activism and volunteering was largely consistent across both studies. The only exception here was around issues connected with Palestine which was a frequent topic of discussion in focus groups and interviews. Anwar shared his perspective:
Well I would say […] I that because Palestinians tend to be more like brown skinned and things and Israeli people are more lighter skinned, there’s obviously the belief that white supremacy comes into it. And there’s also saying that when Palestinians stand up for their rights, they’re labelled terrorists, but when Ukrainians stood up for their rights, they were labelled as heroes and good people. - Anwar
Where we did see some change was with young people’s increased engagement in political activity at school. Young Muslims discussed organising responses to experiences of discrimination within school, working to improve access to prayer space during Ramadan, and driving forward initiatives to tackle racist bullying. For example, Elena spoke about setting up a 'Culture Day' in her school:
Because the school is very diverse, loads of people are from different places and whatever, we had a whole Culture Day where people came in dressed up in their culture and they brought in flags, and we had stalls up in the assembly hall. It was very nice. - Elena
Further information
- read the 2024 report: Young Muslims in Scotland: politics, racism, and the media,
DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.32065.77925 - read the 2016 report: Muslim Youth and Political Participation in Scotland
- learn more about the research team:
- watch the Community Policy Forum Report Launch Event
- explore our School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology and more of our Geographies of Social Change Research
- visit Professor Peter Hopkins and Professor Heather Smith's shared website on anti-racism
