Image credit: Design by MG Khan

 I set out to answer what often seems like a simple question: how is working with Muslim young people the same as, similar to, and unlike working with other young people? I found the answer leads us to dig where we stand.

The phrase comes from the historian Sven Lindqvist and was taken up by Britain’s History Workshop movement and the socialist historian Raphael Samuel, who argued that ordinary people have the right to understand their own histories, starting from the ground beneath their feet rather than the view from above. It echoes Salman Sayyid’s work on Critical Muslim Studies, which asks on whose terms knowledge about Muslims gets produced, who designs the categories and the boxes we find ourselves in, that present themselves as universal while remaining products of European history. A Muslim youth work practice that borrows its frameworks uncritically risks losing the ability to distinguish.

The ground here is demographic as much as historical. The Muslim Council of Britain’s British Muslims in Numbers (2025) counts a community of four million people, 6.5% of the population of England and Wales with a median age of 29 and 46% under 24. That’s a young, dynamic population that should be a focus of youth work development and infrastructure relevance.

Muslim young people – hyper-visible, yet nowhere to be found

There’s a telling binary here. On one side sits the invisibility demonstrated by reports such as Demos’ Inside the Mind of a 16-Year-Old (2025), which renders Muslim teenagers statistically invisible: without disaggregation by religion, their presence disappears into the aggregate. On the other hand, a different dynamic emerges-insularity. Does the Goldsmiths report Muslim Youth Futures (Turner and Khan, 2025) indicate that when the “Muslim question” is asked, it can only bring out the theological Muslim rather than the political one? The theological frame and specific Muslim grievances can dominate. Is there a risk that we fail to see other significant forces at play such as AI and youth futures or the climate challenge and youth futures?

Their fieldwork both names and reminds us of a paradox: young Muslims are hyper-visible with a big P, Political through Prevent, counterterrorism policy, and media coverage that frames Muslim presence as risk and invisible with a small p, politically absent from the frameworks that shape resources and life chances, managing the gap through constant “code-switching”. Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger (2023) supplies a poetic metaphor in which algorithms generate a “mirror world” of distorted, amplified reflections. Her “doppelganger”, the algorithmically reproduced double, radicalised, threatening and security-coded  shapes institutional perception before any individual encounter. Long before a young Muslim chooses what to follow, they are already being followed. 

A philanthropic paradox runs alongside all this. The Equi report Building Britain (Al-Fagih and Siyech, 2025) is aptly named: British Muslims donate around £2.2 billion annually, four times more per capita than the average UK adult. The harder question is where that generosity lands. The Ayaan Institute’s Mosques in Britain Report (2025) found 1,844 UK masjids, almost entirely community-funded, hold a combined asset base of £1.5 billion, are 86% volunteer-staffed, with a governance that frequently excludes women and young people in neighbourhoods where young people say there is “nowhere to go” or there is “no one home”.

Ayan’s report concludes that outdated exclusionary management is the primary reason young people’s knowledge and energy are lost to institutions that could most benefit from them. This tension between spiritual mission and service delivery isn’t unique to Muslim organisations, but Prevent adds another layer, with its “good Muslim/bad Muslim” framing that draws on not just a theological distinction, but a racialised and political one too.

Three Hijrahs

The youth work infrastructure deficit: the long, sustained loss of public youth spaces, community centres and clubs has hit hardest in communities with the highest youth populations. What Lindqvist and Samuel called digging where you stand is now, in effect, the method this deficit calls for.  Muslim civil society has the resources to contribute, but investment has too often gone into sustaining portfolios rather than into people, purpose and practice.

The concept of hijrah or migration offers a useful lens for understanding one dynamic at least that needs a response. In Islamic tradition, hijrah names the Prophet’s (peace be upon him) journey from Mecca to Medina in 622 CE: not simply a move, but a founding act, a new community built on mutual obligation. I see three forms of Hijrah in the world today. The first is geographical: individuals and families seeking safety or security. The second is a moving away from community or family structures that can’t hold an emerging identity, politics, relationships or aspiration. The third is a migration from the physical world into the virtual one, not because it is better, but because the physical world has left a vacuum the algorithm now fills, offering an apparently unlimited range of Muslim identities to explore, even as the self that one constructs there is simultaneously turned into data and product. Yet this cuts both ways: sometimes young Muslims seek the virtual world because the physical world won’t accommodate an identity that society can’t hold.

The Prophet’s (peace be upon him) own journey was a purposeful movement toward something worth building, not exile; Medina was a home rather than just a destination. The task now is not to condemn this third hijrah, but to build physical and relational spaces worthy of returning to a place the virtual world cannot replicate: investing in physical infrastructure is as much a political act as a practical one, building something a feed cannot replicate.

Followers but not Believers

Muslim youth work is simultaneously like all other youth work, grounded in universal principles of informal education and relationship-building: like some other youth work, sharing concerns with other faith-based and diaspora traditions and like no other youth work, because the identity markers, purpose, histories, cultural inheritance, politics and pressures on British Muslim young people produce a distinctive set of questions.

To frame this work primarily around employment risks reproducing the instrumentalism it should critique. Manuel Castells distinguishes between roles and meanings: roles that an economy assigns as flexible and disposable and meanings as the frameworks through which people understand who they are. For Muslim young people facing labour market exclusion and automation, the roles the system assigns are uncertain, but the meanings they carry, rooted in faith and community, can be genuine stabilisers.

There’s something almost too on the nose about the film characters, the Minions, and their unconditional drive to serve/follow a master, whoever that happens to be. The Quran offers a parallel: Surah al-Dhariyat (51:56) — “I did not create the jinn and mankind except to worship Me”, but the service described is not submission to power; it’s a pull not toward authority but toward goodness. The Minions’ tragedy isn’t that they follow the wrong master; it’s that they can’t tell power from goodness. Islamic tradition names this misdirection: taghut (tyrannical power), hawa (desire dressed as conviction), and riya, the performance of service in pursuit of recognition, the subtlest corruption, and the one an economy of followers and likes is almost perfectly designed to reward.

The platform age has made “following” a technical act before it is anything else: a button, a habit acquired long before anyone asks what or who they’re following, and whether it’s worth it. That doesn’t make following in itself is suspect; it’s cultural currency and a way of staying inside a conversation. Sociologist Grace Davie once described Britain as a society “believing without belonging.” Has the digital era produced its inverse: a generation belonging without believing; following communities, causes and creators while withholding real conviction from any of them?  The danger isn’t that young people follow – everyone does, it is that we need to understand better the relationship between following and believing. Our task is to work with young people to examine what, or who, has become the focus of our deepest inclinations, so that no master, screen or brand goes unexamined. Perhaps what the Minions really remind us of is that we all carry a deep-seated drive to “serve/worship” something.

Digging into our differences, not past them

This is where the standard training toolkit for youth workers starts to strain. Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs orders survival, safety, belonging, esteem and self-actualisation into an ascending sequence, assuming higher states wait until lower ones are secured. Bouzenita and Boulanouar’s critique (2016) counters and claims that spirituality runs through every register of life at once, as the Ramadan fast demonstrates: withholding a basic need not after meaning is secured, but as the discipline through which nearness to God is sought. A young person navigating housing precarity isn’t disqualified from questions of faith until circumstances improve; often it’s the anchoring in something transcendent that makes precarity survivable at all.

Tara Isabella Burton’s Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardarshians (2023) traces how Western selfhood shifted from the collective and inherited to the individual, self-branded and commodified. Muslim young people now navigate a culture demanding a personal brand while being defined by a collective doppelganger they never chose; an identity rooted in connection, stewardship and interdependence is a genuinely different answer to what a self is for. Muslim youth work here may be something like no other youth work, because of the scale and reach of this doppelganger

The following is presented more as reflection than as a fact, though it should not be dismissed as one: Is our algorithm as close to us as God, or even closer? I think of the Quranic verse that says God is closer to us than our jugular vein and wonder what it means for many young people and adults today.  It is a measure of how urgent a well-resourced practice of Muslim youth work has become. Such an approach will need to challenge the universalist posture that claims to provide “for all young people” without distinguishing between them. Universalism without differentiation manufactures an unmarked, generic young person whose specificity gets treated as background noise; in seeing everyone, it really sees no one. The public policy claim of the capacity to see everyone is God like, as Donna Haraway would describe, so there is a theological edge there too.

Differentiation takes seriously that a Muslim young person navigating questions and feelings, code-switching and Prevent isn’t easily interchangeable with anyone else. Yet what we learn through such exercises is that our common ground is rarely found by looking past our differences. It’s found by digging into them.