Conclusions
This concluding chapter examines the concentration of British Muslims within British locations. Concentration of people with similar pasts, old-country anchors, and theological tendencies makes it possible to draw rings around one's own group, and to build bridges back home without sensing a need to do so with those next door. But even if some Islamic public actors have seen little reason to move away from established modes of reasoning and practice, and the very welcoming soil of Britain has encouraged them to reproduce older forms, doing so in a new context has inevitably led to social transformations—all the more as the new contexts shift in response to these efforts. Indeed, the shariʻa councils are not replicas of anything existing today or yesterday in South Asia but an effort to create—on the basis of remembered social forms but in a new social context—mechanisms to respond to British Muslims' demands.