A Methodological Blind Spot
When researchers study religious conversion, what exactly are they studying? The answer, according to a provocative new paper, depends on who is asking the questions — and what assumptions they bring to the table.
Jeremiah Adebolajo, a doctoral researcher at the University of Worcester and a Muslim convert himself, has published a thoughtful critique of how academic scholarship approaches conversion to Islam in contemporary Britain. His paper, appearing in the Journal of Religious Education, calls for a fundamental rethinking of the methods used to understand this growing population.
The core problem, Adebolajo argues, is a persistent secular bias. While converts often frame their journeys in explicitly theological terms — speaking of spiritual awakening, divine guidance, and the intellectual appeal of Islamic teachings — researchers frequently explain these experiences through purely social or political frameworks. Conversion becomes a response to cultural alienation, a form of protest against secularism, or a search for community. The religious motivations themselves are treated as superficial or secondary.
This disconnect is not merely academic. It has practical consequences for how Muslims are understood in British society — and particularly in schools, where religious identity increasingly intersects with policy debates about integration, extremism, and multiculturalism.
A Shifting Policy Landscape
To understand why methodological questions matter, Adebolajo traces how British educational policy toward Muslims has evolved over recent decades. The story begins after World War II, when labour shortages brought workers from the Indian subcontinent to Britain. Education became an early point of contact between the growing Muslim community and the state, but the literature examining Muslims’ religious identity remained limited until the 1980s.
That decade saw a shift toward multiculturalism. The 1985 Swann Report, while criticised for treating Muslims primarily as a cultural rather than religious group, nevertheless pushed schools to recognise diversity and combat prejudice. By the 1990s, debates over Muslim faith schools, rising secularism, and Islamophobia had become more nuanced.
Then came the seismic shifts of the early 2000s. The 2001 riots across northern England, which were characterised as a symptom of ethnic and cultural segregation, were followed by the attacks of 9/11 and the global “war on terror.” When the 7/7 bombings struck London in 2005, the policy landscape transformed entirely.
No longer was the “Muslim integration problem” viewed purely through the lens of spatial segregation. Now it was a question of cultural and religious values. Government initiatives increasingly framed Muslim identity as a security concern, with education policies designed to combat extremism. As scholar Lynn Revell observed, government intervention in education effectively “criminalises aspects of theology, education, cultural practices and community that are associated with Islam.”
This context, Adebolajo argues, created an environment where scholars and policymakers alike became comfortable treating Muslim religious identity as inherently problematic — something to be managed rather than understood on its own terms.
The Convert Experience: An Overlooked Diversity
One particularly overlooked group in this landscape is Muslim converts. While there is no exact count, researchers agree that a sizeable and growing population of Britons have embraced Islam, often as adults. This population is diverse in race, class, gender, and background — yet it rarely receives focused academic attention.
Adebolajo notes that existing literature has examined conversion patterns, identity dynamics, and socio-political context. Some studies have explored how race and gender shape the convert experience. Yet across these studies, a pattern emerges: converts’ own religious motivations are often marginalised in favour of secular explanations.
This reflects what Rambo identified as a broader need to “see the phenomenon with new eyes.” In the study of Islamic conversion, Rambo argued, scholars must “move beyond the application of theories that have proven inadequate” and set aside “Christian-based categories” to avoid preconception or bias.
Adebolajo points to the work of Thomas Sealy as a notable exception. Sealy has made significant efforts to foreground convert religiosity and treat theological perspectives seriously. Yet even his work, Adebolajo argues, falls short of providing full epistemological space for converts’ authentic voices, because it remains guided by “methodological agnosticism” rather than a genuine Islamic worldview.
The Insider’s Perspective
This brings Adebolajo to his central proposal: researchers who share their participants’ faith commitments — “insiders” — are uniquely positioned to capture aspects of religious experience that outsiders may miss.
The value of insider research may seem obvious. By sharing many of their participants’ religious and spiritual perspectives, insiders possess deeper insight into lived experiences. They understand the theological vocabulary, the emotional textures of prayer, the intellectual appeal of scriptural study. This insight is not easily accessible to the non-native researcher.
Yet insider status has often been treated with suspicion in the social sciences. Critics worry about objectivity, intellectual rigour, and the danger of “going native” — losing scientific detachment through excessive immersion.
Adebolajo challenges these concerns on multiple fronts. Drawing on feminist and critical theory, he argues that claims to neutrality and value-freedom are themselves ideologically loaded. As one scholar put it, “There is no neutrality. There is only greater or less awareness of one’s biases.”
From an Islamic epistemological perspective, he adds, the pretence of objectivity is more than intellectually questionable — it is harmful. As Zahra Al-Zeera wrote, “The neutrality and freedom from value in scientific and educational research is a dangerous assumption… Suppression of values, principles, and beliefs for the sake of being ‘objective’ causes severe damage to people and to humanity.”
Key Milestones in Policy Toward Muslims in UK Education
| Year | Event | Significance |
|---|---|---|
| 1985 | Swann Report | Recognised importance of minority representation in education, though criticised for treating Muslims as a cultural rather than religious group |
| 2001 | Riots across northern England | Prompted concerns about ethnic and cultural segregation of Muslim communities |
| 2005 | 7/7 London bombings | Accelerated policy focus on extremism and “integration” |
| 2015 | Prevent Duty guidance | Criminalised aspects of Islamic theology and community practices within educational settings |
| 2018 | Commission on Religious Education Report | Recommended shift to “Religion and Worldviews” framework |
A Dialectical Methodology
Adebolajo does not simply argue for insider research — he proposes a specific methodology that combines Islamic epistemology with critical ethnographic and narrative approaches.
This dialectical model has several features. First, it takes seriously the Islamic ontological claim that there is an objective reality, while simultaneously rejecting the notion that researchers can be value-neutral. Researchers are situated, embodied, and invested in what they study. Instead of pretending otherwise, they should foreground their positions through rigorous reflexivity.
Second, the approach draws on critical theory’s concern for marginalised groups and its suspicion of established social meanings. Adebolajo acknowledges philosophical tensions between Islamic theology and critical theory, particularly the anti-religious sentiment sometimes associated with Marxism. However, he argues that Marxism has no monopoly on critique, and critical theory itself is not necessarily secular.
Third, the methodology incorporates narrative inquiry and ethnography in forms that are comfortable with subjectivity. Narrative research, he notes, has historically served “as a counterculture to the dominance of empirical tradition” by bringing to light the “relativistic truths embedded in individuals’ narratives.”
This combination, Adebolajo suggests, is well-suited to capturing the experiences of Muslim converts in a post-9/11 context marked by “epistemic injustice” — the systematic devaluing of Islamic ways of knowing.
Comparing Research Approaches
| Approach | Key Assumptions | Strengths | Limitations |
|---|---|---|---|
| Traditional/Secular | Religious motivations are secondary; conversion explained through social, political, or psychological frameworks | Claims objectivity; fits established academic norms | May distort participants’ own understanding; reproduces secular bias; overlooks theological dimensions |
| Methodologically Agnostic | Researcher remains neutral; brackets personal beliefs | Avoids charge of bias; maintains scholarly distance | Cannot fully access participants’ religious experiences; limits insight |
| Insider/Islamic Epistemology | Researcher shares participants’ faith; foregrounds Islamic ways of knowing; combines with critical reflexivity | Deeper insight into lived experience; enfranchises participants’ voices; challenges epistemic injustice | Requires careful reflexivity; may be criticised for lack of neutrality; demands intellectual honesty |
Implications for Religious Education
The paper also speaks to ongoing debates about Religious Education (RE) in British schools. The Commission on Religious Education’s 2018 report recommended changing the subject’s name to “Religion and Worldviews” to reflect the diversity of belief and non-belief in contemporary Britain.
Adebolajo suggests that closer attention to Muslim converts could enrich this new framework. Converts often display what scholars call “discretely religious identities” — forms of religiosity that cannot be reduced to ethnicity or culture. Studying their experiences could help educators understand how religious identity operates beyond the ethnic and cultural frameworks that have traditionally dominated RE.
Moreover, convert voices could challenge the tendency to essentialise Muslims as a monolithic group. By revealing the diversity within British Islam — including the growing number of converts — the curriculum could become more accurate, more inclusive, and more capable of preparing young people for a pluralistic society.
Reflexivity and Rigour
Throughout the paper, Adebolajo emphasises that insider research, like all research, requires careful attention to reflexivity — the ongoing process of examining how one’s own position shapes the research process and its findings.
Reflexivity is not a weakness but a strength. It improves “the quality and validity of the research and recognising the limitations of the knowledge that is produced,” which leads to “more rigorous research.” By acknowledging their own perspectives and interrogating their interpretations, researchers can produce more honest and defensible work.
Adebolajo also insists that his advocacy for insider research is not a claim that insiders are inherently superior to outsiders. Rather, he proposes that insider research offers “a different source of knowledge” that is “no less true” — a complementary perspective that enriches the field.
Conclusion
Adebolajo’s paper is, in many ways, a reflection upon his own positionality — a Muslim convert researcher who could not see his own story reflected in the existing literature. His argument is not that non-Muslim researchers cannot study converts, but that the field needs more voices from within the community to produce a fuller picture.
By bringing Islamic epistemology into conversation with critical ethnographic and narrative methods, he offers a way forward that respects the integrity of faith while maintaining intellectual rigour. In doing so, he adds momentum to a growing movement of Muslim scholars who are asserting “Islamic conceptualisations of knowledge and research design within intellectual spaces.”
For anyone interested in religion, education, or contemporary British society, the paper raises important questions: Whose voices are we hearing? Whose are we missing? And what might we discover if we listened differently?
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