ABSTRACT
Christians and Muslims have seldom found it easy to understand each other. History and memory matter. The Muslim migrants who made Britain their home over the last 60 years often looked at Britain through a postcolonial lens. Living together, respecting difference, is at best an aspiration, one which needs to take account of the reality that for many immigration is ‘a brutal bargain’ – the loss over time of familiar social worlds, both for the established community and newcomers (Scheffer 2011: 8). It is a loss analogous to a ‘grieving process’, which involves denial, anger and acceptance; very similar to the familiar three-generation immigration trajectory of ‘avoidance, conflict and accommodation’ (36).
