Dying your own way? A comparative approach to Mortality as a religious identity marker in British Islam and British Judaism

This article explores how two religious traditions, Judaism and Islam, confer meaning on the phenomenon of mortality, and it examines how their adherents seek to make sense of death in twenty-first century Britain. This research scrutinizes the religious identities of these two groups within the context of British multiculturalism, and it proposes approaching the manners in which death is perceived and experienced by Muslims and Jews as identity markers. The article argues that death issues contribute to the processes of collective labelling, self-perception and definition, through the perspective of religion. This inquiry will try to elucidate how the study of doc- trines and practices to do with death can provide a meaningful platform for exploring identity boundaries. What does it mean to be a Jew or a Muslim in Britain today? Can the ways in which Jews and Muslims relate to mortality help us to answer this?