Over the past two decades, both the British and Russian states have sought to institutionalise relations with their Muslim communities through Muslim councils. However, such attempts at institutionalisation raise challenges for these organisations, which need to balance state demands for incorporation into religious governance and Muslim community expectations for more inclusive representation. Challenges of integration and representation have received considerable coverage in Western and Russian studies. However, little comparative research has focused on the behaviour of Muslim councils and how this is affected by different institutional settings. In particular, theories of social movements and interest groups suggest that strategies for dealing with this tension between integration and representation vary between more corporatist and pluralist state-religion relations. Russia and Britain are taken as exemplars of the two traditions, and thus help us to understand how these tensions manifest themselves and are responded to in the two different contexts. The project provides a comparative analysis of the strategies and discourses used by the Muslim Council of Britain and the Russia Council of Muftis in 1997-2013. It explores the conditions under which the councils engage with or disengage from the state. It also examines how the two organisations respond to criticisms from Muslim communities and undertake internal reforms to improve their legitimacy. A detailed analysis of the councils’ engagement with state authorities and Muslim communities is used to unpack the challenges of Muslim collective representation. The thesis contributes to research by providing new empirical data and theoretical insights on Muslim national organisations. It offers an innovative analytical framework by revisiting the concepts of pluralism and corporatism and applying them to the institutional context of state-religion relations in Britain and Russia. It draws on social movement theories and institutionalist approaches to understand how Muslim organisations deal with the dual pressure of co-optation and representation. It examines how Muslim councils behave like interest group organisations and offers theoretical insights that can be extrapolated to other kinds of institutions. Finally, the thesis integrates Western and Russian scholarship on the role of interest groups in general and religious institutions in particular.

This study is based on 72 children's and young adult books that met the criteria of being about Muslims and published and circulated here in the U.S. They can be divided into the varied genres as 49 contemporary realistic fiction, 6 historical fiction, and 17 autobiographies, biographies, and memoirs. In-depth reading and coding were used to identify patterns based on a theoretical frame of postcolonial theory and the lens of cultural authenticity.The exploration of ideas focus on the following research questions related to children's and adolescent literature published and distributed in the US that depict Muslim cultures: What are the overall characteristics of the books? What are the background experiences of the authors, illustrators, and translators who write and distribute literature within the U.S. that reflect Muslim Cultures? How do the genres of contemporary realistic fiction, historical fiction, and biographies published for adolescents and children within the U.S. represent and frame the varied Muslim cultures? What are the relationships between the background experiences of the authors and the representations of Muslim cultures in their books?This work is grounded in the assumption that Muslims are presented in a certain manner in popular culture and literature in the U.S., and thus, postcolonial theory is relevant in unpacking issues within the literature about these people. This theory draws on these suppositions to unveil how knowledge is constructed and circulated in dealing with global power relations. It also sheds light on how the identities of natives become hybrids as the process of colonization in certain cases impacts the psyche of inhabitants of these regions.This study is a `critical content analysis' in comprehending how texts are based in the social, cultural, and political contexts in which they are created and read. Content analyses examine what texts are about, considering the content from a particular perspective. This method scaffolds and explained my research to support my analysis of the texts through postcolonial perspectives to observe how Muslims are portrayed within adolescent and children's literature in the U.S.