COVID-19 and Muslims in Birmingham

Blog post by Imran Awan and Damian Breen, Birmingham City University, UK
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March 23rd, 2025 marked five years since the first national lockdown in the UK as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As an unprecedented series of events, the pandemic exposed and exacerbated a range of pre-existing health and social inequalities, with Black and South Asian minority ethnic groups being among those most impacted.

At the height of the pandemic, the risk of mortality from COVID-19 was around three times higher for Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups than the national average. Whilst this is far from a complete picture of Muslim communities in the UK, it is ordinarily as close as we get in terms of data pertaining to British Muslims where religion is not measured in publicly available national-level data. However, whilst there was some acknowledgement of the racialized disparities exposed by the pandemic, one aspect which was overlooked was the impact of lockdowns on faith communities.

As we show in our Identities article, ‘Islam and faith in times of crisis: religious observance and Muslim communities in the pandemic’, key focus of our research was ‘faith in times of crisis’, and specifically faith practice for Muslims in the context of local and national lockdowns. Our project drew attention to the emphasis on practise in the context of Islam, and what lockdowns and restrictions meant for Muslims in particular. 

Our project prioritized considering how faith practice could be facilitated among Muslim community leaders in Birmingham. Collective worship is a significant part of being religiously active for many Muslims, and national and local lockdowns impacted both the religious and social aspects of prayer. Through our research in Birmingham, we found that a local agreement with police allowed three people to be present in Mosques where national restrictions only allowed two. This allowed the Imam and one other person to lead prayers whilst a third, socially distanced, was able to run live streaming so that members of the community could log in and take part. Through interviews with participants who had influential roles in national Muslim organizations, we found that this arrangement was specific to Birmingham and was not replicated elsewhere in the UK.

Similarly, the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Muslim funerals was significant, with Mosques having to take on preparations ahead of burial in sanitized conditions, leading to the requirement for cold storage containers. Aside from the imagery of this in news media reporting, impacts for the community were far deeper, with the numbers of individuals able to attend funerals being restricted.

In exploring these impacts upon Muslims in Birmingham, we found that there are a range of ways in which Muslims have been affected as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our findings suggest that there is a dynamic between impacts of religious observance, and the ways in which religious leaders drew upon Islamic scripture and teachings to reinforce adherence to local and national guidance as a dutiful responsibility to others.

Our research also explored the role of Muslims and their social identity. This included asking questions about religious conservatism, national and international allegiances and the notion of the Islamic Ummah. We found that Muslims used religious practice and coping during the pandemic.  This indicates that religious coping is likely to provide some benefit for individuals of faith in times of crisis. The insights from our project demonstrated a range of impacts experienced by Muslims in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, expanding across individual worship, collective religious festivities and the extent to which individuals were able to engage in their faith at various stages of the pandemic.

The impacts from the pandemic on Muslims in Birmingham can also be traced back to the first national lockdown on those unable to attend religious services until restrictions were lifted. The timings around the lifting of national restrictions and imposition of local lockdowns, and the ability to observe Ramadan and Eid celebrations, had a significant impact upon the communities in Birmingham, including the social dynamics of observing Ramadan, opening fasts and the sharing of food and festive celebrations associated with Eid.

The impacts on other elements of religious observance also extended to communal worship. The pandemic not only impacted individual prayer and the associated rewards and deeds compared with congregational worship, but also the physical contact associated with collective worship more generally. We found that Mosques played a pivotal role in responding to these changes in a positive light, despite the challenges they had to face.

In summary, our research has shown that Muslim communities in Birmingham have used their faith and identity through the means of prayer and community work to help counter the negative aspects of a pandemic. Despite the many challenges they faced, they have shown that communities working together can play a positive role in times of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic, and provide important lessons such as collective identity and social well-being to navigate these.

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​Image credit: Photo by Md Shahin on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
​Awan, I. & Breen, D. (2024). Islam and faith in times of crisis: religious observance and Muslim communities in the pandemic. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2024.2432797   OPEN ACCESS

Read further in Identities:

​Migration aspirations and polymorphic identifications of the homeland: (im)mobility trajectories amongst Chinese international students amidst COVID-19

Intercultural capital and ambiguous loss in in-between space: a digital ethnography of Anglo-Sino academic families amid China’s transformation into the post-pandemic era

Integration, transnationalism and transnational Islam