From hijab to jilbab and the ‘myth’ of British identity: being Muslim in contemporary Britain a half‐generation on

Abstract

This paper is written as a return to the generation of young Muslim women who were participants in a piece of research carried just over a decade ago. Some of these original participants have been re‐interviewed in 2007. The paper traces the shift in discourses around multiculturalism and identity, ethnicity and religion via two recent significant events in Britain. First, the case of a Muslim student excluded from her school for wearing a long, loose, dress‐like outer garment, the jilbab. Second, the riots that took place in several cities in England during the Summer of 2001. Taking these events as signifiers and using the notion of a ‘mythic feedback loop’ in relation to a ‘changing same’, an analysis of the new interviews highlights the movements in the discourses of multiculturalism. The paper argues that the girls’ shifting ‘senses of self’, and their changing discursive articulations, must be understood in light of the sociological changes after 2000 compared to the 1990s, as they dance between the contradictory and shifting discourses concerned with multiculturalism, mediated by notions of essentialism and exclusion, diversity and difference and the difficult and dangerous.