Due to the characteristic of the synthetic aperture radar (SAR) image's sensitivity to the target aspect angles, a multiple sparse representation (MSR) method for SAR target configuration recognition is proposed. Making use of the prior information, dictionaries are constructed by using the samples of each configuration to better capture the detail information of the SAR images. The advantage of MSR over sparse representation for detail feature extraction is analyzed. Moreover, to achieve better recognition results, the Dempster–Shafer fusion is carried out to get comprehensive description of the target for configuration recognition. Two mass functions are constructed based on MSR and the sample statistical property. The combined mass function has the advantages of both the detail and global features of the target. Experiments on the moving and stationary target acquisition and recognition data sets validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed algorithm.