(Not) Just a Piece of Cloth: Begum, Recognition and the Politics of Representation

Abstract

To understand the politics of recognition, one must conceive of it as a politics of representation. Since the politics of recognition consists in a struggle over the representation of identities, one must ask who gets to represent what and whom, and to what extent they are able to hegemonize the representational space. Moreover, recognition shares with representation a certain structure that can best be expressed as a tension between a constative and a performative aspect: by its very nature, recognition must make a claim to produce what it otherwise claims to merely reproduce. I show this using a recent British legal case, Begum. The case concerned a Muslim girl, Shabina Begum, who insisted on wearing a jilbab to school, something that did not conform to the school uniform policy. The case became a matter of which representation of Islam should form the basis for the recognition of Islam in public policy, specifically school uniform policy.

Keywords: Begum, jilbab, Islam, recognition, representation