Girl Interrupted: Citizenship and the Irish Hijab Debate
Social and Legal Studies, Vol. 20, p. 463, 2011
28 Pages Posted: 18 Jan 2012
Date Written: January 17, 2012
Abstract
This article discusses the case of Shekinah Egan, an Irish Muslim girl who asked to be allowed to wear the hijab to school. It traces the media and government response to her demand, and frames that demand as a citizenship claim. It focuses in particular on a peculiarity of the Irish response; that the government was disinclined to legislate for the headscarf in the classroom. It argues that – perhaps counter-intuitively – the refusal to make law around the hijab operated to silence the citizenship claims at the heart of the Egan case. To this extent, it was a very particular instance of a broader and ongoing pattern of exclusion of the children of migrants from the Irish public sphere.
Keywords: hijab, Muslim, law, Ireland, religion, citizenship
JEL Classification: K400
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation