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

• Date: 01 June 2011
• Published date: 01 June 2011
• Author: Lasse Thomassen
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591711400026
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory
39(3) 325 –351
(Not) Just a Piece
© 2011 SAGE Publications
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of Cloth: Begum,
DOI: 10.1177/0090591711400026
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Recognition and the
Politics of Representation
Lasse Thomassen1
Abstract
To understand the politics of recognition, one must conceive of it as a
politics of representation. Like representation, recognition proceeds at once
in a constative and a performative mode, whereby they bring into being what
is simultaneously represented or recognized. This structure has paradoxical
implications. The politics of recognition is also a politics of representation in
the sense that it always involves questions such as, Which representations
are recognized? Whose representations are they? The reverse is also true:
the politics of representation involves recognition because representatives
and representations must be recognized in order to gain authority. In short,
we can examine recognition as representation, and there is no recognition
without representation, and vice versa. This is demonstrated through
a reading of a recent British legal case, Begum, where the issue at stake
concerned which representation of Islam should form the basis for the
recognition of Islam in the school uniform policy.
Keywords
Begum, jilbab, Islam, recognition, representation
1Centro de Estudios Políticos y Constitucionales, Madrid, Spain, and School of Politics &
International Relations, Queen Mary, University of London, UK
Corresponding Author:
Lasse Thomassen, School of Politics & International Relations, Queen Mary, University of
London, Mile End Road, London, E1 4NS, UK
Email: l.thomassen@qmul.ac.uk

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Political Theory 39(3)
Introduction: Begum, Recognition and Representation1
On September 3, 2002, the first day of the school year, Shabina Begum
showed up at her school, Denbigh High School in Luton, Britain, dressed in
a jilbab, a version of the hijab which, when combined with a headscarf,
covers the whole body except the face, hands and feet. Since the jilbab did
not conform to the school uniform policy, she was sent home to change. A
two-year stand-off followed during which Shabina Begum was not allowed
to attend school in the jilbab, and during which she refused to attend school
without it. In 2004, her case came before the High Court, which ruled against
her. The following year, the Court of Appeal overturned the ruling, but in
2006 the House of Lords reversed this decision.2 The case, which comes in
the wake of similar hijab cases in Britain and other European countries, was
much commented upon in the British media at the time, and it raised a number
of questions about the character of multicultural Britain and about what it
means to be a Muslim.
The case did not pit liberals against communitarians and multiculturalists.
Neither the school nor Shabina Begum argued for the distinctions that one
finds in liberalism and in constitutional and human rights law between pri-
vate and public, and between belief and practice. Both parties stressed the
importance of recognizing religious identities within the public sphere. For
Shabina Begum, the jilbab is a public manifestation of her religious identity:
“The jilbab,” she writes, “represents Islam as way of life rather than Islam as
a few personal rituals and actions. It is a public expression of Islam as a way
of life or ideology.”3 Here we have someone who, given her religious beliefs,
cannot privatize her beliefs, whether by leaving them at home, at the school
gates or in her heart and mind. The school’s response was not to insist on the
distinctions between private and public and between beliefs and practice.
Instead, the case concerned the specific identities that should be recognized,
and this boiled down to the difference between the jilbab and a shalwar
kameeze. The latter was one version of the school uniform designed to
accommodate Muslim, Hindu and Sikh female pupils, but it covers less of the
arms and legs than the jilbab. The school had included the shalwar kameeze
as an option within the school uniform after consultation with local mosques;
Shabina Begum insisted that her minority view of Islam—which she had
arrived at after study of Islamic texts and scholars—must also be publicly
recognized. In this way, the case became a matter of which, and whose, Islam
should be recognized in the school uniform policy, pitting a mainstream
Islam against a minority Islam. As such the case also draws attention to the
relationship between recognition and representation.

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Thomassen
327
In the following, my focus is on theories of recognition as they pertain to
identity politics,4 although I believe that the conclusions also apply to other
kinds of recognition theories. I argue that it is necessary to look at the rela-
tionship between recognition and representation for three reasons. First, both
recognition and representation bring into being what is simultaneously being
recognized or represented. They share a structure whereby they proceed in
two modes at once: a constative mode (reflecting already existing identities)
and a performative mode (constituting what is recognized or represented).
This structure has paradoxical and destabilizing implications, which I will
exemplify through the Begum case. Second, I will argue that the politics of
recognition is also a politics of representation in the sense that it always
involves questions such as, Which representations (of e.g. Islam) are recog-
nized? Whose representations are they? Third, the reverse is also true: the
politics of representation also involves recognition because representatives
and representations must be recognized in order to gain authority. In short,
we can examine recognition as representation, and there is no recognition
without representation, and vice versa. To understand the politics of recogni-
tion, we must conceive of it as a politics of representation.
My discussion of recognition and representation is organized around the
Begum case, which precisely raises questions about how identities get repre-
sented and who gets to represent them. While also drawing on the representa-
tions in the media and by the judges, I organize the analysis of the material
around the school’s and Shabina Begum’s representations of themselves,
each other and Islam.5 This necessarily entails an element of simplification of
the case, but this is balanced by attention to the paradoxes within their dis-
courses. The aim is not to resolve the paradoxes, which are precisely consti-
tutive of—that is, inherent to—the politics of recognition and representation.
In this, I am analyzing the case deconstructively in the style of what Joan W.
Scott calls “reading for paradox.”6 Normatively, the purpose is neither to
decide the Begum case (who is right: the school or Shabina Begum?) nor to
judge the correctness of the representations made by the different agents
(does Islam require women to wear a shalwar kameeze or a jilbab?). Nor is
the aim to argue for or against recognition as such; instead, reading for para-
dox may give rise to a different attitude to the concept and practice of recog-
nition. If anything, the normative upshot of the paper is that, by showing the
paradoxes of practices of recognition, we can challenge the assumptions as
well as the representations involved in the politics of recognition in order to
show what they foreclose and in order to open up new political possibilities.
Thus, my sympathies are with attempts to challenge existing, and especially
dominant, representations by showing their contingency, and I am critical of

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Political Theory 39(3)
both the school and Shabina Begum to the extent they try to naturalize their
respective representations of Islam.
Recognition and Representation
To analyze the concept and practice of recognition, I build on Alexander
García Düttmann’s and Patchen Markell’s deconstruction of recognition.7
Here I shall only briefly highlight some of the points they bring to bear on the
concept of recognition as it is found in Hegel, Taylor, Honneth and others.
These are points that I will later shed further light on through the analysis of
the Begum case.
Both García Düttmann and Markell draw attention to the fact that recogni-
tion proceeds in two modes, a constative and a performative. Recognition is,
first, recognition of an authentic and already constituted identity. Recogni-
tion that is true to the identity in question consists in the correspondence
between the act of recognition and that identity. As such, recognition pro-
ceeds in the register of cognition and knowledge, which García Düttmann
and Markell express as “re-cognition” (Anerkennung involves Erkenntnis).
García Düttmann adds that recognition also involves “repeated re-cognition”
(Wiedererkennung) because recognition only works as the recognition of an
already determined identity, an identity that has already been recognized as
this or that.8 In Markell’s terms, agents become bound by recognition because
they become bound to their (recognized) identities.
However, recognition must also add to what is recognized. The demand
for recognition only arises because of a lack that recognition is thought to be
able to ameliorate, and so recognition also performatively constitutes what is
recognized. This is the paradox of recognition: recognition at once reflects
and constitutes what is recognized, and must proceed in both a...