ABSTRACT
On the cover of the book Muslims in Britain, a pretty young Muslim woman identifiable as Muslim from her white hijab displays her British loyalties to prospective readers, as she placidly gazes at them from the book cover while holding a miniature British flag (Gilliat-Ray 2010a). The front cover of another recent and important book, Young, British and Muslim, also portrays a similar image. On this second cover, it is not possible to definitively identify the young man as Muslim as it was with the young woman and her headscarf. Nevertheless, given the subject of the book, it would be forgivable to assume that he is Muslim or that his image has been used with the intention that readers make this assumption. What is important is that the young man, who quite captivatingly seems to be lost in deep thought, has wrapped himself up in a large Union Jack (Lewis 2008). These two images seem to epitomise three considerations in debates around citizenship and Muslims in Britain – firstly, both are images of young people; secondly, the young woman, more so than the young man, is identifiable as a Muslim; and finally both seem to be keen to publicly display their British loyalties.
