ABSTRACT
Islam as a faith and Muslims as a whole have found themselves under something of a siege in a climate of Islamophobia (Allen and Nielsen 2002). This is particularly difficult for ethnic minority Muslim women who have chosen to identify publicly with the faith and wear the scarf as a badge of honour. Islamophobia creates a wide gap between Muslim women’s perceptions of who they are and the ways in which they are viewed by the host society. Groups on both sides of the divide demand of them that they either abandon their faith or conform to particular forms of male interpretations of where mohajabehs should be and how they should be living their lives. Groups such as the Hisb ut Tahrir announce that it is no longer possible for youth in the UK to be both British and Muslim, and declare it necessary to ‘choose’ between faith and nationality (Sunday, BBC 4, 24 August 2003). Parties such as the Al Muhajerun paraded their ‘choice’ in London by calling a conference on 11 September 2003 to glorify the suicide bombers, calling them the ‘Magnificent 11’. These aggressive political positions may be described as part of a concerted effort by Islamist revivalists in Britain to create a male, combative Islamic political identity that seeks to unite the Muslim community in opposition to rising Islamophobia in the host society. Their high-profile, propagandist moves are countered by equally abrasive moves such as the decision by the French parliament in April 2004 to ban the hijab from all government-funded schools and banish the mohajabehs to Islamic schools, thereby barring the most common avenues towards cohesion and multiculturalism.
