ABSTRACT
A year following David Cameron’s speech in Munich on the demise of multiculturalism, the programme is presented as an experiment in multiculturalism – an opportunity to question how individuals from different classes and cultural and religious backgrounds can live together, and whether there is such a thing as a shared sense of Britishness. It offers a positive resolution to the question of how to be British and Muslim, stressing interior virtues and values –aspects of Muslim subjectivities that my interlocutors too were keen to emphasize – above the practices of prayer and hijab. Echoing political discourses on Britishness and national identity, the programme suggests that recognition of ‘shared British values’ will overcome the problems and associated threats of segregation and marginalization. The hijab has become ‘fetishized’ and symbolically overloaded – something Muslim women, as we shall see, simultaneously critique and reinscribe.
