ABSTRACT
My point is that this, too, is part of the ‘felt’ contradiction of young British Muslims today. Their identities are becoming simultaneously more sharply defined as Muslim and blurred by their ‘felt awareness’ (perhaps recognition in some) that they inhabit many identities all at once. How any given Muslim individual navigates these tensions is difficult for them to articulate because the situation is so fluid and unstable. Perhaps it is, in fact, articulated most eloquently by non-verbal forms of communication such as dressing and fashion. The sartorial ensembles put together by young British hijabi women as examined by Emma Tarlo and Reina Lewis in their research – multi-layered outfits drawing on mainstream non-Muslim fashions as well as Muslim traditions of dress and aesthetics – embody their complex, multiple and hybrid identities; both they and their outfits express a newly emergent British Muslim identity that is itself a multi-layered ensemble. It is quite possible that some of these young women also speak of their
identity in ‘distilled’ terms as ‘simply Muslim’, or speak of it sometimes like that, and sometimes otherwise. Others may talk in terms of multiplicity, pluralism, hybridity and so on. The language they use to express themselves is the language by which they come to be known to us – and that language may, or may not, be adequate to the predicament of representing them within knowledge. In other words, Samuel Beckett’s famous dictum in Worstward Ho! holds true for social research as much as it does for literary representation: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better’ (Beckett, 2009). In alerting us to the impossible demand ‘real life’ makes of knowledge and representation, Beckett reminds us of the ethical obligation both to acknowledge, in humility, that impossibility as well as to work once more, never endingly, towards the task for which our knowledge is imperfectly equipped. If, like Sisyphus, our perpetual labour is condemned to perpetual failure, it is not doomed to fail always in the same way; we need not always repeat our mistakes. The double-edge of this dictum, which is both utopian and pragmatic, is both a challenge and an inspiration.
