Girl Interrupted
| Author | Máiréad Enright |
| Published date | 01 December 2011 |
| Date | 01 December 2011 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663911417278 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
20(4) 463–480
Girl Interrupted:
ª The Author(s) 2011
Reprints and permission:
Citizenship and the
sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav
DOI: 10.1177/0964663911417278
Irish Hijab Debate
sls.sagepub.com
Ma´ire´ad Enright
University of Kent, UK
Abstract
This article discusses the case of Shekinah Egan, an Irish Muslim girl who asked to be
allowed to wear the hijab to school. It traces the media and government response to
her demand, and frames that demand as a citizenship claim. It focuses in particular on
a peculiarity of the Irish response; that the government was disinclined to legislate for
the headscarf in the classroom. It argues that – perhaps counter-intuitively – the refusal
to make law around the hijab operated to silence the citizenship claims at the heart of the
Egan case. To this extent, it was a very particular instance of a broader and ongoing pat-
tern of exclusion of the children of migrants from the Irish public sphere.
Keywords
citizenship theory, feminism, hijab, Ireland, multiculturalism, Muslim, religion
In 2008,1 an Irish headmaster asked the Department of Education to advise him on
whether his teenage Muslim student, Shekinah Egan, should be allowed to wear the hijab
to school. Twice the Department refused to intervene, insisting that school uniform deci-
sions were the preserve of individual school boards of management. The headmaster
reported the Department’s position to a national newspaper, provoking a significant pub-
lic debate. Shekinah’s parents subsequently founded the Irish Hijab Campaign, which
lobbied the government to legislate on the hijab (McGarry, 2008). The Department,
under pressure, agreed to consider the issue of religious dress as part of its Intercultural
Education strategy. In the end, a 400-word statement was published jointly by the
Ministers for Education and Integration Policy without any supporting policy document
Corresponding author:
Ma´ire´ad Enright, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent CT2 7NZ, UK
Email: m.enright@kent.ac.uk
464
Social & Legal Studies 20(4)
(Department of Education and Skills, 2008), confirming that the government would not
be issuing a religious dress directive to secondary schools. Instead, the status quo, under
which school uniform policy was decided at the level of individual schools would be main-
tained. Schools’ expansive discretion remained subject to two important restrictions. First,
they should consult widely with the ‘school community’ and, second, they should take
account of the obligations contained in the Equal Status Acts and the Education Act
1998. This legislation charges boards of management with reconciling the ‘characteristic
spirit of the school’ with ‘the principles and requirements of a democratic society [which
require schools to] have respect and promote respect for the diversity of values, beliefs,
traditions, languages and ways of life in society’. ‘[N]o school uniform policy should act
in such a way that it, in effect, excludes students of a particular religious background from
seeking enrolment or continuing their enrolment in a school’ (Department of Education
and Skills, 2008). But beyond this minimum threshold, schools may set such uniform
requirements as they please. So Ireland’s headscarf debate ended as quickly as it began.
It was far from obvious that the dispute should have concluded on this note. Public opinion
on the hijab issue was divided (Mac Cormaic, 2008) and where the Ministers found an
unproblematic path to the management of religious difference in schools, the Evening Her-
ald newspaper announced the beginning of ‘a fundamental debate about the future of Irish
society’ (Evening Herald, 2008). That debate has yet to materialize.
I do not propose here to add to the enormous literature which has grown up around the
justices and injustices of stipulating what Muslim girls and women should wear in public
places. Instead I want to write about the sheer banality of the Irish hijab affair. At a time
when French laws banning the niqab and the hijab in certain public spaces loom large in
European consciousness (Bowen, 2006; Joppke, 2009; Scott, 2007; Vakulenko, 2007), it
is striking that the Irish government not only resisted calls for a ban on religious dress in
schools but made light of the possibility that religious dress posed problems for the state
which were best resolved by law reform.2 In this article, I discuss how and why the gov-
ernment came to take this position. My aim is to suggest something about the govern-
mental production of a ‘second-generation’ Irish female subject. As Mullally writes,
the French bans produce veiled women as ‘abject outlaws’; cast out from the domain
of citizenship (Mullally, 2011). We should not assume, however, that the Irish distaste
for the ban is synonymous with a more inclusive politics. My argument is that the refusal
to engage the law concerning the hijab may also have disempowering and exclusionary
effects. In examining that disempowerment, I focus on the Muslim Irish girl as citizen. I
should say at the outset that I am cognizant of the limitations of a citizenship framing of
Shekinah Egan’s case. I do not contend that an appeal to citizenship solves all of the
problems of ‘being-with’ one another (Motha, 2007); that from this angle we can see our
way to an inevitably better Ireland or a better France. I make a more modest claim; that a
citizenship framing exposes a particular kind of political relation between the state and
the headscarfed girl, and that we ought to pay attention to it.
Acts of Citizenship
My sense of citizenship is influenced by Isin’s notions of ‘becoming’ and ‘being’ polit-
ical (Isin, 2002: x). To ‘be political’ means ‘to constitute oneself simultaneously with
Enright
465
and against others as an agent capable of judgment about what is just and unjust’ (Isin,
2002: x). The moment of ‘becoming political’ is that in which marginalized or excluded
subjects interrupt a prevailing order of domination (Isin, 2002: 275–276). I understand
Shekinah’s case as a moment in which subjects whose inclusion in the Irish public sphere
– a Muslim girl, her parents, the community representatives who took up her cause – was
contentious at best, became political. Excluded subjects demanded both to speak on their
own terms about a place allotted to them in the space of the nation-state and to contest the
distribution of that space (Rancie`re, 2004: 69). But the subjects discussed in this article
became political in a specific sense. They became political, as on Isin’s account, by ‘acts
of citizenship’ (Isin and Nielsen, 2008: 1), enacting themselves, not as simple political
agents but as effective members in the polity, as ‘legitimate partners’ with other citizens
in the allocation and contestation of political space, able as of right to make demands
both on the state and on fellow members of the Irish citizenry (Rancie`re, 2004: 70).
My interest in ‘being political’ is sparked by the notion that migrant women may rene-
gotiate the conditions of their presence in the nation-state when they acquire standing to
‘talk back’ to it (Benhabib et al., 2008: 67). Benhabib, for instance, argues that the dis-
aggregation of citizenship – its division into collective identity, political membership
and social rights – generates possibilities for new modalities of political citizenship
(Benhabib et al., 2008: 47). Disaggregation of citizenship creates new opportunities for
marginalized citizens to insert themselves into legal and political discourse, via ‘demo-
cratic iterations’. These would include Isin’s ‘acts of citizenship’, but might reach more
widely; encompassing circumstances in which marginalized citizens claim ‘political
authorship’ and re-appropriate and re-interpret existing political norms (Benhabib
et al., 2008: 48–49).
Shekinah was asking for a small thing, but her campaign exemplifies the determina-
tion to become political. In her headmaster’s insistence that the Department of Education
provide him and headmasters like him with clear guidance on matters of religious dress,
and in Shekinah’s parents’ and supporters’ efforts, through the Irish Hijab Campaign, to
lobby the government to make law around the hijab, we see a desire to use Shekinah’s
citizenship. It is used to make a particular kind of claim on the state; a claim to draw on
the violence of the state in support of a political project. The demand was that the hijab,
rather than being treated as a signifier of otherness, beyond Irish law and unknown to it,
would find a place at the level of the established, settled, fundamental law of the state.
Most important in this context is Shekinah’s father Liam’s express invocation of the con-
stitution: ‘The hijab is an obligation. Forced removal is a removal of rights, Constitu-
tional rights . . . It also contributes to the deprivation of certain fundamental rights
such as education and employment’ (Enniscorthy Guardian, 2008). Shekinah’s citizen-
ship was operating in its insurgent register; she can be understood not only as claiming
rights from the standpoint of her citizenship, but as going further, challenging the settled
sense of the protections which Irish citizenship might afford to those who could make use
of it. But, in its September 2008 statement, the government merely expressed the need
for schools to ‘take account of the legal position in Ireland’. That position was not ela-
borated upon and ‘rights’ or the constitution were not mentioned.
Benhabib accepts that even where democratic iterations can take...
To continue reading
Request your trial