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research-article2015
ICS0010.1177/1367877915599614International Journal of Cultural StudiesWeedon

International Journal of Cultural Studies

2016, Vol. 19(1) 101117
The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/1367877915599614
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Article
Stuart Hall, the British
multicultural question and the
case of western jihadi brides

Chris Weedon
Cardiff University, Wales

Abstract
This article explores Stuart Halls approach to what he calls the multicultural question. It
identifies what we can take forward from Halls work by bringing a productive and politically
useful form of Cultural Studies to bear on multi-ethnic societies that are riven by problematic
and sometimes violent responses to difference. In the light of Halls practice of thinking theory
in relation to specific social issues and theorizing through case studies, the article looks at how
one might approach the question of the appeal of Islamism to young western Muslims, increasing
numbers of whom are leaving their homes and communities to pursue jihad or, in the case of
women, to marry Islamist jihadi fighters in Syria and Iraq.

Keywords
Britishness, difference, gender, identity, Islamism, race, representation, social media, subjectivity,
voice

The multicultural question

On Twitter, a young British woman, going under the handle @Umm_Ammar, described herself
as a British Muhajirah living under the Khalifah. Last Friday, she tweeted: Ive never
experienced true happiness and contentment until I stepped in Shaam [Greater Syria]. The day
before she had written: Know that Jihad for the sake of Allah will never bring death earlier nor
delay it. What is meant for you will never miss you. (Sunday Independent, 24 August 2014)

The previous week Khadijah Dare had tweeted her wish:

Corresponding author:
Chris Weedon, Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK.
Email: weedoncm@cardiff.ac.uk
102 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

to become the first British woman to kill a UK or US citizen, in the wake of the video showing
the horrific execution of James Foley by a terrorist with a British accent. Dare (who tweets
under the handle Muhajirah fi Sham (immigrant in Syria)) appeared in a Channel 4 video on IS
[Islamic State] where she told her interviewers that she studied media, film and psychology at
college. Her avatar shows her two-year-old son swinging an AK-47. (Hunt, 2014)

These tweets raise complex questions about formations of young Muslim subjectivities
in western societies, in particular questions of identity, emotion and the role of social
media. Since 9/11, there has been a rise of Islamism in western democracies.1 This has
coincided with vocal elements within western societies becoming increasingly hostile to
Muslims within a broader discursive frame of the incompatibility of Islam and the West.
Western societies are also seeing young white people converting to Islam and young,
white men becoming jihadists. These young people are refusing hegemonic binaries and
recreating themselves as the place of that difference that disturbs the borders of race,
gender, national belonging and religion. In doing so they are proving how other markers
of difference, such as class, or social marginalization can work in this context beyond
usual binary demarcations producing spectral, virtual, often spectacular forms of authen-
ticity.2 A year earlier, Channel 4 News had broadcast a report on How British women
are joining the jihad in Syria (23 July 2013). The report by Kylie Morris included film
footage from Syria of an interview with Maryam (a pseudonym) who had gone there to
join the jihad against the Assad regime. In it: Maryam shoots a Kalashnikov for the
camera, and then fires off a revolver. Shed like to fight, to become what she calls a mar-
tyr. But shes not a frontline fighter. Shes a fighters wife, with weapons for her own
protection (Morris, 2014).3
In September 2014, the British media took up a story published in the Scottish news-
paper the Daily Record and Sunday Mail: Irn-Bru bride of jihad: Scots family left bro-
ken after their daughter fled to Syria to marry terrorist from Islamic State (Warburton,
2014). The article tells of Scottish student Aqsa Mahmood who had left her family to
marry a jihadi in Syria. The same day, a press conference held in Glasgow with
Mahmoods grieving parents was broadcast on Channel 4 News.4 Over the following
week a wide spectrum of newspapers and TV channels covered the issue, linking it to
research by Melanie Smith, research associate at the International Centre for the Study
of Radicalisation and Political Violence (ICSR), on which the Sunday Independent arti-
cle of 24 August had drawn. As Homa Khaleeli of the Guardian explained, Smith had
been following social media accounts of 21 British women who have joined Islamic
State including:5

16-year-old Manchester twins Zahra and Salma Halane and 20-year-old former radiography
student, Aqsa Mahmood, from Glasgow, who exhorted Muslims to carry out terrorist attacks in
the west. Follow the examples of your brothers from Woolwich, Texas and Boston, she
tweeted. If you cannot make it to the battlefield, then bring the battlefield to yourself.

Since August 2014, the media coverage of jihadi brides internationally has increased
substantially. April 2015 saw the much publicized Australian case of Zehra Duman, 21,
from Melbourne, widowed after five weeks of marriage to jihadi fighter Mahmoud
Abdullatif. The couple had met in Melbourne and, as in European cases, her family were
Weedon 103

shocked by events; Shes been brainwashed, she wasnt like this three or four months
ago, Mr Duman told News Corp. Were trying desperately, trying to bring our daughter
home weve got the police involved. Its very difficult for us to cope.6 By March
2015, she is reported to be using social media to recruit other young women to become
jihadi brides in Syria.7 Her discourse is that of IS and her language suggests both anger
and empowerment. The press reports that:

Duman is now renowned for being provocative and confrontational on social media, particularly
through her Twitter use: in a series of propaganda pictures, she says shows her five star jihad
lifestyle, and says she and other female jihadists are thirsty for the blood of her former
countrymen.8

In the UK in February 2015 media attention was directed at Muslim girls from a par-
ticular school in Bethnal Green in the East End of London who had disappeared and were
traced to Istanbul airport and bus station.

Intelligence sources in Turkey said Shamima Begum, 15, Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase,
15, appeared to have travelled by car to the border on Friday, from where they crossed into the
Isil-controlled town of Tal Abyad.

A Turkish intelligence source told the Telegraph: They were seen in Tal Abyad on Friday.
They were travelling with a Syrian male in a private car. They were using Syrian identity
cards.

We understand that after arriving in Istanbul, the girls met an Isil member who is charged with
helping foreigners who want to join the group.9

One question has been at the centre of media coverage of jihadi brides. As Carol
Hunt of the Irish Sunday Independent put it: Why then do educated western girls, with
good families and from stable communities, suddenly decide to join an ideology
which so discriminates against them? (Hunt, 2014). The assumptions behind this ques-
tion that good western families allow female agency while Islam discriminates against
women requires problematizing. Central to the issue of jihadi brides are questions of
identity, subjectivity and agency formed in specific western locations that, due to the
internet and new social media, are also sites of the glocal in which the boundaries of the
nation state become fluid and transnational forms of imagined identity and belonging
become paramount. In this article I address the issue of the appeal of Islamism including
to jihadi brides by thinking through the implications of Stuart Halls lifelong commit-
ment to understanding subjectivity, diversity, diaspora and the multicultural question
from a cultural perspective.
In an important essay on the multicultural question published in 2000, Hall makes the
following distinction:

multi-cultural describes the social characteristics and problems of governance posed by any
society in which different cultural communities live together and attempt to build a common
life while retaining something of their original identity. [Multiculturalism] references the
104 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

strategies and policies adopted to govern or manage the problems of diversity and multiplicity
which multi-cultural societies throw up. (Hall, 2000a: 209)

This distinction is reaffirmed in an extensive interview with Maya Jaggi (Hall, 2009a),10
where Hall explains how he was never centrally concerned with multiculturalism as a
set of state policies. These vary between states and socio-historical locations and mul-
ticulturalism as political theory, policy and sets of state practices is but one important
factor in a much broader picture in which anti-racism and social justice must be the
priorities. While Hall contributed to discussions of policy (for example, Parekh, 2000),
he was particularly concerned with rethinking theoretical approaches to the multicul-
tural question. He argued that multicultural drift, that is to say the unplanned, increas-
ing involvement of Britains black and brown populations visibly registering a play of
difference right across the face of British society is deeply uneven: Outside its
radius, racialized exclusion compounded by household poverty, unemployment and
educational underachievement persist, indeed multiply (Hall, 2000c: 2). The multicul-
tural question involves the complex relationship between the struggle for a more
socially equal, racially just society and the question of whether and how peoples of
very different cultural, ethnic, racial and religious belonging can cohabit in British
society and build a common life in a way which recognizes rather than abolishes their
differences (2000c: 2).
For Hall, this is a cultural question that must be grounded in a politics of equality
through difference (Hall, 2009a). Hall insists on understanding social relations as they
are experienced by the subjects who live them and he refuses to separate the psychic
from the social. Following his formative experience of growing up in Jamaica, in a world
in which everyone was originally from somewhere else, where colour caste could ruin
lives and where creolisation was central to the culture (see Hall, 1996a, 2009a), he moved
in 1951 to a Britain where large numbers of economic migrants were arriving from both
the Caribbean and South Asia. They faced a hostile motherland in which racism, social
exclusion and physical violence were often the order of the day (Fryer, 1984; Phillips and
Phillips, 1989). Over the following decades, both first and second generations would find
a range of modes of accommodation and resistance in a predominantly white Britain that
was being made to change in many different ways and by multiple forces. It was the role
of culture understood broadly as the ways in which individuals make sense of their
lives and how this relates to socio-economic factors that concerned Hall. He firmly
believed that progressive social change requires grassroots engagement with the mean-
ing and frames in and through which people live, if meaningful socio-cultural change is
to be achieved (Hall, 2009b: 14).

Cultural Studies approaches to the multicultural question

Halls work suggests that key issues involved in processes of accommodation and resist-
ance by both host society and migrant settler groups are subjectivity, identity, meaning
and power. Subjectivity, identity, agency and meaning are integrally related to socio-
economic relations and are socially and historically produced within specific relations of
power. Understanding this process of production requires the sort of interdisciplinary
Weedon 105

perspective that Hall attempted to develop through Cultural Studies. His approaches to
questions of multiculturalism and diasporas were deeply influenced by his own Jamaican
formation, migration to the UK, and the anti- and postcolonial and new left politics in
which he engaged in Oxford and London (Hall, 1996a, 2009a).
The development of Cultural Studies in the UK marked what Hall and others have
termed the cultural turn in the Humanities and Social Sciences according to which
culture is accorded an equal status with social and economic factors in attempting to
understand a society. This is a crucial point when it comes to understanding difference
and fighting for equality through difference. The cultural turn looked to language and
the production of meaning within socially specific, material, discursive relations that
are always also relations of power. Like feminism, it created the space for the consid-
eration of questions of class-specific, gendered and racialized subjectivity and iden-
tity that are so central to multi-ethnic societies. It insisted on the specificity of culture
as non-reducible to but intrinsically interwoven with the social, the political and the
economic. Its key focus is the relationship between culture and power. A cultural
approach to the multicultural question requires theorization of the processes consti-
tuting identity, racialization, ethnicity, religion, gender, class, diaspora and the multi-
ple effects of globalization.
The cultural turn gained momentum and complexity with the impact, from the 1970s
onwards, of semiotics, structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism and psychoanalysis
on a Cultural Studies shaped by Marxism. These theories allowed new questions to be
asked. While Hall wrote extensively on theory throughout his career, his engagement
always had a political dimension, for example promoting better understanding of the
relationship between culture and power, contributing to a renewal of western Marxism,
and building on and transforming Marxist theories of culture. It was driven by questions
that need a better answer. As he explains in Personally Speaking (2009a), his engage-
ment with what has often been termed high theory, including semiotics, structuralism,
post-structuralism and psychoanalysis, led to an explicit politics of theorizing from
located case studies and what he describes as a pragmatic approach to theories as tools
for analysis. Speaking of theory, he says:

You cant do without it. If youre not theorizing self-consciously, youre theorizing badly. Im
not interested in the production of theory itself; this is how I differ from some of the people
involved in the cultural turn. They want you to produce better and better theories. Theory for
me is always a tool, as Foucault said, its a tool towards analysing something else, something
in the concrete world. So I was never a producer, I never described myself as a theorist; Im too
mundane and too embedded in the world to be a theorist. But nothing can happen in terms of
analysing the world that is not theoretical. Theory is in that sense inevitable. (Hall, 2009b: 49)

Much of Halls work involved collective projects, sometimes including community

activism, as for example in the case of Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law
and Order, which became both an important text for the future of criminology in the UK
and a groundbreaking text for thinking about how to approach many of the issues central
to race and the multicultural question. It stressed the role of state power, the power of the
media, the production of forms of resistance in specific locations, and the importance of
self-location and of recognizing the limitations of individual subject formation. All of
106 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

these issues are central to understanding todays multi-ethnic societies and the current
appeal of Islamism to young Muslims in the West.

Identity and belonging

Stuart Halls work has been concerned with challenging a central aspect of the multicul-
tural question, the apparent givenness of identity, whether this be rooted in biologically
based racist discourse, in socio-economic position or in fixed ideas of religion, culture
and ethnicity (Hall, 1990, 1996b, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2009a). The problematization of
identity requires attention to broader issues of subjectivity. Hall argues that: what we
call the self is constituted out of and by difference, and remains contradictory, and that
cultural forms are, similarly, in that way, never whole, never fully closed or sutured
(Hall, 1996c: 145). The self, moreover, is but one dimension of subjectivity, which
includes unconscious dimensions of meaning and what recent scholars in the Humanities
and Social Sciences, drawing largely on Spinoza and Deleuze, term affect. This term is
used in range of different ways but here I would endorse Seigworth and Greggs defini-
tion where it signals the: forces or intensities that arise:

in the midst of in-betweenness: in the capacity to act and be acted upon.

[It] is the name we give to those forces visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other
than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion that can serve to drive us
towards movement, towards thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us (as if in
neutral) across a barely registering accretion of force relations, or that can leave us overwhelmed
by the worlds apparent intractability. (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 1)

The affective turn in theory and Cultural Studies gained momentum after Halls key
publications on the multicultural question had appeared. It is useful for signalling bodily
sensations and feelings that are at work in specific contexts and which become chan-
nelled into particular emotions and psychic states.
The Caribbean was an important early influence on Halls thinking about identity and
difference (Hall, 2007), taken up in the influential essay on new Caribbean identities in
which he argued that cultural identity is:

a matter of becoming as well as of being. It belongs to the future as much as to the past. It is
not something that already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. Cultural
identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they
undergo constant transformation. (Hall, 1990: 225)

In the case of the migrants who became pillars of postwar multi-ethnic Britain, the cen-
tral question was how they adapted and changed when they found themselves in new,
shared and often hostile spaces. Related to this is how the society within which migrants
settle changes. In the British context this includes the question of how Englishness,
Welshness, Scottishness and Britishness change, and how processes of mutual adaptation
come about in contexts where racism and Islamophobia often hinder creative adaptation
to change. Similarities and differences, Hall suggested, will cause conflict but this needs
Weedon 107

to be managed in ways that do not push the different parties to extremes. Reflecting on
his own experience, he recalls how:

When I came to England, the first question I was asked was when are you going home? But
then I saw the people in the 50s who werent going home at all. Many of them thought like me,
that we were going home, but we werent going home at all, we were being disseminated. That
is the diasporic process. We were being pushed on to somewhere else where you have to make
a new life where the similarities and the differences have to be fought out without eating one
another, without destroying one another. So I thought this is the coming question, the cultural
question of a global world, how difference is going to survive, because difference in this sense
is very persistent, people wont give up easily some things that they bring with them because it
defines who they are, it defines their identity. (Hall, 2009b: 45)

In the light of the growth of Islamism in the West in the last two decades, one might also
add that how societies and specific groups within them deal with similarities and differ-
ences can have profound implications that, in a mediatized, globalized world, transcend
borders and defy containment. Hall (2000a) argues that global discourses in local situa-
tions involve the articulation of the narrative in question with other forces in other
words a located conjunctural analysis is required. Virtual transnational and diasporic
communities, including communities of belief, offer very real forms of identity and
belonging that capture and channel affect, and as I argue in the case of jihadi brides,
bring a whole new dimension to the multicultural question.
Hall points to the importance of understanding structures of similarity and difference
which include the persistence of versions of tradition that people bring with them when
they settle and do not give up easily. Thus so-called traditional ways of life derived
from the cultures of origin remain important to community self-definitions, but con-
stantly operate alongside extensive daily interaction at every level, with British main-
stream social life (Hall, 2000a: 220). These include narratives of history, religion and
specific cultural practices that may take on different forms in the new context or become
defined as tradition. The diasporic tendency among many first-generation migrants to fix
the version of culture that they arrived with as their traditional culture is a recurrent
theme of second-generation literature and film. Second and subsequent generations also
develop legacies from their families place of origin in new ways. For example, since
the1980s the recognition and inclusion of the history of the slave trade and plantation
slavery within British educational and cultural institutions has become increasingly
important to many people of Caribbean descent, producing strong emotional responses
and empowering forms of identity (Weedon, 2008a). In the case of some second- and
third-generation British Muslims, it is global Islamist narratives that empower, speaking
both to individual and collective feelings of marginalization and offering forms of agency
and empowerment otherwise unmet in contemporary Britain (Husain, 2007).

The appeal of radical Islamism

As Stuart Hall (2009a) argues, minority cultures will adapt to new terrains but where
they are rejected, resistance will be produced. This can be seen in the UK, for example,
in the case of the niqab, adopted by many young British Muslim women in response to
108 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

negative debates in the press and statements by politicians (Weedon, 2008b). Much can
be learned about how to approach the appeal of fundamentalist Islam and Islamism from
Halls analysis of the example of young British blacks in the 1970s:

the lacerating experience of the second generation who had never seen the Caribbean, were
having a very alienating experience in schools, subject to discrimination, subject to racism,
subject to police oppression. They reached for a conception of themselves as a new kind of
African people. In what sense? Theyve never been to Africa. They only know Africa through
Rastafarianism (Hall, 2009b: 29)

Hall argues that to understand such forms of resistance we need to track the routes by
which people have come to their present situation (2009b: 29). Cultural background,
social position, racism and discrimination are all important, as are diasporic cultural
forms and practices and the internet. Moreover, in the UK post-9/11 and 7/7, the impact
of security measures on both individuals and communities has brought new forms of
lacerating experience home to British Muslims.
Part of the attraction of Islamism to young western Islamists is the imagined, roman-
ticized idea of an ideal future Islamic state where they are accepted and free to fully
practise their true version of Islam. This idea draws on images of the state that was
founded in Medina by the first community of Muslims along with the Prophet Mohammed,
after escaping oppression in Mecca. A Cardiff Muslim professional, who studied after
9/11 and wishes to remain anonymous, recounts how she:

attended university with many newly practising Muslims who mourned the demise of the
Khalifah (Islamic State). The Khalifah is depicted as nothing less than a utopia. Obviously they
turn a blind eye to many injustices perpetrated in the name of the state, or at least explain them
away. They had their own political ideas and could state all the problems with British society
as well as those Muslim majority countries which werent implementing Islam. There were
also many Salafis who pronounced all other interpretations or schools of thought as deviant. I
could fill a book with my experiences, unfortunately I do not find the idea of jihadi brides going
to the Levant surprising.11

As with the question of gender, this battle over the true meaning of the holy texts, and
the lack of any agreed modern interpretation of them, play a crucial role in contemporary
Islam.
The role of the media in shaping subjectivities, meanings and values was integral to
Stuart Halls understanding of multi-ethnic societies. In the case of Muslim identities in
the West, the multi-faceted and multi-layered formations that shape diasporic subjectivi-
ties have been deeply affected by world politics, the press, new media and globalization.
For Islamists, the internet offers a medium in which to address Muslims throughout the
world as part of the imagined global community of Muslims, the Ummah. It facilitates
the free distribution of filmed material that can have immense emotional power. The
issues that jihadis address to gain popular support include the perceived double standards
in western governments responses to terrorism, the invasion of Iraq on the basis of find-
ing non-existent weapons of mass destruction (WMD), drone attacks in Pakistan,
Afghanistan and Yemen killing so many civilians, the siege of Gaza, the carving up of the
Weedon 109

Ottoman Empire and handing it over to puppet kings in the Middle East, the double
standards in media reporting, Guantanamo Bay, government complicity in torture, the
scenes that came out of Abu Ghraib prison, and the list goes on. Many British Muslims
have commented on the emotional power of these issues:

For me, the memory of Bosnia sends shudders simply because they were a community who
were assimilated and part of Yugoslavia and neighbour managed to turn on neighbour. Jihadis
use the tragedy of Bosnia to support the claim that regular Muslims will never really be part of
Britain.

If these grievances are not addressed or at least acknowledged, it seems many Muslims will at
least look at this long list and sympathize with the Jihadi cause.12

Along with local organizations and groups, the internet and social media function as
important sites for the propagation of radical Islamism. Like the appeal of Rastafarianism
for young blacks in the 1970s, Islamism offers a fixing of identity, a way of living and an
imagined place of belonging. Unlike the 1970s, its appeal can be broadcast via the inter-
net and new social media. Research to date shows, for example, that the appeal and
spread of the phenomenon of western jihadi brides, relies to a large extent on Twitter
and Facebook. As Haras Rafiq of the Quilliam Foundation13 has suggested: There are
people who are enticing women to come over social media, romanticizing the whole
aspect of coming over and imploring them that its their religious duty. If a particular
Twitter account or Facebook account is closed down, another one pops up (quoted in
NBC, 2014). The internet and social media have become everyones realm of potential
self-invention. This sometimes includes the flattening out of complex lived realities
into avatars and modes of self-presentation that work autopoietically as people start
believing in their own performances. Once flattened into clear publicized roles, such
identities can move, be sold and become part of the global flow without consideration
for the remaining organic relations within physical communities. They can move into
other sets of relations, including intricate cultural, political and geostrategic conflicts in
the Middle East and elsewhere (see for example Mahmoods Diary of a Muhajirah).14
Yet they are as much part of the West in its globalized formation as forms of resistance
that lack a singular unifying ideology, such as the London riots of August 2011 and the
Occupy movement.
The local appeal of Islamism became a major issue in the British public sphere fol-
lowing the London bombings of 2005. The press had long been paying negative attention
to Muslim difference and after 9/11 the popular press in particular took to presenting
Muslims living both in and outside the West in a polarised binary opposition to western
forms of modernity, whether secular or Christian. In press coverage since the Rushdie
Affair of 1989, there has been a preponderance of articles on forms of religious funda-
mentalism, which are portrayed as intolerant and bereft of any ability to cope with satire,
or different value systems, and cultural and religious practices often presented as fun-
damentalist such as halal food, gender segregation and the wearing of the hijab and
niqab (Baker etal., 2013; Poole, 2002). These issues feed into widespread discourses of
Muslim separation and non-integration, which are reinforced by coverage of news items
linked to Muslims beyond the borders of the UK, for example the Danish cartoons
110 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

incident, the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and more recently the Charlie
Hebdo and kosher supermarket shootings in Paris.
Drawing on colonial modes of representation, popular press coverage has tended to
represent Islam as an undifferentiated, static belief system, rooted in 7th-century Arabia
that is unresponsive to change, context or historical differences. For example, the veiling
of women is presented as Islamic without reference to its cultural and historical contexts,
and forced marriage is often represented as a Muslim problem rather than a cultural prac-
tice shared by other faiths, grounded in kinship relations imported (in the British context)
largely from South Asia. In the media, fundamentalism is rarely clearly differentiated
from Islamist extremism and both are depicted as a threat to our values and society. The
tendencies to collapse fundamentalism and Islamism, and to fail to distinguish between
violent and non-violent forms of Islamism, often result in simplistic linkings of funda-
mentalism and terrorism. Since 2005, the Islamist trope has been so prevalent in the media
that, as Lewis argues, The complexity and dynamism of Britains Muslim communities,
with their multiplicity of identities, stories, ethnicities and migration histories, is in danger
of being reduced to one single affiliation (2007: 1). This has had negative effects on the
subjectivity of British Muslims. As one young man put it in an interview for the Parekh
report on the Future of Multi-ethnic Britain (Parekh, 2000):

Im Muslim and portrayed in the media, its always negative, you never see anything
positive, its always fanatics. But Islams not all about that and it sort of gives you low self-
esteem, because beyond that theres a lot of positive. (Asian, male, Birmingham, 1624 age
group, in Parekh, 2000: 41)

Key issues in press coverage are voice and perspective. In his book Only Half of Me
(2006), British Somali journalist, Rageh Omaar shows how only those aspects of subjec-
tivity are acknowledged within public discourse that fit within existing norms of
Britishness. Other dimensions, linked to religion and culture, remain hidden or, more
often, misunderstood. He demonstrates how the power differentials structuring the dis-
cursive field within which British Muslims are located do not acknowledge the legiti-
macy of many aspects of Muslim identity nor allow a rounded picture of British Muslims
to emerge in the public sphere. This can have dire consequences for ordinary Muslims,
particularly at times of heightened tension. It effectively creates the conditions for moral
panics. These have effects not only on the subjectivity and identities of British Muslims
but also on the non-Muslim majority in the UK. Most non-Muslims only encounter what
it means to be Muslim via media representations, usually in the context of events in
which the Muslims in question, and often implicitly all Muslims, are seen to be at fault.
The London bombings of 2005 constituted such an event and, since then, a stream of
news reports related to the appeal of radical Islamism have pointed to the need to under-
stand the factors motivating young, British-born and educated Muslims to turn to jihad.
What can be learned from Stuart Halls work in approaching the appeal of radical
Islamism? What creates the contexts in which Islamist groups successfully recruit sub-
jects? These are complex questions and, following the models offered by Hall, the key
areas for investigation would be the ways in which forms of young Muslim subjectivity
and identity are produced and lived in the context of issues of race, Islamophobia, global
Weedon 111

Islamism and social justice. Multiple factors are important here: family, class, gender,
education, religious upbringing, community, cross-generational conflicts, the more gen-
eral problems associated with teenage years, mosques and madrasas, internet-based reli-
gion and politics, new social media, youth cultures, socio-economic inequalities and
differences, racism, Islamophobia, state policy (particularly in the Middle East and as
regards the prevention of terrorism), the press and other mainstream and alternative
Islamist media. All these factors, ranging from the broadest social processes (the very
logic of capitalist and neoliberal modes of production and subjectivation) to the most
minute localizations, and individual psychosocial forms, need to be brought together in
located, conjunctural analyses that take account of how they are lived and felt at the level
of individuals, groups and communities. None of the above factors can be taken in isola-
tion, and all are subject to the meshing of global and local forces.

Jihadi brides and the question of gender

Challenging the givenness of identity, or even the very existence of any fixed or firm
identity, is central to feminist approaches to understanding subjectivity and identity.
Issues of gender and sexuality become more complex in multicultural societies, where
western norms come into conflict with particular ethnic and religious views and prac-
tices. Thus, for example, the apparent givenness of identities and gender roles located in
non-negotiable interpretations of key religious texts comes through in various funda-
mentalist versions of religion. Yet even here, these forms are complex and have interpre-
tative histories that tend to be simplified and criticized both in western Orientalist
reductionism and in fundamentalist responses. In the process, complicated gendered
realities are flattened out to fit labels of equality or subalternity.
As many Islamic feminists both in the Middle East and the West argue, western femi-
nism often fails to understand Muslim women, viewing observant women who wear what
has come to be defined via culturally specific Middle Eastern influences as traditional
Islamic dress as victims of an oppressive patriarchal religion rather than culturally con-
structed agents in their own right. The contested nature of the position of women in Islam,
much of which revolves around the distinction between the demands of text-based doc-
trine and culturally specific practices, is rendered invisible. Islamic feminists differentiate
between religion and culture and argue that the Quran and the Sunna demonstrate the
legitimacy of a discourse of equality. For them the challenge is to develop forms of femi-
nism that work within Islamic traditions while championing womens position in educa-
tion, work and public life. At issue are questions of gendered power and agency that both
have their own specificity and share aspects with the wider society.
In the case of jihadi brides, the challenge is to understand why young women,
brought up in the West and often highly educated with career paths promising profes-
sional employment, choose to leave this behind for lives described by Smith as given
over to undertaking typical female roles: making house and establishing community
and support structures not fighting. Most of the women fit into two groups those
who travel with their husbands to Jihad, and those who travel to Syria or Iraq to get
married (in NBC, 20014). Yet, establishing community and support structures can
involve real agency:
112 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

An elite militia of British women has been put in charge of stamping out immoral behaviour
at the heart of the Islamic State (IS). Sixty women from the UK have reached IS forces in Iraq
and Syria, with many tweeting from the captured Syrian city of Raqqa. Monitoring groups say
that some have joined the feared al-Khansaa brigade, an all-female morality police which
patrols the city, hunting for deviation from ultra-strict Sharia law. With as many as 500 female
Jihadis thought to have arrived from overseas, experts say the British contingent has impressed
IS commanders with its extremism. (Metro, 2014)

The channelling of affect into embodied conscious identities that have a powerful
emotional dimension is a crucial component in the successful recruiting of young
western-born Muslims and Muslim converts jihad. Understanding the relations
between affect and emotion and their power in shaping the subjectivities beyond and
below the usual identitarian demarcations and labels is important. Both research into
the appeal of radical Islamism and jihad, and autobiographical accounts suggest the
significance of affect and emotion in shaping bodies and modes of self-presentation,
and connecting them to forms of imagined and real empowerment, to networks of
mutual emotional and social support and the formation of shared identities that often
work in tandem with encouragement to adopt an Islamist understanding of religion
(Husain, 2006). For young women marriage is a strong convector of emotion. A
woman interviewee explains:

Girls may be fearful of having to marry someone of their own cultural background with whom
they may have very little in common. There is often a gap between cultural practices of parents
and the proper interpretation of Islam (very well-funded by a certain country in the Middle
East).

Marriage is considered completion of your faith or half your faith and a womans jihad is to be
a good wife. For a teenager, marriage in UK is probably a distant aspiration full of uncertainty
and coupled with hormones [the idea of] being protected and honoured by a young warrior
might be quite alluring, especially so if they have had negative experiences of being female and
Muslim in UK.

Yet there are also factors more widely shared by young women. Thus Rafiq argues that
jihadi brides should not be seen in isolation from other young girls, arguing that teenage
problems are not just a Muslim phenomenon:

the profile [of the typical bride] is too broad to nail down: it could be girls fighting with their
parents, experiencing the identity crises that often accompany teen years, or it could be
anything.

This could be girls who are looking for an avenue, something to do for themselves some sort
of empowerment. Charismatic recruiters either online or on the ground will play on this. (in
NBC, 2014)

He notes that most teens not just Muslims at some point question their identity and
that the recruiters will play up the romantic, idyllic notion of an Islamic state when
encouraging women to come. This romantic idealism, when mixed with religion, can
Weedon 113

have powerful effects on subjectivity as can be seen in the tweets of jihadi brides who
play an important role in attracting new young women to the cause:

I always wanted to live under Sharia Besides, my Muslim brothers and sisters over there
need help. Another Dutch girl, Sara, said that she went to Syria, to follow Gods rules and to
help people. (Hunt, 2014)

Yet jihadi women recruiters do not only appeal to traditional ideas of the feminine. In the
case of Australian Duman, for example:

Photographs were posted to a Twitter account, believed to belong to the former Melbourne
woman, depicting several women standing under an Islamic State flag, reclining against a clean
white BMW M5, wielding machine guns and dressed from head to toe in black Islamic dress.

In one tweet, Duman said: US + Australia, how does it feel that all 5 of us were born n raised
in your lands, & now here thirsty for ur blood?

Another image of five women standing under an Islamic State flag is captioned: Cant mess
with my clique. From the land down under, to the land of Khilafah. Thats the Aussie spirit. 15

Here we see an image that might be part of mainstream popular culture, were it not for
the Islamic dress of the women concerned. Moreover the tweet directly links this new
form of activism to the national idea of Aussie spirit.
In his autobiography, The Islamist (2007), Husain describes how in the UK Islamist
organizations active in communities, higher and further educational institutions and in
mosques actively set out to emotionally engage and shape the thinking and belief systems
of young British Muslims. Yet he also suggests how affective responses to social segrega-
tion and exclusion can be channelled into specific emotionally and psychically empower-
ing Islamist networks and organizations that meet the need to belong and the sense of lack
created by the socio-economic situation of young, inner-city Muslims. Sites where young
Muslims come together have become a source of public concern and, in the case of the
three Bethnal Green girls who disappeared to Syria in February 2015, government and
media attention soon turned to the role of the school in question. In addition to mosques,
madrasas and educational institutions, these sites include prisons, which are reported as
serving as places for the recruiting of young Muslims, in particular converts, to extremism,
and also of gangs that force inmates to convert to Islam.16 While prison-based gangs may
use intimidation, Marc Sagemans (2004) research into the appeal of jihad, which stretches
back to the 1980s war in Afghanistan, suggests that positive emotions are much more
important than negative ones.17 While negative emotions, generated, for example, by rac-
ism, Islamophobia and other forms of social exclusion, create the need for a sense of
belonging and agency, positive emotions that come from finding a place to belong can
recruit more effectively. Thus Montasser Al Deemeh quoted in Hunt (2014) suggests that:

The girls feel that there is no place for them in society, as they are being rejected by everyone,
including Muslims. By contacting Muslims who feel the same way, they try to fulfil needs such
as love, recognition and sisterhood.
114 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

Reflections
Stuart Halls approach to Cultural Studies, mostly formed in the decades preceding the
affective turn in humanities, stresses the importance of not detaching the psychic from
the social. His work has shown how representations of those variously defined as other
in mainstream culture tend to be shaped both by contingent factors and by long-
established popular assumptions, often with roots in colonialism. While films and writ-
ing by and about Muslims have begun to challenge such modes of representation, signal-
ling the importance of affect and addressing questions of emotions in their social contexts,
for example the film Yasmin (Glenaan, 2004) and the two-part TV serial Britz (Kosminsky,
2007), they too belong to specific moments and need to be part of broader conjunctural
analysis. Contingent factors affect what is privileged at any particular moment and insti-
gate cultural change. For example, writing in 2007, Philip Lewis points to how shifting
discursive contexts simplify issues in different ways. When he was writing his first book
about Muslims in the early 1990s, his agenda was to convince a largely secular and left
liberal leaning race and ethnicity community to take religion seriously as a compo-
nent of identity (Lewis, 2007: xiii). By 2007 this agenda had changed radically:

This book, contrariwise, worries that many politicians, journalists, policy-makers and academics
have fallen into the opposite trap namely of privileging Islam as an explanation for quite
disparate phenomena, whether riots, disaffected inner-city youth, political radicalization or
violent extremism. (2007: viii)

Stuart Hall argues that multicultural societies are the product of the dynamics of cul-
tural change, as they are affected by issues of inequality and discrimination. Societies
both produce and are produced by ongoing subtle and less subtle changes in perceptions,
beliefs and values. Hall advocates nuanced and complex, located, multi-layered and
multi-faceted conjunctural analysis. This entails the historicization of meanings and val-
ues as effects of power. This approach needs to be defended if the project of Cultural
Studies, so important to Stuart Hall, is to maintain relevance and social reach. The exam-
ple of western jihadis, posed here as a problem that as yet knows no solution, and the
many more racialized, gendered and class-bound dramas of lived culture, require such an
approach if we are to understand their dynamics in ways that enable policies and prac-
tices that counteract violence and promote inclusion and equality through difference.18

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

Notes
1. For Islamists, Political sovereignty belongs to God rather than the people. Islamists believe
that their reading of Shariah should be state law, and that it is the religious duty of all Muslims
to pledge allegiance to an Islamic state that reflects these principles. See: http://www.quil-
liamfoundation.org/wp/wp-content/uploads/publications/free/Jihad-trending-quilliam-report.
pdf (accessed 14 September 2014).
Weedon 115

2. Aljosa Puzar commented from Korea that it is western and not Islamic schools in the East
that are generators of this mediatized Muslim violence, and that similar examples can
be found in unexpectedly militant Buddhist guerillas and terrorist groups in Thailand and
Myanmar that play differently under the western radar (personal communication).
3. Available on YouTube, it was filmed by Bilal Abdul Kareem, an American Muslim convert.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hAlKlQ2g1Q (accessed 8 September 2014).
4. See: http://www.channel4.com/news/aqsa-mahmood-parents-syria-terrorism-islamic-state-
glasgow-ISIS (accessed 10 September 2014).
5. According to Smith, quoted in a Guardian article by Homa Khaleeli (2014):

no one knows exactly how many of the 500 Britons thought to have travelled to Syria to join
ISIS as of autumn 2014 are women, but [she] believes there are around 200 western women
in the country. However, as Smith explains, this total has risen since the insurgents territory
(swathes of land totalling an estimated 35,000 square miles in Syria and Iraq) was declared a
caliphate. There is a stronger pull now Baghdadi has called for all women to come.

6. See: https://au.news.yahoo.com/world/a/25869299/melbourne-woman-marries-jihadi-play-
boy/ (accessed 5 April 2015).
7. See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3019932/Australian-Jihadi-Bride-using-social-
media-website-recruit-new-women-join-ISIS-share-deepest-secrets.html#ixzz3WKKQTD00
(accessed 4 April 2015).
8. See: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3019932/Australian-Jihadi-Bride-using-social-
media-website-recruit-new-women-join-ISIS-share-deepest-secrets.html#ixzz3WKQq8MCz
(accessed 5 April 2015)
9. See: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/islamic-state/11427505/Schoolgirls-have-
already-crossed-Syrian-border-say-sources.html accessed 5/04/2015
10. This circa four-and-a-half hour interview covers Halls life and thought, including useful
material on identity, race and multiculturalism.
11. Interview conducted in Cardiff in September 2014. Lewis (2007: xiv) estimates the numbers
of radical Salifi/Wahabi mosques as 40 out of 1000 in the UK.
12. Interview, Cardiff, September 2014.
13. Founded by two former Islamists, Maajid Nawaz and Ed Husain, the Quilliam Foundation
describes itself as the worlds first counter-extremism think tank set up to address the unique
challenges of citizenship, identity, and belonging in a globalized world. Quilliam stands for
religious freedom, equality, human rights and democracy. See: http://www.quilliamfounda-
tion.org (accessed 14 September 2012).
14. Available at: http://fa-tubalilghuraba.tumblr.com/archive (accessed 30 September 2014).
15. http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3019932/Australian-Jihadi-Bride-using-social-
media-website-recruit-new-women-join-ISIS-share-deepest-secrets.html#ixzz3WKQq8MCz
(accessed 5 April 2015).
16. There have been a number for press reports suggesting this over the last few years, see, for
example, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/law-and-order/9298578/Prisoners-under-
pressure-to-convert-to-Muslim-gang.html (accessed 11 April 2015).
17. Marc Sageman, author of Understanding Terror Networks (2004), is a former CIA case officer.
From 1986 to 1989 he worked with Islamic fundamentalists on a daily basis during the Afghan-
Soviet war. After leaving the Foreign Service in 1991, he returned to practice psychiatry, acquired
a doctorate in political sociology and specialized in research into the origins of collective violence.
18. Thanks to Aljosa Puzar, Abeer Ameer, Caroline Joll and Handel Wright for their helpful feedback
on this article.
116 International Journal of Cultural Studies 19(1)

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Author biography
Chris Weedon is Honorary Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory at Cardiff
University. She has published widely on feminist theory, cultural politics and womens writing.
Her books include Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory (1987 and 1996); Cultural
Politics: Class, Render, Race and the Postmodern World (with Glenn Jordan, 1994); Postwar
Womens Writing in German (ed. 1997); Feminism, Theory and the Politics of Difference (1999);
Identity and Culture: Narratives of Difference and Belonging (2004); and Gender, Feminism and
Fiction in Germany 18401914 (2006). Her current work is on multi-ethnic Britain and cultural
and collective memory.