How to recognize a muslim when You See One western secularism and the politics of conversion

Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

Volumn , Issue , 2006, Pages 444-474

  Valenta, Markha G ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM   (Netherlands)

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EID: 84879986020     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
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References (62)

1. As Robert N. Bellah argues in "Religion and Belief: The Historical Background of 'Non-Belief'," Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), 216-29.
2. While my concern is with the nature of the debate about the veil in Western public space as a whole, the most urgent and contested discussions are in fact centered in continental Western Europe. English-speaking nations of the West share the same prejudices toward the Islamic veil as Western Europe, but this has not generated the same level of distressed debate, political posturing, and legislation. I'll come back to the reasons for this below. For now, I want to recognize that in many ways the debate about the veil is in fact more about the nature of (continental Western) Europe specifically than about the West in general. Yet precisely the historical slippage between "Europe" and the "West," and the question of the extent to which Europe still can imagine that it represents the West as a whole, is one of the most central issues here. In line with this slippage, I continue at moments to use the term West to refer both to the larger collection of nation-states tracing their primary descent lines to all of Europe and more specifically to the smaller collection of powerful Western European nations that continue to conceive of themselves as representing the West as a whole. Most specifically, my locale is the public space of the Netherlands-the West's first modern world power, once the world's largest "Muslim" empire, and today perhaps the Western European nation-state most torn between modernity's contradictory heritage of tolerant, pragmatic humanism and purist, idealist rationalism (a distinction Stephen Toulmin develops beautifully in his Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity [New York: Free Press, 1990]).
3. This is not an argument I can elaborate here, but I might note that the deep complexities and contradictions of Pim Fortuyn's intellectual legacy and political trajectory as an openly gay, reactionary populist, who was at once anti-immigration and open about his nights of pleasure with young North African men, culminating in his assassination by a radical animal-rights activist, offer one useful starting point for thinking about the Netherlands as more "representative" of the West's crisis-ridden modernist project than its tiny size today might suggest. In the U.S. context, the veil's equivalent in terms of affective resonance and political sensitivity is perhaps the Spanish language of Latino (im)migrants, likewise read as a synechdochal index of an "alien," nonwhite, Catholic presence. Here too, in the U.S., the likes of Pat Buchanan and Samuel Huntington argue that Hispanics, specifically Mexican immigrants, resist linguistic and cultural integration and in doing so threaten both the integrity of American national identity and the future of the nation-state. Unlike in Europe, however, there exists in the U.S. a much more extensive repertoire of counter-narratives and scholarly critiques with which to engage such arguments. See Samuel Huntington's recent Who Are We?: The Challenges to America's National Identity (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004)
4. along with the furious letters in response to an extract from this book collected by the journal Foreign Policy 142 (May/June 2004): 4-13, 84-91.
5. Notably, Huntington's previous book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order
6. provided the blueprint for this one in arguing the incompatibility of Western and Islamic civilizations. An article that offers a comparative overview of these issues from a sociological perspective is Aristide R. Zolberg and Long Litt Woon, "Why Islam Is Like Spanish: Cultural Incorporation in Europe and the United States," Politics & Society 27, no. 1 (March 1999): 5-38. (I thank Jan Rath for bringing this article to my attention.) The critical question of the relation between language and religion relative to the construction of the nation-state, both conceptually and practically, is unfortunately not one of the concerns of this paper. A crucial difference between the U.S. and Europe on this point, however, is that widespread resistance to Hispanic language and culture within the U.S. is mixed with widespread response and appeal to it-whether by commercial interests seeking to benefit from new media markets or presidential candidates, such as Bush, striving to benefit electorally. Spanish is, furthermore, the most popular foreign language among high-school children. We have yet to see the equivalent development in Europe: a non-Muslim political candidate at moments donning a headscarf (or, in the case of a heterosexual man, enticing his wife to do so) in order to appeal to Muslim voters, while Turkish, Arabic, and Berber become not only widely accessible languages at school but top European languages in the number of students they draw.
7. Charles S. Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History: Alternative Narratives for the Modern Era," The American Historical Review 105, no. 3 (2000), www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/105.3/ah000807.html 3 (December 12, 2003).
8. The citation is from George Lord Curzon of Kedleston, Frontiers: The Romanes Lectures of 1907 (1908; Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976)
9. originally cited by Ewan W. Anderson in "Geopolitics: International Boundaries as Fighting Places," Journal of Strategic Studies 22 (June-September 1999): 128.
10. Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History," par. 26.
11. See on this point Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991).
12. cited by Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History," par. 29.
13. Simon Critchley, "The Problem of Hegemony," Albert Schweizer Series on Ethics and Politics, New York University (April 22, 2004)
14. in Political Theory: Essays; http://www.politicaltheory.info/essays/critchley.htm (May 14, 2004).
15. On this process and the imbrication of the territorial with the capitalist in the field of literary studies, see Edward W. Said's "Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community" (1987)
16. Reflections on Exile and Other Literary and Cultural Essays (London: Granta Books, 2000), 118-47. Said traces the ways in which originally radical forms of literary criticism, ones with comprehensively liberating, democratic intentions, such as the American and French New Criticisms, Leavisite criticism in Britain, or Marxist literary theory, have become depoliticized, privatized, and self-confirming through a process of disciplinary specialization. At the same time, the university's fragmentation of knowledge not only produces particular economic constituencies-the audience/client-base of 3,000 scholars in a given literary field likely to buy a scholarly book in that field-but also specifically strives to develop the techniques necessary for "protect[ing] the coherence, the territorial integrity, the social identity of the field, its adherents and its institutional presence" (126).
17. Maier, "Consigning the Twentieth Century to History," par. 22.
18. For an interesting and useful elaboration of this argument, see Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Other (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).
19. The wonderfully evocative and telling phrase "waiting room of history" I borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty, though Amit Chauduri notes that the German playwright Heiner Muller also used it to refer to the Third World in a 1989 interview. Amit Chauduri, "History's Waiting Room," Australian Financial Review (August 6, 2004), http://www.afr.com/articles/2004/08/05/1091557987708.html (May 12, 2005).
20. See Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 8.
21. On the universalizing intent of particularly British colonial discourse, see Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage, 1993)
22. esp. the first three sections of chap. 2, "Consolidated Vision" (73-132). On Egypt "as mirror of the Arab world in the modern age," a common standpoint among scholars, based on Egypt's influential cultural, intellectual, political, and social role in the modern Middle East, see Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 6. Just as important, however, has been the West's habit of selectively universalizing Egyptian discourse, when convenient. So, e.g., the fatwa of the head ulama of Al-Ahzar University fully affirming the right of the French state to prohibit headscarves within its domain has been given wide coverage by the Western press and various publicists. These like to present the ulama as embodying the highest (and implicitly universal) Islamic authority, but leave aside considering his complex local relations to the Egyptian state (his employer), along with the dose of practical cynicism with which his decision has been received by those portions of the Egyptian and broader Islamic public that do take such complex local relations into account.
23. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, discusses these developments in chap. 2, "The Mediterranean Middle East." I should note that there has been much questioning of the historical validity and thoroughness of Ahmed's account of the ancient Middle East. My initial introduction of this section as a story, then, was in full awareness of the complex location of storytelling between fabrication and truth. Elaborating as it does on weak historical evidence, the account here is as much a narrative of what might have been as of what actually was. The point is to enable a creative rethinking of the relation between Europe and the Middle East, Christianity and Islam. To reimagine our past, so that we can reconsider the present. This is always risky. Always. But vital too. Precisely because we need new imaginations to uncover new facts.
24. Linda Kerber and Jane DeHart-Mathews, eds. Women's America: Refocusing the Past, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 224.
25. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 152.
26. Catherine A. MacKinnon's discussion of pornography comes to mind here as one of the few relevant, and radical, engagements with this issue, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 11, "Pornography: On Morality and Politics." More generally, while extant Western feminist discussions of women's construction and consumption through the male gaze under capitalist liberalism are highly developed and at moments quite powerful, they have yet to tap the rich resources (or engage the challenge) offered by the intricate dynamics of veiling. This entails, on the one hand, veiling as a dynamic response to the difficult problem of how to contend with the potency of human sexuality and, on the other hand, veiling as a practice that situates itself at the vital intersection between subjection and agency, abjection and identity, the social and the divine, the male and the female, the personal and the political, in ways as complex as they are demanding.
27. Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 153.
28. Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism, 129.
29. The essay Said references offers a particularly useful elaboration of this point: Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), 1:203-35.
30. On the human consequences-the disrupted lives, broken families, flights into exile, and forced repatriations-resulting from, for example, the U.S. security and registration acts, see the collection of articles in the Chicago Tribune special report "Tossed Out of America" (November 16-18, 2003) http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-031116immigration-storygallery.special (May 17, 2004).
31. Pim Fortuyn's foregrounding of this standpoint in his political campaign helped to usher in much of the current atmosphere of aggressive controlling gestures, fear, and revulsion toward Islam so frequently expressed not only in the media and government but in the everyday contacts of shopping lines, work, and on the street. For one of the few truly thoughtful and powerfully elaborated critiques of this development in the Netherlands, see Peter van der Veer, Islam en het 'beschaafde' Westen: Essays over de 'achterlijkheid' van religies [Islam and the "Civilized" West: Essays on the "Backwardness" of Religions] (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2002).
32. Bastiaan Patermotte, "Boris Dittrich versus Theo van Gogh," Metro (May 26, 2004), 13
33. Stephan Sanders, "De stok, de hond & de wond" [The Stick, the Dog, & the Wound], Vrij Nederland 64, no. 39 (September 27, 2003): 51.
34. While I bracket the question of the nature and extent of active repression within Western societies, this certainly is a relevant question-particularly, at this moment, in the face of the United States' repeated gross violations of potential and suspected enemies' human rights. More generally, there is the ongoing problem of American police brutality and the state's excessive incarceration of its citizens (after Rwanda, the country with the highest proportion of its citizens in jail, accounting for one quarter of all the world's prison inmates) and dubious death sentences (such as the case of the radical black journalist Mumia Abu-Jamal), alongside the fact that the national media is owned by a small handful of conglomerates, some with close ties to the military and government. Similarly, serious concerns can be raised when it comes to the treatment of asylum seekers and immigrants in Europe and Australia. At the same time, such violations of the West's democratic ideals are publicized and challenged by a wide range of grassroots religious, intellectual, and political interest organizations committed to confronting Western nation-states with their own failures and hypocrisies. Too infrequently remarked, however, are the ways in which this confrontation between democracy and "restricted" repression within the West parallels similar tensions in Iran, Morocco, and Indonesia, among others, between democratic and dogmatically repressive forces. The general assumption that Western democracy is a given-and most especially the assumption of the priority, superiority, and refinement of its democratic practice relative to the Rest's democratic backwardness (temporal as well as practical)-too often obscures the global nature of the tension between modern states' totalizing intentions and "true" democracy's disruptive nature. That is, even in light of Western nation-states' relative democracy, there is much to be learned and emulated from the debates and developments beyond its borders. In particular, what those in the West seem to forget is the existence of intensely layered underground intellectual and artistic cultures beyond its horizon, flowering persistently under the most repressive conditions: cultures capable of a richness, nuance, and productivity at moments far superior to the relatively simplistic images and positions (progressive as well as conservative) so stimulated by the West's saturation in market-driven media, expert opinions, books, and films. On this last point see, e.g., the Iranian Shervin Nekuee's account "Een Armeense wijsheid" [An Armenian Proverb], De Helling 4 (Winter 2003): 19.
35. Critchley, "The Problem of Hegemony," par. 23.
36. Talal Asad, "Muslims as a 'Religious Minority' in Europe," in Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 159.
37. Michael Wintle, "Cultural Identity in Europe: Shared Experience," Culture and Identity in Europe (Aldershot: Avebury, 1996), 13
38. discussed in Asad, Formations of the Secular, 166. Crucially, Wintle himself has been influenced in his work by both Edward Said and Michel Foucault, and at times locates his contemporary project in the realm of postcolonial criticism.
39. Asad, "Muslims as a 'Religious Minority' in Europe," Formations of the Secular, 166.
40. See Dipesh Chakrabarty's development of this argument in Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).
41. T. M. Scanlon, "The Difficulty of Tolerance," Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Rajeev Bhargava (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 60-61.
42. Michel Rocard, "Europe's Modest Mission," http://www.project-syndicate.org (May 27, 2004).
43. On Dutch assumptions about their nation's superiority as Gidsland (Guiding Nation) for the world and immigrants' resistance to the Dutch national narrative and culture, see Joris Luyendijk, "Vraag niet van de ander 'ons' te willen zijn" [Don't Ask the Other to Want to Be "Us"], NRC Handelsblad (January 15, 2004). More generally, the scholarly literature on the Netherlands as Gidsland is extensive.
44. On the risks and challenges of rigorous, serious tolerance, see Scanlon, "The Difficulty of Tolerance."
45. I take this phrase from the title of Peter van der Veer's anthology Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity (New York: Routledge, 1996).
46. I am in this section heavily indebted to Peter van Rooden's discussion in "Nineteenth-Century Representations of Missionary Conversion," in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York: Routledge, 1996), 65-87.
47. See also A. D. Ward, The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1982).
48. Van Rooden, "Nineteenth-Century Representations of Missionary Conversion," 78.
49. As Callum Brown points out, even the most secular and atheist of nineteenth-century socialist radicals invariably understood and narrated his life as a "conversion" from irresponsible, thoughtless pleasure-seeking to serious and responsible activity. See Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000 (London: Routledge, 2001).
50. C. Snouck Hurgronje, Nederland en de Islâm [The Netherlands and Islam], 2d ed. (1911; Leiden: Brill, 1915), xiii-ix.
51. Charles Taylor, "Modes of Secularism," in Secularism and Its Critics, ed. Bhargava, 31-53.
52. Talal Asad, Introduction, Formations of the Secular, 6.
53. Peter van Rooden is one of the few scholars to have traced this crucial historical development. See specifically his "Nineteenth-Century Representations of Missionary Conversion and the Transformation of Western Christianity" and, more comprehensively, Religieuze regimes: Over godsdienst en maatschappij in Nederland, 1570-1990 [Religious Regimes: On Religion and Society in the Netherlands, 1570-1990], (Amsterdam: Bert Bakker, 1996).
54. Hélène Cixous and Jacques Derrida, Veils, trans. Geoffrey Bennington, drawings by Ernest Pignon-Ernest (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
55. Immanuel Kant, "On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy," trans. Peter Fenves, in Raising the Tone of Philosophy: Late Essays by Emmanuel Kant, Transformative Critique by Jacques Derrida, ed. Peter Fenves (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 71
56. cited in Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 375. I thank Yolande Jansen for bringing this quotation to my attention.
57. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 375.
58. For an intriguing reading of this moment, see Dianna Rhyan Kardulis, "Odysseus in Ino's Veil: Feminine Headdress and the Hero in Odyssey 5," Transactions of the American Philological Association 131 (2001): 23-51.
59. Cited by Cynthia D. Schrager, "Both Sides of the Veil: Race, Science, and Mysticism in W. E. B. Du Bois," American Quarterly 48, no. 4 (1996): 551.
60. My whole discussion of Du Bois here is heavily indebted to Schrager's essay. On the historical and contemporary precedents for Du Bois's use of this trope, see also Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., "W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness," American Literature 64, no. 2 (June 1992), 299-309.
61. Schrager, "Both Sides of the Veil," 554-55.
62. Sam Gill, "Territory," in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 300.