HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMset of distinct themes, discourses, and histories. But at the same time they are continually
made to flow through each other; almost invariably any discussion of one generates refer-
ences to all the others. So the veil is not only the meeting point between East and West,
is not only a border phenomenon, but has made its way to the very heart of contemporary
Western history and identity. Today the West cannot answer the question of its nature
and its future without going through Islam. In this sense, the West has already been as
‘‘Islamicized’’ as the Islamic world has been Westernized.
The fourth point to note is the centrality of territoriality to this discussion. In fact,
this is the heart of the matter. The most fundamental socio-political trend of modernity,
as the historian Charles Maier argues, has been the control of space as the primary princi-
ple not only for organizing and regulating power but also for our very imagination of the
world.^4 The role and conception of space over past centuries has, of course, been far
from universally consistent. Yet since the sixteenth century societies across the world have
increasingly linked both their identity and their security to bounded space—by force as
much as by choice. More specifically, since the mid-nineteenth century, new technologies
have mandated and enabled a rescaling of territoriality, all too often through civil war, in
the course of which decentralized (proto-)national regimes transformed themselves into
increasingly centralized, coherent nation-states. From Meiji Japan to Canada, from Ar-
gentina to the states of Italy, and from Thailand to the German Confederation, this devel-
opment has been both too global and too simultaneous to be understood (though it often
still is) as a matter of diffusion, as the gradual spread of the European nation-state model
to the rest of the world. Instead, what we see is that the combined effect of new technolo-
gies, human migrations, and the spread of revolutionary ideologies led to a comprehen-
sive disruption of rural hierarchies: in China and Japan, in the Americas, and in Europe
itself ‘‘the land was escaping the control of its traditional rulers.’’^5 Responses of the elites
varied, of course, but the most successful were those where, as in Meiji Japan, old and
new elites joined together to deploy the newest resources at hand—steam power, the
railroad, the telegraph, the market—to expand the geographical scale of their political
control. If the Peace of Westphalia initiated the ‘‘invention of the frontier’’ in Europe and
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the great ‘‘epochs of enclosure,’’ then by
the late nineteenth century spatial partition had become the hegemonic form of global
politics and social imagination, turning frontiers into ‘‘the razor’s edge on which are
suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life or death to nations,’’ as the trium-
phant colonialist Lord Curzon declared.^6 ‘‘The modern world,’’ Maier writes, ‘‘was
gripped by the episteme of separation’’:
When the boundaries were transgressed or could not be stabilized, social orders de-
generated. Liberals and revolutionaries as well as expansionists shared the conviction
that tribal peoples lacking territorial structures must succumb to modern states....
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