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MARKHA G. VALENTA

say: the veil cannot easily stand, as so many have assumed or asserted, for the difference,
the boundary, between Europe and some repressive Oriental/Byzantine/Islamic other.
What the veil in fact marks is one of the many moments of difference’s dissolution, of
the historical interweaving of Occidental and Oriental to create the very thing that today
at moments most seems to divide the two.
This is a crucial point to the extent that many in the West argue that Islam itself must
undergo a process of ‘‘enlightenment’’ and advancement—a process of modernization,
even secularization—whose success depends on making it, in Western eyes, more akin to
the West they know. For many this step entails dropping the veil, read simultaneously as
a symbol for a ‘‘medieval’’ past that Europe itself has left behind and as resistance to
universal norms of secular democracy and equality.

INTERLUDE: WHAT’S IN A HOME?

Federal [Dutch] Equal Treatment Commission—Judgment 2003–157.On April 4, 2003, the

director of a nursing home in The Hague gave a radio interview in which she described her

institution’s dress code prohibiting nursing-home staff from wearing headscarves, caps, or

any other head-coverings. The director explained that the code was required because of

the nursing home’s ‘‘lifestyle-based’’ approach to geriatric care. This consisted in having

demented and thus easily frightened residents live in an environment familiar to them. Is-

lamic headscarves, she believed, didn’t fit in with the culture in which these residents had

been raised. Correspondingly, some Indonesian nurses who refused to remove their veils

were transferred to another nursing home. Following the radio interview, the Office of Dis-

crimination Issues (The Hague) brought a suit against the nursing home for religious dis-

crimination. The Equal Treatment Commission hearing the case agreed, remarking that

headgear of all sorts, including headscarves, had been part of the daily street scene when

these residents had been growing up during the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s. The nursing home

therefore was found to have made a ‘‘not objectively justified’’ (indirect) religious distinc-

tion, in violation of the equal treatment law.

Some Questions

Why is it that the nursing-home director moved to foreground Islamic scarves as a site

of particularly disruptive potency, in curious contrast to her (assumed) tolerance for such

drastically ‘‘foreign’’ entities as blue jeans and sneakers, plastic, fresh nonlocal produce,

racial and ethnic minorities, central heating, male nurses, women with short hair, and so

forth?

Does it perhaps ‘‘cover up’’ the fact that nursing-home residents by definition are bound

to be subject to a temporal, spatial, and physical regimen utterly foreign to them, to their

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