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HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIM

memories and desires, and so inclined to disrupt most senses of being ‘‘at home’’ on a

regular basis, no matter how well intentioned the nursing-home policy?

Some Conclusions

Certainly, in this way the whole onus of all that is ‘‘alien,’’ ‘‘fearful,’’ and ‘‘intrusive’’ in the

nursing home comes to reside in the veil and the Muslim.

It is precisely this movement, however, that the commission in exemplary fashion re-

jects by refusing specifically to recognize the highly selective, strategic partition between

present and past, Dutch and Muslim, headscarf and veil, on which this move so vitally

depends.

Consistent with the principled ‘‘pragmatism’’ of Dutch judicial decisions though it is, the

commission’s judgment at the same time stands in sharp contrast to the general tenor of

public discourse on the veil in the Netherlands. As I write, for example, the board of my

university is considering enacting its own dress code barring full facial veils and requiring

students to make eye contact and shake hands with their professors, all in the name of

protecting ‘‘Dutch cultural norms’’ and ‘‘Western values.’’

This is, to be sure, a triple elision. On the one hand, it is an erasure of the ancient
Mediterranean world’s ‘‘coherence’’ as a constellation of intersecting, mutually influenc-
ing cultures as these contributed critically to the evolution of both the West and Islam. In
this sense, it makes as much sense to claim ancient Greek and Roman thought and
achievements for ‘‘Islam’’ as for ‘‘Europe’’—considering thatboththese identities devel-
oped long after their object. In the second place, a blindness to the fact that the veil we
have today is not that of yesterday. The coverings on women’s heads that the British
encountered in Egypt were, in fact, one variation on the whole range of head-coverings
common for women (and men) throughout Europe as much as throughout the Middle
East. It was the colonial encounter that made of specific women’s head-coverings some-
thing more, a covering not like all others but instead a category all its own, a ‘‘Muslim
veil,’’ symbolizing the line between West and East, enlightened and oppressed, the familiar
and the fearful. Finally, this is an obfuscation of the comprehensive misogynist collusion,
of the ease with which all these societies—including an originally egalitarian Egyptian
one—were able to find each other in women’s containment and comprehensive oppres-
sion. Certainly, women’s possibilities, roles, and ‘‘nature’’ varied from one place to the
next; certainly women had their own forms of resistance, indirect power, and creativity.
Yet the veil’s survival over the course of thousands of years traces the shared traffic in and
through women, their collectively separate condition relative to men’s in the midst of a
realm of differences between ancient Judaic, Greco-Roman, Christian, Zoroastrian, and

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