HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIM
We believe without belief, beyond belief.
—Wallace Stevens
After you’ve spent a whole morning seeing through the illusions of politics,
of love, of family and God, of art and meditation, have had to declare them
unfit, when yet in the course of another morning you’ve left nothing whole
of all that mankind believes in—not because youwantto destroy, but
because it already was broken, torn, ravaged in the first place, because
the scales must finally fall from peoples’ eyes—then, sometime around
lunchtime, you feel a need for spirituality.
—Arnon Grunberg,The Asylum Seeker
The debate on the veil is part of the larger—and as yet unresolved—problem of
minorities in representative democracies; the difficulty, perhaps even the impossibility,
that minor positions and experiences have in being heard—recognized—by the majority.
At the same time, of all the minorities within the West’s nation-states, the case of Islam
stands out at this moment by virtue of the urgency with which it is experienced as an
issue in need of immediate and drastic attention; the intensity with which it links local,
national, and international currents; the degree to which the representation of Islam, and
correspondingly of the West as Islam’s other, are contorted and distorted; and the range
and extent of the political, social, and human consequences of such distortions.^27
So, in the Netherlands, a land with a long tradition of religious and cultural tolerance,
the events of September 11 released a flood of anti-Islamic commentary, practices, and
legislation (most recently, the effective if indirect suppression of Islamic schools in a
country committed to state support of religious education), which shows no signs of
abating soon. If all Western nations have their own history of anti-Islamic orientalism,
the shift in the Netherlands from a national commitment to antidiscrimination before
September 11 to a national commitment to the forceful integration, marginalization, and
repression of divergent Muslim elements after the September attacks has been, quite pos-
sibly, the most dramatic of all European responses—notwithstanding the French commit-
ment to Muslims’ ‘‘laicization’’ and the British and German willingness to discriminate
against Muslims relative to Christians and Jews. And so a tide of anti-Islamic ‘‘common
sense’’ now infects the public realm, vociferously and blindly—as in the columns of the
late Theo van Gogh, or in essays by the writer Leon de Winter, or in the LPF’s echoes of
Pim Fortuyn’s jeremiad against the ‘‘Islamicization’’ of Dutch society—asserting Islam’s
‘‘backward’’ nature, its aggressive resistance to conversion into the modern, Western fold,
and its disruption of moral citizenship.^28
This development has captured virtually the entire spectrum of Dutch public
thought, from the Liberals and Christian Democrats to the Labor Party and Socialists,
and from the ever crudely provocative antiestablishment Theo van Gogh—who imagined
that Islam’s presence reintroduces the possibility of religious war in Holland, ‘‘a kind of
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