MARKHA G. VALENTABelfast, with bomb attacks and burned-out churches and mosques... a fight to the death.
An unequal fight that we’re going to lose’’—to the explicitly progressive, gay, mixed-race
writer Stephan Sanders, who can likewise only see in the veil a gaping wound that marks
the destruction of a woman’s individuality and expressiveness, her subjection to a male
or divine hand, a ‘‘moral masochism... [a] danger, in the form of someone who thinks
that she must hide herself from sight.’’^29 Spying a girl whose headscarf has slid back,
Sanders imagines that she wrestles with the question of whether or not to put the veil
back in place. And in watching her, Sanders himself takes on the role of ‘‘witness,’’ docu-
menting her grand ‘‘personal struggle like that of all struggles for freedom in history’’—a
struggle for the freedom, Sanders in fact implies, to become like him, an individual unfet-
tered by tradition, religion, or social ties.
To a significant extent, these developments are, of course, the continuation of a tradi-
tional Eurocentrism that to this day quite unself-consciously values and foregrounds clas-
sically ‘‘Western’’ views and concerns, including anti-Islamic stereotypes that have
changed little since they were first developed during the Crusades. Crucially, the domi-
nant terms of this discourse are those of modernism and secularism, concepts equated
and exchanged regularly and unself-consciously with those of democracy and tolerance.
Correspondingly, all parties in the public discussion now being held throughout Western
Europe are in fact required to enact modernist (which is also to say: territorial, nationalist,
rationalist, individualist) secularity even when secularity itself, and modernism, are the
ideologies they most seek to challenge and resist. If secularity and modernity are to be
questioned, their discursive and political priority force critics to question them on their
own terms. To consider the veil—or the nation—outside this framework is to risk placing
oneself outside the public discussion itself.
This, in fact, is what has happened. On the one hand, the significant analyses of the
veil not framed in exclusively modernist, Western-centric terms—such as, among others,
the work of the historian Leila Ahmed (Women and Gender in Islam), the anthropologists
Fadwa El Guindi (The Veil) and Lila Abu-Lughod (Writing Women’s Worlds), the sociolo-
gists Fatima Mernissi (Beyond the Veil) and Monique Gadant (‘‘Femmes alibi’’), the radi-
cal anticolonial writer Frantz Fanon (‘‘L’Alge ́rie se de ́voile’’), the literary critic Winifred
Woodhull (Transfigurations of the Maghreb), the psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray (Speculum of
the Other Woman, among others), the filmmaker Yamina Benguigui (Femmes en Islam),
and the philosopher-theologian-activist Tariq Ramadan (Western Muslims and the Future
of Islam)—continue to be generally marginalized and ignored by Western politicians,
policymakers, journalists, pundits, and public intellectuals. And not only by them but by
feminists, as well, deeply indebted as the majority are to Western humanism, including
its most recent antifoundationalist variation. I’ve touched on this above, but it is still
important to observe how spare, how watery and thin, has been the Western feminist
engagement with Islamic critical thought, including with Islamic feminism.
To this extent, our public discussions of the veil, that marker of Islamic difference,
are vitally impoverished. Democratic principles certainly are abided by in the sense that
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