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HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIM

the state’s suppression of those views it deems a threat to itself and the nation—‘‘anti-
Western,’’ ‘‘fundamentalist,’’ and ‘‘refusing to integrate’’—remains within the framework
of constitutional law. Yet divergent views of all stripes, whether explicitly religious or
pacifist or anticonsumerist, only reach the public sphere with difficulty, and then all too
often are distorted.^30 The problem is that precisely the privileging of selected segments of
Western society—those enacting and representing mainstream, Western self-concep-
tions—over others in the public space is itself fundamentally undemocratic. In essence,
what takes place is the propagation of undemocratic practices in the name of democracy.
The crucial point here is that Western nations’ public debate around the veil, repre-
sentative as it is for the debate about Islam, has failed according to the standards not only
of progressive multiculturalism but of democracy itselfonce democracy is conceived as a
comprehensive rather than a nationalist project—that is, once we commit ourselves to de-
mocracy in the name of democracy and not of this or that authority, this or that nation.
The key point is that while it may be the nation’s intention to realize democracy, it cannot
be democracy’s intention to preserve the nation. True democracy, as Simon Critchley
argues, at once strives for and never achieves ‘‘the fantasy of the society as one, as a unity
or fullness.’’^31 It is the perpetual incompleteness of the intention, as well as the intention
itself, that must be recognized and kept alive. The moment democracy is imagined as
truly achieved, or as the particular achievement/property/essence of only one people or
civilization, is the moment of its death. That is to say: democracy is as much an ethics as
a politics. In this sense, the actual participation of democratic subjects is at least as vital as
the legislative creation of the possibility to participate. In this specific regard, the growing
alienation of individual citizens from collective democratic practices in Western nations
since the Second World War is all the more flagrant in light of the knee-jerk frequency
with which contemporary Western democracy is presented as a corrective to Islam’s os-
tensibly inherent repressive and calcifying deficiencies.^32

INTERLUDE: AN INTERVIEW WITH THE MINISTER

Below are some excerpts from a recent conversation between the journalist Folkert Jensma

and Rita Verdonk, the Dutch Minister of Aliens Affairs and Integration. She is a member of

the Liberal Party and a former prison director. It was printed a day after the AIVD, the Dutch

domestic intelligence and security agency, published a report documenting that the harsh

attacks on Islam in the media and government are alienating minority youth, possibly to the

point of driving them into the hands of fundamentalists (NRC Handelsblad, March 13–14,

2004, 17).

RV: If your child goes to school in the Netherlands, then it can’t be that he hears something

completely different at home. That has to be changed.

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