HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMtraced to the fact that it is the site at which not one but two highly charged discourses
encounter, intermingle, and disrupt each other: one concerning the relation between
Islam and the West, the other, the relation of the West to its own past and future.^33
Talal Asad’s essay ‘‘Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe’’ is important, among
other reasons, for foregrounding the extent to which the problem of Islam in Europe is
the problem of Europe’s own self-representation.^34 Such representation has never been
easy, for the multiple peoples, cultures, politics, and religions that inhabit the territory of
‘‘Europe’’ mean that any definition of Europe’s boundaries is bound to be political. Tell-
ing the story of Europe has meant implicitly or explicitly excluding the putatively non-
European within Europe: the Jewish, the Scandinavian, the Roma, the Eastern (Orthodox/
Russian), the Muslim, the African. What then survives this onslaught is the narrative of a
civilization and a history understood in terms of a fundamental, essential Europeanness
developing across homogeneous space and through linear time. So the notion of ‘‘Eu-
rope’’ is used—by the historian Michael Wintle, for example—to designate the peoples
and cultures that have been subjected to the successive formative events of the Roman
Empire, Christianity, Enlightenment, and industrialization.^35 Each event in turn is under-
stood as having shaped the subjects within its bounds into respectively Roman, Christian,
Enlightened, and modern European subjects (such that the modern both transcends yet
contains within it the Roman, the Christian, and the Enlightened). At the same time, the
multivarious foreign ideas and techniques that entered Europe from outside its bounds
are likewise reworked into ‘‘Roman,’’ ‘‘Christian,’’ ‘‘Enlightened,’’ and ‘‘modern’’ ones,
to be cultivated and passed down as Europeans’ own inheritance.^36
Though not based in notions of race, this still is, in Edward Said’s terms, a deeply
filiative vision, founded on historical lines of descent that determine contemporary distri-
butions of authority, authenticity, and hierarchy—and the distribution of property, in the
sense that Europeanness becomes a distinct characteristic, nature, or essence subject to
laws of inheritance and ownership. To embody Europe, to represent and be represented
by Europe, is to enact its history—where History itself, as Dipesh Chakrabarty has quite
brilliantly argued, is understood as the matter of becoming modern and secular as Europe
did. That is, History—as it most often continues to be practiced by our scholars and
embodied by our national narratives the world over—entails becoming (of failing to be-
come) ‘‘Europe,’’ where ‘‘Europe’’ consists not so much in the specific cultural, political,
and religious content of modern Europe but rather in the constellation of assumptions,
ideologies, and worldviews—modern Europe’s notions of time, of the relation of the
secular to the sacred, and of the nature of human agency—structurally embedded in the
scholarly methods we have inherited from modern Europe and to this day use to under-
stand our world from Bombay to New York to Istanbul.^37 The important point here is
that, at its most fundamental, this problem is not a matter of lacking adequate knowledge
of Europe’s actual Islamic history and heritage, which is well documented if not well
known. Rather, it is that that history cannot be told within the logic of a History that
allows for only one trajectory through space and time, one reality per territory.
PAGE 461461.................16224$ CH23 10-13-06 12:36:12 PS