MARKHA G. VALENTASo within Europe’s dominant self-narration, divergence from the Roman-Christian-
Enlightenment-modern trajectory places one, at one and the same moment, outside Eu-
rope, outside history, and beyond belief—irrespective of one’s historical, cultural, politi-
cal, or residential ties to material, geographical Europe. All that is understood to be
opposed to the ‘‘Roman,’’ the ‘‘Christian,’’ the ‘‘Enlightened,’’ the ‘‘modern,’’ and the
‘‘secular’’—as these successively contain and succeed each other—can neither be imag-
ined as European nor lay claim to Europe. Those considered incapable or found unwill-
ing—whether in body or in spirit—to believe in and to reflect Europe back to itself as
‘‘Europe’’ are excluded. So to this day the second- and third-generation descendents of
non-Western immigrants to the Netherlands are called ‘‘allochthonous,’’ which is to say,
‘‘foreign-born.’’ And it is the continuing power of this mechanism that ensures that
Islam—and its veiled markers—continue to feared as alien.
In this sense, the reigning European history is fundamentally intolerant, fundamen-
tally unwilling to take the risk of an active tolerance, one that asks as much as it gives. As
Thomas Scanlon clearly explains: ‘‘Toleration is, for all of us, a risky matter, a practice
with high stakes.... What tolerance expresses is a recognition of common membership
that is deeper than these conflicts, a recognition of others as being just as entitled as we
are to contribute to the definition of our society. Without this, we are just rival groups
contending for the same territory.’’^38 It is the difference between easy tolerance and rigor-
ous tolerance—as these, in turn are linked to easy and rigorous democracy. If easy toler-
ance is a willingness to accept the existence of an insignificant, because impotent,
minority, rigorous tolerance means recognizing that divergent minority as vitally consti-
tutive of the nation and its future. It is to give these people, whoever they may be, a say
not just over themselves, but over us.
Time and again, however, a politics of (cultural-ideological) descent trumps that of
dissent. Most obviously, perhaps, what is at issue here is the fact that the operative princi-
ple in these discussions again and again is the assumption that the West’scurrentsocio-
political stability, moderate state violence, and material success validate maintaining a
privileged set of (what are presented as)traditionallyWestern standpoints. This is not
simply a theory of power, but also one of history; which is to say: power makes its own
past as much as its own truth. In the process, the division between East and West, the
veiled and unveiled, isdoublymapped onto the grid of Western history: it marks the
divide not only between past and present but also between twosortsof past—implicitly
framed as two sorts of morality—that which we repudiate (the oppressive, the violent,
the exploiting, the hypocritical, the antidemocratic, and in all these senses ‘‘un-Western’’)
and that which we today have realized (the liberating, the democratizing, the tolerant, the
moral). The crucial thing to remark is that, taken to its logical conclusion, this is a deeply
ahistorical—and in that sense impotent—vision. It is a vision, in essence, incapable of
addressing our new conditions: post-territorial, post-secular, postmodern.
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