HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMlectual, and aesthetic development. Rocard’s account is in effect a narrative not only of
self-birth but of stillbirth—for the ‘‘Europe’’ he imagines is one not transforming through
time but only expanding in space, ‘‘first to ex-Yugoslavia, then to Turkey, then one day
to the Middle East and the Islamic world.’’ It is capable of ‘‘assuring peace and develop-
ment’’ to all humanity and yet, at the same time, incapable of politics, for it is ‘‘only a
space of proximity.’’
This fundamental discursive rupture between ‘‘peace’’ and ‘‘development,’’ on the
one hand, and ‘‘politics,’’ on the other, critically masks the politics of peace and liberal-
market economics themselves—the extent to and ways in which the forms these take are
historically determined and contingent, even as they themselves are held in place force-
fully by Europe’s nation-states. The notion of ‘‘development’’—as it entails the fantasy of
effective bureaucratic government by secular states opening the way to universal wel-
fare—is one of the most deeply political notions of our day, at once powerfully productive
anddestructive. Most crucially, Rocard’s portrait is both blind to and unable to account
for the forms of violence that today confront Europefrom within. This same logic of
splitting, between present and past and between good past and bad past, is at work in
Dutch (former) Prime Minister Wim Kok’s assertion not so very long ago that ‘‘The
Netherlands have been completed [Nederland is af]’’—a statement meant to refer to the
completion of Holland’s postwar project of reconstruction, but quickly taken to mean
much more. The present has been freed from the past’s limitations, even as that past’s
intentions in the present have been realized. And behold, he saw that it was good.
So it is the conjunction between, on the one hand, an essentialist narrative of Eu-
rope’s history and, on the other hand, an ahistorical account of Europe’s present that
explains why Islam, and the veil as its symbol, today are widely represented as simultane-
ouslyalienintrusions on Western ground,premodernholdovers, andantimodernthreats
to what we have achieved today. The essence of the Western present is constructed as
the continuation and embodiment of a very particular quasi-sacred modern, Enlightened
‘‘origin’’ (at once centuries old and purely contemporary), from which all contradiction
and multivalence have been bleached out. Correspondingly, the Western present likewise
can only with difficulty be imagined as a site of contradiction, divergence, and as-yet-
unknown becoming. The diffusion of what is into what has been and what will be makes
history impossible, and with it a West whose (post)modernity is ours to continue making
rather than simply to inherit and steadfastly defend.
Yet even as we speak, there is a crucial rupture. Precisely the inability of the modernist
narrative of Europe to account for either the return of the religious or the presence of the
Islamic in its midst means that its veneer of ‘‘naturalness’’ is stripped away. In being
confronted with contemporary events and forced to defend itself, Europe finds its own
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