TALAL ASADthe extent that this is so, the commission was a device toconstitutemeanings by drawing
on internal (psychological) or external (social) signs, and it allowed certain desires and
sentiments to be encouraged at the expense of others. A government commission of in-
quiry sought to bring ‘‘private’’ concerns, commitments, and sentiments into ‘‘public’’
scrutiny in order to assess their validity for a secular Republic. The public sphere, guaran-
tee of liberal democracy, does not afford citizens a critical distance from state power here.
It is the very terrain on which that power is deployed to ensure the proper formation of
its subjects.
From its beginning the idea of the secular Republic seems to have been torn in two
conflicting directions—insistence on the withdrawal of the state fromallmatters of reli-
gion (which must include abstention from even trying to define ‘‘religious signs’’) and
the responsibility of the state for formingsecular citizens(by which I do not mean persons
who are necessarily ‘‘irreligious’’). The Stasi report seizes this basic contradiction as an
occasion for creative interpretation. The trouble with the earlier legal judgments relating
to the veil, it says, is that ‘‘the judge did not think he had the power to pronounce on the
interpretation of the meaning of religious signs. Here was an inherent limit to the inter-
vention of the judge. It seemed to him impossible to enter into the interpretation given
to one or another sign by a religion. Consequently, he was not able to understand that
the wearing of the veil by some young women can mean discrimination between man
and woman. And that of course is contradictory to a basic principle of the Republic.’’^25
The Stasi report regrets that judges in these cases had refused to enter the domain of
religious signs. It wants the law to fix meanings, and so it recommends legislation that will
do just that. But first it has toconstitutereligious signs whose meanings can be deciphered
according to objective rules. For what the commission calls ‘‘a sign’’ is nothing in itself.
‘‘Religious signs’’ are part of the game that the secular Republic plays. More precisely, it
is in playing that game that the abstract being called the ‘‘modern state’’ is realized.
One might suggest that for the Stasi commission the headscarf worn by Muslim
schoolgirls is more than a sign. It is an icon in the sense that it does not simply designate
but evoke. What is evoked is not a ‘‘headscarf [un foulard]’’ but ‘‘the Islamic veil [le voile
islamique].’’ More than an image, the veil is an imaginary—a shrouded difference waiting
to be unveiled, to be brought into the light of reason, and made indifferent.
Dealing with Exceptions
The Stasi report insists that secularism presupposes the independence of political power
as well as of different religious and spiritual choices; the latter have no influence over the
state, it says, and the state has none over them.^26 What emerges from the report, however,
is that the relationship is not symmetrical. It is claimed that the Republic treats all reli-
gions equally. But this does not preclude its taking certain decisions that affect religion,
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