INTRODUCTIONcal, in that he asks how these binaries ‘‘have come to be constituted rigidly as such.’’ His
primary concern is, therefore, less with historical narrative, let alone a social history of
secularization, than with a series of inquiries, all of which establish the secular and secu-
larism in their analytical, systematic, political, and juridical specificity, while granting that
there has been neither a ‘‘single line of filiation in the formation of the secular’’ nor a
singular origin, and hence a stable historical identity, of the concept and construct in
question.
This circumstance, Asad stresses, does not condemn us to silence. There have been
significant breaks in the relationship between the secular and the religious in which
‘‘words and practices were rearranged, and new discursive grammars replaced previous
ones.’’ These breaks can be studied and evaluated in critical ways. In fact, only such an
approach allows one to take a distance from all too reductive accounts, for the secular is
not simply ‘‘a mask for religion,’’ even though the former may ‘‘simulate’’ the latter. And
there is no such thing as ‘‘the apparently secular’’ parading for ‘‘the truly religious’’; in
other words, ‘‘signs are a part of reality and not a way of pointing to it.’’^162 And the
rearrangement of the symbols and narratives that make up history lead to unexpected
effects, which finally determine the perception of concrete issues such as the controversy
surrounding the veil.^163
In his contribution, Peter van der Veer documents and analyzes another widely re-
ported incident, this time in the Netherlands, namely, the murder of Theo van Gogh,
preceded by but not unrelated to the assassination of Pim Fortuyn, both of which have
haunted Dutch politics ever since. Van der Veer sketches the historical and socio-cultural
context against whose foil we should place the murders of Fortuyn and van Gogh and
especially the devastating impact they have had on the political and intellectual climate in
the Netherlands, bruising its longstanding reputation for tolerance and diversity. He sug-
gests that the recent upheavals exposed the fragility of this much-cultivated and somewhat
self-congratulatory self-image of liberalism and the apparent inability of Dutch society so
far to deal with the fact that its newcomers are there to stay or, rather, have already
become part and parcel of a radically changed political landscape, one that will not neces-
sarily correspond to a unilaterally imposed model of integration, with its expectation of
cultural (or often even linguistic) adaptation. In other words, van der Veer claims that
van Gogh’s murder was more revelatory of Dutch culture at the crossroads than of Islam
and its perceived global militancy. An unwillingness or incapacity to come to terms with
this fact helps explain why the responses of the political and cultural elites to this event
were (with a few exceptions) so unhelpful. And no easy solution seems in sight.^164
That more constructive approaches than those of artistic and mediatic provocation,
counter-reaction, and repression by the state apparatus are thinkable, desirable, and possi-
ble, not just theoretically but at the level of municipal governmental policy in modern
democracies, is demonstrated by the contribution of Job Cohen, since 2001 the mayor of
Amsterdam (in 2003 he was also the Dutch Labor Party’s candidate for prime minister
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