The Shifting Politics of Identity 263the notions of esteem and dignity. In his social contract, Rousseau ([1762] 1976:
268) emphasised the legal and political equality of citizens:
I shall end this chapter and this book by remarking on a fact on which the whole
social system should rest: i.e., that, instead of destroying natural inequality, the
fundamental compact substitutes, for such physical inequality as nature may
have set up between men, an equality that is moral and legitimate, and that men,
who may be unequal in strength or intelligence, become every one equal by
convention and legal right.The exclusion of status, or any ‘natural inequality’ from the public, was the
founding event of modern identity. Taylor (1991: 28) believed that Rousseau
and other European philosophers like Herder substituted inherited, given iden-
tities of the pre-Enlightenment period for identities based on the dignity and
personality of each individual (Taylor 1991: 28). The status of a person as a serf
or a noble must be overcome, and, if need be, dissimulated and hidden, in order
to participate in an egalitarian society. But what was acquired in place of status
was a sense of self-worth and dignity. There seemed to be a tension between the
identifi cation of dignity as a process through which one asserted oneself, and
the dissimulation of the ‘natural inequalities’ of people in an egalitarian society.
Both self-assertion and dissimulation were equally important for participating
in an egalitarian society. Without dissimulation, one could not speak of a truly
democratic process. But each citizen also had the task of developing a sense of
the self that would participate in this polity. In the late-twentieth-century politics
of identity, Taylor tried to recover such an aspect of identity for the multicultural
societies in Canada where he lived, and for those countries that regarded them-
selves as inheritors of the legacy of the Enlightenment. The various cultures in
such societies represented the ‘natural inequalities’ that had to be recognised, on
the one hand, but balanced against the demands of egalitarianism (free speech,
equality and freedom) on the other (Taylor 1991). The successful future of mul-
ticulturalism rested on the balance between recognition and dissimulation.
Taylor’s insights are not suffi cient to study the construction of modern
Muslim identities that emerged in the shadow of imperialism and capitalism.
The modern egalitarian states came to the shores of Africa, the Americas and
Asia in very different ways from the manner in which they were developed in
Europe. They were accompanied by Europeans who were ruthless in their
search for raw materials, brutal in their aims to control trade routes even against
other European states, passionate to convert people to one form of Christianity
or another, and arrogant in their proclamation that humanism was a special gift
of Europe to the rest of the world. Napoleon Bonaparte occupied Egypt in 1798
in order to convey the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity to the Egyptians.
Such ironies abounded in the history of modern, colonial states. Nevertheless,
there is no doubt that identities in the colonies were created and constructed