HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMugal to be coherent powers. They lack that which war requires: a central intelligence, an
authorized authority that we follow as One—as a Holy Body—into the vortex of History.
That isn’t to say that we might not yet create them, or that they might not clash. But for the
moment it is precisely the mythic nature of the battle that makes it so appealing to the
fantasies of our politicians and lesser commentators, while it is only a minor drama relative
to the so much more grand drama of invention that is taking place. An invention of collabora-
tion, through difference. What is at stake is the possibility of imagining a role for the power
and practice of religion, of belief, of fundamental conviction within democracy, rather than
beyond or against it. Not just our own religion, our own conviction, but also another’s. And
not just democracy at home, but democracy across the world. It means making minorities of
us all, risking my conviction as it touches yours. Which is to make the world ours. This
requires all our ingenuity and dedication, for the answers we already have fail us now. Private
belief, blessed nation, and sacred state. Beyond these, in our passions, as in democracy, beats
life. And it is up to us to say what kind of life it will be.
The Problem
The problem is not the veil itself. For more than a thousand years, Muslims, Christians,
and Jews engaged each other (and before them Persians, Greeks, and Romans) without
its becoming an issue. Only an odd hundred years ago, in the second decade of Europe’s
colonization of the Islamic worlds, did this simple piece of cloth on a woman’s head
become a primary site of attack and counterattack. Since then, the veil has been an
astoundingly pregnant source of social, political, religious, and judicial conflict. The ques-
tion is: Why?
The first point to note is that the veil’s prominence in the encounter between Islam
and the West depends on a fundamental collaboration among all those involved: whatever
their standpoint, however opposed and far removed from each other, all have agreed that
this is to be a primary site at which to take their stand. Precisely the intensity and expan-
siveness of the conflict means that the veil—the veiled woman—is a point at which the
many Muslim and Western worlds stand especially close to each other, touch each other.
The veil is a medium of translation, communicating power and resistance, desire and
otherness to each other, from West to East and East to West, from faction to faction,
across a gap of difference. So there is much at stake.
The second point to note is that the discussion of the veil within the West’s public
space, which is the space that concerns me in this essay—our media, governments, judici-
aries, scholarship, and arts—takes place in terms that are themselves largely secularist
and modern.^1 So the operative epistemological and ontological concepts are those of the
individual, self-expression, culture, choice, identity, independence, and so forth. Though
the veil is closely imbricated with religious experience and belief, the concepts and con-
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