MARKHA G. VALENTAcerns of religion—the question of the relations among the human, the sacred, and the
divine; the question of our spiritual life; even that of finding a haven, a sanctuary, a spring
of hope and beauty to challenge the mundane world of consumerism, sexual saturation,
inequality, injustice, and violence—are repressed. Man’s relation to man squeezes out the
question of man’s relation to her ultimate horizon, to the final terms of her being. And
the question of human agency is reduced to a nitty-gritty materialism, a petty, dreary
tug-of-war between man and man barely able to imagine anything else, least of all the
fullness—whether we call it God, or desire, or our infinite responsibility to the other—
whose call to us has been there before we ourselves were. Overflowing with norms, the
debate achingly struggles for an ethics, a means of relating self to other, far beyond its
grasp. As do I.
The problem, then, is not so much the debate’s modernism or secularism per se as
the fact that it is an impoverished modernism, a hollow secularism. Once, perhaps, these
were ideological constellations, processes, ways of life whose vision—however faulty—was
universal in the sense of striving to bind together self and world; but now, in the contem-
porary debate about Islam in the West, they most often are terms of division. They make
the other wish not so much, in the words of Arjun Appadurai, to have become modern
as to convince her of modernity and secularism’s limits, their provincialism, their inability
to grasp and enfold this other life, my life. Most fundamentally, the power of these
two—as of any faith system—once lay (and perhaps still lies) in their ability to imagine
and project human unity and redemption through sacrifice and commitment, including
unto death if necessary^2 —as, for example, the myth of ‘‘the white man’s burden,’’ for all
its vicious and violent arrogance, did for modern colonialism. If profit and brute power
were the obvious base motives for colonialism, sacrifice—the risking of life and limb in
the name of ‘‘King’’ and ‘‘God’’ and ‘‘civilization’’—is what gave colonialism its golden
aura: what allowed the West to sanctify its violence, as well as its greed. In this sense, you
might say that the failing point of colonialism was the moment at which indigenous
resistance made colonialism a true burden, unprofitable, brought home the sacrifice and
killed the romance. So, too, the modernism and secularism of the contemporary West—
whether that of ‘‘fortress Europe’’ or ‘‘benevolently’’ expansionist America—is one in
retreat from the universal, from the true universalism that dares to imagine sacrificing
the self for the other, for the world. The only modernism and secularism capable of
rallying the world, including the world within the West, to its banner today would be one
capable of imagining itself taking on the veil—if only for a moment, a day, a lifetime.
Belief, to be powerful, must be a risk of faith as much as its buttressing.
The third point to note is that the debate about the veil is the debate about Islam in
the West; that the debate about Islam is the debate about the future of the Western nation-
state; and that at the heart of the debate about the nation-state is the question of the
nature of the West and its democracy.^3 Each of these—the veil, Islam, the nation-state,
the West, and democracy—certainly constitutes a discrete terrain of its own, with its own
PAGE 446446.................16224$ CH23 10-13-06 12:36:06 PS