MARKHA G. VALENTAhistoricity and contingency to be revealed—and thus also the possibility of an alternative.
Central to this development has been the dislocation of the once so powerful link between
modernity and the world’s disenchantment—to the point that today intellectuals and
politicians can no longer assume religion’s irrelevance and inevitable demise under
(post-)modernity. Crucially, however, the language and conceptual tools necessary for
considering this condition as a domestic, Western development, like those necessary for
articulating a new democracy, are highly impoverished after years of repression by the
secularization thesis. It is under such pitiable conditions that our public discussions turn
to substitutes—including the veil, and Islam more generally—as a way both of articulating
their distress and of masking our failures. It is easier in Western Europe to speak of the
return of the religious as the threat of analienreligiosity, opposed both to secularization
andthe West. In this sense, the West returns to and engages its own inherited religiosity
through that of the (Islamic) other—much as it once returned to its Greek roots through
Muslim scholarship. And just as that Muslim scholarship had left its own improvements
in the thought of the Greeks before it was translated back to the West, so too our engage-
ment with Islam in the West today is bound to mark and re-form Western religiosity
itself.
This crisis of the secularist assumption, then, is central to European discourses of the
veil, particularly in societies such as France and the Netherlands, committed strongly to
both a secularist understanding of modernity and a universalist account of human prog-
ress inclined to place their respective nations at history’s forefront.^40 Within such a frame-
work, minorities’ refusal to be absorbed fully into the reigning national culture and
narrative, particularly their persistent, resistant religiosity—even while abiding by the laws
of the political state—are necessarily understood as not only a challenge to the superiority
of the particular nation but a more general resistance to and disruption of modernity. To
tolerate such deviation—in the rigorous sense of tolerance as the recognition of others’
equal right to define the nature and future of our society—would mean critically recon-
sidering the nature of both the nation and modernity itself.^41 It is at this point that the
issue of conversion arises—both modernity’s hunger to convert the other, and its own
resistance to conversion.
It is modernity’s logic of conversion, tied as it is to the Western project of colonialist
territoriality, that continues to define the limits of the contemporary Western engagement
with the Islamic veils in its midst. In fact, you might say that conversion is the politics of
secularism. At the religious level, conversion, of course, played a crucial role through the
collaboration of European missionary activities with their nation-states’ colonial projects:
a close—if at times testy—partnership between state, religious institutions, and/or lay
religious societies in the interests of converting savage ‘‘them’’ into loyal, if lesser, mem-
bers of ‘‘our’’ empire. At the same time, Western missionary activity itself—the active
imagining of converting the world to Christianity—only emerged subsequent to and as a
result of Christianity’s own ‘‘conversion to modernity.’’^42 That is, modern conversion can
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