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MARKHA G. VALENTA

labor side by side, and he praises highly the missionaries’ commitment to the great task
of achieving ‘‘a unity that, if it came into being, would remove all obstacles to a unification
of the civilization and national consciousness in the Eastern and Western part of the
kingdom of the Netherlands.’’^47 Yet at the same time he reprimands the missionaries for
their religious fervor, fearing that it will stoke indigenous peoples’ resistance to Dutch
control. Instead, he argues, all Dutch in the East Indies, including missionaries, must
work first for national, political, and epistemological conversion of the indigenous (or
what he calls their ‘‘spiritual annexation’’), after which there will be all the time necessary
to struggle with the arduous and extended task of converting Islamic inhabitants to
Christianity.
Crucially, Hurgronje explicitly rejects Protestantism as an essential unifying factor
for Dutch national culture—in a society that includes not only ‘‘Christians of the most
diverse confessions, but also Jews and Free Thinkers,’’ all of whom ‘‘feel themselves at
home to such an extent that they resist with all their might, even to the sacrifice of
goods and blood, all attempts to make them take on another nationality or another state-
alliance.’’^48 While quite accurate in practical terms, Hurgronje misses two crucial facts
here. First, it is precisely the religious content of the missionaries’ intentions that sustains
their transnational vision—their commitment to converting the indigenous peoples of
the East Indies to nationalized Dutch-Protestant modernity—while the government offi-
cials who so frustrate him remain trapped in what amounts to a provincialist and preterri-
torialist secular pragmatism, incapable of looking farther than the possibility of short-
term economic profit. At the same time, it is his nation-state’s fragmentation into separate
religio-socio-political ‘‘pillars’’—which is to say, its incomplete territorialization due to
the absence of a coherent, all-powerful ‘‘center’’—that makes any saturation and conver-
sion of the colonial territories likewise impossible. The very diversity of the Netherlands,
which prevents Protestantism from being a unifying factor, also ensures the impossibility
of ‘‘spiritually annexing’’ the periphery. And yet, early-twentieth-century Holland’s con-
version to modernity was not so much disrupted by fragmentation but rathercreatedthe
fragments of the nation-state, as such. That irony today haunts the nation’s renewed
encounter with Islam. More generally, this is the eternal irony of territorial modernity, of
modernity as the capitalist nation-state: the necessary persistence of instability, the perpet-
ual incompletion, the staggered segmentation of a nation-state simultaneously imagined
as always already whole and complete.



While secularization’s disruption has generated a wide variety of responses within the
West today, there also are clear patterns that allow us to locate these relative to each other.
To begin with, the first division is between those who, on the one hand, continue to see
the religious and the secular modern as opposed categories of thought and life and those

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