HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMwho, on the other hand, approach them as fundamentally interrelated and interdepen-
dent. The important point here is that this gathers together in the first group—their
mutual antipathy notwithstanding—those to whom such a return of the religious is a
relief, seeing in religion a site of socially redemptive, moral, and political possibility, and
those to whom religion marks the triumph of irrationality, inequality, repression, and
violence. While the former call for a repudiation of the secularist thesis, the latter (includ-
ing the proponents oflaı ̈cite ́in France, such absolutist Dutch atheists as the strident
Islam-fighter Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Herman Philipse, and the American philosopher Rich-
ard Rorty) argue that the return of the religious in fact calls for an even more radical
reinforcement and enforcement of a secularism that essentially boils down to a secularist
nationalism. Yet, however elegantly articulated, there exists a fundamental flaw in such
standpoints, in that they ultimately require the critic to present the religious or secular
other being opposed in terms of caricature rather than complex reality. Such a position
necessarily represses the long and intriguing actual history of shifting coexistence, dia-
logue, and collaboration between the secular and the religious.
More interesting and useful than this first group is the second group of critics, who
recognize the fundamental historical and conceptual imbrication of the secular and the
religious. These too can be divided into two groups: on the one hand, those, such as the
philosopher Charles Taylor, who see in secularism a neutral and independent political
ethic, whose value lies in enabling diverse traditions and worldviews to live together
peaceably—that is, secularism not as a bulwark against religion but as an enabler of reli-
gious diversity in the face of the return of the religious—and those, on the other hand,
such as the postcolonial thinkers Talal Asad, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Peter van der Veer, and
Gauri Viswanathan, who argue that secularism’s fundamental implication in the project
of European colonialism requires us not so much to reject secularism outright as critically
to engage the nature of its political, cultural, and historical intentions.
While Taylor, in his essay ‘‘Modes of Secularism,’’ explicitly seeks to trace both secu-
larism’s origins in religious history and its subsequent historical development, his argu-
ment is marred by two significant weaknesses.^49 The first of these, as Talal Asad has
pointed out, is that Taylor’s vision of secular democracy as a form of voluntary self-
discipline obscures the extent to which secularism becomes the political ideology through
which the state justifies its monopoly on violence—a violence it uses not simply to impose
order but to assert what are to count as the core political principles according to which
political disputes are resolved. So while Taylor suggests that the state works through nego-
tiation and persuasion and Asad recognizes ‘‘the generous impulse behind this answer,’’
the latter is forced to point out that ‘‘the nation-state is not a generous agent and its law
does not deal in persuasion.’’ The moment that ‘‘parties to a dispute are unwilling to
compromise on what for them is a matter of principle (a principle that articulates action
and being, not a principle that is justifiable by statements of belief,’’ the state is free to
resort to intimidation, command, and the threat of legal (which is to say, indirectly or
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