HOW TO RECOGNIZE A MUSLIMresolve the tension between nation-states’ decreasing control over their own economic,
social, and cultural territories, even as such states are still the only institutions we have to
guarantee the protection and enforcement of human rights?
It is at this point—the question of the West’s identity and historical intention—that
discussions of the veil become most ‘‘local,’’ most shaped by national, regional, even
municipal differences in historical vision, political tradition, and socio-cultural life. So,
for example, while all the debates on the veil throughout Europe express a deep-seated
anxiety and sense of strident urgency, the discourse varies significantly across the conti-
nent. It centers, for example, on the issue oflaı ̈cite ́in France, whereas the question of the
state’s religious toleration is the organizing principle in the Netherlands. The question of
Judeo-Christian social and cultural superiority predominates in Germany, while that of
Catholicism’s cultural and institutional centrality preoccupies discussion in Italy. Just as
importantly, within nations themselves there exist significant internal differences. In the
Netherlands, for example, at the municipal level public responses to Islam encompass
everything from the controversial multi-religious, dialogic, and inclusive policies of Am-
sterdam’s mayor Job Cohen to the equally controversial anti-Islamic intentions of Rotter-
dam’s influential Leefbaar Rotterdam (Livable Rotterdam) faction. Even more locally, at
the level of the city district, individual neighborhood schools and other institutions are
developing intentionally inclusive and exclusive policies regarding headscarves and veils,
religious education, and holiday celebrations. While certain traditionally Christian schools
in the Netherlands are once again foregrounding their respectively (orthodox/reformed)
Protestant or Catholic identities and principles in the hopes of discouraging poor Muslim/
migrant students, other historically ‘‘Dutch’’ and even Christian schools are developing
and integrating Muslim religious educational materials in order to strengthen their ties to
the predominantly migrant neighborhoods surrounding them. Such integration of an
Islamic trajectory, however, can in turn frustrate new Muslim schools competing for the
same students with their own mix of Islamic/migrant and Dutch pedagogical structures,
which now are less likely to obtain a license for establishing educational facilities for those
neighborhoods. The majority of migrant parents indicate a preference for having their
children attend ‘‘integrated’’ schools, yet the demand for Muslim schools has expanded
phenomenally in recent years.
In this way, the abstractions of much larger continental and national debates are
concretely re-enacted in funding and policy decisions made neighborhood by neighbor-
hood, street by street, family by family. These operate within the framework of an intricate
local politics of money, religion, and culture, articulated in terms of institutional, neigh-
borhood, city, and personal life-worlds that bedevil any simple opposition between ‘‘Is-
lamic’’ and ‘‘Western’’ standpoints. At the very same time, each conflict and development
cannot help but be deeply formed by the ongoing and unresolved question of European
nations’ individual and collective future in the face of their growing multi-culturalism
and multi-religiosity. So even as local developments follow their own complex logic of
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