TALAL ASADsocieties must be ‘‘open’’ implies that majorities do not have an absolute right to remain
undisturbed. Even in a democracy the majority may have to learn to reorient itself. ‘‘As-
similation’’ is never a one-way process, but the attitude of the majority to its signs is
always critical: Is the process to be read as enrichment (never tidy, often unpredictable in
its consequences) or as contamination (‘‘adulteration,’’ ‘‘debasement,’’ ‘‘mongrelism’’)?
There is in fact no ‘‘final solution’’ to political problems—other than death.
The preoccupation with unity has been a central feature of authoritarian discourse,
and the requirement of loyalty to symbols of the nation is central to that political tradi-
tion. I do not mean to suggest that it is always an indicator of authoritarianism. My
thought is that the call for ‘‘unity’’ and ‘‘integration’’ may be seen as part of the problem
ofcentralized state control. Those who are to be unified or integrated are required to
submit to a particular normative order. The solution to that problem has taken various
forms. The genocidal horror inflicted on European Jews by the Nazi state, including Jews
who had assimilated, was one such ‘‘final solution.’’ Effacing public signs of religious
difference in order better to integrate with the abstract state they inhabited did not save
them. For this racist state, assimilation was itself highly dangerous because it carried the
implication of degeneration.
Racist states seem to have emerged in Europe at the threshold of modernity. The
Spanish historian Rodrigo de Zayas describes how, during the latter part of the sixteenth
century, Spanish ruling elites came to the conclusion that Moriscos (Spanish Muslims
who had been forcibly converted to Catholicism) had to be eliminated in order to attain
a unified nation. They discussed ways of attaining that end, including genocide, assimila-
tion, and deportation. Being assimilated to the state religion did not save the Moriscos.
In 1609 a law was finally passed in favor of deportation, resulting, Zayas writes, in the
first racist state in European history.^5 True, there was an earlier ‘‘racist’’ law forbidding
anyone who didn’t have ‘‘clean blood’’ from taking up a paid position in Spain—the
person concerned having to prove that no Jew or Muslim had been a member of his
family for at least four generations.^6 Zayas argues, however, that this was a confused way
of trying to identify ‘‘religious purity’’ inspecificcases. By contrast, the 1609 law focused
neither on religion nor on the individual case but on an entire minority population identi-
fied formally as ‘‘a different nation’’ according to cultural signs (dress, language, habits,
etc.). This reading amounted, in effect, to a ‘‘secular’’ response to the problem of integra-
tion, even though it had emerged from the realm of Catholic Kings. In many respects,
Zayas claims, the ‘‘Morisco question’’ in the sixteenth century anticipates the ‘‘Jewish
question’’ in the first half of the twentieth: a concern with the ‘‘political health’’ of a
governed population.
In what follows I want to look in some detail at another secular reading recently
rearticulated in France in relation to its Muslim citizens, which is certainly not as drastic
as either of the two I have mentioned. France is, after all, a democratic country, in which
various liberties are safeguarded, legally and in everyday intercourse. I reflect on the recent
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