NOTES TO PAGES 445–46a crucial role in enabling this paper—as, indirectly but fundamentally, has the vibrant legacy of
Edward Said.
- This is a space that to a large extent remains non-Muslim. Which is to say, there are diverse,
fascinating, and extended discussions taking place about the veil among Muslims that will not be
addressed here because within the West these remain largely relegated to the ‘‘private’’ realm of
homes, grassroots organizations, Internet sites, mosques, and minority media and have yet to be
given full and equal access to the public realm. This essay, then, in focusing on the public realm,
addresses only one part of what is actually a larger discussion—reproducing in this way the very
exclusion (of Muslim arguments) that I critique. It is, of course, a lesson in how we are shaped by
our objects of study. At the same time, this essay is the first step in a larger project of opening up
our spaces of debate to fuller encounters between ‘‘Western’’ and ‘‘Muslim’’ arguments, as well as
to the recognition that these two positions as often blend with as challenge each other, that the
Muslim may be Western and the Western Muslim. - As Robert N. Bellah argues in ‘‘Religion and Belief: The Historical Background of ‘Non-
Belief,’ ’’Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World(New York: Harper & Row,
1970), 216–29. - While my concern is with the nature of the debate about the veil in Western public space
as a whole, the most urgent and contested discussions are in fact centered in continental Western
Europe. English-speaking nations of the West share the same prejudices toward the Islamic veil as
Western Europe, but this has not generated the same level of distressed debate, political posturing,
and legislation. I’ll come back to the reasons for this below. For now, I want to recognize that in
many ways the debate about the veil is in fact more about the nature of (continental Western)
Europe specifically than about the West in general. Yet precisely the historical slippage between
‘‘Europe’’ and the ‘‘West,’’ and the question of the extent to which Europe still can imagine that it
represents the West as a whole, is one of the most central issues here. In line with this slippage, I
continue at moments to use the termWestto refer both to the larger collection of nation-states
tracing their primary descent lines to all of Europe and more specifically to the smaller collection
of powerful Western European nations that continue to conceive of themselves as representing the
West as a whole. Most specifically, my locale is the public space of the Netherlands—the West’s first
modern world power, once the world’s largest ‘‘Muslim’’ empire, and today perhaps the Western
European nation-state most torn between modernity’s contradictory heritage of tolerant, pragmatic
humanism and purist, idealist rationalism (a distinction Stephen Toulmin develops beautifully in
hisCosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity[New York: Free Press, 1990]). This is not an
argument I can elaborate here, but I might note that the deep complexities and contradictions of
Pim Fortuyn’s intellectual legacy and political trajectory as an openly gay, reactionary populist, who
was at once anti-immigration and open about his nights of pleasure with young North African
men, culminating in his assassination by a radical animal-rights activist, offer one useful starting
point for thinking about the Netherlands as more ‘‘representative’’ of the West’s crisis-ridden mod-
ernist project than its tiny size today might suggest.
In the U.S. context, the veil’s equivalent in terms of affective resonance and political sensitivity
is perhaps the Spanish language of Latino (im)migrants, likewise read as a synechdochal index of
an ‘‘alien,’’ nonwhite, Catholic presence. Here too, in the U.S., the likes of Pat Buchanan and
Samuel Huntington argue that Hispanics, specifically Mexican immigrants, resist linguistic and
cultural integration and in doing so threaten both the integrity of American national identity and
the future of the nation-state. Unlike in Europe, however, there exists in the U.S. a much more
extensive repertoire of counter-narratives and scholarly critiques with which to engage such argu-
ments. See Samuel Huntington’s recentWho Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity
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