NOTES TO PAGES 454–57pealing) to Dutch colonial administrators and writers and that the veil itself did not become an
issue of contention as it did in British-occupied Egypt, even for someone as internationally versed
as Snouck Hurgronje in his most imperialist phase. Only today, when the Netherlands’ former
religio-socio-political pillars have more or less dissolved into a larger collective national identity,
and as mainstream Dutch women’s self-identity has come to include an active sexuality and a
secular, rationalized individualism, has the discourse of the veil as a threat to the nation and West-
ern civilization come to exert a strong appeal.
- Ahmed,Women and Gender in Islam, 152.
- I have in mind here, among many others, the work of the Malaysian ‘‘Sisters of Islam,’’
the growth of feminist Muslim organizations in Indonesia, the activism of female Turkish students
protesting the ban on headscarves in universities, the dramatic increase in the number of female
students attending Iranian universities following the Revolution, precisely because by wearing the
veil they could now go out in public, and a recent march organized by French Muslim schoolgirls.
Working through informal Internet networks and wearing the French flag as a headscarf, these girls
protested the French (secular) state’s right to prohibit the scarf and to impose the ‘‘priority’’ of its
authority to define Muslim women’s identity, relative to the authority of immigrant cultures and
Islam, in the name of protecting and liberating these women. - Catherine A. MacKinnon’s discussion of pornography comes to mind here as one of the
few relevant, and radical, engagements with this issue,Toward a Feminist Theory of the State(Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), esp. chap. 11, ‘‘Pornography: On Morality and Politics.’’
More generally, while extant Western feminist discussions of women’s construction and consump-
tion through the male gaze under capitalist liberalism are highly developed and at moments quite
powerful, they have yet to tap the rich resources (or engage the challenge) offered by the intricate
dynamics of veiling. This entails, on the one hand, veiling as a dynamic response to the difficult
problem of how to contend with the potency of human sexuality and, on the other hand, veiling as
a practice that situates itself at the vital intersection between subjection and agency, abjection and
identity, the social and the divine, the male and the female, the personal and the political, in ways
as complex as they are demanding. - Ahmed,Women and Gender in Islam, 153.
- Edward Said,Culture and Imperialism, 129. The essay Said references offers a particularly
useful elaboration of this point: Anna Davin, ‘‘Imperialism and Motherhood,’’Patriotism: The Mak-
ing and Unmaking of British Identity, ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge, 1989), 1:203–35. - This is, in fact, precisely how Toynbee represents the British position on the eve of the
First World War in hisCivilization on Trial, written at the close of the Second World War. - On the human consequences—the disrupted lives, broken families, flights into exile, and
forced repatriations—resulting from, for example, the U.S. security and registration acts, see the
collection of articles in theChicago Tribunespecial report ‘‘Tossed Out of America’’ (November
16–18, 2003) http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-031116immigration-storygal
lery.special (May 17, 2004). - Pim Fortuyn’s foregrounding of this standpoint in his political campaign helped to usher
in much of the current atmosphere of aggressive controlling gestures, fear, and revulsion toward
Islam so frequently expressed not only in the media and government but in the everyday contacts
of shopping lines, work, and on the street. For one of the few truly thoughtful and powerfully
elaborated critiques of this development in the Netherlands, see Peter van der Veer,Islam en het
‘beschaafde’ Westen: Essays over de ‘achterlijkheid’ van religies[Islam and the ‘‘Civilized’’ West: Essays
on the ‘‘Backwardness’’ of Religions] (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 2002).
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