HENT DE VRIESpart of the social contract’’ (p. 433). In other words, norms of kinship and the purity or
honor of the national population—expressed in the state’s nonrecognition and undoing
of forced marriages and conversions (of children and women, that is)—were rigidified by
being turned into the rule of law, thus producing a ‘‘disciplining of sentiment according
to the demands of the state,’’ while, conversely, ‘‘sovereignty continues to draw life from
the family.’’ Indeed, Das, concludes: ‘‘Does this story, located at the juncture of the inau-
guration of the nation-state in India, tell us something about the nature of sovereignty
itself ?’’ (pp. 436 and 440). Such analysis reminds us of the stakes involved, even or espe-
cially in scholarly inquiry into what might seem the most abstract and ethereal of con-
cepts—for example, that of the theologico-political.
Markha G. Valenta’s incisive discussion of European responses to the veil or headscarf
and the politics of gender clarifies how the confrontation between ideologies of secularism
and the multifarious strategies of conversion fails to register what should have been clear
all along: namely, that anxious contemporary Western responses to Islam exemplify a
collective amnesia concerning a long history of mutual imbrication and interaction, ob-
fuscated by colonialism and orientalism alike. Drawing on the pioneering work of Edward
Said, Leila Ahmed, Lila Abu-Lughod, and others, Valenta suggests that only ‘‘with the
arrival of the northern Mediterranean powers—the Greek conquest of 333b.c. (by sol-
diers bearing under their arms learned Aristotle’s treatise on women’s natural inferiority
to men), followed by the Romans and the spread of Christianity—did the practice of
veiling and, more broadly, of women’s enclosure, devaluation, and repression spread. In
this sense, veiling was the material measure of ancient Egypt’s Hellenization and Roman-
ization, its ‘Europeanization’ ’’ (pp. 450–51). In consequence, the current debates sur-
rounding the veil—conceived by both its detractors and its proponents as a ‘‘primary site
of attack and counterattack’’ (p. 445)—does not constitute a problem in and of itself, but
rather ‘‘dramatizes Europe’s encounter not just with the Islamic world but with its very
own foundations’’ (p. 451). This paradox explains why in the nineteenth century, when
Egypt was under British rule, those who vehemently opposed Muslim veiling often agi-
tated against women’s suffrage and feminism ‘‘at home.’’ Perhaps it also helps explain
why present-day Western feminism has hardly been more successful in addressing the
issue posed by the marker of the veil.
Valenta’s anamnestic recovery treats the genealogy of the problem dramatized by the
veil as one that has at least as much to do with Europe’s insecurities about itself as with
its exterior and interior ‘‘others.’’ More importantly, she argues that the problem ‘‘is not
a matter of lacking adequate knowledge of Europe’s actual Islamic history and heritage,
which is well documented if not well known. Rather, it is that that history cannot be told
within the logic of a History that allows for only one trajectory through space and time,
one reality per territory’’ (p. 461). Europe cannot narrate, let alone conceptualize, its
identity, fate, and future in its own terms alone. Acknowledging this fact would mean
engaging in ‘‘rigorous’’ rather than merely ‘‘easy tolerance,’’ recognizing that minorities
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