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How to Recognize a Muslim When You See One Western Secularism and the Politics of Conversion Markha G. Valenta Whatever else the project of the Enlightenment may have created, it aspired to create persons who would, after the fact, have wished to become modern. —Arjun Appadurai And yet most individuals enter modernity rather as converts enter a new religion—as a consequence of forces beyond their control. —Talal Asad I think we lack a name around which a radical politics can take shape. —Simon Critchley Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. —Goethe Prelude One of the most dramatic aspects of the encounter between the West and Islam today is the urgency with which both are being driven to reexamine their most fundamental assumptions and worldviews—and to reinvent them. Striving, forced, fearing to live together, we are creating a new world, now, this very minute. Yes, there is caricature, aversion, and fear; and yes, these sow the seeds for what has been imagined by some to be an epic ‘‘clash.’’ So we speak of the West and of Islam, we write down these words, black on white, ink to paper. Yet this makes them no more real or true. Less so, if truth be told. The West and Islam encompass histories too varied, too porous, too centrif4 44 HOW T O RE CO GNIZE A MUS LIM ugal to be coherent powers. They lack that which war requires: a central intelligence, an authorized authority that we follow as One—as a Holy Body—into the vortex of History. That isn’t to say that we might not yet create them, or that they might not clash. But for the moment it is precisely the mythic nature of the battle that makes it so appealing to the fantasies of our politicians and lesser commentators, while it is only a minor drama relative to the so much more grand drama of invention that is taking place. An invention of collaboration , through difference. What is at stake is the possibility of imagining a role for the power and practice of religion, of belief, of fundamental conviction within democracy, rather than beyond or against it. Not just our own religion, our own conviction, but also another’s. And not just democracy at home, but democracy across the world. It means making minorities of us all, risking my conviction as it touches yours. Which is to make the world ours. This requires all our ingenuity and dedication, for the answers we already have fail us now. Private belief, blessed nation, and sacred state. Beyond these, in our passions, as in democracy, beats life. And it is up to us to say what kind of life it will be. The Problem The problem is not the veil itself. For more than a thousand years, Muslims, Christians, and Jews engaged each other (and before them Persians, Greeks, and Romans) without its becoming an issue. Only an odd hundred years ago, in the second decade of Europe’s colonization of the Islamic worlds, did this simple piece of cloth on a woman’s head become a primary site of attack and counterattack. Since then, the veil has been an astoundingly pregnant source of social, political, religious, and judicial conflict. The question is: Why? The first point to note is that the veil’s prominence in the encounter between Islam and the West depends on a fundamental collaboration among all those involved: whatever their standpoint, however opposed and far removed from each other, all have agreed that this is to be a primary site at which to take their stand. Precisely the intensity and expansiveness of the conflict means that the veil—the veiled woman—is a point at which the many Muslim and Western worlds stand especially close to each other, touch each other. The veil is a medium of translation, communicating power and resistance, desire and otherness to each other, from West to East and East to West, from faction to faction, across a gap of difference. So there is much at stake. The second point to note is that the discussion of the veil within the West’s public space, which is the space that concerns me in this essay—our media, governments, judiciaries , scholarship, and arts—takes place in terms that are themselves largely secularist and modern.1 So the operative epistemological and ontological concepts are those of the individual, self-expression, culture, choice, identity...

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