Islam and the Quest for a European Secular Identity: From Sovereignty through Solidarity to Immunity

This study explores the process of cumulative 'symbolic sublimation' of power within secular formations as it unfolded through the formative phases that saw in Western Europe the rise and consolidation of patterns first of state sovereignty (within early modernity) and then of social solidarity (within late, colonial and postcolonial modernity). It spells out the process of symbolic sublimation through which secular power justifies itself in cultural terms, by effecting the simultaneous mutation and occultation of traditional symbols in order to underwrite sovereignty and solidarity. Finally, it shows that symbolic sublimation, particularly in the current phase that witnesses the erosion of both sovereignty and solidarity, can no longer disguise wider patterns of connectedness within social relations that are irreducible to either modernist formation. This contemporary stage of the 'secular' in the post-colonial era is analysed by reference to political and judicial decisions on issues related to the Islamic headscarf and responses thereto. It reveals the extent to which 'immunity', the obverse more than the antithesis of community, is both the long-term vector and the ultimate outcome of both sovereignty and solidarity as the two historic arrows of the 'secular'.