Solidarity and the Secular

Europe is not merely the name of a geopolitical space or natural territory. Rather, as Talal Asad illustrates in “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe” (Chapter 5 of Formations of the Secular , 2003), it is a project that coheres and unifies, swallows and expels. Thus Asad observes: Muslims are “included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way” (ibid.: 159). The transformation of Muslims into a ‘minority’—an in-between status before assimilation into the Western family, or decisive expulsion from it—enacts this double movement. But Asad's intervention in Formations is not a call for the inclusion of Muslims and the (ex-)colonized; it is to question ‘inclusion’ per se. Perhaps this is why Asad describes his own claim, that Muslims cannot be represented in Europe, as “ironic” (Azad 2015). Not because Muslims can in fact be ‘included,’ but because their meaningful presence—the ability to live a “particular [way] of life continuously, co-operatively, and unselfconsciously” (Asad 2003: 178)—would mean the end of the very order that produces inclusion and exclusion, majority and minority: the end of Europe.