Web of Secular Power: Civilization, Space, and Sexuality

Bringing Islam into our readings of European secularity requires scrutinizing the universalistic underpinnings of the secular and its equation with the European experience. The contemporary powers of the secular cannot be grasped only in monocivilizational realities. The postcolonial European Muslim perspectives and practices challenge and contest secular hegemony on definitions of self and sexuality. The headscarf as a powerful marker of Muslim religiosity reveals a historically charged intercivilizational field and a multilayered realm of conflicts. Muslim women’s covering breaks away with the (tacit) consensus on secular norms of modernity and gender emancipation. Comparing the cases of headscarf debates in French and Turkish contexts, this chapter addresses the ways Muslim experiences of secularity problematize our understandings of the secular age.