Talal Asad

Works

• 1986The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam

  Occasional paper of the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown: Islam is neither a single essence nor a collection of local “islams” but a discursive tradition that relates practices to the founding texts and teaches their correct form.

• 1993Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam

  Essays on medieval Christian discipline, ritual and pain, and on the Islamic revival: the opening essay argues against Geertz that there can be no universal definition of religion, since its elements and its very definition are products of historical discourses and powers.

• 2003Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

  Genealogy of the secular, of secularism and of secularisation: the secular is not what remains when religion is removed but a formation of its own, bound up with the modern state, its law and its idea of the human; chapters treat agency and pain, human rights and the reform of law in colonial Egypt.

Position

Talal Asad is on the map for two concepts that changed the study of religion: Islam as a “discursive tradition” and the secular as a historical formation. In “Anthropological Conceptions of Religion: Reflections on Geertz” (1983) he argued against Clifford Geertz’s definition of religion as a system of symbols that establishes moods and motivations: such a universal definition is itself the product of a particular history, in which Christianity was redefined after the Reformation as a matter of inner belief, separable from power, discipline and law. In “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” (1986) he proposed to study Islam neither as a single essence nor as a mere collection of local practices, but as a discursive tradition that relates practices to the Qur’an and the hadith and teaches Muslims the correct form of those practices – a tradition that includes argument about what is correct. “Genealogies of Religion” (1993), drawing on Foucault’s analysis of power and discipline, traced how medieval Christian monastic practice formed virtues and desires. “Formations of the Secular” (2003) argued that the secular is not simply what remains when religion is removed: it is a formation of concepts and sensibilities – about agency, pain, the human and the public – bound up with the modern nation-state and its law, as he showed in the reform of family law in colonial Egypt. Saba Mahmood, Charles Hirschkind and other students and readers developed these ideas in studies of piety and of the Islamic revival; Ovamir Anjum (2007) and others have discussed how far the concept of discursive tradition captures disagreement and change within a tradition.

Life & context

Talal Asad was born in April 1932 in Medina. His father was Muhammad Asad, born Leopold Weiss in Lemberg, a convert to Islam, journalist and later Pakistani diplomat; his mother came from Saudi Arabia. He grew up in India and Pakistan and studied in Britain, first architecture and then anthropology at Edinburgh, and took his doctorate at Oxford with a study of the Kababish Arabs of Sudan, published in 1970. He taught at the University of Khartoum and at the University of Hull, and later at the New School for Social Research, at Johns Hopkins University and, until his retirement, at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1973 he edited “Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter”, a collection that examined the relation between British anthropology and colonial rule.

Further main works

• The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe (1970)
• Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (ed., 1973)
• Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (with W. Brown, J. Butler and S. Mahmood, 2009)
• Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason (2018)