Talal Asad

Dzieła

• 1986The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (Idea antropologii islamu)

  Opracowanie okolicznościowe Center for Contemporary Arab Studies w Georgetown: islam nie jest ani jedną istotą, ani zbiorem lokalnych „islamów”, lecz tradycją dyskursywną, która odnosi praktyki do tekstów założycielskich i naucza ich właściwej formy.

• 1993Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Genealogie religii: dyscyplina i racje władzy w chrześcijaństwie i islamie)

  Eseje o średniowiecznej dyscyplinie chrześcijańskiej, rytuale i bólu oraz o odrodzeniu islamskim: esej otwierający dowodzi wbrew Geertzowi, że nie może istnieć uniwersalna definicja religii, ponieważ jej elementy i sama definicja są wytworami historycznych dyskursów i władz.

• 2003Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Formacje tego, co świeckie: chrześcijaństwo, islam, nowoczesność)

  Genealogia tego, co świeckie, sekularyzmu i sekularyzacji: świeckość nie jest tym, co zostaje po odjęciu religii, lecz odrębną formacją, związaną z nowoczesnym państwem, jego prawem i jego ideą człowieka; rozdziały dotyczą sprawczości i bólu, praw człowieka i reformy prawa w kolonialnym Egipcie.

Stanowisko

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.

Życie i kontekst

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.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• 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)