塔拉勒·阿萨德

作品

• 1986伊斯兰人类学的构想

  乔治城大学当代阿拉伯研究中心的专题论文：伊斯兰既不是单一的本质，也不是地方性“伊斯兰”的集合，而是一种把实践与奠基性文本联系起来并教导其正确形式的话语传统。

• 1993宗教的谱系：基督教与伊斯兰教中的规训与权力的理由

  关于中世纪基督教的规训、仪式与痛苦，以及伊斯兰复兴的论文：开篇一文针对格尔茨主张不可能有宗教的普遍定义，因为其要素及其定义本身都是历史性话语和权力的产物。

• 2003世俗的形成：基督教、伊斯兰教、现代性

  对世俗、世俗主义与世俗化的谱系研究：世俗不是去掉宗教后剩下的东西，而是自成一体的形态，与现代国家、其法律及其人的观念相联；各章论述能动性与痛苦、人权，以及殖民时期埃及的法律改革。

立场

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.

生平与背景

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.

其他主要作品

• The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe (1970)
• Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (ed., 1973)
• The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam (1986)
• Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993)
• Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003)
• 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)