Talal Asad

Talal Asad is an anthropologist at the City University of New York who has made important theoretical contributions to Post-Colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and Ritual Studies and has recently called for, and initiated, an anthropology of Secularism. Using a genealogical method developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and made prominent by Michel Foucault, Asad "complicates terms of comparison that many anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists receive as the unexamined background of thinking, judgment, and action as such. By doing so, he creates clearings, opening new possibilities for communication, connection, and creative invention where opposition or studied indifference prevailed" [William E. Connolly in "Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors", Stanford 2006, 75.] .

Biography

Talal Asad is a son of Muhammad Asad, Jewish convert to Islam and author of several books on Islam. Talal Asad, born in Saudi Arabia and brought up in Pakistan, attended a missionary boarding school where he was one of only a few Muslims among a majority of Christians. This situation seems to have given Asad a particular view toward East-West relations and influenced his later studies. After his boarding school experience he was sent to England to be schooled in architecture. The study of architecture had no special appeal to him and he moved on to Edinburgh where he began his studies in anthropology at the University of Edinburgh.

In general the British anthropology scene at the time was concerned primarily with the study of social structure. But at Edinburgh he was exposed to American styles of anthropology, such as psychological anthropology and symbolic anthropology. After obtaining his M.A. at Edinburgh he went on to Oxford to work with the renowned social anthropologist E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who had done studies in the Middle East and Africa, notably on the Nuer tribe of the Sudan and the Sanusi of Libya. It was as a result of his association with Evans-Pritchard and his work that Asad chose to do his field studies for his book on the Kababish during a five-year stint teaching at the University of Khartoum in the Sudan, a position he obtained through the close relationship between the Sudanese university and Oxford.

Asad’s book (1970) focused on colonialism and on the ways the West defined the East as “non-Western.” On colonialism, Asad later wrote: “The historical process of constructing a humane secular society, it is said, has aimed at eliminating cruelties. Thus it has often been claimed that European rule in colonial countries, although not itself democratic, brought about moral improvements in behavior — that is, the abandonment of practices that offend against the human.” [Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2003. p. 109.] He continued: “I want to propose, however, that in their attempt to outlaw customs the European rulers considered cruel it was not the concern with indigenous suffering that dominated their thinking, but the desire to impose what they considered civilized standards of justice and humanity on a subject population — that is, the desire to create new human subjects.” [Ibid. p. 110.]

During his time as a lecturer at Hull University, Asad and his colleagues Roger Owen and Sami Zubaida began holding regular seminars and publishing papers on Middle East studies, and they founded the journal Review of Middle East Studies (1975- ) in order to publish the papers from these seminars. When Edward Said’s influential book Orientalism was published in 1978, its popularity was a reinforcement and encouragement to Asad’s own investigations on the uses of Western-world standards as measures of the non-Western world.

After his time at Hull, Asad moved across the Atlantic and joined the faculty of the New School for Social Research as a professor of anthropology. His book (1993) was published after his move. Bryan S. Turner in his review of "Genealogies" stated: “The book concludes with an analysis of the nature of British national culture under the impact of multiculturalism, Islamization, and religious change, especially as these issues have been illustrated by the case of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses.” [Bryan S. Turner, Deakin University, in Sociology of religion, V. 55, N. 3, (Fall 1994) pp. 371-373.]

The work defines religion as being contextual: each religion is the product of its specific cultural and historical developments. This follows Asad’s view on the interchanges between East and West, between the “developing” and the “developed” worlds, and on who should participate in them. As Bruce Lincoln writes in his review of "Genealogies", Asad “maintains that ethnographers and others ought to limit themselves to description, reserving critique to those who participate firsthand in the language and culture under discussion: that is, people who offer their criticism on the basis of shared values and are prepared to engage in a sustained conversation of give-and-take.” [Bruce Lincoln, in "History of Religions", V. 35, N. 1 (August 1995) pp. 83-86] Measuring non-Western societies with a Western Christian measuring stick places non-Christian, non-European societies in a position of never being able to advance to that standard.

Asad’s recent writings have been focused on his investigations into secularism and modernity (e.g., his book "Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity", 2003.) In his essay "Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt," Asad defines secularism thus: “A secular society [...] is a modern construct based on the legal distinction between public and private, on a political arrangement requiring ‘religion’ to be subjected by law to the private domain, on an ideology of moral individualism and a downgrading of the knowing subject, on a celebration of the physical body as well as on a range of personal sensibilities, that all emerged in Western Europe together with the formation of the modern state.” [Thinking about secularism and law in Egypt. Leiden, ISIM, 2001. (ISIM papers, 2) p. 1.]

On modernity Asad has said, “One of the things that modernity has done ... is to extinguish various possibilities." [David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, editors, "Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors". Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006. P. 274.] Further, in an interview with Saba Mahmood published in the "Stanford Humanities Review", Asad explained that Western academics “still make assumptions that prevent them from questioning aspects of Western modernity. For example, they call these movements [such as Islamism] ‘reactionary’ or ‘invented,’ making the assumption that Western modernity is not only the standard by which all contemporary developments must be judged, but also the only authentic trajectory for every tradition. [Interview, “Talal Asad, modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions” by Saba Mahmood. Stanford Humanities Review, v. 5, n. 1 (http://www.stanford.edu/group/SHR/5-1/text/asad.html)]

Given his background and interests, Asad has of late become a commentator on current events: he has been asked to talk and write about "fundamentalism" in the Islamic world, and his analyses of secular societies facing fundamentalism have been the focus for a number of recent articles. ["Thinking about Secularism and Law in Egypt." Leiden, ISIM, 2001 (ISIM papers, 2)] [“ [http://www.islamamerica.org/ArticleLibrary/tabid/55/ArticleType/ArticleView/ArticleID/94/PageID/93/Default.aspx Reflections on Laicité and the public sphere] ,” Beirut Conference on public spheres, October, 22-24, 2004.http://www.islamamerica.org/articles.cfm/article_id/94/)]

The vast majority of this biography is taken verbatim from http://prelectur.stanford.edu/lecturers/asad/.

Critical thematics

William E. Connolly summarizes Asad's theoretical contributions as follows: [William E. Connolly in "Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors", Stanford 2006, 75-76.]
# Secularism is not merely the division between public and private realms that allows religious diversity to flourish in the latter. It can itself be a carrier of harsh exclusions. And it secretes a new definition of "religion" that conceals some of its most problematic practices from itself.
# In creating its characteristic division between secular public space and religious private space, European secularism sought to shuffle ritual and discipline into the private realm. In doing so, however, it loses touch with the ways in which embodied practices of conduct help to constitute culture, including European culture.
# The constitution of modern Europe, as a continent and a secular civilization, makes it incumbent to treat Muslims in its midst on the one hand as abstract citizens and on the other as a distinctive minority either to be tolerated (the liberal orientation) or restricted (the national orientation), depending on the politics of the day.
# European, modern, secular constitutions of Islam, in cumulative effect, converge upon a series of simple contrasts between themselves and Islamic practices. These terms of contrast falsify the deep grammar of European secularism and contribute to the culture wars some bearers of these very definitions seek to ameliorate.

Select Bibliography

* "Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam". The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-8018-4632-3
* "Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity". Stanford University Press, 2003. ISBN 0-8047-4768-7
* "On Suicide Bombing". Columbia University Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-231-14152-9

See also

* Alasdair MacIntyre
* Saba Mahmood
* Charles Taylor (philosopher)

References

External links

* [http://web.gc.cuny.edu/anthropology/fac_asad.html Faculty website]
* [http://www.asiasource.org/news/special_reports/asad.cfm "AsiaSource Interview with Talal Asad" by Nermeen Shaikh]