Talal Asad

Asad was born in April 1932[13] in Medina,[14] Saudi Arabia, to the Austrian diplomat, writer, and reformer Muhammad Asad, a Jew who converted to Islam in his mid-20s, and a Saudi Arabian Muslim mother, Munira Hussein Al Shammari (died 1978).[15] When Talal was just eight months old, his parents moved to British India, where his father would play a pivotal role in the Pakistan Movement.[16][17] Following Pakistan's independence in 1947, his father joined the Pakistani government, serving the country in various administrative and diplomatic posts.[18][19] Talal was raised in Pakistan,[20][21] and attended a Christian-run missionary boarding school.[22][23] He is an alumnus of the St. Anthony High School in Lahore.[1] His parents divorced shortly before his father's third marriage.[19]

Asad went to the United Kingdom for higher education aged 18, initially to study architecture per his father's wishes but later switching to anthropology.[22][23] He traveled on a Saudi Arabian passport, as Pakistan did not have naturalized citizenship laws in place yet; later on, he received a Pakistani passport which enabled him to live and work freely in the UK as a Commonwealth citizen.[1] He graduated from the University of Edinburgh with an undergraduate degree in 1959 and from the University of Oxford with a Bachelor of Letters degree and, in 1968, a Doctor of Philosophy degree.[24] He worked at the University of Khartoum and, thereafter upon returning in the early 1970s (following which he also acquired British nationality),[1] at the University of Hull before moving to the United States in 1989.[10] He then served as professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research and then Johns Hopkins University.[10] He later became distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.[10]

William E. Connolly attempts to summarize Asad's theoretical contributions on secularism as follows:[25]

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.

Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity is both an original work and a reworking of previous essays and papers by Asad.[26] In Formations of the Secular, Asad examines what he views as the curious character of modern European and American societies and their notion of secularism.

Secularism, often viewed as a neutral or flat space that forbids religious opinion or interference in political questions, is found to be somewhat curious to Asad. Specifically, Asad's experiences with the response to the September 11, 2001, attacks from the point of view of a Muslim in United States exposed him to "explosions of intolerance" that seemed to him "entirely compatible with secularism in a highly modern society".[27] However, rather than simply letting such a coincidence pass, Asad continues by stating that such behaviors are "intertwined" with secularism in a "modern society".[27]

This leads Asad's deployment of the genealogical method in order to understand why a country like the United States denominates itself as secular despite the distinctly religious Manichaean tones – "good" and "evil" – often found within the historical record of the United States.[27] He further notes that despite the nominally secular character of the United States, "repressive measures have been directed at real and imagined secular opponents."[27]

These events, as well as other questions, lead Asad to what might be termed the thesis of the book:

The secular, I argue, is neither continuous with the religious that supposedly preceded it (that is, it is not the latest phase of a sacred origin) nor a simple break from it (that is, it is not the opposite, an essence that excludes the sacred). I take the secular to be a concept that brings together certain behaviors, knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life.[28]

Building on that notion, Asad is also critical of the more common concept of secularism, which he views as having no distinct features that demarcate it from other prior forms of secularism found elsewhere in the world. Instead he favors another approach to viewing modern secularism: "In my view the secular is neither singular in origin nor stable in its historical identity, although it works through a series of particular oppositions."[29]

With that said, Asad's goal for the book is to understand how a more general pre-secularism mutates into the more familiar "novel" form of secularism present within Euro-American societies – Asad makes clear his interest in this specific "novel" variant.[30]

• The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority, and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. Praeger Publishers, 1970. ISBN 0-900966-21-1
• "Market Model, Class Structure, and Consent: A Reconsideration of Swat Political Organization." Man 7(1) (1972), pp. 74–89.
• Editor, Anthropology & the Colonial Encounter. Ithaca Press, 1973. ISBN 0-903729-00-8
• The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, 1986. ISBN 978-9991289526
• 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
• Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. Columbia University Press, 2018. ISBN 9780231189873

• Aziz al-Azmeh
• William T. Cavanaugh
• Alasdair MacIntyre
• Saba Mahmood
• Charles Taylor (philosopher)

Wikiquote has quotations related to: Talal Asad

• CUNY Graduate Center Anthropology Faculty Website
• Interview with Asad on YouTube
• "AsiaSource Interview with Talal Asad" by Nermeen Shaikh