Interview with Talal Asad

Abstract

The work of Talal Asad, in particular his two landmark volumes Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2004), has given new life to critical study of secularism and the idea of “religion” across the disciplines of anthropology, political science, religion, history, and colonial studies. In fact my first published article, “Islam as a Discursive Tradition” (2007), was a methodological inquiry into efforts to conceptualize Islam, focalized through the work of Asad and his interlocutors. The preface to my 2012 book on Islamic political thought remarked my broader indebtedness to Asad’s notion of “discursive tradition” (against simple accounts of the “politicization” of modern Islam). Shortly after the book was published, in June 2012, I conducted a dialogue with Professor Asad in his Manhattan apartment, unique also for being a dialogue between an anthropologist and an intellectual historian. Our conversation spanned topics of mutual interest: secularism and the nation-state, democracy, Islamic tradition, the questions of reform and coercion, and too (what was at the time) Egypt’s new revolution and so the possibilities and limits of Islamist politics. Since then, Asad has published articles which touch on themes we discussed (for example, the pair of 2015 essays in Critical Inquiry 41:2 and 42:1), and a few other interviews have appeared in which he also reflects on his intellectual trajectory and methodological considerations (see in particular the interviews by Fadi Bardawil and by Basit Kareem Iqbal). Now, nearly six years later after they took place, AJISS publishes an edited transcript of our 2012 conversations, both for their remarkable theoretical and biographical candor and for how, when read in relationship to the essays he has published since then, they make visible the development of a sustained argument regarding “tradition” and the project of modernity ...