Talal Asad
| Talal Asad | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1932 Medina, Saudi Arabia |
| Nationality | Pakistani and American |
| Fields | Anthropology |
| Academic advisors | E. E. Evans-Pritchard |
| Notable students |
Saba Mahmood David Scott Charles Hirschkind |
Talal Asad (born 1932) is an anthropologist at the CUNY Graduate Center.
Asad 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".
His long-term research concerns the transformation of religious law (the shari'ah) in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Egypt with special reference to arguments about what constitutes secular and progressive reform.
He was born in Saudi Arabia to 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).
William E. Connolly attempts to summarize Asad's theoretical contributions on secularism as follows:
Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity is both an original work and a reworking of previous essays and papers by Asad. 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 2001 September 11th 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”. However, rather than simply letting such a coincidence pass, Asad continues by stating that such behaviors are "intertwined" with secularism in a "modern society".
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