Left to right, Jocelyne Cesari, Dan Varisco, Jens Kreinath, Nadia Fadil, Refika Sarionder at AAR in Montreal

Last Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion I had the privilege of serving in a “responding” role on one of the first panels on the program. This was a session entitled “Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam,” organized by Jens Kreinath (Wichita State University), presided over by Refika Sarionder (University of Bielefeld) and with presentations by Jocelyne Cesari (Harvard University), Nadia Fadil (Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven), Jens Kreinath and Bruce B. Lawrence (Duke University). [Abstracts of the panel and papers are posted at the bottom of my comments.]

Following a typically powerful presentation by Bruce Lawrence and placed in the difficult role of representing Talal Asad (who was not present), I began my remarks by noting that I felt myself between a rock (a solid one at that) and a hard place. Drawing on my anthropological roots, I offered myself in the metaphorical role of Thomas Henry Huxley to Darwin, dubbing my wrapping-up task as akin to Asad’s Bulldog. This is not to say that the papers were overtly critical of Dr. Asad’s work; on the contrary, all expressed appreciation of his work as formative in their own ideas. Yet, in reading over the individual papers I detected several criticisms that stem more from dealing with isolated comments than considering the impressive and expanding corpus of Asad. I decided the best approach was to sum up what I see as some of the reasons the continuing intellectual trajectory of Dr. Asad is useful for those of us interested in something that might be called an “anthropology” of Islam.

Bruce Lawrence at AAR in Montreal

(1) The first, and perhaps the most general, point is that the work of Talal Asad stems from a provocative (in the best sense) voice. He might best be styled as an experiential skeptic of received wisdom. Consider his own biography, as nicely drawn in the published interview with David Scott (in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and his Interlocutors, edited by David Scott and Charles Hirschkind, Stanford University Press, 2006, 243-303). I note with appreciation that this interview is labeled “The Trouble of Thinking.” We all need to take the trouble to think about thinking, which is often a matter of trouble-speak. In his early years, influenced by fieldwork in Sudan, he became a skeptic of British structural-functionalism at the time, especially the formulaic structural pigeon-wholes that Radcliffe-Brown had created; nor was he particularly at ease with his advisor Evans-Pritchard, who he describes: “He was in many ways a rather prejudiced man, and he reveled in his prejudice” (p. 246). Later on, Asad provided firm critical assessments of the textual attitude of Geertz in reading culture as a set of inscribed or ascribed symbols and Gellner’s overtly philosophical flavoring. More recently he has problematized the categories of “religion,” “secularism,” and even “Islam” as commonly used, especially as binary pairings with deep Western genealogical roots.

(2) I would also characterize the thinking of Talal Asad as a-theological and a-meta-theoretical: for Talal those hermeneutists who claim to have found “real” meaning suffer from what I might neologize as a kind of hermeneurosis, with emphasis on the “euro” to be highlighted. As he notes in his interview: “I’m trying to complicate descriptive categories. I’m trying to complicate the Western tradition of secularism” (pp. 284-285). As he reflects, criticism is important “but for tactical purposes rather than in some absolute sense” (p. 266). Scholars of religion predicate much of their argumentation on some notion of doxa, not always aware of the political implications in any designation of “orthodoxy.” In Asad’s work the standard intellectual dancing with such doxa is always toxic, never escaping into a neutral playing field. This is further evidenced in Asad’s suspicion of unitary, as well as binarily dual, formulations. It is telling that his two major books, Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003) begin with plurals.

(3) Another feature of the work of Talal Asad that I find most refreshing is the level of self-critique. The tendency in many fiefdoms of the overarched realm of Academe is for inflated egos. A clever intellectual can parry with less agile Ivory Tower prey almost without fail, especially if there are verbal accolades from his or her seconds and thirds and fourths. In this respect I would dub Talal Asad a re-thinker and not simply a thinker. “I’m very dissatisfied with almost everything I’ve written,” (p. 303) he confides in his interview. This is the mark of someone who is confident enough to know that written words are fossils with the life drained out of them; such inscribed remnants may yield valuable clues but are not the same as the functioning organism. All forms of writing are for certain kinds of audiences, so there is no sacred authority inherent in any text for the cautious critic. As is clear from his responses to the essays in Powers of the Secular Modern, he appreciates critical engagement, especially in areas for which he does not claim to have expertise.

(4) Finally, and here I speak primarily as an anthropologist, Talal Asad remains a disciplined anthropologist. He has not abandoned ship for the sunny literate waters of Cultural Studies or the neo-canonization of Postcolonial Studies. While some scholars dismiss the rise of anthropology as a colonialist enterprise, Talal Asad rightly observes that anthropologists have played a peripheral role in the process. “And I felt that one had to somehow try and find a way of speaking about this without descending either into personal blame or describing the discipline as the ‘handmaiden’ of colonialism” (p. 258). The aggrandizement of ethnographic writings as some sort of blueprinting for imperialist ambitions is highly inflated. While re-thinking categories and refining concepts at the theoretical level, Talal has always recognized the significance of sound ethnographic fieldwork for “making real intellectual contact with the traditions and experiences of ordinary people” (p. 279).

All of the above comments relate to the approach of Talal Asad in general. Several of the papers noted his short monograph published in 1986 as “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” Unfortunately this text has not been widely read, as it was buried in pre-internet days in the “Occasional Papers Series” of Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. In his interview Talal noted that he approached the subject in this essay “in a preliminary way” (p. 303) and does not think he addressed the issue adequately. “I want to think about it in a sustained way,” he concludes. Ironically, this preliminary set of ideas, now over two decades old and still hard to find, is quoted as though it is somehow a major stand-alone statement. As Talal himself notes, there is still much more to be said and certainly his later works must be read as a filter on ideas presented in this earlier essay. My own suggestion is that in any future re-working the title be updated to “Ideas of an Anthropology of Islam,” since I do not think there has ever been a single “idea” motivating or representing anthropological interest and discussion of Islam. I also find more merit than Talal does, as is also the case for Jens Kreinath in his paper, on Abdel Hamid El-Zein’s notion of “islams” as the primary focus of anthropological analysis (as I discussed in my Islam Obscured, Palgrave, 2005). The debate over what “Islam” is (both with a capital I and as a long and varied historical tradition) is ultimately a theological or philosophical engagement, since it usually revolves some notion about the “truth” (spiritual or material) of the religion. But it is dangerous from an anthropological perspective to assume that there is and has been only one way of submission (the original meaning of the term Islam before it took up a reserved seat in the intellectual pantheon of world religions).

While listening to the individual presentations, most of which engaged with the situation of contemporary Muslims in a secularized (either European or global) sense, I felt that I have heard this debate before. Growing up in a proudly “fundamentalist” Bible-believing Baptist church in northern Ohio, the cultural binary was the “church” (and this did not include Catholics and liberals) vs. the “world” (which meant those who strayed and drank, smoked, used playing cards, danced socially, and a gamut of ordinary acts made to look extraordinary with a literalist reading of holy writ). Coping with the world and keeping the faith: this is also the crux facing many Muslims in non-Muslim majority countries, as well as in those with no specific separation of mosque and state. Any anthropology of Islam is at the same time a cross-cultural exercise. This is not to say that Islam must undergo a Protestant reform, as many in the West seem to be calling for. I am referring to the more basic context of contested values between a received discursive tradition (to uses Talal’s term) and the wider social order of things. As we who study “Islam” or “islams” and certainly “Muslims” proceed within different disciplines, the work of Talal Asad will serve as a useful guide and reminder that no matter how much any of us might accomplish in the eyes of our peers, the most appropriate scholarly mantra is Talal’s closing remark: “I want to think about it in a sustained way” (p. 303).

Daniel Martin Varisco

Panel Abstracts:
Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam

This panel discusses the role of an anthropological approach to the study of Muslim societies within the broader field of the study of Islam. On the basis of a common theoretical frame, each paper focuses upon specific aspects in the work of Talal Asad, including notions of tradition, orthodoxy, and secularism. The rationale is to analyze empirical cases (ethnographic and/or historical) in light of these concepts; arguing that the anthropological account of Islam offers crucial leverage for studying various discourses and practices in Muslim societies. Through in-depth accounts in various sociopolitical contexts, this panel fosters the anthropological perspective in studying the religious diversity of Muslim societies. The aim of this panel is to expand this endeavor of scrutinizing current Western conceptualizations in the anthropology of Islam, and to present approaches that allow us to refigure ethnographic accounts of Muslim societies while bringing the anthropology of Islam onto the academic agenda.

Jocelyne Cesari, Harvard University
Islamic Religiosity in the West and Asad’s Notion of Tradition

This paper will present results of recent fieldwork among Muslims in major European and American cities. Our understanding of Muslim minorities in the West takes the phenomenon of global Islam into account as well. However, such an approach runs the risk of removing Islam from its particular contexts and reducing it to a series of essentialized symbols and principles. Thus, to combat essentialist assumptions that construct meaning as a unified system extending from the international through the national to the local level, this paper will build on Asad’s notion of tradition to present Western Islam as a conglomeration of discursive practices that are situated within the democracies of the West but also connect to major discussions and conflicts regarding the global doxa of Islam today. These discursive practices include debates about the content and form of Islamic observance, as well as what it means to practice Islam.

Nadia Fadil, Katholieke Universiteit, Leuven
Questions of Orthodoxy and Legitimacy in the Islamic Hermeneutical Enterprise

Talal Asad’s concept of Islam as a discursive tradition initiated a new conversation which examines how the Islamic theological legacy and practice is shaped (and contested) according to particular epistemological procedures and rationales. His notion of orthodoxy allows us to observe how authoritative readings are shaped due to these procedures. This paper suggests that whereas this understanding helps to understand and unpack the discursive rationale behind authoritative Islam, it tends to underestimate how orthodoxies are shaped throughout a continuous distinction or differentiation from heterodox hermeneutics or practices. Drawing on Bourdieu’s relational method, these issues are examined in the narratives of second generation Maghrebi Muslims in Belgium and their position towards certain questions in Islamic tradition and practices. The analysis of their accounts shows that “orthodox” and “non-orthodox” standpoints can be differentiated not only in function of their hermeneutical rationale, but also in function of the structural self-positioning within the Islamic tradition.

Jens Kreinath, Wichita State University
Emerging Traditions and Clashing Secularisms: Orthodoxy and Agency in the Turkish Discourse on Veiling

Within the anthropology of Islam, an issue exists of which conceptual light is needed to view Islam. In contrast to approaches which presuppose the notion of a universal Islam, social anthropologists question the idea of a universal form of Islam. In this paper, the author argues that Talal Asad offered one of the most fruitful proposals for the anthropology of Islam in treating Islam as a discursive tradition and instituted practice. However, these notions should be radically grounded in contextual settings and thoroughly refined. This paper takes up the discourse on the headscarf in Turkish politics and media in order to reread and refine the central concepts of Asad’s anthropology of Islam. By considering the formation of a political Islam in Turkey, the author questions the assumption that it is possible to determine the notion of discursive tradition and instituted practice as presented by Asad.

Bruce B. Lawrence, Duke University
The Stake of African and Asian Minorities in the Critical Theory Debate on Minorities