[Discussion] book review - Talal Asad. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity

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<http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=3D89361083559676> =09



	*Talal Asad.* /Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity//. /Cultural Memory in the Present Series. Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2003. 269 pp. Bibliography, index. $49.50 (cloth),
ISBN 0-8047-4767-9; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0-8047-4768-7.

Reviewed by *Robert W. Hefner*, Department of Anthropology, Boston
University.
Published by H-Gender-MidEast <http://www.h-net.msu.edu/%7Egend-mid/>
(March, 2004)


*Rethinking Religion and the Modern*

With the late-twentieth-century resurgence of Hindu nationalism,
political Islam, Christian conservativism, and other assertively public
religions, the question of the role of religion in the modern world has
taken on a new and urgent intensity. Earlier, in the aftermath of the
Second World War, it was a truism of social and political theory that
the more a society becomes modern, the more its religious traditions
decline or are, at the very least, privatized. Although a few old-guard
theorists still cling to this latter idea, opinion in political and
religious studies as a whole has shifted against this key premise of
secularization theory. At the same time, although most scholars believe
that the time is right for a new model of religion and modernity, there
is as yet surprisingly little consensus on just what such a revisionist
model might require.

A distinguished professor of anthropology at the Graduate Center of the
City University of New York, Talal Asad has in recent years been one of
the most vocal and original of scholars attempting to lay the groundwork
for just such a rethinking of religion and the modern. Asad's role in
this effort is all the more noteworthy inasmuch as the discipline of
anthropology has been largely uninvolved in this discussion. The neglect
reflects the fact that most anthropologists were never particularly
impressed by secularization theories one way or another. In addition,
until, roughly, the 1980s, most anthropologists were not interested in
the equally expansive question of what it means for a society to be
modern. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, the question of the modern
moved to a position of central importance in anthropological theory. In
part this was an effect of postmodernist debates. But it was also the
result of far-reaching changes in the local communities anthropologists
study.

Despite the growing interest in questions of modernity, however, most
anthropologists continued to show little interest in questions of
secularity and secularization. As Asad notes, even today the main
textbooks in the anthropology of religion make no reference to these
issues (p. 22). Meanwhile, in other social sciences and humanities,
debates rage as to whether secularity is a phenomenon intrinsic to the
entire modern world, a condition unique to the West, or an ideological
mythology that, even in the West, obscures the wellsprings of
religiosity running through all societies.

Asad's Formation of the Secular does not attempt to take on these last
issues directly, but instead places the question of religion and
secularity at the center of a richly eclectic but deliberately
unfinished anthropology of modernity. A mix of new chapters and essays
originally written in the late 1990s, the book takes aim at these
questions "indirectly" (p. 67), by way of epistemic reflections on the
genealogy of "the secular" and "secularism." As this latter phrasing
hints, Asad's approach owes as much to Foucauldian methodologies as it
does anything specifically anthropological. In the volume's
introduction, Asad takes exception to colleagues who equate the
anthropological method with "the pseudoscientific notion of 'fieldwork'"
(p. 17). It is not fieldwork that underlies the anthropological method,
Asad counters, but, following Marcel Mauss and Mary Douglas, "the
comparison of embedded concepts (representations) between societies
differently located in time or space" (p. 17). He adds, "the important
thing in this comparative analysis is not their origin..., but the forms
of life that articulate them, the powers they release or disable" (p. 17)=
.

Even this authorial aside fails to capture the peculiarities of Asad's
methodology. Whereas social anthropologists like Mary Douglas develop
their comparisons of embedded concepts from the aggregate
particularities of concrete interactions, Asad's analytic begins with
the macrosociology and epistemology he believes undergirds modern
society and modern systems of knowledge. In his discussion of the
secular, then, Asad is less concerned with concrete social particulars
than he is with the general concatenations of capitalism, the nation
state, and the "new concepts of 'religion,' 'ethics,' and 'politics'"
they have engendered (p. 2). The approach bears a stronger resemblance
to the macro-civilizational analyses of Nietzsche, Weber, and,
especially, Foucault, than it does Oxford social anthropology.

It is this broader concern with, so to speak, epistemic hegemonies that
unites the volume's eight chapters. The book opens with an overview of
the category of the secular in Western social history, and then moves on
to a longer and equally fascinating chapter on "What Might an
Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?" The next three chapters come at
the issue of the secular more "indirectly" (p. 67), talking about agency
and pain, cruelty and torture, and the epistemological assumptions of
the "human" in human rights. The premise that links these essays is that
Western discourses on these matters became possible only after the
secularization of popular understandings of the body, the mind, and the
relationship of individuals to abstract social imaginaries like
"humanity." This is an important point, one that Asad develops by way of
a far-ranging survey of contemporary debates in moral philosophy,
political theory, and the anthropology of subjectivity.

In these and other chapters, Asad shows a preference for reading
contemporary culture from the perspective of high intellectual
commentaries rather than local social actors. When he does speak about
actors-in-context, as in his discussion of Malcolm X's views of human
rights (pp. 141-144), the result is invariably original and convincing.
Where the Olympian method becomes less bracing, however, is when it is
used to explain the diffusion of concepts like democracy, human rights,
and the secular across civlizational divides. When speaking about
non-Western modernities, in particular, Asad places primary emphasis on
the role of Western domination in globalizing new systems of knowledge
and new social disciplines, including those of the marketplace,
governance, and neo-secular understandings of "religion." He writes:

    Assumptions about the integrated character of 'modernity' are
    themselves part of practical and political reality. They direct the
    way in which people committed to it act in critical situations....
    Modernity is a project--or rather, a series of interlinked
    projects--that certain people in power seek to achieve. The project
    aims at institutionalizing a number of (sometimes conflicting, often
    evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy,
    human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the
    market--and secularism." (p. 13)

Of course there are powerful agencies in the West dedicated to the
promotion of human rights and democracy in non-Western settings.
However, to leave the matter there is to lose sight of some of the most
far-reaching and grassroots changes taking place in our world. Whether
among Mayan activists challenging ethnic exclusions in Guatemala,
Indonesian Muslims promoting a civic-pluralist interpretation of Muslim
politics, or Taiwanese women invoking their traditional role as
custodians of the hearthhold to justify their participation in new forms
of environmental activism, democratization is an emergent effect of
varied influences, the most decisive of which are as much local as
anything Western.[1] At several points in his analysis, Asad seems on
the verge of acknowledging this fact. However, his genealogical method
always pushes him back toward a culture-strong and actor-weak
understanding of democratic culture and politics.

The book's last three chapters are the most comprehensively
sociological, and provide the clearest statement of Asad's own normative
position on questions of politics and pluralism. "Muslims as a
'Religious Minority' in Europe" explores the impact of the "grammar of a
discourse" about "Europe" on mainstream European attitudes toward
Muslims (p. 161). Although some readers may find Asad's deconstruction
of the "narrative of Europe" ironically homogenizing, its critique is no
less unnerving. The next chapter, "Secularism, Nation-State, Religion,"
makes a related and equally compelling argument about the way in which
the modern public sphere in the West has, contrary to Habermasian
idealizations, always been a space of social exclusions, in which those
invited to speak may do so only inasmuch as they conform to certain
liberal habits of knowledge and practice. The most critical of these
requirements, Asad argues, has been that religion be either privatized
or stripped of public political demands. As Asad shows in the book's
last chapter, a brilliant discussion of the "Reconfigurations of Law and
Ethics in Colonial Egypt," this latter requirement has posed especially
vexing problems in the Muslim world. There the separation of religion
and state demanded by secularizing governments "presupposes a very
different conception of ethics from the one embedded in the classical
shari'a" (p. 209).

This last statement is consistent with much contemporary scholarship on
shari'a politics, as is Asad's observation that throughout the
postcolonial Muslim world the shari'a has been transmuted into "a
subdivision of legal norms (fiqh) that are authorized and maintained by
the centralizing state" (p. 227). However, here, as in the previous two
essays, Asad's critique of the modern sequestering of the shari'a has an
unexpected irony. He comments in passing that some modern Muslim writers
"have claimed that secular life was always central to the past ...
[b]ecause religious law (that is, the shari'a) always occupied a
restricted space in the governance of society" (pp. 205-206). But Asad
never says whether this claim has any historic truth. More generally,
the often problematic relationship of shari'a to other Islamic norms is
noted in passing but not systematically engaged.

Asad recognizes that the shari'a courts were never but one of the
various systems used in the administration of law in Egypt and other
Muslim countries (p. 210). In a highly original rereading of Muhammad
Abduh's ideas, he also provides a provocative analysis of the way in
which, contrary to many Orientalist readings, there is in mainstream
Islamic tradition no binary opposition between Sufism and the shari'a.
However, when discussing Muslim Egyptians' reservations about reliance
on shari'a-based codes as the foundation for the country's modern legal
system, Asad dismisses such opposition with the startling claim that it
"represents an aspiration for a Westernized future rather than for a
reformed continuity of the recent past" (p. 215). This observation flies
in the face of the fact that pious believers like Abdulkarim Soroush of
Iran and Nurcholish Madjid of Indonesia have concluded that the most
compelling reason for a (relative) separation of political and religious
authority is so as to protect the integrity of Islamic ideals from
corrupt rulers and statist monopolies.

This blind-spot is in turn related to what sociological readers of this
book will regard as its most startling theoretical omission: Asad's
tendency to conflate secular differentiation with secularism as an
"epistemic category" and "a political doctrine" (p. 1). As the recent
controversy in France over the hijab sadly reminds us, there are
fiercely secularist ideologies in the modern West, and the category of
the secular is one to which many, although by no means all, modern
Western political philosophers adhere. However, as Jos=E9 Casanova has
argued in his Public Religions in the Modern World (1994),
secularization theory was always concerned not just with the category of
the secular or the political doctrine of secularism, but with the
growing differentiation of roles, disciplines, and knowledge in society.
This differentiation and its attendant tensions are by no means a
uniquely modern phenomenon; both were visible in the post-prophetic
Muslim community. Moreover a recurring feature of Muslim civilizational
history has been the tension between totalizing interpretations of the
faith intent on controlling all aspects of social life and the
demand--religious as well as secular--for an acceptance of
differentiation, specialization, and self-organization. As Sami Zubaida
has recently demonstrated in his Law and Power in the Islamic World
(2003), the attempt to fuse religious and political authority into a
monopolistic whole has provoked fierce resistance in Muslim societies,
not because of secular ideologies, but because such efforts threaten the
integrity of the law and the welfare of believers themselves. To the
degree that a relative separation of religious and political authority
has long existed in the Muslim world, then, it has done so in part
because many believers are convinced that such a separation is demanded
by the deepest Muslim ideals.

Although he tends to downplay the Muslim world's pluralism, Asad's own
political views embrace just such a pluralist vision. In an important
conclusion to his essay on Muslims in Europe, Asad sets out the terms
for what he calls a "decentered pluralism," a notion he adapts from the
political philosopher W. E. Connolly. Asad argues that Muslims in Europe
will find little institutional representation as long as they are
represented as a minority opposed to and presided over by a majority
nation (pp. 177-178). Effective representation demands a decentered
pluralism characterized by a "continuous readiness to deconstruct
historical narratives" and to open up space for the full multiplicity of
overlapping (rather than opposed) social identities (p. 177). This is an
appealing formula, one consistent with an emerging body of
deep-pluralist opinion in democratic theory. One problem Asad's
formulation leaves largely unresolved is that some authority figures, in
both the ostensibly "mainstream" and "minority" communities, will oppose
such a differentiating proposal because it challenges the elite's
in-group privileges. The violence of these controlling elites will in
turn prompt some within the "minority" community to appeal for outside
intervention, once again raising the question of how to balance citizen
rights with decentered pluralities.

A dark but brilliantly original work, Formations of the Secular is one
of the most important books on religion and the modern in recent years.
Some readers may wonder whether the genealogy of the secular developed
in these chapters is too Olympian and discourse-centric for its own
good. Not just an effect of Western hegemonies, in growing numbers of
societies the challenge of pluralism and participation makes
vernacularized ideals of citizenship meaningful to the most diverse
social actors, including Muslims. Whatever one's viewpoint on these
matters, Asad's book is a significant achievement. It provides a rich
and troubling perspective on one of the central problems of our age: how
to live together in a world in which religious difference has become,
not a diminished, but a growing part of our public, plural lives.

Note

[1]. See, respectively, Kay B. Warren, Indigenous Movements and Their
Critics: Pan-Maya Activism in Guatemala (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1999); Robert W. Hefner, Civil Islam: Muslims and Democratization
in Indonesia (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Robert
P. Weller, Alternate Civilities: Democracy and Culture in China and
Taiwan (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999).

*Library of Congress call number:* BL2747.8 A75 2003
*Subjects:*

    * Secularism.
    * Islam and politics.
    * Christianity and politics.

<http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showpdf.cgi?path=3D89361083559676> =09


*Citation:* Robert W. Hefner. "Review of Talal Asad, /Formations of the
Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity/," H-Gender-MidEast, H-Net
Reviews, March, 2004. URL:
http://www.h-net.msu.edu/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3D89361083559676.


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