Interview with Talal Asad

The work of Talal Asad, in particular his two landmark volumes Genealogiesof Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianityand Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,Modernity (2004), has given new life to critical study of secularismand the idea of “religion” across the disciplines of anthropology, politicalscience, religion, history, and colonial studies. In fact my firstpublished article, “Islam as a Discursive Tradition” (2007), was amethodological inquiry into efforts to conceptualize Islam, focalizedthrough the work of Asad and his interlocutors. The preface tomy 2012 book on Islamic political thought remarked my broaderindebtedness to Asad’s notion of “discursive tradition” (against simpleaccounts of the “politicization” of modern Islam). Shortly afterthe book was published, in June 2012, I conducted a dialogue withProfessor Asad in his Manhattan apartment, unique also for beinga dialogue between an anthropologist and an intellectual historian.Our conversation spanned topics of mutual interest: secularismand the nation-state, democracy, Islamic tradition, the questions ofreform and coercion, and too (what was at the time) Egypt’s newrevolution and so the possibilities and limits of Islamist politics.Since then, Asad has published articles which touch on themes wediscussed (for example, the pair of 2015 essays in Critical Inquiry41:2 and 42:1), and a few other interviews have appeared in whichhe also reflects on his intellectual trajectory and methodologicalconsiderations (see in particular the interviews by Fadi Bardawiland by Basit Kareem Iqbal). Now, nearly six years later after theytook place, AJISS publishes an edited transcript of our 2012 conversations,both for their remarkable theoretical and biographicalcandor and for how, when read in relationship to the essays he haspublished since then, they make visible the development of a sustainedargument regarding “tradition” and the project of modernity ...