Asad's Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular Two and Three Decades Later

In the wake of Asad’s foundational work, scholarship across the humanistic social sciences has been skeptical of the liberal discourse of secularism. Interrogating the Eurocentrism of the concept, several authors have argued that secularism’s roots in Protestant Christianity render it hostile to Muslims in particular, calling Islam the other of secularism. Are there other ways to understand the relationship between secularism and Islam, for instance, in a non-western democracy such as India? As Muslims organize to reclaim the country’s secular foundations endangered by the ruling Hindu majoritarian government, this paper examines how Muslims harness and refashion the Islamic tradition in their articulation of secularism through ethnographic fieldwork with three Muslim civil society organizations in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. The paper concludes by drawing out the implications this Muslim activism carries for the methodological framework formulated by Asad for the study of Islam.

This paper takes up both Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular to argue that scholars of religion should engage with Talal Asad as a semiotician: the secular on his terms is a new way of structuring the relationship between a real and its representation. I argue that reading the secular in Asad as a semiotics makes salient, through the work of genealogy, that the defining characteristic of the secular isn’t just that concept and practice are inextricable—it’s the insistence on disclosing how they are co-constitutive. Asad reads secularism as a particular way of naming “how the changes in concepts” associated with the secular—new understandings of citizen and power and myth and pain—“articulate changes in practice": metafiction. The secular, in other words, isn’t just a management strategy—it's a management strategy that operates by explicating its own operation.

This paper inaugurates a theoretical dialogue between secularism studies and the emergent discipline of interreligious studies by reading Talal Asad’s theories of embodied discipline and religious tradition as experiments in interreligious thinking. In Formations, Asad imagines the disciplined body as that which distinguishes Islamic tradition from the demands and foreclosures of secular modernity. This essential dichotomy has shaped debates within secular studies for two decades, but it has similarly been central for interreligious theologians who take the body as a site of relationality across (non)religious difference. Reading together recent contributions to both disciplines through their ongoing struggles with the body can further highlight persistent but unresolved questions as well as generate new insights for interdisciplinary collaboration. Particularly, engaging secular studies and interreligious studies together more clearly illuminates the normative stakes implicit in defining secular discipline, better revealing the Asadian struggle with the body and its ongoing afterlives.

Famously, Asad critiqued Geertz for his definition of model that centered on symbols, explaining that this was not the only way religious meaning was made. In the last decade's intractable debates about the niqab and burkini in France, the niqab's detractors have leveled the objection of "symbolic violence" agains those who would wear them, insisting that the niqab should be read not as a garment but rather as an act of aggression. Using French legal archives, I show the way that this perverts the notion of 'symbolic violence' as introduced by Bourdieu and suggest that Asad's _Formations of the Secular_ still has much to teach us.