This essay deals with the influential anthropological work of Prof. Talal Asad on Islam, secularism and the secular. I argue that the binary `Western—non-Western' which is constitutive for Asad, the relative absence of ethnography in Asad's work, and the state-centred nature of Asad's approach to secularism and the secular has contributed to an anthropological impasse whereby the complex engagement of Muslims living in secular and liberal `Western' contexts with the secular has become difficult to conceptualize. I argue in favour of the conceptualizations in a nascent body of works which transcend some of these binaries, most notably those of Marsden and Soares and Otayek, and in favour of investigating the secular as a vernacular practice.
Afary, Janet and Kevin B. Anderson (2006) Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
2.
Ahmad, Aijaz (1992) In Theory: Nations, Classes, Literatures. London: Verso.
3.
Al-Azmeh, Aziz (1993) Islams and Modernities, 2nd edn. London: Verso.
4.
An-Na`im, Abdullahi Ahmed (2008) Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari'a. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
5.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony (2005) The Ethics of Identity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
6.
Asad, Talal (1970) The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe. London: Hurst & Co.
7.
Asad, Talal, ed. (1975) Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.
8.
Asad, Talal (1979) `Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology', Man14(4): 607-27.
9.
Asad, Talal (1980) `Review of Orientalism', English Historical Review95: 648-9.
10.
Asad, Talal (1986) The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam. Occasional Papers Series. Washington, DC: Institute for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.
11.
Asad, Talal (1993a) Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
12.
Asad, Talal (1993b) `A Comment About Aijaz Ahmad's In Theory', Public Culture6(1): 31-9.
13.
Asad, Talal (2000) `What Do Human Rights Do? An Anthropological Enquiry' , Theory and Event4(4).
14.
Asad, Talal (2001) `Reading a Modern Classic: W.C. Smith's The Meaning and End of Religion', in Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (eds) Religion and Media, pp. 131-50. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
15.
Asad, Talal (2003) Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
16.
Asad, Talal (2004) `Where Are the Margins of the State?', In Veena Das and Deborah Poole (eds) Anthropology in the Margins of the State , pp. 279-88. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
17.
Asad, Talal (2006a) `Responses', in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors , pp. 206-42. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press .
18.
Asad, Talal (2006b) `Trying to Understand French Secularism', in Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (eds) Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, pp. 494-526, 763-72. New York: Fordham University Press.
19.
Asad, Talal (2007) On Suicide Bombing. New York : Columbia University Press.
20.
Asad, Talal (2008) `Reflections on Blasphemy and Secular Criticism' , in Hent de Vries (ed.) Religion: Beyond a Concept, pp. 580-609. New York: Fordham University Press.
21.
Bakhle, Janaki (2008) `Music as the Sound of the Secular', Comparative Studies in Society and History50(1): 256-84.
22.
Bauman, Zygmunt (1989) Modernity and the Holocaust. New York: Cornell University Press.
23.
Bayat, Asef (2007) Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
24.
Berger, Peter L. (2006) `Between Relativism and Fundamentalism', The American Interest2(2): 9-17.
25.
Berlinerblau, Jacques (2005) The Secular Bible: Why Non-Believers Must Take Religion Seriously. New York: Cambridge University Press.
26.
Bhargava, Rajeev, ed. (1999) Secularism and Its Critics. New Dehli: Oxford University Press.
27.
Bilgrami, Akeel (1999) `Secularism, Nationalism, and Modernity', in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and Its Critics, pp. 380-417. New Dehli: Oxford University Press.
28.
Bilgrami, Akeel (2004) `Secularism and Relativism', Boundary 2 31(2): 173-96.
29.
Blumenberg, Hans (1983) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
30.
Bowen, John R. (2008) `Islam and Authority', post on the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) blog The Immanent Frame (28 April). Accessed 1 July 2008 http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/04/28/islam-and-authority/
31.
Brittain, Cristopher Craig (2005) `The "Secular" as a Tragic Category: On Talal Asad, Religion and Representation', Method and Theory in the Study of Religion17: 149-65.
32.
Brown, Wendy (2007) `Idealism, Materialism, Secularism?', post on the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) blog The Immanent Frame (22 October) . Accessed 9 December 2008: http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2007/10/22/idealism-materialism-secularism/
33.
Bull, Malcolm (2007) `The Catastrophist', LondonReview of Books 1 November.
34.
Casanova, José (2006) `Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad' , in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, pp. 12-30. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
35.
Chatterjee, Partha (2006) `Fasting for Bin Laden: The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India', in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, pp. 57-74. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
36.
Chipkin, Ivor (2007) Do South Africans Exist? Nationalism, Democracy and the Identity of `the People'. Johannesburg: Wits University Press.
37.
Çinar, Alev (2005) Modernity, Islam and Secularism in Turkey. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
38.
Cohn, Norman (1957) The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages. London: Secker & Warburg.
39.
Connolly, William E. (1999) Why I Am Not a Secularist. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
40.
Dabashi, Hamid (2007) Iran: A People Interrupted. New York: The New Press.
41.
Das, Veena (2006) `Secularism and the Argument from Nature', in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, pp. 93-112. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
42.
Eickelman, Dale F. (1987) `Changing Interpretations of Islamic Movements' , in William R. Roff (ed.) Islam and the Political Economy of Meaning, pp. 13-30. London: Croom Helm.
43.
Ferguson, James (2006) Global Shadows: Africa in the Neoliberal World Order. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
44.
Fischer, Michael M.J. (1980) Iran: From Religious Dispute to Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
45.
Foucault, Michel (1972) The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. Rupert Swyer. London: Tavistock.
46.
Gauchet, Marcel (1997) The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
47.
Gourgouris, Stathis (2008) `Detranscendatalizing the Secular', Public Culture20(3): 437-45.
48.
Gray, John (2007) Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. London: Allen Lane.
49.
Habermas, Jürgen (2008) Between Naturalism and Religion, trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity Press .
50.
Hirschkind, Charles (2006) The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics. New York: Columbia University Press.
51.
Hurd, Elizabeth Shakman (2008) The Politics of Secularism in International Relations . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
52.
Jakobsen, Janet R. and Ann Pellegrini (2008) `Introduction: Times Like These', in Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (eds) Secularisms, pp. 1-38. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
53.
Judt, Tony (2006) `Goodbye to All That?', New York Review of Books 21 September. Keesing, Roger M. (1989) `Exotic Readings of Cultural Texts', Current Anthropology 30(4): 459-69.
54.
Kołakowski, Leszek (2005[1978]) Main Currents of Marxism: The Founders, the Golden Age, the Breakdown. New York: W.W. Norton & Co.
55.
Löwith, Karl (1949) Meaning in History. Chicago : University of Chicago Press.
56.
Mahmood, Saba (1995) `Modern Power and the Reconfiguration of Religious Traditions', Stanford Humanities Review5(1): 1-16.
57.
Mahmood, Saba (2005) Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
58.
Mamdani, Mahmood (1996) Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism. London: James Currey.
59.
Marsden, Magnus (2005) Living Islam: Muslim Religious Experience in Pakistan's North-West Frontier. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
60.
Masud, Muhammad Khalid (2005) `The Construction and Deconstruction of Secularism as an Ideology in Contemporary Muslim Thought', Asian Journal of Social Science33(3): 363-83.
61.
Mbembe, Achille (2001) On the Postcolony. Berkeley : University of California Press.
62.
Metcalf, Barbara D. and Thomas R. Metcalf (2002) A Concise History of India . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
63.
Mufti, Aamir (1995) `Secularism and Minority: Elements of a Critique' , Social Text45(Winter): 75-96.
64.
Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2002) Faces of the State: Secularism and Public Life in Turkey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
65.
Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, eds (2007) The Crisis of Secularism in India. Durham. NC: Duke University Press.
66.
Norris, Pippa and Ronald Inglehart (2004) Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide. New York: Cambridge University Press.
67.
Ortner, Sherry B. (1995) `Resistance and the Problem of Ethnographic Refusal' , Comparative Studies in Society and History37(1): 173-93.
68.
Pamuk, Orhan (2008) `My Turkish Library', New YorkReview of Books 18 December.
69.
Pecora, Vincent P. (2006) Secularization and Cultural Criticism: Religion, Nation and Modernity. Chicago: Chicago University Press.
70.
Peter, Frank W. (2006) `Individualization and Religious Authority in Western European Islam', Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations17(1): 105-18.
71.
Roy, Olivier (2007) Secularism Confronts Islam (trans. George Holoch) . New York: Columbia University Press.
72.
Said, Edward (1978) Orientalism. London: Penguin.
73.
Salvatore, Armando (2005) `The Euro-Islamic Roots of Secularity: A Difficult Equation', Asian Journal of Social Science33(3): 412-37.
74.
Salvatore, Armando (2006) `Power and Authority within European Secularity: From the Enlightenment Critique of Religion to the Contemporary Presence of Islam', The Muslim World96 (Oct.): 543-61.
75.
Schielke, Samuli (2006) `Snacks & Saints: Mawlid Festivals and the Politics of Festivity, Piety and Modernity in Contemporary Egypt', unpublished PhD Dissertation, University of Amsterdam.
76.
Scott, David (2006) `The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad', in David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, pp. 243-303. Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press.
77.
Sen, Amartya (2005) The Argumentative Indian: Writings on Indian History, Culture and Identity. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.
78.
Shaikh, Nermeen (2002) `AsiaSource: Interview with Professor Talal Asad.' Available at http://www.asiasource.org.news/specialreports/asad.cfm
79.
Silverstein, Brian (2003) `Islam and Modernity in Turkey: Power, Tradition and Historicity in the European Provinces of the Muslim World', Anthropological Quarterly76(3): 497-517.
80.
Soares, Benjamin and René Otayek (2007) `Introduction: Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa' , in Benjamin Soares and René Otayek (eds) Islam and Muslim Politics in Africa, pp. 1-26. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
81.
Starrett, Gregory (1998) Putting Islam to Work: Education, Politics and Religious Transformation in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.
82.
Taylor, Charles (1995) Philosophical Arguments. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
83.
Taylor, Charles (1999) `Modes of Secularism', in Rajeev Bhargava (ed.) Secularism and Its Critics, pp. 31-53. New Dehli: Oxford University Press.
84.
Taylor, Charles (2007) A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
85.
Tayob, Abdulkader (2005) `Secularisation in Islam', in Christina Timmermann and Barbara Saegert (eds) How to Conquer the Barriers to Intercultural Dialogue, pp. 117-32. Brussels: Peter Lang .
86.
Tejani, Shabnum (2007) Indian Secularism: A Social and Intellectual History . Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
87.
Tripp, Charles (2006) Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
88.
Varisco, Daniel Martin (2005) Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation. New York: Palgrave .
89.
Varisco, Daniel Martin (2007) Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
90.
Viswanathan, Gauri (2008) `Said, Religion and Secular Criticism', in Müge Gürsoy Sökmen and Başak Ertür (eds) Waiting for the Barbarians: A Tribute to Edward W. Said, pp. 164-75. London: Verso.
91.
Warner, Michael (2008) `The Ruse of "Secular Humanism"', post on the Social Sciences Research Council's (SSRC) blog The Immanent Frame. Posted 22 September 2008. (accessed 26 September 2008): http://www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/2008/09/22/the-ruse-of-secular-humanism/
92.
Wilson, Jon E. (2006) `Subjects and Agents in the History of Imperialism and Resistance', in David Scott and Charles Hirsckind (eds) Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, pp. 180-205. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
93.
Yared, Nazik Saba (2002) Secularism and the Arab World (1850-1939). London: Saqi Books.
94.
Zubaida, Sami (2005) `Islam and Secularisation', Asian Journal of Social Science33(3): 438-48.
