Qui Parle

Thinking about Method

A Conversation with Talal Asad

basit kareem iqbal

In 2009 Qui Parle (17, no. 2) republished Talal Asad’s 1986 paper
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” in an effort to make more
broadly available the particular arguments that developed his influ-
ential concept of “tradition.” In the exchange that follows here, he
describes what drew him to reprise the concept in his 2015 article
“Thinking about Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today.”
The present interview is occasioned by this arc of thought spanning
thirty years.
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” was first published in the
same year as Writing Culture, and might be read as a response to the
anxiety provoked in anthropology after the linguistic turn. Asad be-
gins the article by surveying common answers to the question “What
is the object of investigation for the anthropology of Islam?” The
varied answers he found available were based on nominalist or es-
sentialist principles, each of which he found inadequate for “orga-
nizing the considerable diversity of the beliefs and practices of Mus-
lims.”1 Whatever the complexity of these answers, he wrote, they
were broadly reducible to a catalog of items held together by the

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anthropologist’s own authority, sundry manifestations of an uncon-

scious logic, an ethnographic phenomenology whose scope was de-
fined by one’s interlocutors, or a dramaturgical social blueprint. In
contrast, he developed in that article a concept of “tradition” that
would be adequate to considering authority and temporality at
once, without making either epiphenomenal.
Asad has described his own work as an effort “to ask myself what
is the best question to ask in this or that situation,” as confronted by
a particular topic and requiring the exploration of a given question,
in the face of which one’s existing theoretical repertoire may not be
sufficient.2 The following interview situates his reprisal of the con-
cept he had developed thirty years earlier. In the 2015 article, now
in the aftermath of the coup in Egypt (and emerging from the virulent
polemics there between secularists and others), Asad was drawn to
consider what he here calls the “vital sense” of tradition, and the dif-
ficulties of its present life. But although he has written that in tradi-
tion the present is always at the center,3 tradition is not defined by
the present. Hence the need to “unthink” the language that limns
that present and its impasses—a process he describes for himself as
unfolding through writing.
The exchange that follows demonstrates the style of Asad’s
thought—what others have described as his “anthropological skep-
ticism,”4 his “antitheoreticist style of reasoning.”5 Asad does not ad-
vance a critical project (critique as a mode of establishing conditions
of possibility, as antiessentialist historicism, or as normative compar-
ison), nor does he seek to locate particular problems within new
frames of reference (replacing one interpretive category with an-
other).6 As he says here, he is not interested in “proposing para-
digms.” Rather than declare a theory of state or capital, of religion
or even of secularism, Asad works to understand the grammar of
concepts, forms of life, memories and desires released and disabled
in situations striated by asymmetries. And he returns, across his
work, to themes of embodiment and temporality, as sites to focus
the productive and destructive powers of modern liberalism.7
basit kareem iqbal: Let’s begin with your 1985 George-
town lecture “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam.” This was a

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 197

methodological intervention directed at developing an analytic cate-

gory that might allow the anthropologist to perceive, among other
things, the play of heterogeneous but overlapping temporalities and
the aspiration to coherence through discourse and practice. Yet the
concept of “tradition” developed in that paper has been received in
some quarters either as an empirical answer as to what Islam sub-
stantively is, or as an attempt to somehow direct the course of all
subsequent study of Muslims. Both such receptions of the category
seem to me to confuse use of the term tradition as an ethnographic
referent (namely the historical object of study, as one might study
Christian or Islamic or liberal traditions . . . ) with its employ-
ment as a methodological category, which foregrounds certain ele-
ments of a given situation in order to observe (not abstract away)
questions of power, embodiment, grammar. Returning to your artic-
ulation in that paper, what are the stakes today of pursuing an an-
thropology of Islam, rather than (as some have advocated) an an-
thropology of Muslims? The latter tends toward demonstrating
familiar entanglements with market and state, but the former seems
to yield a different (though not mutually exclusive) set of questions.
talal asad: You are quite right, of course. My 1985 lecture was
not, as many critics suppose, an attempt at generalizing what all
Muslims actually believed and practiced, still less at specifying what
“real Islam” is. It was intended to open up a range of questions for
investigation. Generalizing Muslim belief and practice would have
been a foolish thing for me to do; after all, I am personally familiar
with Muslims in different parts of the world and I know that they
live very different lives and talk about being Muslims in different
ways. On the other hand, the assumption that the lecture was at-
tempting to define a priori “real Islam” would imply tremendous ar-
rogance on my part. I do say quite explicitly—in the very first
paragraph—that my concern is with “Islam” as an object of anthro-
pological investigation, and in that connection I am proposing an
idea of what that object might be. “The Idea of an Anthropology
of Islam” is not an account of Islam or of Muslim society. It is
what it says it is: an attempt to formulate anthropological questions
about a theoretical object.

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In taking up critically several different approaches to the anthro-

pological study of Islam, I suggested that some were interesting but
problematic: I point out, for example, that the claim that a Muslim’s
beliefs and experiences are sufficient to define what Islam is, and
therefore in themselves an adequate basis for anthropological in-
quiry, ignores the fact that a subject’s beliefs about the beliefs of other
Muslims are part of his or her beliefs, and as such they enter into
complicated social relations (real or imagined) with other subjects
and therefore belong to a form of life. This point certainly deserved
more discussion than I gave it, because it was pushing toward the
fact that it’s not simply the variety of beliefs and practices that is
at issue here but also the fact of disagreement, and disagreement pre-
supposes some kind of shared framework (even when this isn’t en-
tirely clear to those who disagree) that has temporal dimensions.
What might such a framework be? The styles of argument used in
expressing disagreement, and how these are related to changing con-
ditions of life, are therefore part of what calls for anthropological
description and analysis. The approach that I discuss at some length,
based on Ernest Gellner’s text, critically addresses the categories
used to analyze social relations in Muslim societies. In other words,
I point to the importance of the assumptions underlying what pur-
port to be purely empirical accounts of social reality. My critical dis-
cussions of anthropological approaches in the first part of the lecture
try to prepare the ground for an idea that I propose in the second
part: the idea of Islam as a discursive tradition, in which questions
about the interconnections between language, embodiment, and time
(historical, experiential, generational, unidirectional, ephemeral, re-
cursive, cumulative, etc.) can be formulated.
This brings us to your question: Why an anthropology of “Islam”
and not an anthropology of “Muslims”? The short answer to that is
that the two are conceptually interlinked. Even if being a “Muslim”
is simply an identity (whether claimed or attributed), it is parasitic on
some notion of a collective (but not homogeneous) tradition that is
assumed to have had a central historical role in the development of a
complex religious/secular civilization—and hence in the formation
of that identity.

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 199

bki: The concept of “tradition” developed in that 1985 paper

(drawing on and reworking MacIntyre and Foucault) promised to
avoid the methodological traps of emphasizing either homogeneity
or heterogeneity, to draw together past, present, and future in con-
sidering the apt performance of a practice, to include forms of rea-
soning and argument, and to account for styles of power and resis-
tance (genealogy and tradition, together). This was clearly not a call
for nativism or an “indigenous paradigm” of analysis (you wrote in
1980: “There is, after all, no guarantee that ‘indigenous paradigms’
will be any better. . . . It is not the origin of given theories, methods,
and explanations which will tell us whether they are more suit-
able”).8 Yet you also wrote there, in a sentence that has confounded
critics since, “If one wants to write an anthropology of Islam one
should begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of a discursive tra-
dition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the
Qur’an and the Hadith.”9 Granting that “tradition” does not limit
analysis to founding texts, that it allows for a complex temporal in-
heritance, and that it is not a concept’s origin but its use that should
determine its status, can you comment on the significance of the
phrase “as Muslims do” in that sentence? And what might you
say to those who, reading your work hastily, conclude that an em-
phasis on tradition’s aspirational “coherence” (the work of or-
thodoxy) inscribes a spatial division—“inside” versus “outside” the
tradition—that obscures how the “inside” of a tradition is necessar-
ily exposed to its “outside”? Finally, how generalizable is the concept
of “tradition” to anthropological inquiries into, for instance, Chris-
tianity or liberalism, where the contest of authority may not proceed
as it does in Islam?10

ta: The phrase “as Muslims do” is not intended as a social/histor-

ical generalization about the beliefs and practices of a vast popula-
tion over a thousand years—and certainly not as a claim that what
“Muslims do” must ipso facto be right. I am not concerned with pro-
posing paradigms. Individuals find themselves growing up and living
in a society of Muslims, taking some things for granted, following
some norms regularly or occasionally or never, and doing so for a
variety of motives, with results that include resistance and failure.

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The phrase “as Muslims do” is a reminder that in studying a given

people the anthropologist begins by trying to record what they say
about how they live and relate this to how they are actually seen to
be living and how they express themselves. In other words, to under-
stand what one encounters, one has to have a critical awareness of the
categories used by the subjects as well as by the discipline in which
the anthropologist has been formed. The crucial point is that there
are not only different varieties of living-as-a-Muslim but also dis-
agreements among people who identify themselves as Muslims in
their understandings of “Islam,” especially their often contradictory
understandings of what they think of as the foundational basis of
their beliefs and behavior. Disagreement is central to what I take a
discursive tradition to be. This doesn’t imply that all Muslims con-
sciously try to follow the Qur’an and the Prophet’s sayings, still less
that all Muslims are familiar with them. It is that arguments about
what it means to be a Muslim (when they do occur, and whether,
when they occur, they invoke “authorities” or not) are oriented to-
wards a coherent understanding or appreciation of a divine revela-
tion and of the role of the messenger who made it available to man-
kind. In that sense the distinct concepts of “Islam” and “Muslim”
are linked and conceptually inseparable. You are right to say that
each leads to questions that can be pursued independently—but I
would add: only up to a point.
The aspiration to coherence with regard to connections between
“Muslim” and “Islam” is a process, not a fixed structure. It comes
from a challenge or a sense of discordance between what one be-
lieves to be traditional norms (or others argue are traditional norms)
and how one lives—or wants to live or is compelled to live. At that
level there is no inside and outside, there is only a tension of which
one has become conscious and that demands a resolution. The use of
the figure “inside” and “outside” by someone who aspires to coher-
ence is an expression of experiential tensions; the use indicates tem-
porality rather than spatiality. The history of reform of the discursive
tradition is precisely a matter of persuading (some) Muslims that
what was hitherto thought to be “outside” is really “inside” (or at
least compatible with it)—and vice versa. A discursive tradition is not
a bubble in which one is located but a set of aspirations, sensibilities,

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 201

commitments, and relationships of subjects who live and move in the

different times of a common world.
Finally, on the question of its generalizability “beyond Islam.”
The term tradition continues to be used by scholarly adherents and
nonadherents when speaking about Christianity or liberalism, even
when they do not explain what exactly they have in mind when using
that term. I see no reason in principle why the questions it generates
aren’t relevant in those contexts.

bki: You draw on both Foucault and MacIntyre to develop the

concept of tradition. This much has been widely recognized, but
less so the ways you stand apart from each—specifically in how
they each think of temporality. For you, tradition discloses “a set
of practices that presuppose the present as part of unfinished time.”11
And through insisting on the possibility of difference through repe-
tition, it provides the space in the world for an ongoing relation to
potentiality. Thus you write:

A tradition is in part concerned with the way limits are con-

structed in response to problems encountered and conceptualized.
There’s always a tension between this construction of limits and
the forces that push the tradition onto new terrain, where parts
or all of the tradition ceases to make sense and so needs a new be-
ginning. And looked at another way: with each new beginning,
there is the possibility of a new (or “revived”) tradition, a new story
about the past and future, new virtues to be developed, new pro-
jects to be addressed.12

Do you find resources in Foucault and MacIntyre for conceptualiz-

ing a time that can be completed?
ta: MacIntyre is a Catholic, so presumably living a Christian life
will be for him a way of completing his time on this earth. In this
matter Foucault’s concept of “care of the self” is at once more inter-
esting and more troubling. Interesting because, unlike MacIntyre,
Foucault provides a meticulous analysis of the creative functions of
disciplinary time. But in contrast to individualistic formulations of
that process in Foucault’s work, my emphasis here is on how the
self gradually learns to develop its abilities from within a discursive

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tradition that presupposes generational collaboration in the preser-

vation, teaching, and exercise of practical knowledge that is at the
same time rooted in a transcendental vision of the good life. In his
later work, we know that Foucault was greatly inspired by the great
historian of classical antiquity Pierre Hadot, who in turn admired
Foucault’s work but also disagreed with him. His main reservation
was that Foucault’s excessive focus on the care of the self led him to
see ethics in terms of “an aesthetics of existence.” This was very dif-
ferent, Hadot maintained, from the Greek idea of learning to prac-
tice what he described as “the ever-fragile exercise of wisdom.”13 I
would put it more strongly: fragility and imperfection, the failure
to accomplish one’s intentions, vulnerability to doubt, are precisely
central to the predicament of the followers of religious traditions be-
cause they are the outcome of the accidents of childhood and the
contingencies of adult life. The disciplines offered by tradition have
to negotiate the times of biography as well as of society. But what
Hadot’s response also brings up is the historical shift in the concep-
tion of ethics through changes in their orientation (although this is
not quite how he himself puts it): a shift from being part of a theo-
retical vision in which interdependence, finitude, and failure are
transcendent, and where one is open to the limits of human under-
standing and action, to one in which the sovereign, overconfident
self is the pivot of moral judgment, intention, and action.

bki: Your 2015 return to the concept of tradition takes place over
a long and complex article, which weaves together different registers
of analysis—political as well as conceptual. This has the effect of
locating consideration of the tradition concept in post-coup Egypt,
situating it as the 1985 consideration was not. At the same time, the
subjunctive comments at the end of the article (on amr bi-l-ma‘ruf,
for instance) have the opposite effect, working to dislocate a concrete
practice from its historical institution for constructive purposes.
Whether locating or dislocating, a specific situation provides an ini-
tial locus for you to think from. Can you comment on the analytic
approaches taken in the two articles, separated by thirty years? What
drew you to reprise the concept?

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 203

ta: The article was based first of all on a lecture I was invited to
give at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown
University in the fall of 2014, and as almost thirty years had elapsed
since I gave my 1985 lecture there, they asked me to revisit it. I then
gave a revised version of that talk a couple of months later at a con-
ference at the American University of Beirut, and finally I revised it
again and expanded it for Critical Inquiry.
I was thinking at the same time about the tragic coup in Egypt
after the uprising against Mubarak in 2011, and the reasons why
the hopes of so many were dashed in October 2012. I had spent four
months (February to May) in Cairo in 2011. Although much criti-
cism could be made—and has been made—of the brief Morsi gov-
ernment, I was appalled by the support of most of my liberal and left
Egyptian friends for the military takeover. This grave misjudgment
on their part seems to me to have been occasioned by a visceral re-
action on the part of secularists who saw themselves challenged by
the appearance of a religious organization in control of government.
I had written much over the years on the force of secular sensibilities.
I had become increasingly skeptical of the capacity of the progres-
sive, secular state to act humanely, let alone to deal adequately with
human survival in this dangerous world. In the upheavals after the
fall of Mubarak there seemed to me little understanding among sec-
ularists of the potentialities and limits of what I call tradition. But it
also became evident that I needed to think through many aspects of
that question myself in order to understand what many of us who wit-
nessed the events of 2011 regarded as a tragic failure—of a movement
(“political liberation”) as well as of an ideology (“political Islam”). I
realized that a resort to tradition would not have saved the situation,
partly because some political traditions are themselves bankrupt,
and partly because tradition in its vital sense has become almost im-
possible to sustain in advanced capitalism.
bki: So you are writing from the position of that difficulty—but
you also recognize that the life or death of tradition is not a simple
fact or transparent event. In the first section of the 2015 article, you
write that “in principle tradition can accommodate rupture, recuper-
ation, reorientation, and splitting—as well as continuity. Tradition is

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singular as well as plural. For subjects there are not only continuities
but also exits and entries. Tradition accommodates mistakes as well
as betrayal; it is not by accident that tradition and treason have a com-
mon etymology.”14 One of the last classes you taught at CUNY be-
fore retiring was titled “Exploring Treason: Sacred and Profane”
(2015) and included inquiries into security, paranoia, blasphemy,
and betrayal. Meanwhile, in your contribution to Is Critique Secu-
lar? you note that “every new tradition . . . is founded in a discur-
sive rupture—which means through a kind of violence.”15 Taken to-
gether, these suggest not only that tradition is a space of even violent
contestation (already granted in your 1985 address) but that rup-
ture, betrayal, and transformation are themselves modes of the
“life” of tradition. I’m thinking for instance of Michel de Certeau
writing about the lost science called mystics (la mystique), seeking
(through means of historiography, psychoanalysis, erotics, and nar-
rative) to describe how sixteenth- and seventeenth-century figures
transformed unique utterances into mystic experiences.16 These fig-
ures did not easily inhabit orthodoxy; indeed, they perceived the
Church as lying in ruin, but they did not abandon it. Instead they
developed acts of speech in the space of that institutional corruption,
incommensurable with but responding to the authorized discourse
of the Church. Is this the kind of rupture that is accommodated by
“tradition,” resonating with the transformative task of Benjaminian
translation?

ta: The last class I gave at the Graduate Center was an attempt to
think systematically about some themes that have concerned me for
several years. They are mostly connected with the question of the
morphing of liberal democratic states in our time, and of the inade-
quate attention secular rationality has paid to failure, individual and
collective. Incidentally, contrary to secular triumphalism that insists
that there is an answer to every question and a solution to every
problem, most spiritual traditions seem to retain a strong sense of
human failure. I am still in the middle of thinking about all this.
But I will certainly read Michel de Certeau’s two volumes on mystics
on your recommendation.

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 205

Finally: Walter Benjamin’s concept of translation has long at-

tracted me. However, I think of the transformation that he called
for in the process of translation not as the rupture of a given tradition
(in this case, of a given language) into something entirely different—
i.e., into its dissolution—but as the enlargement of its potentialities.

bki: Speaking of the enlargement of potentialities, then, you have

observed that what you most appreciate about certain literary works
is their subtle depictions of relationships whose elements resist sys-
tematization.17 What place is there in an analytic of tradition for
appreciating works that are less instructive or prescriptive than
explorative?
ta: I hope you aren’t asking me for a fatwa! I have neither the au-
thority nor the desire to issue one. I can only say that as I use it, the
concept of discursive tradition isn’t a figure for an entire prescribed
way of life. As you know very well, even in fiqh there is a category
called mubah, meaning not simply “permitted” but also free and
open to everyone, actions that are theologically “indifferent.” It ges-
tures toward what falls outside the forbidden and the mandatory,
and therefore it can’t be exhaustively enumerated in advance. The
limits of mubah are indeterminate. Its practices include casual con-
versation, pleasurable activities, the accumulation of knowledge, et
cetera. Each of these activities may be explorative in different ways,
and may generate a desire for coherence in a particular genre or in
one’s life—viewed in part or as a totality. But practices that are mu-
bah can also affect desires that are central to spiritual life, and as
such they may be pulled into one or other of the evaluative catego-
ries, whether positive or negative.
In the best literature one is not only sensitized to the subtleties of
human life but also challenged to respond from one’s own tradition
to the disturbing insights it offers. In stories set in imagined futures
(for example, Brave New World or 1984) one can also be brought to
think vividly about the possible consequences of present trends in the
development of applied science, for example in genetic engineering
and information technology, developments combined with the grow-
ing inequalities of political-economic power, and the disparities in

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the hopes and fears of different social groups. How might the dan-
gers these stories alert us to be confronted?
bki: So explorative activities can raise certain possibilities (as
threat or as promise) that then would be drawn into the orbit of eval-
uative techniques. But I’m thinking not just of the possibilities liter-
ature can imagine (to then be evaluated) but also of poetic genres that
through typological relations and rhythmic recapitulations them-
selves achieve the play of heterogeneous temporalities which you
write is central to tradition. Although not primarily concerned
with points of doctrine, as embedded in forms of life they do have
bearing on the aspiration to coherence and the cultivation of embod-
ied capacities.
ta: Learning another language, exploring another form of life,
calls for a readiness to entertain heterogeneous temporalities but
also to risk incoherence. One cannot say in advance whether any ex-
perience of incoherence should be taken as a sign of silliness or a de-
mand for making an effort to understand new grounds of coherence:
not to waste one’s time or to postpone judgment and try to learn how
one might inhabit a very different time competently.
bki: In the roundtable that followed his “‘Above All, No Journal-
ists!’” you asked Derrida to say more about the so-called return of
religion: “Where could religion have gone to that it could so return?
Islamic rhetoric speaks of an ‘awakening’ of Islam rather than a ‘re-
turn,’ so Islam is considered to be always there. By contrast, a ‘return’
implies the secularist story of something that has been put aside and
should have gone away but that now returns.”18 In his response he
focused on your later comments on modern technologies of the
voice, but in a postscript he returned to your distinction: “Between
awakening and return there is the outbreak of visibility.”19 He wants
to underscore how “the expression ‘return of the religious’ retains a
theatrical dimension,” such that religion is not “born again” but re-
turned “to the stage.”20 In those same comments, you agreed gener-
ally with Derrida’s description of the “Christianization of the world,”
pointing even to “the way we talk of religion itself as a general, uni-
versal category” as a kind of globalatinization.

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 207

This exchange raises the question of how the contemporary situ-

ation could be described without capitulating to the terms of the
“secularist story” by which history is something dramatically made
through human action21 while yet recognizing how global transfor-
mations (differentiating and classifying) have remade possibilities of
action, infusing them with a new theatricality and visibility. You of-
ten turn toward a notion of the grammar of concepts (Wittgenstein)
as what releases us from the impasse of deciding on the identity or
difference of a historical case. Such “grammar” also suggests that
understanding a given situation of life will not come from gauging
how well it accords with a particular rule. At stake in that situation
of life is the acquisition of a “capability . . . by which the need to
submit consciously to a rule would eventually disappear.”22 The
meaning of life is not available to read (as through a law or symbol)
but is disclosed through its form. But understanding a form of life
seems to require a sensitivity that is as ethical as it is ethnographic.
Does this difficulty explain why you concluded your 1985 lecture on
tradition by indicating the asymmetry in the anthropologist’s posi-
tion? “To write about a tradition is to be in a certain narrative rela-
tion to it. . . . Moral neutrality, here as always, is no guarantee of
political innocence.”23
ta: I have not seen the published version of the exchange with
Derrida (I think it was in the Dutch embassy in Paris, many years
ago). For me the similarity of religion being “awakened” and reli-
gion “coming back” is primarily its challenge to the Enlightenment
story of secularism. But the difference between the two expressions
brings out the ambiguity in the term religion. The word return sug-
gests the absence or presence of an object, while the term awakening
(sahwa) suggests a shift in consciousness. Such a shift (whether from
dreaming to wakefulness, or from the unconscious to the conscious
mind) is not only temporally different from the theatricality of “it
went away and has now returned” but makes the very thing attended
to different. The shift in consciousness is precisely what is made pos-
sible in tradition through what Hadot refers to as the “exercise of
wisdom,” and the new knowledge acquired of the object and its con-
text enables it to be seen and made anew.

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Incidentally, when I resort to Wittgenstein’s sense of grammar I

try to think of the possibilities and limits of change in a language
(in the narrow, verbal sense) and the practice with which that lan-
guage is connected. The possibilities and limits of a form of life are
identified—in part, at least—ethically. But the difficult question then
is: what makes such judgments ethical? I am not persuaded by the
Kantian figure of conscience as a moral “sovereign.” One’s consci-
ence can lead one to do bad things. My point is simply that when
a capability is acquired there is no longer a temporal interval be-
tween judging according to a universal rule and acting in a particular
situation in the way Kant conceptualizes ethics—they are morally
the same instant. Of course, the fact that a capability is embodied
does not guarantee that you will act morally any more than acting
according to conscience guarantees it. The act of recognizing a rule,
judging how it can be applied in a particular context, and then ap-
plying it, reflects a different temporality from one where one acts ac-
cording to a capability that is dependent on a collective form of life
that sustains a transcendent vision. This, I think, is what Ghazali
meant when he reputedly said: Oh! if only I had the implicit faith
of the old women of Nishapur! Meaning: To live without having
to go through the process of verification and application of moral
rules, to live at once in the time of this world and the time of eternity.
bki: You often turn to R. G. Collingwood’s distinction, made in
his Principles of Art, between feeling and sensing, on the one hand,
and thinking (and believing), on the other. Thus you write:
Since mistakes are made only at the level of thinking and interpret-
ing, not at the level of feeling, it seems to me one should not as-
sume that an interpretive frame always and necessarily accompa-
nies sensing and feeling. It is true that we normally see things as
something, but this does not in itself imply that experience inevi-
tably depends on interpretation. Where the subject recognizes her-
self as “I” (in divinity, in humanity, in animality); the degree to
which she seeks an integrated image of herself; what happens when
(in consternation) she fails to find herself where she assumed quite
naturally that image would be—these are matters that do not ne-
cessitate construal on the subject’s part.24

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 209

Marking a distinction between sensing and interpreting runs against

the grain of historicist social science, which insists on the social con-
struction of experience. But it seems to me that you are not describ-
ing a prediscursive space of natural materiality or raw behavior so
much as indicating the possibility for the body to develop capacities,
to retrain the senses and educate one’s desires, so that self-conscious
practices can through conscious repetition be made unselfconscious.25
More generally, this distinction between sensing and interpreting
seems consistent with both your uncoupling of the principles of ef-
fectivity (agent) and consciousness (subject)—“an agent’s act is more
(and less) than her consciousness of it”26—and your claim that “the
body’s memories, feelings, and desires necessarily escape the rational/
instrumental orientation” of the “homogenous time of national pol-
itics.”27 A historicist social science would here reach for a hermeneu-
tic toolkit to properly interpret embodied experience with reference
to the appropriate contexts and frames of reference. But these dis-
tinctions that you maintain do not make life available to be so con-
textualized and thus accounted for (as observed of your work by Gil
Anidjar and by Ananda Abeysekara).28 Is it this disarticulation—of
subject and agent, sensing and thinking, embodied capacities and
homogeneous time—that holds open the space for what you describe
as “democratic sensibility as an ethos,” namely “desire for mutual
care, distress at the infliction of pain and indignity, concern for the
truth . . . the ability to listen”?29 This “ethos” expresses our com-
mon vulnerability to the work of time. Yet paradoxically it also
seems to require time to cultivate. This is time not released under jeal-
ous sovereignty, nationalist fervor, bureaucratic rationality (as you
describe state politics, its exigencies of necessity and exception)—
and also seems to be a time not admitted in the rush to explain
through historicization.

ta: I find Collingwood’s distinction of feeling (ranging from bod-

ily sensations of cold and heat to emotions like anger and compas-
sion and reverence) from the process of thinking (that includes inter-
pretation and is not to be confused with thought) helpful. He uses the
term experience to cover both (passive) feeling and (active) thinking.
This allows one to introduce the notion of “socially constructed

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experience” where it is relevant, but it also encourages a skeptical

view of empiricism, the methodology that assumes there is some-
thing pure and foundational called individual experience on which
knowledge of the external world (“reality”) is based.
In previous centuries “experience” was taken to be the ground
from which knowledge of natural regularities could be asserted; by
the end of the seventeenth century, however, “experience” itself came
to be seen as capable of being disciplined and reconstructed through
measurement and calculation. The mathematization of “experience”
was not only a way of sterilizing feeling, of separating the intellect
from feelings supposed to be inessential to it, but also of facilitating
the manipulation of nature. The prototypical context here is the lab-
oratory in which “experience” becomes “experiment.” So it is not
just that context is important for experience but that the relationship
of experience to context can change in and through thinking. Polit-
ical stories can be—and are—constructed, but their plausibility is a
complex matter that depends in great part on the time of the context.
Experience is also, as you know, the knowledge one gains from
the past—both (a) in the sense that previous encounters with a place
or person or situation may lead to a specific kind of (positive or neg-
ative) anticipation, and (b) in the sense that cumulative practice de-
velops aptitudes and skills (“an experienced teacher”). In the former
case the encounter doesn’t have to be direct to evoke certain feelings;
it can be mediated by memory (whether personal or social) and the
unconscious. Whether, and if so, and in what way such feelings are
“socially constructed” is surely a complicated question.
My reference to a “democratic ethos” that can contradict a “dem-
ocratic political system” is a plea for thinking carefully about our
contemporary sacred cow: liberal democracy. It is also intended to
signal a contrast between following a rule responsibly and living
compassionately and with spiritual awareness, where verbal lan-
guage may become redundant.
bki: I want to come back to how “tradition in its vital sense” re-
lates to “democratic ethos.” But the point that responsibility (in po-
litical life as elsewhere) need not entail compassion—is this alluding
to your discussion of Oedipus’s passional action in Formations?30

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 211

ta: I’ve said something about a “democratic ethos” in a number

of places.31 And yes, of course, responsibility—whether acknowl-
edged or attributed—doesn’t entail compassion, it is a legal or quasi-
legal notion. But my point here is simply an invitation to think again
about the faith of the old women of Nishapur as a form of capability.

bki: In the introduction to Genealogies of Religion, you wrote:

When a project is translated from one site to another, from one
agent to another, versions of power are produced. As with trans-
lations of a text, one does not simply get a reproduction of iden-
tity. . . . Although the outcome of [new possibilities of action in
non-Western societies] is never fully predictable, the language in
which the possibilities are formulated is increasingly shared by
Western and non-Western societies. And so, too, the specific forms
of power and subjection.32

You recently gave the Annual Birks Lectures at McGill (November

2016), on the topic of Christianity, translation, and secularization.
Is this also a return to the Benjamin essay that was so important for
you in thinking about asymmetries in the late 1980s? What are the
limits of thinking about secularization along a model of translation?

ta: Benjamin’s essay on translation remains very important for

me. But I think the limit of thinking about secularization as transla-
tion depends on what we think translation is or can be. The figure is,
as you know, very evident in the writings of many since the nineteenth
century who have claimed that the central values of secularism—
such as equality—originate in Christianity. But the sense of equality
in Christian theological discourse is very different from the sense it
has when it is translated into secular political language. One of the
most famous attempts at working with the notion of translation is of
course Habermas’s argument for a “postsecular” (or postmetaphys-
ical) politics, in which he proposes that an egalitarian society ought
to allow believers into the public sphere so long as their discourse is
translated into secular language which is accessible to all. This thesis
has already been criticized, but perhaps not from the perspective that
interests me. I dealt with this topic in the first of two lectures I gave
recently at McGill. But the wider sense of translation includes the

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movement of something from one medium to another—for example,

from language to music or dance or visual image. (I referred to this
briefly in my essay on “The Concept of Translation in British Social
Anthropology.”)33 In the second lecture I pursued an idea of transla-
tion that is not from one verbal medium to another, and discussed
some of its limits. This allowed me to consider translation from lan-
guage to embodied practice (including, especially, what anthropolo-
gists have theorized as “ritual”) and hence to historical moments
where one might detect the inception of secular sensibilities. I am
thinking about all of this because I plan to revise and expand my
McGill lectures for a series of three lectures at Columbia early
next year (the Ruth Benedict Lectures).
bki: But can I ask you to say more about what you find important
in Benjamin? You know I’ve long been interested in your engage-
ment with his Trauerspiel book, where you contrast his treatment
of allegory with de Man’s account of symbol. And you have dis-
cussed at length his “Task of the Translator,” “Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” and “Storyteller.” Gil has even
read your article on the violence of humanitarianism in the method-
ological key of “Critique of Violence,” in how you refuse the conven-
tional utilitarian perspective of analyzing the ends or effects of vio-
lence.34 Clearly Benjamin is important for you to think with—but I
haven’t seen you elsewhere address how that came to be, or what
you find bears enduring attention in his articulations.
ta: I am deeply impressed by Benjamin’s resort to theology as a
kind of practical knowledge in which ethical and political dimen-
sions of thought and action are illuminated. In his very early work,
The Origin of German Tragic Drama, he takes up the notion of “sym-
bol” as an experience of sheer materiality, as essentially itself and not
something whose meaning is to be found in what it signifies (a notion
espoused by influential contemporary theorists of aesthetics), and re-
sponds critically through the exploration of allegory that this notion
is simply an attempt to avoid the ethical questions that underlie
works of art. I found this book enormously suggestive—although I
didn’t agree with every thought it offered. It is sometimes claimed
that in his later work his concern with secular politics emerges as

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 213

more central than ethics—as in his famous “The Work of Art in the
Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” But I think that even there the
concern with ethics is crucially present. Certainly one can detect,
in that sometimes misunderstood work, a sense of the supreme value
of the past (“tradition”) for the present. One finds this again, in a
deeply pessimistic form, in his famous “On the Concept of
History”—one of the last things he wrote. I am thinking particularly
of section IX, which describes a Klee painting as the angel of history
thrown backward into the future by a storm (“what we call prog-
ress”) blowing from Paradise, and sees in inescapable horror the
past as nothing more than accumulating debris. Benjamin spoke
both the language of historical materialism and the language of theo-
logy, with what he called profane time and messianic time—not as a
matter of translation and appropriation but of mutual provocation.
But here is a thought that neither Benjamin nor his horrified angel
of history could have had. Our present, called Anthropocene, has
seen our secular knowledge and our way of life generate unprece-
dented threats to all of global life: climate change and nuclear war.
The End of Time was originally a divine fiat; it now reveals itself as a
probable human achievement.
bki: In closing, can we return to your 2015 reprisal of “tradi-
tion”? When considering a possible non-Schmittian politics at the
end of that article, you write:
The tradition of amr bi-l-ma‘ruf could form an orientation of
mutual care of the self, based on the principle of friendship (and
therefore of responsibility to and between friends) not on the legal
principle of citizenship. This sharing would be the outcome of con-
tinuous work between friends or lovers, not an expression of accom-
plished cultural fact. . . . The risk of a military force being formed
to create an exclusive territorial body would have to be met not
merely by constitutional barriers but also by the work of tradition
in the formation, maintenance, and repair of selves who are bond-
ed to one another. The longing for tradition by someone who
doesn’t have one that Wittgenstein spoke of is not a frightened
wish for the comfort that comes from submission to authority;
it is a desire for being transformed through friendship, through

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belonging to others who belong to you, as they themselves are also

changed by that mutuality.35

To live without sovereignty in a political community of friends: this is

what might break the “gridlock” in which moral critique is permitted
at the price of political acquiescence.36 This gesture toward a different
kind of community draws on given traditions but clearly is not limited
by their historical forms. What does limit the practice of such a politics
of friendship is the time it takes. For “to identify time as unfinished is
not to say that there is still time enough.”37 But although tradition dis-
closes heterogeneous temporalities, it does not make available among
them a time of decision that could take hold of (operationalize) un-
finished time. It doesn’t make that practice into a kind of material
available for critical action—you are reticent to identify the time of
analysis with the time of action.38

ta: We simply don’t have a language now to speak adequately of

the changes in which we live and the threats we face. To develop such
a language one requires not only thought but also practical condi-
tions for its development. But the time of danger is different from
the time required to meet it practically. (I’m reminded yet again of
Benjamin’s much-cited “Theses on History.”) So when I refer to tra-
ditions like amr bi-l-ma‘ruf, I do so primarily to try and unthink our
language of sovereign power, its secular forms, and its progressive
orientation, not to devise strategies for a “liberated future.” My ref-
erence is not meant to outline a possible future because unless we
understand fully where we have come from, we cannot choose
from the possibilities facing us now that we are where we are. A re-
constituted amr bi-l-ma‘ruf may be a way of trying to think ourselves
out of our present language and our present impasse—at least for
people to whom Islamic tradition matters. It is a resource available
in the Islamic tradition that is worth thinking with. For me such
thinking has typically been a matter of exploring through writing—
and as with any exploration one cannot be sure when one will en-
counter dead ends, and what one will be surprised at as one makes
one’s discoveries. Of course thinking alone is insufficient: we will
need to devise strategies for practical organization and resistance.
For that people from different traditions need to come together.

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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 215

But I’m not very optimistic. I believe that whatever we do now the
future will very probably be a dark one.
......................................................
talal asad is distinguished professor emeritus of anthropology
at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is author of
dozens of articles and The Kababish Arabs (1970), Genealogies of
Religion (1993), Formations of the Secular (2003), and On Suicide
Bombing (2009).

......................................................
basit kareem iqbal is a doctoral candidate in anthropology
with a designated emphasis in critical theory at the University of
California, Berkeley.

Notes
1. Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 5.
2. Bardawil, “The Solitary Analyst of Doxas,” 158; Berthold, “Penser la
terreur, l’horrible et la mort,” 8.
3. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 222.
4. Scott and Hirschkind, “Introduction.”
5. Bardawil, “The Solitary Analyst of Doxas,” 153.
6. See especially his response to Judith Butler in Is Critique Secular?; and
Mas, “Why Critique?”
7. This contrast emerges nicely from the pair of long essays he published
in Critical Inquiry in 2015: “Reflections on Violence, Law, and Hu-
manitarianism” and “Thinking about Tradition.”
8. Asad, “Indigenous Anthropology in Non-Western Countries,” 662.
9. Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 14.
10. On the difficulty of pursuing such inquiry into Christianity, see Anidjar,
“The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity”; and Marshall, “Chris-
tianity, Anthropology, Politics.”
11. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 213.
12. Scott, “The Trouble of Thinking,” 289–90.
13. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life.
14. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 169.
15. Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” 33.
16. Certeau, The Mystic Fable.
17. Berthold, “Penser la terreur, l’horrible et la mort,” 7.

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18. Derrida, “‘Above All, No Journalists!,’” 70.

19. Derrida, “‘Above All, No Journalists!,’” 73.
20. Derrida, “‘Above All, No Journalists!,’” 72.
21. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 14–19.
22. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 176. See also Agamben, The Highest
Poverty.
23. Asad, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” 17.
24. Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” 49.
25. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 176.
26. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 15.
27. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 179–80.
28. Abeysekara, “The Un-translatability of Religion, the Un-translatability
of Life”; Abeysekara, “Religious Studies’ Mishandling of Origin and
Change”; Anidjar, “The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity”;
Anidjar, “The Violence of Violence.”
29. Asad, “Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” 56.
30. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 92–99.
31. For example, “Muhammad Asad, between Religion and Politics,” 164;
“Thinking about Religion, Belief, and Politics,” 56–57; and “Thinking
about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics,” 672.
32. Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 13.
33. Included in Clifford and Marcus, Writing Culture, 141–64, and in
Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 171–99.
34. Anidjar, “The Violence of Violence,” 439.
35. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 212–13.
36. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis.
37. Asad, “Thinking about Tradition,” 213.
38. Asad, “Responses,” 207.

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Agamben, Giorgio. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-
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Iqbal: Thinking about Method 217

Anidjar, Gil. “The Idea of an Anthropology of Christianity.” Interventions

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