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Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Talal Asad. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 269 pp.
Displaying immense erudition in both Islamic scholarship and the history of European thought, and sharply skeptical of received wisdom, Talal Asad offers trenchant soundings into secular modernity. This book is neither a celebration of secularism nor a neutral ethnographic exploration of secular life. It is a genealogical investigation of both the emergence of a concept ("the secular"), the additional concepts, discriminations, and practices it makes possible, as well as those it closes off, and, finally, an articulation of a political program ("secularism"). Asad intends to counter the self-affirming tone with which scholars-secular intellectuals-frequently approach the topic, seeing in secularism a triumph of liberal and ethical trends in European thought and Western democracy. Instead of viewing the secular "as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of 'religion' and thus achieves the latter's relocation" (p. 191), he analyzes how the modern state produces the very distinction between the secular and "religion," justifying itself in the process and occluding other forms of community.
The book is thus less a discussion of religion (or its absence) per se than a contribution to empirically and historically informed political theory. Asad argues that secularism is not the positive condition of overlapping consensus and public conversation, as envisioned by theorists like Charles Taylor, but rather the political medium by which differentiating practices of religion are transcended. In addition, secularism defines itself against an other, which becomes, in...