Secular Narrations and Transdisciplinary Knowledge

2020

The book under review is an expanded version of the inaugural Ruth Benedict Lectures delivered at Columbia University in 2017. All chapters and sections present strong depth, as multiple strands of arguments and analyses ranging from incredibly rich disciplines of study are interlaced within and among the various chapters. Given that reducing the author's essays into a single argument are next to impossible, the main ideas of this book have nevertheless been pitched and formed around the phenomenon and theme of translation, for translation cultivates and renders a particular understanding of a self whose genesis is rooted not only in the culture where one grows and learns, but also in a religious tradition whose effects can never be denied as such. Thus secular and religious issues have historically been much contested issues. Seen through the lens of the contemporary world, secular and religious issues are best apprehended and expressed through writing, for writing has secured its place as the dominant channel through which ideas and, moreover, practices flow (pp. 2-5).. This has a particular resonance for Asad for it begs the question "Why is it important for self-described secularists to claim a Christian heritage?" Due to the difficulty of separating the historical traces, Asad moves on to the more MA. Student, İstanbul University.

2020

This course will consist of an in-depth engagement with foundational accounts about secularism as these have been explored by anthropologists, social theorists, and intellectual historians. Part I of the seminar will focus on the thought of the contemporary anthropologist of Islam Talal Asad, undertaking a close and in-depth reading of his seminal texts to address his thinking about religion, secularism, tradition, time / temporality, modernity, and the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge (particularly religion and the public sphere). Part II of the course will draw on works inspired by (and sometimes critical of) Asad's writings, including the writings of Saba Mahmoud, Fernando Coronil, and Gil Anidjar, among others. Throughout his career, Talal Asad has engaged with the assumptions behind multiple disciplines that have framed the way that the West has formulated knowledge about the non-Western world, interventions that continue to reverberate in multiple disciplines. Asad, moreover, has also engaged with the question of human embodiment (pain, emotion, and discipline), the concepts of tradition and of culture, and with questions about modern democratic politics, building upon Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault via the method of genealogy. By juxtaposing Asad's thought with that of his critics, students from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds will be able to gain much from the different ways of thinking about secularism that may inform their own research and help them be more sensitive to potential methodological assumptions and problems.

Introduction to special issue of Intellectual History Review, 27/1 (2017). With contributions from Ian Hunter, Brad Gregory, Peter Harrison, Dominic Erdozain, Elizabeth Shakman Hurd, Conal Condren, Knox Peden, Simon During

Comitatus, 2015

Contemporary Political Theory (2018)

This article investigates the understudied politics of translation at work in contemporary theories of secularism and turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida in order to challenge both critical and apologetic versions of liberal perspectives. It argues that without a complex analysis of translation and its ethico-political effects the negotiation of difference remains ineffective and the liberal politics of translation exclusionary. The article contributes to contemporary debates on religion and politics by illuminating the fact that ignoring the politics of translation at work in dominant conceptions of secularism contributes to maintaining frameworks that have wide-ranging exclusionary effects.In response to this, it offers a thorough challenge to the understandings connected to such implications.

Religion and Society: Advances in Research , 2010

Revue de l'histoire des religions 228 (2011), p. 175-205 (Cairn International), 2011

This inquiry examines, over a long period of clandestinity for French Protestantism, the mysteries of the spiritual resistance of a religious community battling with the absolutism of the kingdom and its demand for religious unity. The analysis deals with the appeals and the concealed practices used by Calvinists to confound the Catholic dogma imposed on them. The vivifying role of this faith that is forced to be silent – whose Desert, born out of oppression, echoes the biblical metaphor in regards to ordeal and insubordination – will be examined alongside the complex role of secrecy through hidden practices and coded languages coming up against the Christian requirement to confess one’s faith publicly.

2017

Geopolitics, 2023

France's idiosyncratic form of secularism, laïcité, is a highly contested principle bound up in centuries of conflict over the state's relationship to religious practice. Of late, commentators have interpreted it as taking somewhat of an authoritarian turn as it is used to disproportionately identify and suppress signs of overt Muslim religiosity, including notably within the public school system. I apply Painter's 'prosaic stateness' framework to understand how educators interpret and rework laïcité within the French public school to produce 'actually-existing' laïcité. In particular, I show that educators are situated within three 'spatialities' through which laïcité inhabits French schooling: the idealised space of the French republic set against religious obscurantism, schools as spaces of inviolable neutrality, and risky bodies who refuse to conform to norms of republican citizenship. Within these spatialities, educators enact a prosaic stateness of laïcité through their experiences of diversity of the student populations they serve, the incoherence of the institution they work for, and the divergence of the policies they end up applying.