Talal Asad (born 1932) is a Saudi-born British-Pakistani cultural anthropologist who is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His prolific body of work mainly focuses on religiosity, Middle Eastern studies, postcolonialism, and notions of power, law and discipline.

His parents are Muhammad Asad, an Austrian diplomat and writer who converted from Judaism to Islam in his twenties, and Munira Hussein Al Shammari, a Saudi Arabian Muslim.

[13] After his doctoral studies, Asad completed fieldwork in Northern Sudan on the political structures of the Kababish, a nomadic group that formed under British colonial rule.

[12] Throughout his long and prolific career, Asad has been greatly influenced by a broad spectrum of scholars, including notable figures such as Karl Marx, E.E.

He has also cited the invaluable influence of contemporaries and colleagues such as John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Edward Said, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Judith Butler, as well as his former students Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind.

This diverse intellectual network has shaped Asad's unique approach to studying society, culture, and power dynamics, leaving a lasting impact on the field of social sciences.

Most analyses, Asad notices, conclude on either the theoretical inexistence of Islam ; the irreducible multiplicity of its forms ; or define it as a total socio-historical structure.

While each of these propositions holds some relevance, they remain unsatisfying – if not wrong due to an initial conceptual flaw, which he proposes to discuss, for ‘to conceptualize Islam as the object of an anthropological study is not as simple a matter as some writers would have one suppose.’ The very question to answer indeed, the starting point of any attempt at understanding Islam, is that of its correct defining – a seemingly basic point which nonetheless reveals paradigm-shifting when put into practice.

Asad’s intervention on Islam is nothing less than a critique of established anthropology as an ethnocentric, irreflexive and in that still much colonial discipline, which paradigm and methods are to be challenged and revised in order for it to properly engage with human forms existing outside of its cultural cradle.

Asad argues for the importance of the historicization of both observer’s positions and analytical categories and their insertion within a certain power-knowledge moment and configuration, a theoretical approach he draws from Foucault.

While the first one was considered as followed by the elite, text-based and urban – and thus orthodox, the latter characterized the diversity of local practices of rural communities and, in opposition, was understood as heterodox.

On the contrary, texts, which do not have an agency by themselves, are practiced, that is read, discussed, made sense of and embodied by believers – and, this, within a given social structure, that is power-knowledge configuration.

This allows him to introduce a political economy perspective in the analysis of Islam, which, dismissed by Geertz and Gellner’s focus on dramatization, explains the diversity of its forms in different contexts.

Asad’s discursive tradition concept has been fundamental for a number of later Islam scholars,[17] although diversely interpreted and prolonged, as noted by Ovamir Anjum.

The intention of this book is to critically examine the cultural hegemony of the West, exploring how Western concepts and religious practices have shaped the way history is written.

Following this, Asad discusses two elements of medieval Christianity that are no longer generally accepted by modern religion, those being the productive role of physical pain and the virtue of self-abasement.

Secularism, as theorized by Asad, is also deeply rooted in narratives of modernity and progress that formed out of the European Enlightenment, meaning that it is not as “tolerant” and “neutral” as it is widely considered to be.

The final few chapters explore transformations in religious authority, law, and ethics in colonial Egypt in order to illuminate aspects of secularization not usually attended to.