Interview with Talal Asad

alal Asad on religion, modernity and Islamism:
Interview with Saba Mahmood, Stanford Humanities Review (1996)
Talal Asad is a professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York, and is the author of the groundbreaking work, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993). Similar to Michel Foucault and Edward Said, Asad's works examine the mutual influence of knowledge and power in generating structures of thought dictating discourse and ways of organizing the world. He primarily focuses on the issue of religion and secularism.
Saba Mahmood is herself an eminent Professor of Anthropology at the University of California at Berkeley, and the author of Politics of Piety: the Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton University Press, 2005); a work examining women in the Islamist movement in Egypt.
This interview, conducted when Dr. Mahmood was still a graduate student at Stanford University, was originally entitled "Talal Asad: modern power and the reconfiguration of religious traditions." In the excerpts provided here, Asad discusses the methods of Islamism, or the call for an Islamic polity. He provides fresh insight into important Islamic concepts such as ijtihad (independent reasoning) nasiha (advice), and ikhtilaf (difference of opinion), avoiding facile equations to their counterparts in the Western "liberal" tradition. He looks critically at the notion of religious "evolution" towards secularized deism and points to the curious phenomenon of disembodied religious belief in the West, where so-called Christians and atheists practice the same life-style. He warns against linking the social practice of Islam with the modern nation-state: not because of the practice of Islam should not be "public", but because the nation-state itself must be transcended.
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Saba Mahmood: Given our discussion about polity and community, in what ways do you think the contemporary Islamist movements represent a vision of polity that is distinct from regnant conceptions of the nation, political debate, and consensus?
Talal Asad: A different vision of polity. That is an aspect of Islamist thinking that requires much more original work. I feel that there is a need to rethink the nature of the political in a far more radical way than Islamic movements seem to have done. To a great extent, there has been an acceptance of the modernizing state (and the model of the Western state) and a translation of its projects into Islamist terms. Often Islamists simply subscribe to the parameters of the modern nation- state, adding only that it be controlled by a virtuous body of Muslims. A much more radical idea is needed before we can say that Islamists have a vision of a distinctive kind of polity.
However, I don't want to exaggerate the homogeneity of these movements. There have been some interesting schematic attempts at rethinking. For example, the Tunisian Islamic leader Ghannushi, who is banned from Tunis, has recently argued for the political institutionalization of multiple interpretations of the founding texts. In one sense, the institutionalization of divergent interpretations is already a part of the Islamic tradition (both Sunni and Shi`a). But, if I understand him correctly, Ghannushi is trying to politicize that traditional arrangement and make it more fluid, more open to negotiation. Starting from the classic distinction between the essential body of the text, on the one hand, and its commentaries (i.e., "consequences"--what follows), on the other, he argues that the latter be brought into the political arena. This would involve the electorate being asked to vote for or against the policies that flow from given interpretations--and always having the option of changing its mind about them. In other words, the political implications of an interpretation (not all "the meanings" of the text itself) would be open to acceptance or rejection like any other proposed legislation or project. This clearly needs to be much more elaborately developed and clarified if it is to make political sense.
Are elements of this kind of thinking part of the Islamic discursive tradition?
I certainly think they are. That's what ijtihad, the principle of original reasoning from within the tradition, is all about. There is a lot of talk about ijtihad nowadays among Muslims, but too often it's used as a device to bring Islamic tradition in line with modern liberal values for no good reason. I believe it ought to be used to argue with other Muslims within the tradition and to try to formulate solutions to problems that are recognized as problems for the tradition by other Muslims.
You discuss in your work the practice of nasiha in Saudi Arabia, as an example of public critique within the Islamic tradition, which is quite distinct from the liberal notion of public criticism. Can you speak to that, given your comments on the limits and possibilities of specific traditions of thought?
Yes, nasiha is different from liberal notions of public criticism. For example, it doesn't constitute a right to criticize the monarch and/or political regime but an obligation. Similarly, the business of criticism is not restricted only to those expressly qualified--the educated and enlightened few. It's something that every Muslim has the duty to undertake, and whose theory the `ulama must continually reconsider and discuss for each time and place. It is, therefore, a form of criticism that is internal to a tradition. That is to say, only someone who has been educated in that tradition, who has been taught what "appropriate Islamic practices" are, can undertake it properly. This is not a criticism that anyone coming from the outside, a total stranger, say, armed with a fine sense of logical argument and a set of universal moral principles, can carry out. So it is quite different from the notion of abstract and generalized criticism that has to be confined to the enlightened, literate members of a polity.
Do you think that the post-Reformation Protestant conception of religion, as an internal belief system that has little to do with arranging political and social life, influenced or transformed the character of Islamic debates in this century? If so, in what ways?
Well, I think to some extent they have--where Islamic reform movements have adopted standards of rationality from modern Western discourses or even where Muslim apologists claim that Islam does quite well when properly measured by Western standards of justice and decency. This influence is also evident whenever the shari`a is made compatible with Western law and practice and is subjected to institutions of the modern state. And the modern state gives rise to two quite distinct movements--those for whom religious faith is something that fits into "private space" (in both the legal and the psychological sense), and those for whom the "public functions" of the modern state must be captured by men with religious faith.
It has often been argued that the tradition of liberalism is based upon principles of pluralism and tolerance in ways that Islamic tradition is not, and that the concept of plurality remains foreign to Islam. How would you respond to that?
Well, I would say that it is certainly not a modern, liberal invention. The plurality of individual interests is what the liberal tradition has theorized best of all. On the other hand, the attempt to get some kind of representation for ethnic groups and minorities in Western countries has been difficult for liberalism to theorize. Liberalism has theories of tolerance by which spaces can be created for individuals to do what they wish, so long as they don't obstruct the ability of others to do likewise. But these aren't theories of pluralism in the sense we are beginning to understand the term today. Liberalism has theories of multiple "interests," interests which can be equalized, aggregated, and calculated through the electoral process and then negotiated in the process of formulating and applying governmental policies. But that is a very different kind of pluralism from the different ways of life which are (a) the preconditions and not the objects of individual interests, and which are, (b) in the final analysis, incommensurable.
Now the Islamic tradition, like many other non-liberal traditions, is based on the notion of plural social groupings and plural religious traditions--especially (but not only) of the Abrahamic traditions [ahl al-kitab]. And, of course, it has always accommodated a plurality of scriptural interpretations. There is a well- known dictum in the shari`a: ikhtilaf al-umma rahma [difference within the Islamic tradition is a blessing]. This is where the notions of ijtihad and ijm`a come in. As modes of developing and sustaining the Islamic tradition, they authorize the construction of coherent differences, not the imposition of homogeneity.
Of course there are always limits to difference if coherence is to be aimed at. If tolerance is not merely another name for indifference, there comes a point in every tradition beyond which difference cannot be tolerated. That simply means that there are differences which can't be accommodated within the tradition without threatening its very coherence. But there are, of course, many moments and conditions of such intolerance. One must not, therefore, equate intolerance with violence and cruelty.
On the whole, Muslim societies in the past have been much more accommodating of pluralism in the sense I have tried to outline than have European societies. It does not follow that they are therefore necessarily better. And I certainly don't wish to imply that Muslim rulers and populations were never prejudiced, that they never persecuted non-Muslims in their midst. My point is only that "the concept of plurality," as you put it, is not foreign to Islam.
Talking of pluralities of interpretations within the Islamic tradition, some scholars make a distinction between the Sufi [mystical] and Salafi [reformist] tradition within Islam. You have criticized the ways in which these two traditions are often mapped onto rural/urban, folk/elite, and oral/scriptural dichotomies, respectively. Yet it is hard to deny the substantial differences between Sufi and Salafi thought. How can one fruitfully engage with these differences without falling into simplistic dichotomies?