Talal Asad

Multiculturalism and British Identity in the Wake of the Rushdie Affair

IT is common knowledge that the Rushdie affair precipitated a sense of political crisis in Britain. Large numbers of Muslims publicly expressed their anger and distress at the publication of The Satanic Verses, demonstrated in London, petitioned Penguin Books to withdraw the book, and the government to ban it. The government rejected the call for banning and warned Muslims not to isolate themselves from the &dquo;host&dquo; society. Newspapers and television almost unanimously condemned the &dquo;fundamentalism&dquo; of Britain’s Muslims. On February 14 Ayatollah Khomeini issued his shocking death sentence on Rushdie. This greatly aggravated the sense of crisis in Britain although most prominent Muslims there publicly dissociated themselves from it.l Ten days later Home Secretary Douglas Hurd made a speech at a gathering of Muslims emphasizing the importance of proper integration for ethnic minorities, the need to learn about British culture without abandoning one’s own faith, and the necessity of refraining from

Two European Images of Non-European Rule ∗

Functionalist anthropology in its study of African societies and orientalism in its study of Islamic history present two different and contrasting images of political systems. The anthropological p...

Agency and pain: An exploration

The notion of agency has become particularly prominent in social‐science writing. This article identifies some of the weaknesses in the ways it has been employed in contemporary anthropology. It criticises the assumptions of self‐empowerment, responsibility, and constructivism that are held to be essential to moral agency in much of that usage. Present‐day conceptions of agency in this literature introduce—whether intentionally or not—a triumphalist vision of history. Drawing on recent neuro‐physiological research, religious history and ethnography, it focuses on pain in order to think about agency in other than triumphalist terms. Triumphalist versions of agency, the article argues, are not only inherently questionable, they also distract our attention away from the need to understand how different traditions articulate the idea of living sanely in a world that is inevitably painful.

Anthropological texts and ideological problems: an analysis of Cohen on Arab villages in Israel ∗

Anthropological texts, like all ideological products, are related in complex ways to social practice. Abner Cohens Arab Border Villages in Israel is analysed as an ideological specimen which embodies contemporary anthropological practice in its typical form—the field monograph—and objectifies a specific historical reality in a politically charged manner. For understanding this text a distinction must be made between (i) its conscious analytic concerns (rooted in anthropology as a discipline dealing with colonized peoples) and (ii) its unconscious political ideological determinations (connected primarily with the Zionist Colonial character of Israel). It is argued that the coherence of Cohens text at the unconscious, political level is the very condition of its failure at the conscious, analytic level. It is suggested that in order to be adequate at the theoretical level, Cohen would have had to break radically with anthropological practice and attack the political reality which he attempts to reflect

Notes on body pain and truth in medieval Christian ritual

Anthropologists who study exotic religions tend to analyse rituals as systems of symbolic communication. This article offers an historical analysis of particular medieval Christian rituals directed at establishing the Truth, especially those in which physical pain is employed. Its primary interest is in the disciplinary conditions and effects of such rituals, and not in their symbolic meaning.

Thinking about religion, belief, and politics

Since the closing decade of the millennium, social friction generated by the presence of substantial numbers of Muslim immigrants in Europe, as well as the threat of Muslim terrorists, has given a new impetus to the fear of politicized religion. Violent and intolerant “Fundamentalist movements “ have emerged not only in the Muslim world (although these are the most frightening in the West) but also in Israel and the United States. The secular values of liberal democracy are under siege – or so the Western media tell us. Academics who teach religious studies have responded eagerly, seeing in this an opportunity to demonstrate the public relevance of their expertise. What is to be done about the dangers of religious belief to liberal democracies? More generally one may ask: What are the relations between the secular promise of liberal democracy and the conditions for private belief in transcendence? There is no simple answer to this question, of course, because modern religion has both hindered and aided liberal values and because liberal values are more contradictory and ambiguous than is sometimes acknowledged. But I want to begin with other questions: What is “religion”? How has it come to be defined in the ways it has? What are some of the political consequences of making belief central to the definition?

Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism

One thing the Enlightenment has bequeathed to us is a moral imperative to reduce suffering. This is not just a sensitivity to suffering, a greater squeamishness about inflicting it or witnessing it. It is true that this undoubtedly has occurred, as we can see it in a host of ways, especially in the softening of penal codes which the Enlightenment helped bring about, partly under the influence of Beccaria and Bentham. But beyond this, we feel called upon to relieve suffering, to put an end to it. . . . We routinely grumble about our lack of concern and note disapprovingly that it requires often spectacular television coverage of some disaster to awaken the world’s conscience. But this very critique supposes certain standards of universal concern. It is these that are deeply anchored in our moral culture.1

Thinking about terrorism and just war

Since 2001 a new urge to moralize the use of violence as an instrument of state policy has appeared in liberal democracies. The American idea of a War against Terror, and the European notion of confronting a global terrorist threat, have together merged with a discourse on humanitarian military action: the political/moral ‘responsibility to protect’ is no longer to be confined to ones own citizens. Renewed interest among academics in ‘just war’ theory, the tradition that seeks to humanize war through law, reflects this development. This article questions the assumption that there is an essential difference between war (civilized violence) and terrorism (barbaric violence). It argues that their similarity appears more clearly if we set intentions aside—such as the deliberate or accidental killing of ‘innocents’—and focus instead on three main facts: (a) modern war strategies and technologies are uniquely destructive, (b) armed hostilities increasingly occupy a single space of violence in which war and peace are not clearly demarcated, and (c) the law of war does not provide a set of ‘civilizing’ rules but a language for legal/moral argument in which the use of punitive violence is itself a central semantic element.

Thinking About Tradition, Religion, and Politics in Egypt Today

1 I have used the term tradition in my writings in two ways: first, as a theoretical location for raising questions about authority, time, language use, and embodiment; and second, as an empirical arrangement in which discursivity and materiality are connected through the minutiae of everyday living. The discursive aspect of tradition is primarily a matter of linguistic acts passed down the generations as part of a form of life, a process in which one learns and relearns how to do things with words, sometimes reflectively and sometimes unthinkingly, and learns and relearns how to comport one’s body and how to feel in particular contexts. Embodied practices help in the acquisition of aptitudes, sensibilities, and propensities through repetition until such time as the language guiding practice becomes redundant. Through such practices one can change oneself—one’s physical being, one’s emotions, one’s language, one’s predispositions, as well as one’s environment. Tradition stands opposed both to empiricist theories of knowledge and relativist theories of justice. By this I mean first and foremost that tradition stresses embodied, critical learning rather than abstract theorization. Empiricist theories of knowledge assert the centrality of sensory experience and evidence, but in doing so they ignore the

Ideology, class and the origin of the Islamic state

Text reviewed: Sulayman Bashir (1978) Tawazun an‐naqaid; muhadarat fi‐l‐jahiliyya wa sadr al‐islam (The Balance of Contradictions; lectures on the pre‐Islamic period and early Islam), Jerusalem.