I'm not criticizing how people experience what they might call spirituality. I am interested in looking critically at something else - at how people use their language to articulate theories about something they call religion, to say, for example, that… — Talal Asad Copy Share Image
The propensity to intellectualize is itself both essential and dangerous. I think in our modern world we are much more aware of its essential… — Talal Asad Copy Share Image
Certainly in order to understand the natural world one needs clarity, logic, and the capacity for theory building. But that understanding tends to improve… — Talal Asad Copy Share Image
I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about… — Talal Asad Copy Share Image
Language has multiple uses, and is embedded in different forms of life. It is not necessary to have this grand concept of "humanity" in… — Talal Asad Copy Share Image
Believers are often thought of as people who have some kind of private conviction or repudiation of something, whereas "the faithful" refers to a relationship, which was also incidentally the earlier sense of "faith" in premodern, preliberal Christianity. This is not to say, incidentally, that "faith" refers simply to external behavior as opposed to internal belief but that it refers… — Talal Asad Copy Share
You do not need intellectuality for deep faith. You do not need it for behaving humanely towards people whether fellow Muslims or non-Muslims. You do not need a concept, a theory, you do not need intellectual arguments for justifying a way of living that is already in place in order for it to proceed. — Talal Asad Copy Share
The Genealogical Science is a wonderful account of how old-fashioned race science has come to be re-defined by resort to the most recent developments in genetics. But this book is not simply another story of the ideological uses to which science may be put. Nadia Abu El-Haj has provided the reader with a very detailed analysis of the historical entanglement… — Talal Asad Copy Share
In liberal society we claim that freedom of speech is sacred and therefore has an absolute character. But we know (or should know) that "free speech" inhabits a structured space: not only is "hate speech" legally forbidden in liberal societies, but there are also laws protecting the circulation of copyrighted material, and the reproduction of trademarks and patents without explicit… — Talal Asad Copy Share
“The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality:… — Talal Asad Copy Share
For the law, the clarity of language and the finality of judgment is crucial, because you have to decide a case one way or another - whether it is criminal or civil or whatever. In ordinary life, you do not have to decide things with absolute finality. You do not have to decide on a theory in order to behave… — Talal Asad Copy Share
You should never employ your intellect but only that it is not essential to exercise it in order to live a humane life. Language… — Talal Asad Copy Share Image
The notion of "humanity" as a form of transcendence derives, I think, from the conviction that intellectuality possesses an absolute power, from the demand that our best behavior depends on our ability to think abstractly, in terms of a universal rule, about something called humanity, that we need to understand humanity abstractly so that we can act responsibly towards those… — Talal Asad Copy Share
