... of life. © 2020 Talal Asad 2020 This is an open access article distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). religious reasons tradition practice abstraction the secular In what follows I try to think about religious tradition through Wittgenstein's...

... force of present powers, in the desire to imagine and live in a world without shying away from its brutality or its wonder. 1. Mahmood, “Religious Reason.” 2. Mahmood, Politics of Piety . 3. Mahmood, Religious Difference , 213 . 4. Mahmood, Religious Difference...

... and the juridico-political state returns us to a schema Saba identified in “Religious Reason and Secular Affect,” an essay on the Danish cartoons affair, and her concerns about “the costs entailed in turning to the law or the state to settle such a controversy.” 30 “For anyone interested in fostering greater...

... to the temporalities of embodied life, its sedimented patterns of relationship, with its “practices extended, taught, and grasped over time” (412). Following Wittgenstein, we should not “reify reason,” abstracting it out from our daily lives and then turning it against ourselves. Asad's question—“Can I refuse to speak...

... adds, is “an authoritative discourse for grounding religious claims.” 5 In the debates over the novel, “complex Christological issues about the nature of Christ had to be reduced to questions such as who did what, when, and for what kinds of worldly reasons.” 6 For me, this clinches the argument...

... between belief and practice as a starting point, scholars should attend to the variety of ways language comes to be used in contexts of embodied learning, contexts wherein the abilities and aptitudes germane to religious life are developed and honed. Turning his focus to what Wittgenstein called...

... and support for statism in current political and social formations. Nor do they identify the specific elements of neoliberal reason—a radically extended reach of the private, mistrust of the political and disavowal of the social, which together normalize inequality and disembowel democracy—that shape...

... scholarly volumes, and it is now more often than not an object of sarcasm or indifference. Yet in everyday life, the question remains moot in a myriad of global contexts, from religious movements and secularist anxieties to the antivaxxers and the technocratic faithful. The clash, or the play...

... autonomous subjects (the subjects of the Enlightenment for Kant, as for any serious attempt to defend “Enlightenment values”) do not know their place in the private use of reason: they question everything restlessly, question other humans in a way that respects their autonomy; this questioning makes them...

... that the decisive moment in modernity is the move from transcendent to immanent, or from vertical to horizontal, modes of reasoning. Think of liberalism, Marxism, pragmatism, each in its own way coming to terms with scientific categories and modes of reasoning; in short, flattening the curve of metaphysical...

... a specific thing that one has learned to do” (404). Learning is embodiment, and embodiment is learning—this was Marcel Mauss's lesson, of course, and before him, that of many a “religious” tradition—but this is not sufficient, for, as Asad further says, “at the center of the human soul is the ability...

... have certain sympathies with such a view, his own priorities lay elsewhere and he regarded scientific methods, which could bolster claims for representation, as a strategically necessary bulwark against the tyranny of the majority. 76 At the same time, he was also clear that, more than reason...

..., or a Europhile who puts on a show of chastising Europeans and quoting the Qurʾān but exposes his obsession with European progress and himself as a parrot of colonial discourse. Finally, Sayyid Quṭb exemplifies the religious fanatic , or the radical Muslim who justifies religious violence and absolutist...

...). If—and to the extent that—this claim holds true, we are poised to formulate the following question: What conditions have been enabling us to take for granted the notions that faith starts where reason and doubt end, that aesthetics is one thing and the religious another, that worship belongs to one world...

... in Thailand's far south in the late 1930s, he was watched and his remarks reported. In addition to being considered a threat to the state, Haji Sulong's modernist teachings of Islam were anathema to the conservative ulama s and uztaz s (religious authorities) and the Malay Muslim elites. In short, he...

... to the front during the Second World War, and who, after having fought in both Europe and Africa, is killed on his way home, by white French soldiers. It is based on a real event: the massacre, by the French, of West African troops at Tiaroye in 1944. Fanon tells us: “The reason I have chosen this long...

... than reveal nonviolence to be a practice that remained groundless or without reason. But its status as a set of habits or practices that made social life possible meant that nonviolence was also capable of enabling the emergence of violence, which continued to depend upon its virtues of solidarity...

... of Islamic fundamentalism—that is, precisely the most westernized version of Islam, which emulates the West in its identitarian and racializing essentialism. 3 Are we not then witnessing the intent to impose and spread a religious war like the one that has been destroying the Middle East, exactly...

... , or religious scholars, continue to be trained in madaris (sing. madrassa ) with varying levels of independence. Ulema and jurists remain confident of resources from within the tradition to address contemporary concerns, and—as muftis, practicing jurists, and mosque custodians—continue to be linked...

... of a symbolically dense religious structure of feeling. In this neomedieval morality play, the insurrectionists were cast as persecuted martyrs and holy warriors fighting for jobs stolen by nebulous liberal elites who drink the blood of infants, nonmetaphorically, and who have infiltrated the government to undo...