Introduction
Is there a tension in Talal Asad’s oeuvre—between discursive tradition as a mode of argumentation and discursive tradition as primarily embodied, which precisely works best when it needs no justification?[1] One answer to this question would be to say that a close examination of his work shows a binary framing between discourse and embodiment to be a false one. And indeed, it is. Nevertheless, there remains, I argue, a tension between two different ways in which language works, one in which language is used by the subject argumentatively—intellectually—and one in which language acts on the subject, is non-justificatory, and imbricated with a ‘form of life.’ How does it shift from one to the other? This might be resolved by understanding discursivity as crisis.
- Discursive Tradition
Has there been a shift in emphasis in Talal Asad’s work over time, from an Islamic discursive tradition operating through forms of justification, contestation, argumentation and power, to an examination of forms of language that do not demand an explanation? I want to explore this subtle shift—and its implications for how we understand discursivity and Islam—through looking at his early and later work.
It was in the 1986 article entitled ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ that Asad first argued that Islam must be understood as a discursive tradition—one which connects the past, future and present. The text opens with a lengthy analysis of the prevalent ways in which anthropologists of Islam have approached their object of study. These include their approach of it in terms of the ‘small’ and ‘great’ traditions, in terms of orthopraxy and orthodoxy, and other binary framings. Asad critiques what he calls this ‘dramaturgical’ approach to Islam, one which is about great narratives between social groups (the nomads, urban poor, the bourgeoisie)—a main shortcoming of which is the tendency to produce a static picture that fails to recognise the significance of changing ‘political economies.’ Failing to attend to the latter obscures the social conditions for the production of discourses, including questions of power. An adequate analytical concept for dealing with these questions, in his view, is to pay attention to what Muslims do:
‘[To] begin, as Muslims do, from the concept of a discursive tradition that includes and relates itself to the founding texts of the Qur’an and the Hadith. Islam is neither a distinctive social structure nor a heterogeneous collection of beliefs, artifacts, customs and morals. It is a tradition.’[2]
But what is a tradition for Asad? Far from static, it is a set of discourses that change over time, through questioning, contestation and modes of argumentation. These discourses ‘seek to instruct practitioners regarding the correct form and purposes of a practice.’ Temporality is a key aspect of how a discursive tradition functions. Its discourses:
“relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted), and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions). An Islamic discursive tradition is simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to particular practices in the present.”
How the past, present and future are related is centrally concerned with the question of practice, that is, with the question of apt performance. The imbrication between practice and language is important here. For the notion of the ‘correct model’ to which a practice—including ritual—ought to confirm is determined discursively. This model, then, is implemented through a process of teaching; practitioners have to be taught the correct model. This often requires articulation, correction, persuasion and sometimes argumentation. Indeed, argumentation is crucial: ‘Argument and conflict over the form and significance of practices are […] a natural part of any Islamic discursive tradition.’[3]
This focus on argumentation is an interesting one. Having described Islam as a tradition, Asad goes to lengths to stress that he is not referring to an unchanging or purely imitative set of practices. Nor is the ‘discursive’ aspect understood as the application of a set of texts or laws (as if rules have a meaning apart from their use!). Rather, he argues, reason and tradition are not mutually contradictory, that tradition does not require ‘unthinking conformity.’ On the contrary, reason and argument are necessarily involved in traditional practice not just for teaching, but ‘whenever the teaching meets with doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding.’ That we think otherwise, he says, is largely because ‘we think of argument in terms of formal debate, confrontation, and polemic that we assume it has no place in traditional practice.’
Yet, by making this point, he also affirms that not all forms of reasoning and argumentation are the same: ‘the process of trying to win someone over for a willing performance of a traditional practice, as distinct from trying to demolish an opponent’s intellectual position, is a necessary part of Islamic discursive traditions as others.’ But these modalities, the primarily intellectual, present an opening for an examination of the question of power and resistance. For, as he admits, there can be no need to explain unless there is resistance. Thus, he says that the process of arguing, of using the force of reason, ‘at once presupposes and responds to the fact of resistance.’ This is an important point, which will be returned to at the end in the paper.
To conclude this section, we might note that through thinking about the question of teaching—of authorising discourses—Asad offers an account of language oriented towards the production of selves. The influence of Wittgenstein is clear: the way language is enmeshed within ‘forms of life,’ particularly the way it inducts, instructs, trains, as opposed to merely represents (‘A practise is Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam, and is so taught to Muslims—whether by an ‘alim, a khatib, a Sufi shaykh, or an untutored parent’). However, unlike Wittgenstein’s approach to learning, which is devoid of an analysis of power, Asad treats the two together by offering a historical (genealogical) account of discourse and its ‘political economy’—in other words, the way language articulates rules, discipline, and produces selves.[4] It is this that defines an authorising discourse and, moreover, it this that produces systematic knowledge.[5] This impetus to discourse that Asad gestures at here—and more broadly in his critique of the emergence of ‘religion’ as a category—is precisely what I will take up at the end of this paper. For now, suffice it to say that in the ‘earlier’ Asad, what is foregrounded is the role of discourse in the discursive tradition—and therefore the role of power. Forms of reasoning, contestation and argumentation are central and return, for their authority, to the fundamental textual traditions of Islam.
2. Unconscious Assimilation
Now I want to move to the latest moment in Asad’s work, where he revisits his notion of discursive tradition but, this time, with some discernible shifts in emphasis. Focusing on embodied understandings of Islam (which, as we have seen, was already there) but a tradition that is primarily sustained through unconsciously assimilated practices. This notion of unconscious assimilation—and the role of language undergirding it—is rather different from the notion of practices directed through reason, argumentation and contestation.
Secular Translations opens with a discussion of the reasons behind the ‘untranslatability’ of the Qur’an. Characteristically, Asad begins descriptively, ‘as believers do,’ examining their form of engagement with the Qur’an.[6] Those who argue in favour of its untranslatability do so on the basis that something is inevitably lost in the attempt to translate divine prose into the language of logic. In a recent article, Asad contrasts the approach to divine language of the ‘philosophers’ (mu’tazilites) with that of the ‘traditionalists’ (here, Hanbalites). While the former attempt to use reason to understand the (in)consistencies of the Qu’ranic prose, the latter treat language quite differently. Rather than seeing it as representative, of expressing ‘meaning,’ the ‘traditionalists’ focus on what the language does to us. Its effect on the sensible body, too, can be regarded as a kind of translation. For language is not only translated inter- and intra-linguistically, but also into habits, propensities, dispositions and sensibilities. In day to day use, Qur’anic language is not merely communicative, but is translated into the sensible body, through ritual prayer but also through discourses that seek to teach certain virtues.[7] (Belief is also an effect of this—not as a state of mind, an intellectual position, but rather a disposition, a way of being in the world – one characterised by reverence, awe, sometimes terror.[8])
The success of a tradition, for Asad, is measured by the absence of justification, the absence of a need for explanation. Perhaps, otherwise put, this is the absence of a need for intellectual exertion—even discursivity? He says: ‘Living in a tradition is not, strictly speaking, a matter of justifying obedience to another person by reference to an intellectually recognised authority but of learning to live without justification.’[9] The success of a tradition can be gauged insofar as it operates without a sense of obedience to external rules (‘the products of Reason’). It is, in this sense, quite different from the operation of modern law. Rather, the proper performance of a practice depends on how to do something and on a community that can confirm that it is properly done.[10] The ‘reasoning in context’ appears quite different from the argumentative kind—say, between the Mu’tazilites and the Hanbalis.
Discursive tradition—to the extent that it is successful—is not primarily verbal or written but embodied in habit, feeling and behaviour.[11] However, at certain points, argumentation, discussion and debate are triggered, and a re-envisioning of the tradition ensues. Do these two tendencies need reconciling? Of course, in some ways the binary is a false one: producing discourse on Islam comes through embodied, Muslim subjects; and it is through discursivity, through conceptions of correct practice, that the unconsciously practised Islam is learned. Yet, a question remains, to which I will venture an answer. If a discursive tradition is primarily one that is unconsciously assimilated into the body, when do those exceptional occasions occur, from the embodied word (non-sense) to the act of writing (sense), or, even, the act of ‘thought’? For the switch from one mode to another does happen and happens unevenly. The answer is crisis.
3. How Discursive is the Tradition?
The switch from different modes of engagement in Islam has received little attention. The word switch, perhaps, is misleading as it implies discrete modes, whereas the question is less to do with whether Islam is a discursive tradition but rather how discursive the tradition is at any given moment. In other words, it is the question of the intensity and kind of discursivity, that is of interest to me. In fact, there are important allusions to Asad’s own work—when he gestures toward different forms of discursive engagement with the tradition.
As we have seen, Asad argues that demolishing an intellectual opponent’s argument is not the same as the kind of discourse that instructs good practice. But even with the latter, argument, persuasion and even explanation suggest, to varying degrees, resistance on the part of the subject. Given this, might not a greater degree of discursivity come hand in hand with a greater a degree of resistance? It might be thought that sufficient resistance could be regarded as a crisis, generating a disjuncture in the ordinary way in which language instructs and is assimilated into practice.
Asad best articulates the link between discursivity and power in his discussion of orthodoxy.[12] At the outset he problematises the established notion that Islam is an ‘orthopraxy’ standing in contrast to Christianity’s ‘orthodoxy.’ This separation fails to recognise that correct ‘praxis’ requires an authorising discourse. Orthodoxy must not be understood as a mere body of opinion, since even ‘doctrine’ (in its older meaning) implies teaching, discipline and therefore practice. Thus, in the Islamic context, Asad argues, the question of orthodoxy remains important when understood as a relationship of power: ‘Wherever Muslims have the power to regulate, uphold, require, or adjust correct practices, and to condemn, exclude, undermine, or replace incorrect ones, there is the domain of orthodoxy.’[13] It is such a context that generates a production of discourse—and systematically. (Indeed, it was precisely the power of the Christian church led to the definition of religion). It might be argued that this is quite different from the form of discursivity that seeks to persuade a practitioner who simply shows ‘lack of understanding.’ Indeed, it was through such more ‘mundane’ forms of resistance, when a teaching ‘meets with doubt, indifference, or lack of understanding’ that Asad sought to show that reason and argumentation are not exclusively symptoms of a ‘tradition in crisis.’ Yet, crisis is important too—notably its intensification of discursivity—and takes several forms.
I use the word ‘crisis’ loosely to describe the ways in which the ordinary, ‘unconscious’ way that language directs and even melts into a way of living (‘form of life’) comes to be interrupted. This interruption engenders quite a different use of language—conscious, deliberate, argumentative and ‘intellectual.’ It is not only ‘resistance’ that generates an intensified return to practices of argumentation within a tradition. It is also when the conventional practices of a ‘form of life’ are found to be at a disjuncture with needs. Here, there is a need to reassess, to rearticulate principles, to reconstruct categories and a response. Intellectual activity is born—in some ways—of interruption to ‘forms of life,’ to the familiar and quotidian ways of engaging language in the world. (This is not reason ‘in context’ but in its most rarefied form). In such moments, one finds a discursive generation: the emergence of debates, schools, genres—text.
4. Writing as Crisis?
The implication here, then, is that there is a relationship between the act of writing and crisis. In this light, we might rethink the nature of one genre of Islamic writing, namely fiqhi (juridical) writing and the circumstances which explain its preponderance. Although fiqh (deemed to be the interpretation of the shari’a)is understood to be paradigmatic to Islam, this particular mode of Islamic discursive engagement might fruitfully be regarded as exceptional. On the one hand, juridical approaches areoften drawn on most intensively in particular periods of conflict—where ordinary resolution mechanisms fail to suffice. A juridical approach allows for the delineation of rights and duties. In such situations, there is a need for thought, for the conscious application of a set of tools to a particular situation. The ‘ethical’ mode of being, which is antithetical to rights and duties, since it does not presume the individual, is replaced by a transactional mode of encounter.[14] Here I offer the notion that Islam might usefully be viewed as a discursive repository, the source of a repertoire of practices. Primarily, Islam will be practised as a ‘form of life,’ a familiar way of being in the world, in which Islamic ‘discourse’ is assimilated into the sensible body. Yet, on occasion, this experiences disruption—and a different mode of engagement is drawn on.
This is not surprisingly when it is remembered that fiqh flourished in urban and commercial settings and deals with transactions (mu’amilat)—it is predominantly a commercial discourse. In other words, it is well-suited for encounters with strangers—for, say, the operation of long-distance trade—or with those one encounters as strangers, in their individuality. This contrasts with those within one’s community, an ethical space, the sociality and integrity of which, anthropologists have shown us, is founded on the non-quantifiability and incommensurability of ‘gift’ exchange.
I end of the following note: the above reflections call for thinking about not only the political economic conditions for the possibility of thought but also writing, especially in its abstract forms (whether philosophy or fiqh). It also brings up the question of the relationship between theory and political economy—not only in the sense of what materially sustains intellectual life, but in sense of what instigates, provokes, generates theorisation, the need for explanation?
References
Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion; Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam, 1993. Johns Hopkins University Press.
Asad, Talal. 2003. Formations of the secular: Christianity, Islam, modernity. Stanford University Press.
Asad, Talal. 2018. Secular Translations: Nation-state, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason. Columbia University Press.
Asad, Talal. 2020. ‘Thinking about Religion Through Wittgenstein,’ Critical Times, 3(3), pp. 403-442.
Graeber, David, 2012, Debt: The First 5000 Years (Brooklyn: Melville House).
Scott, David, and Hirschkind, Charles, 2006. Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors. Stanford University Press.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. [1953]. Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
[1] Talal Asad, Secular Translations, p. 93.
[2] Asad, ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,’ p. 14.
[3] Talal Asad, ‘On the Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,’ pp. 15-16.
[4] It might be said that what Asad adds to the Wittgenstinian approach to language is precisely a Foucauldian analysis of power and its genealogical method.
[5] A case in point is the desire to acquire knowledge of the ‘other’ by the Roman church being linked to its concern with heresy.
[6] Mirroring almost exactly his approach in ‘The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam’ (to the question of ‘What is Islam?’ he answers “We must begin as Muslims do”), almost thirty-five years later, Asad says on the question of the Qur’an’s untranslatability: ‘[W]e should begin descriptively, as believers do, with the reverential attitude on the part of the believer toward the Creator, an act that combines feeling and act, public visibility and private thought’ (Secular Translations, p. 58).
[7] Talal Asad, Secular Translations, p. 96.
[8] Talal Asad, ‘Thinking about Religion through Wittgenstein,’ Critical Times,
[9] Talal Asad, Secular Translations, p. 93. Asad adds “The language of tradition is therefore not the language of the state in so far as the law, whether issued or authorised by the state, demands obedience.”
[10] p. 94.
[11] Talal Asad, Secular Translations, p. 5.
[12] The question of orthodoxy is addressed in both ‘The idea of An Anthropology of Islam’ and more extensively in Genealogies of Religion.
[13] pp. 15-16.
[14] It will be objected here that this suggests that fiqh lacks an ethics. It is not my intention to suggest that fiqh is a dry, transactional mode of behaviour.