Being Human: An interview with Talal Asad (2015)

This interview, conducted by Hasan Azad, was featured in the Islamic Monthly's website.

Islam, the West, and our (shared?) responsibilities

Talal Asad (b. 1932) is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Asad’s work has played a major role in the study of Islam as far as including Muslim self-understandings of what Islam is and what it means to be Muslim. In this interview, Asad discusses Eurocentric notions of “humanity” and “civilization,” growing Islamophobia in Europe and America, and the violence committed with impunity by Western states — particularly the U.S. — previously and today.

Courtesy of Talal Asad

Hasan Azad: “Humanity” is finding itself at the brink of a precipice, which is entirely of its own doing, with the threat of complete environmental collapse and the sixth mass extinction (a group of scientists published a report in June predicting that, given the unprecedented rates at which species are becoming extinct, the planet is entering the sixth mass extinction as a result of human-made disasters). Now, more so than ever before in history, the notion of difference vis-à-vis the natural world and other groups of human beings has to be turned on its head into a recognition of a fundamental unity between all of us. What are your thoughts on this?

Talal Asad: Referring to the great achievements of the modern world — I’m going back to just after World War II — people would write about the great achievements of “European civilization.” At that time, as I remember it, everyone talked about European civilization — and even “the crisis of European civilization” that the world had gone through at the defeat of European fascism. (“European civilization,” “modern civilization,” or simply “civilization” were used interchangeably.) This was how the distinction was made between the most advanced part of “humanity” and the other parts that hadn’t reached its level. This is an old, old story, of course, one which has been retold many times, and occasionally criticized. But it also had this implication: “We are able to achieve these wonderful things and defend these wonderful values, not you.”

A friend of mine long ago used to joke whenever we were confronted with something technically sophisticated, saying, “You see how clever the white man is!” And so I’ve used that phrase quite often ever since: “You see how clever the white man is!” My point is merely that this was a common posture, a serious claim in the late 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th century, and even just after World War II. The idea of European racial superiority was quite commonly associated with claims to inhabiting European civilization, which was, of course, the “highest.”

Now, over the last few decades, as the various global crises have been accumulating — climate change, the threat of nuclear war as well as the dangers of nuclear energy, the uncontrollability of the global financial system, and so on — we now hear people saying things like: “Look at what humanity has done.” Now suddenly the subject is “humanity,” whereas originally, Euro-Americans had claimed: “Look at the stunning achievements of the West.” Because if you re-read the earlier writings, you see that everybody talked endlessly — well, perhaps not everybody but intellectuals, politicians and colonial governors — about the great achievements of European civilization, of the West. And it seemed quite reasonable to talk in these terms. Even many reformers in the Third World talked that way because they too had internalized the idea that growing scientific knowledge and military prowess were signs of moral worth. My point is simply that when it comes to global disasters, then it’s all of humanity. Suddenly we hear the claim that humanity is responsible — including, no doubt, the peasants in Asia, Africa and Latin America, and the urban poor!

Hasan Azad: But in actual fact, it’s typically the West — the developed world — that is responsible.

Talal Asad: Yes. Having claimed all the wonderful things — or what people thought were wonderful — for one particular part of humanity, the West (or the Christian West), the looming catastrophes can be disclaimed by that very part as uniquely attributable to it. The focus is no longer on “the West,” it’s now all of humanity. All of humanity has brought about our troubles. And yet, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki by the United States that initiated the nuclear age was one of the worst things that has ever happened. It has not received as much attention as the Nazi genocide of the Jews in Europe. And yet the latter was not as much of a break in human history as the former; although its scale of mass murder was much greater, the destruction of European Jewry depended not on a leap in scientific knowledge but on the forced concentration of large numbers of human beings who needed to be eliminated for ideological reasons. The nuclear bombing killed a mass of children, women and men — and even non-human animals — living ordinary lives in an ordinary city. All were destroyed at one stroke. And that weapon was primitive compared to what is now available. A new and more precarious age in human history was inaugurated. This was not the achievement of humanity but of particular people armed with technological and ideological weapons.

Incidentally, the claim is still being made that this was done to save millions of American lives. But it was really done — as a number of people who were part of the decision-making apparatus conceded — not for a humanitarian reason but for a political one: to demonstrate American power to the Soviet Union. My point is simply this: It’s all very well talking about the Western achievements in science and technology, and about the West’s unique moral values. The West is responsible for scientific discoveries, for inventing the steam engine, the radio, electricity, modern medicine, democratic government and universalism. When it comes to the dreadful possibilities that are now looming, then people want to claim that they are not just Westerners but essentially part of humanity. The agent responsible for a dark future has simply changed. More significant than that, perhaps, is that there is little sense that the modern world created by the capitalist West, despite its many achievements, is itself full of horrible possibilities. And I don’t just mean climate change and the threat of nuclear war.

Hasan Azad: The Global Rally For Humanity organized (what turned out to be largely unsuccessful) 20 rallies outside mosques throughout the U.S. on October 9 and 10. One of the main people behind these rallies is Jon Ritzheimer, a former U.S. Marine who led a “Draw Muhammad Contest” outside a Phoenix mosque in May. With the 2 million strong rally in France after the Charlie Hebdo killings in January, which sociologist Emmanuel Todd has called “an odious display of middle-class domination, prejudice and Islamophobia”; with British shock jock Katie Hopkins in April calling Syrian refugees and migrants “cockroaches” that need to be wiped out; with anti-Islamic “Reclaim Australia” rallies held in Melbourne in July, it seems that Islam and Muslims have come to represent all that is not “human” in the West. In your recent article, Reflections on Violence, Law, and Humanitarianism, you trace a genealogy of the notion of “humanity.” One of the things you point out is the way in which, during World War II, “humanity” became a universal synonym for “Christianity.” You also mention how “The idea of difference is built into the concept of human.” What do you think is expected of Muslims/Islam for them to be fully integrated into this Euro-American notion of “humanity”? Is it possible? Is it even desirable?

Talal Asad: The notion of European civilization as the most progressive, the most ingenious, and the most productive civilization the world has ever known, already presumes a certain kind of hierarchy. And, to the extent that many people maintained in the past (and perhaps continue to do so in the present) that much of this is owed to Christianity, we have an imaginary construction and not one that is real. But this is certainly the way people thought of “humanity” in the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as being represented by its best and most forward looking, the most moral part of that totality. That implies a hierarchical relationship. And there may be some kind of perverted logic to wanting to share with the whole of humanity the disasters that are threatening the world on the grounds that “we are all one.” The threat is indeed to all humans, regardless of their differences. Yet animal life too is threatened with annihilation so “humanity” is not an adequate category here. Nevertheless, the inclusion of non-human animals as objects of annihilation underlines how absurd it is to make “humanity” the agent of global disaster.

I’m not sure how far the notion of humanity can help morally and politically. I’m not persuaded that you need a clear notion of humanity in order to be able to behave humanely. A theory or concept even of humanity doesn’t seem to me necessary — or sufficient — for people to act humanely. What acting humanely depends on is learning certain forms of behavior, acquiring certain kinds of sensibilities, within various forms of life. I think one of the troubles with academics is that they are often — we are often — deluded into thinking that expounding a concept theoretically is always necessary for ethical behavior. I don’t think it is, because I don’t think we are able to control — I don’t think we have been very good at controlling the ways things go, in war as well as in the long-term development of social life generally. Thus famously, historians have shown how World War I emerged from a series of accidents and how the war itself eventually helped to produce a world that nobody actually intended.

I don’t know that there is a single question with a single answer as to whether Muslims should or shouldn’t integrate into some notion of humanity. I think that Muslims are clearly, at the moment, in a very difficult situation — well at least many Muslims are. I can’t claim I’m in a difficult situation. I dislike what I see and hear and read, but that doesn’t mean to say that I am in the same situation as a recent Muslim migrant in Europe or the U.S. who has very few resources, who has to face discrimination, hostility and even violence. And it’s true, Islamophobia is massively present in the “advanced part of humanity.” It is far more important at present than anti-Semitism. I mean there may be corners in which anti-Semitism can be found but I don’t think it’s any longer a real threat as it was in Europe under the Nazis — or even in North America prior to World War II. Whereas Islamophobia is, and it’s not inconceivable that violence may be used against Muslims in the West in a systematic way — not just in the way that Hungary is now treating the Syrian refugees, and not just in the way that neo-Nazis are doing in different European countries.

To come back to your question: I think Muslims in different countries, in different classes, are situated in different circumstances and have different problems. An educated person will be differently placed compared to people who are not educated, and who have just recently arrived in a country whose language they can barely speak. I don’t think that everybody’s condition is the same. It makes sense to talk about Islamophobia in a general way precisely because this hostility, this animus, is directed at an imagined homogenous alien within Europe.

I used to teach courses on the Middle East when I was in England, and I usually began by pointing out that several centuries ago, in medieval times, there were all sorts of people in Europe, including people with different religions, before Christianity became dominant in the entire population. So the question one should ask oneself is: Where is this multiplicity now? It was eliminated with the emergence of the modern state. In the Middle East, you still have by and large many religions, ethnicities, customs. But we too are going down that European road — which is why I think of ISIS as a modern movement despite its invocation of the caliphate, and not typical of Islamic history. Whether and if so, to what extent the modern state can accommodate great differences is an open question.

By the way, this brings up something by which I am often irritated: One may concede that the so-called Islamic State is doing monstrous things — just as the Saudi government is doing horrible things in Yemen, and the Egyptian government has been doing in Egypt — but then the Western media tells us (or at least suggests in the way it talks about things) that they are much worse than anything in America or Europe, evil beyond compare. I don’t know if you’ve been following the fate of this poor man, Richard Glossip in Oklahoma, a man condemned to death on the word of somebody else, the real killer, who claimed that he was given money and promises of a job by Glossip if he would carry out the murder (and in this way, he himself avoided the death penalty). Glossip has been on death row awaiting execution since he was convicted nearly 20 years ago. I cite this case to make the point that the death penalty here is as cruel as public beheadings in Saudi Arabia. I don’t think cutting off people’s heads is worse than keeping them isolated in uncertainty about their execution for years on end and eventually injecting them with lethal drugs that often result in extreme agony before they die. The extreme cruelty consists in the fact that you are deliberately and ceremonially killing somebody on the grounds that the state says they have to be killed lawfully.

In order to condemn the kinds of awful things that are happening in the Muslim world, it doesn’t follow that what happens in comparable situations in the West is more moral. It seems to me just as bad, sometimes even worse. Saudis believe in punishing murderers by killing them publicly. They have no conception of execution being brutal or inhumane if it’s done in public. Liberals in the West say they believe in being humane, even toward criminals who are to be punished. But once the idea of punishment has been accepted, I maintain you are on a slippery slope. In many U.S. states, relatives of the murdered victim are entitled to witness the murderer’s execution and to get whatever satisfaction they can from their knowledge that vengeance has been taken. Half the time, people who claim to be liberals don’t know what they believe — or at any rate, they don’t realize that what they believe doesn’t correspond to what they do or to what is done in their name. Proponents of the Islamic State believe they are entitled to do the awful things they do because non-Muslims (and that includes even people who think of themselves as Muslims) must be eliminated. But Westerners do things that are as awful. There’s not much to choose between the two. It might be worth asking whether there isn’t something schizophrenic about people who, on the one hand, proclaim their commitment to “humanity” as their distinguishing value, and on the other hand, do the most awful things to human beings in the name of humanitarianism. At least others don’t think there is anything special about killing people whom we would consider to be innocent.

As to your question about how Muslims should act, well, different Muslims will have to develop different strategies in different countries, depending on their situation. There is no single answer. There cannot be a single formula for all Muslims. And there certainly shouldn’t be any attempt at a total isolation from the rest of the population. I think that, wherever one can, one should join with other people for the sake of acting together against injustice — in other words, injustice that is experienced by non-Muslims as well as Muslims. There are non-Muslims — African Americans, for example — who suffer from all kinds of deprivation and discrimination. I think there ought to be a sense of solidarity, a sense of possibility of acting together, with the poor living in dreadful situations, workers as well as the unemployed who are oppressed. Muslims should give them as much solidarity as Muslims as they can.

In other words, it is important not to surround oneself into a kind of laager [protective camp], where you can try to make yourself safe: that is the Zionist solution. You have your own little state (secured regardless of moral cost) and since the world is against you, you can forget about it. But of course, this only works if the important, powerful parts of the world are with you, if they give you help and protection. Zionists have the fantasy that Jews will be safe in their laager. Of course being safe in this way (protected by the great powers and living near a subordinated population of untermensch [underman]) is a perfect recipe for a fascist mentality. But one has to recognize that one is living with other people with problems that require solutions that cannot be devised by one group in isolation, and which cannot be devised in and by the modern sovereign state.

Wael Hallaq [an Islamic law scholar at Columbia University] is surely right to be skeptical of the modern state, although I’m not sure that Muslim citizens can level effective moral criticism at the modern state on the basis of sharia values. I don’t think we can do that because I don’t think the modern state, being what it is, is capable of responding positively to that kind of criticism — as Hallaq himself has suggested in [his book] The Impossible State. I think the modern state is a monster inextricably tied up with a national capitalist elite and a global political economy. But the modern state does exist (however contradictory and “impossible” it is) and it’s not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. In theory, we can all imagine wonderful things, in theory, but to get to that utopia, or to specify how it will work in practice, is quite a different thing.

But the isolation of people from others only plays into the hands of people who benefit from hostilities and hatreds. It seems clear to me the isolation of Muslims from non-Muslims is a bad thing. You can’t have a simple formula for working against isolation. It’s something that people have to think through for themselves. The important thing is not to think of one’s people as supremely virtuous or as supreme victims.

I don’t think that total assimilation is the answer either. That was the one thing I wasn’t entirely happy about in Emmanuel Todd’s excellent book on Charlie Hebdo [Who is Charlie?]. He thinks that some kind of assimilation of Muslim immigrants to “Frenchness” is the answer. Well, I’m not sure that that is so. In any case, the terms of assimilation need to be negotiated. They’re not easy to negotiate when one side has all the power. And therefore assimilation will never be simple. It could be something more sinister, as in the case of “assimilated” Jews in racist European societies in the first half of the 20^th century. What is required is also a massive reform of the so-called host society. Without that there cannot be a complete answer to your question about how Muslims should try to be included in “humanity.” Another thing that is very disappointing, and I imagine it must be the case in England too, is the way in which many Muslim immigrants in the U.S. from Asia and the Middle East, or people who are of immigrant origin, relate to other excluded minorities — for example, African Americans in the U.S. I think that that is quite disgraceful.

Hasan Azad: It’s unbelievable, the racism that some Muslims have — without even realizing it sometimes — and it oftentimes comes out when a daughter will want to marry an African American, black man, who may be pious in every sense as far as Islam is concerned, but he’s black. It’s really disgusting. 

Talal Asad: I agree. And I think a sustained effort has to be made to oppose this attitude. To the extent that we have the kind of states that we do have, that we are all citizens (refugees are a tragic exception in our time, vulnerable non-citizens, as [political philosopher Hannah] Arendt would say), we have also to try to work through the possibilities that are offered through the language and institutions, and relationships that exist within the states in which we live. The concept of citizenship requires that we think in terms of the responsibilities to one’s own community in relationship to other communities — and also as members of the larger community that becomes relevant to our collective life, not only the larger community within the nation state but across nation states as well. It’s very important. Even though we now have the nation state and we can’t see it disappearing, there are all sorts of relationships that transcend it.

I mean the Islamic idea of umma [community] is precisely not a bigger form of the nation, a kind of international nationalism embracing all Muslims. It is also an invitation to think ethically. In the Quran, there are several usages for the word “umma,” but none of them connects it to ideas of territory or polity. And that’s something that should push one to think further. It’s possible nowadays, with all the dangers that modern technology contains, to engage in forms of interaction — positive as well as negative — that have not been available in the past.

In other words, it’s important for Muslims to explore ways of relating in friendship among themselves as well as among non-Muslims. One way this might be done is through the Islamic notion of amr bil ma’ruf [enjoining the good] as an institution independent of the state. As a way of relating to equals and also to those in authority, amr bil ma’ruf enables reproach as well as advice. And although amr bil ma’ruf is primarily directed at other Muslims, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t be extended to non-Muslims as well. The crucial thing is that it shouldn’t be an instrument of the state, a means of governance.

Hasan Azad: At the same time that Muslims and Islam are being questioned as to their humanity, the Saudi ambassador to the U.N., Faisal bin Hassan Trad, was recently elected to chair the panel that oversees the U.N.’s Human Rights Council. Although the election was made in June, the story only made mainstream news in the past few weeks to a considerable degree of public outrage: How can a country that has “arguably the worst record in the world” on freedoms for minorities, women and dissidents chair the U.N.’s Human Rights Council? Commentators have called this appointment “a farce.” U.N. Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer has described it as “a victory for cheap oil over human rights.” It seems to me that the question is not whether or not Saudi Arabia beheads people (it has been pointed out that 100 people have been beheaded by the Saudi state this year alone), but whether it has the right to behead people. Of course “the State,” as [German sociologist] Max Weber teaches us, has the sole right to violence, which has accrued to it through a process of legitimation. And this is what differentiatesSaudi Arabia’s beheading and lashing of dissidents from beheadings carried out by ISIS/ISIL. Saudi Arabia has the political legitimacy, while ISIS/ISIL does not. Would you care to comment on this?

Talal Asad: There are many things I don’t like about Saudi Arabia, and especially given the enormous amount of wealth that has accrued from oil. But I think, as far as politics is concerned in this world and international politics, nobody has clean hands. And when people talk about Saudi Arabia as uniquely horrid, they are being hypocritical. I mean the amount of horrible things that the United States has done for 200 years (if not longer) is at least as brutal as Saudi Arabia’s record. I don’t want to defend Saudi Arabia, but I don’t like the condemnation of Saudi Arabia to make people here feel good.

And listen: We are a democracy. A democracy is a political organization in which its citizens are responsible for what their government does. Saudis do not live in such a state. They live in an autocracy. It’s the royal family that dominates everything, that controls national life by and large. Ordinary Saudis don’t. So ordinary Saudis are not responsible for what the Saudi state does — nor, for that matter, are all Saudis responsible for what some Saudis do. We still hear the story about most activists in the Twin Towers atrocity being Saudis, as though that told you what all Saudis were like. Do we hear the claim that all Americans are like the pathological shooters in school massacres? There are lots of ordinary people in Saudi Arabia who don’t approve of what happened on 9/11, and in any case, most of them aren’t able to do anything against their government.

I do feel horrified by what Saudi Arabia is doing in Yemen (supported by the U.S. and Europe). I find … this kind of ruthlessness unforgiveable, as the saying goes. Ruthlessness is not new in history, but with the use of modern weapons of mass destruction, war has become an indescribable horror. Think of land mines, cluster bombs, nuclear weapons. People who say they are liberals will not ban landmines or cluster bombs, and they won’t abolish nuclear weapons (used twice by the world’s greatest democracy). In fact, Western governments encourage the production of increasingly sophisticated killing machines and sell them to foreign governments. If you look at that alone, you must admit that we live in a horrid world. Still, there are redeeming features, even in this world: a lot of decent people who are willing to sacrifice their comfort and to risk their lives in the pursuit of justice.

So it is right to raise the question of hypocrisy regarding Saudi Arabia’s appointment to the chair of the Human Rights [Council]. It is hypocrisy, but when has hypocrisy been absent in international politics? What is the attitude of the United States towards Israel as it continually flouts international law and cruelly oppresses the Palestinians? Why is it that, except for [former Serbian leader Slobodan] Milosevic, every single person indicted in the International Criminal Court is either an African or an Asian, but not a European? Why are [George W.] Bush, [Dick] Cheney, [Donald] Rumsfeld and [Tony] Blair — who are responsible for the killing of hundreds of thousands of people and the making of millions of refugees, and the destruction of an entire country — immune from prosecution for violating human rights? Forget about [Barack] Obama, who authorizes killing by drones and assassination by Special Operations units and the continued imprisonment of innocents in Guantanamo and turning a blind eye on the use of torture. None of these politicians would ever be indicted. The United States has helped to engineer the coup against [Salvador] Allende in Chile in which thousands were killed, it has undermined the democratically elected government of [Mohammad] Mossadegh in Iran and restored the dictatorship of the Shah — and yet it would never be indicted. This is not a blame game. It’s a matter of saying: Stop pretending that the U.S. is a virtuous state, that it’s the defender of “humanity” and humane values. Stop suggesting that anyone who challenges its claim to moral superiority, its unqualified right to what it euphemistically calls “leadership of the world,” is guilty of blasphemy.

Do Muslims Belong in the West? An Interview with Talal Asad

From Jadaliyya, 2.3.2015

In this discussion, Talal Asad identifies the problematic ways in which the presence of Muslim communities in Western contexts has been characterized in response to outbreaks of violence such as the recent events in Paris. Asad argues that many of the critiques to which Muslims are subjected, namely their dependence on transcendent forces, also inhabit the intellectual assumptions of secular and atheist commentators.  He further expresses the need to examine Islam as a "tradition" in order to avoid precisely the types of sweeping generalizations and focus instead on the complexities and particularities of the various ways in which Islam is lived. The inability to historicize Islam as a tradition has played into the calls for a "reform" of the religion and resulted in the inability to confront the underlying causes of the recent eruptions of violence. This interview was conducted in New York on 17 January 2015. It was later transcribed for publication. 

Hasan Azad (HA): Do Muslims belong in the West? This is a question that has been asked for many years, but perhaps with no more force than today. You wrote in your essay “Muslims as a ‘Religious Minority’ in Europe” (2003), over a decade ago, that “Muslims as Muslims cannot be represented in Europe.” Is there something almost inevitable in the way “the clash of civilizations” is being set up by certain sectors in the West?

Talal Asad (TA): No, I do not think there is such a thing as a “clash of civilizations.” When I said that Muslims as Muslims cannot be represented in the West, I was being ironic, and also referring to the fact that ninety percent of the time when people talk about “the problem of Muslims” in the West, it is to complain about the fact that Muslims have not “integrated.” There is very little serious discussion about what it means to be “European,” what it means to be French, or British, or whatever, and what exactly “secularism” in Europe means for religion in general and Islam in particular. The problem is always seen as, either: We must try harder to integrate them, or: It is their fault they do not integrate, and it is because they are attached to an illiberal religion, and so to values that conflict profoundly with our secular, egalitarian society.

In other words, the problem is seen as a matter of why “they” do not fit in to what is thought of as “our” society, rather than: What or who are “we,” as Europe or as France or Britain, and what must we do to change aspects of ourselves in order to make it possible for Muslims (who will also need to change) to be represented in Europe as Muslims? The problem is always seen as one of assimilating Muslims into Europe (whose structure and identity are fixed) if we are well intentioned towards them, and if you are not well intentioned, then making it quite clear that they do not belong with us–that they ought to “go back to where they came from.” Europe in the sixteenth century was not what it is like today–indeed, it was not even “Europe” but “Christendom.” Even after the forces of secularization things did not remain the same–politically, economically, or culturally. This is one of my voices, by the way. I am now speaking as someone who has lived most of his life in the West.

Incidentally, I think the term “West” does have some uses: It is not always to be dismissed as nonsensical (“there’s no such thing as the West”), but nor is it to be used in the slaphappy way many people use it when they say “the West has done this, the West has done that.” But I think the term has legitimate uses. Think of it this way:  if there are governments, if there are generals and politicians and bankers and even ordinary people like us, who talk about “the West”–on the European and North American continent–then there is a West. Because that is what our own activities presuppose. And in presupposing it, they partly create it, for good or for ill.

I say this because I am now talking to some extent to the West, to people in the West, whom one considers to be one’s cultural peers, one’s fellow citizens–regardless of whether they are hostile or friendly. That is part of it. I think it is important for me, certainly, to remember that one cannot or should not talk just as a “Muslim in Europe,” but also as somebody who is making a claim in the West on the West, in European countries and in the United States (as Tariq Ramadan has written). And in those situations I can talk about “we” even without any sense of incongruity.  

HA: The recent murders of ten journalists of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in Paris have re-ignited fears vis-à-vis Muslims in Europe. Regarding the Danish cartoon controversy of 2005, in your article “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism” (2009), you point to the problems with our secular rejection of transcendence, and the ways in which the arrogance of such assumptions are rooted in the secularization of the biblical injunction that the truth will free us. Are Muslims seen asblasphemers in relation to the proclamations of secularism?

TA: Let me first of all address the question of transcendence. The irony, it seems to me, is that although self-styled atheists say they reject “transcendence,” they are in fact subject (often willingly subject) to transcendent forces. Such as the transcendence of the market, which is a crucial part of modern capitalist society. And the transcendence of the state–the political form in which everyone lives in our world and makes absolute demands on our loyalty as citizens. And then of course there is the transcendence of “free speech.” In liberal society we claim that it 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 permission. And of course government secrets and commercial secrets cannot be breached without incurring severe penalties, which is an aspect of the transcendence of the modern sovereign state. I have discussed this point elsewhere and argued that there is a crucial distinction in liberal societies between the circulation of representations that are regarded asproperty and those that are not. Claims to the absoluteness of “free speech” are not very persuasive in this context.

Another, problematic example of “non-religious” transcendence is of course “humanity” and the worship it requires. And very closely connected with it is the modern notion of (cultural and moral) progress, which is assumed to be an open-ended movement that transcends all particularities, and stands over and above particular improvements of some particular state of affairs, the righting of something that is evidently wrong. To reject the transcendent progress of humanity is not necessarily to accept the status quo for what it is. So I think the different forms of transcendence need to be critically examined.

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 who represent it. But it seems to me perfectly possible to act humanely towards other beings, whether humans or animals or plants. One simply has to learn how to behave. To behave “humanely” it is perfectly possible to do without the notion of “humanity.” Language has multiple uses, and is embedded, as Wittgenstein pointed out, in different forms of life. It is not necessary to have this grand concept of “humanity” in order to behave decently. 

I recall, incidentally, a striking expression from al-Ghazali: “Ah, to have the faith of the old women of Nishapur!” which, as I understand it, is really a recognition of the importance of deep everyday faith, of apprehending transcendence not primarily with one’s intellect but in the way one lives one’s daily life.

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. Which is not to say you should neveremploy your intellect but only that it is not essential to exercise it in order to live a humane life. Language permeates all of life, of course, and one’s mind is essential to it, but that does not mean intellectualityshould transcend all of life.

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 in a certain way towards other people. Of course, one needs clarity of language in all sorts of situations. Certainly in order to understand the natural world one needs clarity, logic, and the capacity for theory building. But that understanding tends to improve because and to the extent that it is provisional, hypothetical, when it looks for disconfirmation in the particular rather than final proof as a universal. The propensity to intellectualize is itself both essential and dangerous. I think in our modern world we are much more aware of its essential character than of its dangers, and that is why I think of it as being an expression of transcendence.

So let me turn to the question of blasphemy. People sometimes ask me: Are you willing to criticize religion? I would prefer to answer this question by looking at what people say and what they articulate, at how they live their life, and to the extent that the concept of religion is presented as itself transcendent, I think it is to be looked at critically and carefully.

In other words, I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of “religion”–as I said in Genealogies. I am not looking for a better definition. 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 “in Islam religion and politics necessarily go together,” or to insist that “violence has no place in religion,” to universalize it.

So transcendence is not entirely absent for people who are “nonreligious.” Indeed, I think that most of the things–not all–that such people accept as transcendent are dangerous, because they are damaging to thought and life.

HA: As I see it, part of the problem is the result of a reification of Islam; and I think Muslims are as guilty of this as their counterparts. Your 1986 essay “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” (republished in 2009), has played a significant role in reshaping scholarly discourse on Islam. You write that “Islam as the object of anthropological understanding should be approached as a discursive tradition that connects variously with the formation of moral selves, the manipulation of populations (or resistance to it), and the production of appropriate knowledges (10).” Can you describe for our readers how this approach may help us to de-reify Islam?

TA: First of all, in that paper I am talking about Islam as “an anthropological object,” that is as a way of approaching the question “What is Islam” more productively in anthropology.

Reification? It is worth thinking about why one uses the word “reification.” Reification means making something that was not a thing (but what is “a thing”?) into a thing. There are many philosophical theories of reification–especially Marxist theories of society and economy. When people say that Islam has been reified what do they mean?

I suppose one of the reasons people are suspicious of “reification” is that it implies a certain kind of closure, a certain kind of fixity and unchangeableness. What is one’s concern about the “reification” of Islam? Is it that the notion closes off the possibility of change and generalizes too much? In that case, what are the alternatives? How should one talk about it? This is why I think the approach to Islam as a tradition is helpful. Tradition helps us to focus on questions about authority and temporality, and about the language used in relation to the two. The idea of tradition helps us to understand the questions and arguments held to be important within a tradition, as well us to formulate productive questions about the tradition from outside. “Tradition,” in other words, can be made to yield a double sense: as a theoretical frame for asking questions, and as an empirical phenomenon to be described and analyzed even as it develops. 

As I have said, the question is how to approach the object of one’s enquiry. When speaking about Islam as a tradition one is not saying “All people do this, or believe this.” One is not saying that all people who identify themselves as Muslims do follow the Quran and hadith (or must follow them to be realMuslims). One is suggesting that there’s a certain kind of coherence–which may or may not be realized in particular situations–where people are trying to talk about Islam as a distinct intellectual object. I’m thinking about intellectuals, especially anthropologists, for whom this is an important concern. So how should one try to ask interesting questions about Islam as an anthropological object and not confuse that with “the reality” (actual experience) for different Muslims? How should one relate their sense of following or not, having “strong faith” or not, to authority and temporality.

By the way, I have increasingly preferred, for a number of years, to use the term “faithful,” wherever possible, instead of “believers.” This is basically whatmu’minin are, “the faithful,” rather than “believers,” a word that has acquired strong but often confusing modern senses. 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 to an act. Thus even if you think of the declaration of niyya when you say your prayers, that is in a sense itself a kind ofact, part of the tradition that you have to learn. By this I do not mean that it do not really have to be believed. It’s that one needs to get away from the modern idea of religious belief as something that is “purely private,” something one is entitled to hold–so long as it does not make (political) claims in the public sphere.

So, I think we need to think about Islamic tradition as a way of asking questions that cut across (and transgress) the assumptions of a purely secular world in which we already know how things stand for individual subjects as well as for societies. I think one must try and think of tradition in that way, as well as using it in other ways, as I have been using it, to describe empirically how some people follow such and such a tradition or don’t.

HA: What I am interested in examining in my own research is how competing discursive traditions within Islam (take Salafi and Sufi as two polar examples) interact with one another, thereby reshaping each other, without necessarily altering their core logics. In a similar vein, Islam and secularism (two other polar examples) have been reshaping each other–and continue to do so–for a very long time. Could you speak a little to the inner complexities of Islam as a group of competing “discursive traditions,” together with secularism being thrown into the mix?

TA: Well, I think that MacIntyre’s very fruitful discussion of tradition, which opened a whole new area of thinking about the world, and which I found very helpful in thinking about Islam. He talked about a living tradition being characterized by debate, and I found that crucial. To the extent that a tradition is a living tradition, and there is dispute within it–there is argument also as to what is essential to the tradition, to what belongs essentially to that tradition, to the way an account (whether oral or written) of behavior, attitudes, principles, etc., belongs or does not to that tradition, and to how its context is defined. I think that that notion is absolutely central. Arguments about which texts, accounts–other than founding discourses–belong or do not belong, can be drawn on or not because of the way they affect what the core of the tradition is, all that is absolutely central to what a living tradition is. And part of those arguments is of course over what is “secular” in an acceptable or unacceptable way. 

The notion that there is nevertheless something essential about a tradition is precisely what generates argument within a tradition, and it also provides the possibility of having conversations (not just arguments) both within given traditions as well as between them. Traditions such as the different schools (Hanafi, Shafi’i, Hanbali, Maliki and so on) and between Shia and Sunni, salafi and sufi, not only just intellectually to one another but also define themselves by reference to what they are not. (Which is why, incidentally, I find appalling the kind of mutual antagonism and violence that is occurring in so many Muslim countries.) But I am not sure I would describe all this, whether violent or not, as competition. Competition as a metaphor carries too much of a commercial load (accumulating profit, for example) that may misdirect one.

I am also not sure that the stereotypical contrast between salafi and sufi is always useful, if only because each of these terms has covered a number of shifting positions. “Salafis” in the Arabic speaking world at the end of the nineteenth century (such as Abduh) as opposed to “salafis” in early twenty-first century Egypt (influenced by wahhabism) are not the same. So too the different “sufi” brotherhoods. If salafis and sufis are polar opposites, how is one to understand Ibn Taymiyya, say, who is an important inspiration for contemporary salafis, and yet was the member of a tariqa?

Everyone, is to some extent placed, in one way or another, in what I have called a “narrative relation” to a tradition, for whom the continuity or disappearance of that tradition is either of importance or of indifference. So, I would say that “the religious” is involved precisely in attempts at either enriching or reforming a particular tradition in relation to the challenges it faces, or defending–or destroying–it. And those possibilities apply to “the secular” too. The secular is as much a part of the ensemble and the space of the spiritual as anything else–that is, “this world” is important to both in multiple ways. It is the attitude one has to this world, the way one inhabits it, that is sometimes confused with the question of belief (or disbelief) in “another world.”      

HA: The issue of being Muslim and being Othered in and by the West is a longstanding one. What I have recently been finding productive to think about is the ways in which Muslims themselves internalize this narrative of Otherness. What is the way forward for Muslims living in the West?

TA: The fact that one is an Other does not mean that no productive relationship can be had with the Other. I don not know that “internalizing” what “the West” says to/about one that is ipso a bad thing; it depends on how that internalization takes place, what it does to one. The question really is: Whether and if so to what extent and how is the Other connected to oneself.  

There is a thought provoking statement, not very well known, by Wittgenstein, where he says: “Tradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.” Tradition is an aspiration to connect the Self with the Other. One “internalizes” the Other as one acquires a sense of what one’s own tradition is, what one belongs to and what gives valid shape to one’s life.

What is the way forward for Muslims living in the West? I do not think there is a single answer to that question because Muslims in the West are not a single homogeneous group, sociologically or theologically. Nevertheless they are seen, and will continue to be seen, as a minority within the Western nation state. And given the widespread violence perpetrated by heavily armed Western states and lightly armed jihadists (a symbiotic relationship if ever there was one) Muslim minorities in the West will continue to be the object of suspicion and discrimination. Our concern in this matter should not be to find someone to blame but to try to understand the limits of action facing Muslim minorities. The very common suggestion that Muslims should undertake a reform of their own religious tradition to help prevent “Islamic extremist violence” assumes that Muslims constitute a single political subject, that they are entirely self-contained, and that reform has not in fact been continuously undertaken in Islamic history. Those who urge theological reform to enable the effective condemnation of jihadism (especially after the Paris murders at Charlie Hebdoand the Jewish supermarket) should first inquire into the recency of this phenomenon: the Islamic tradition in all its variety has been around for centuries, and mainstream Muslim authorities have condemned such killing for ages. Why has the phenomenon of jihadism appeared–and proliferated–only now?