Basit Iqbal's interview: Thinking about Method (2017)

Basit Kareem Iqbal's interview with Talal Asad got published in Qui Parle

Read it here.

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?

The suspicious revolution: an interview with Talal Asad

Nathan Schneider's interview with Talal Asad at The Immanent Frame

Schneider, Nathan. 2011. The suspicious revolution: an interview with Talal Asad. The Immanent Frame. http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/2011/08/03/the-suspicious-revolution-interview-with-talal-asad/ (accessed January 13, 2012).

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NS: Since you’ve just been in Egypt, I wonder if we can start by talking about some of your reflections on the Arab Spring. How would you characterize what has changed in the Middle East, and in the world?

TA: I wouldn’t say that I’m competent to talk about the whole world, but I think it’s an extremely encouraging development in the Middle East. The bravery and courage and idealism of the people was really something to watch and to listen to. It is quite true, as everybody says, that, whatever happens, we’ll never go back to square one in Egypt. But a lot of the other things that people want, I suspect, may not be realized. There won’t be social justice—there won’t be all sorts of reforms that the pro-democracy activists called for. Currents and forces both inside the country and out will ensure that it doesn’t proceed as many people had hoped at the beginning. It’s much more complicated than accounts in the media would lead us to believe. I’ve been trying to make sense of it myself ever since I arrived in Cairo. But, you know, I’m a pessimist about all sorts of things—politics included.

NS: What was it like to be there in the midst of a revolution?

TA: Even before my wife and I went, people kept saying to us, “Are you sure it’s safe?” Our Air France plane was actually cancelled. We were due to go on the 29th of January. We eventually left on the 12th of February, via Paris. We weren’t even able to go directly to Cairo, either. We had to go through Beirut. Then, all sorts of people starting ringing, again asking, “Is it safe? Are you sure you’ll be safe? We’ve heard all sorts of frightening things.” Remember the stories circulating early in the uprising about the prisons that had been opened and the police being withdrawn from the streets? That was what the fear was about. People wouldn’t believe me, but I was there for four months, almost, and I went all over town and never encountered any violence. I didn’t have any friends who could attribute violence to the uprisings—which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. Cairo contains eighteen million people, so it has always had its fair share of criminality. But ordinary life, actually, continued. Cafes were open, and shops, restaurants, and so on. You’d often hear that foreigners were in danger, or that ordinary life was impossible, but that is really not true.

NS: Impossible, that is, without the control of the state and the police?

TA: Exactly. There are elements in Egypt that were quite happy to circulate stories of unrest. The Supreme Council of the Armed Forces talked again and again about the fact that we must have stability, which is then linked ominously to questions about the state of the economy. Since the economy suffers from the political instability in the country, they say, we shouldn’t have more demonstrations or strikes. But one of the things that emerged for me there, and which I’m trying to make sense of, was the constant flow of speculation, of suspicion, about who’s saying and who’s doing what. Why are they doing this? Are they really doing it for good reasons? Is it the army? The Muslim Brothers? Is their presence or absence significant? Do they mean what they say?—You know, that sort of thing. I can’t claim to have made good sense of it yet, but, to me, this seems very important.

NS: The fault lines of Egyptian society definitely seem to be shifting, and maybe suspicion is a consequence of that. We saw lots of images here of Muslims and Christians watching over each other in Tahrir Square, for instance.

TA: I was very pleased to see these expressions of solidarity.

NS: A lot was made of the fact that their demands were economic and political rather than explicitly religious. Did you see, or did you sense, that this suspicion was part of a novel form of secularity emerging on the streets there?

TA: My own work has questioned the mutually exclusive categorization of the secular and the religious, and I think there is lots of evidence, empirical and analytic, to show that the way in which secularity has been thought of conventionally won’t do to understand all that has occurred in recent history. Just recently, I saw scenes on Democracy Now! of people carrying placards with slogans for the camera, in Arabic, which said, “We insist on the trial of such and such,” but which started off with “Allahu akbar!” These utterances were not seen as inconsistent. I saw this myself in Tahrir Square. Egyptians use these expressions, like inshallah—God willing—all the time. As far as expressions are concerned, there was such spillover in all sorts of ways.

NS: But does that linguistic spillover go so far as to affect how institutions are being transformed?

TA: They may, to the extent that language use carries sentiment, hopes, and fears about social changes. There is discussion about whether the new Egypt will be a secular state or not. Many among the Muslim Brothers and those who are sympathetic to them have said, of course, that they are against a secular state. But they’re not saying they want a religious state either. Instead, they’re talking about having adawla madaneyya, which literally means a “civil state.” What that implies isn’t entirely clear yet. But the insistence by people that they want neither a religious state nor a secular one has appeared again and again in all sorts of discussions.

NS: Such ambiguity might be disappointing to some secularists watching from the West.

TA: But it isn’t a straightforward question, in any event, of unambiguous “secularism” arising in that context. What will emerge in Egypt, in terms of both practical politics and thinking about politics, and the role of religion, is still very open.

NS: Do you think something had to change in the minds of people to build this kind of movement? Take the assassination of Anwar Sadat, compared to the uprising against Mubarak. One had machine guns and grenades, and the other had millions out in the street, mostly peacefully. What accounts for the difference?

TA: Well, it isn’t as if the recent events were totally without precedent.

NS: No, there had been decades of organizing—and, of course, there was the example of Tunisia.

TA: There had been strikes and demonstrations for a long time, and there was the Kefaya movement, although it was rather limited and somewhat elitist. But peaceful protests in the past have not attracted much attention from the Western media. I do think things have changed, but I don’t think it was quite like a conversion, so to speak, nor was it all pre-arranged and carefully thought out as a revolution. In some cases, people discover that they’ve got some power they didn’t think they had—even a technique that they don’t intentionally develop, but which they suddenly find themselves with and begin to understand. Maybe one needs to think of the uprising as more than a technique for getting rid of a despotic regime, but as a mode of existence, almost. The novelist Alaa Al Aswani said in an interview with The Independent that being part of this revolution is “like being in love.” I don’t think it’s quite like that. You might say, actually, that it’s more like a religious experience.

NS: Does the sense of suspicion that you were talking about fit into those comparisons? Is it like jealousy in love, or doubt in religion? How uniquely Egyptian is it?

TA: I’ve been thinking of it as something intrinsic to revolutionary situations. If you look back even to the French Revolution, and certainly to the Russian Revolution, that’s exactly what always happens. The revolution eats its own children, as the saying goes—partly because there’s so much at stake. There are so many enemies, and you don’t know who they are or who will do what. I see it simply as part of such a situation, which can never be resolved by final answers because it is always generating new questions on one side or another. No revolution is ever finished.

NS: Can you say more about how that suspicion took form in Cairo?

TA: I had a discussion with some friends of mine just before the March 19 referendum, and all the left-wing ones were saying that they’d be voting no. I remember thinking that it doesn’t quite add up. To sayno would be to say that there would be no elections in September for the national assembly as originally planned, and that the army would stay on ruling the country for another year and a half. And yet these same people had already said that they didn’t trust the army! “Yes,” they said, “but we want the army to be replaced by a committee of three civilians.” But you know that’s not going to happen, I said. So there seems to be a certain inconsistency here: one becomes so suspicious about some possibilities that where one should be suspicious one isn’t.

NS: Since coming back to the United States, have you noticed a shift in how the West perceives the Muslim world?

TA: Well, I don’t read newspapers regularly—so you might be in a better position to answer that than I.

NS: Really? Why don’t you read newspapers?

TA: It’s not that I have any sound reason for it. I haven’t read newspapers for thirty years because I find that, for some reason, they tend to break up my mind. They write about so many different things, and you’re always going from one thing to another, and then on to another, unrelated to the last. I like to read journals—weeklies. I also watch Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! and some of the news programs on Russia Today. Listening to TV newscasts is less disruptive, strangely. So I’m not sure I can adequately answer your first question as to whether there has been a change in Western depictions of the Muslim world or not.

NS: I suppose I’m thinking about the difference between the images we saw of the “Arab Street” in Tunis and Cairo and, say, those during the Danish cartoon controversy—

TA: Shouting, and the rest.

NS: Yes, shouting, and burning flags, intense violence, people getting killed and killing each other—this sort of self-immolating fury. And then, suddenly, we have this other set of images, where two dictators get knocked off in the space of a few months, in a relatively orderly and impressive way.

TA: I think one should distinguish between the cartoon affair, which mostly involved Muslim immigrants in Europe, and the popular uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, and elsewhere. Western media haven’t been interested in the long history of political protests and strikes in Egypt, say, as they have been in the sexy cartoon affair. The significance of the current uprisings is not just that they are peaceful. It’s that they indicate a major unsettling of a region strategically crucial to Western powers.

NS: What do you think made the Danish cartoon incident such a crisis?

TA: I’ve written about this at length in several places a couple of years ago. I think it was partly the continuing obtuseness of liberals, especially in Europe—liberals who are almost never consistently liberal. That particular scandal was unfair to the immigrants, and somewhat hypocritical. Liberals like to say that everything should be up for criticism. But we know it isn’t. And now in the US we have a state that is increasingly invading our privacy, and there seems to be very little resistance to that from liberal intellectuals. Anyway, shouldn’t we be more disturbed by the intellectual undermining of things we think of as eminently rational and decent? We should be ready to ask ourselves whether perhaps they’re not quite as rational or decent as we thought. But instead of learning how to deal with immigrants as part of our society we think of them as invaders.

NS: It sounds like the revolutionary suspicion that you were talking about earlier—seeing enemies everywhere except where it matters most.

TA: Normally, the element of hypocrisy in itself is not terribly interesting. What interests me more is that the cartoon scandal raises questions about how we think of freedom, including religious freedom, and about the language that is used to defend some of the things we think of as most valuable, if not sacred, to us.

NS: In the case of the cartoon controversy, for instance, free speech.

TA: Yes, if you want to put it that way.

NS: What’s being asserted, then, when Western, secular liberals claim that a cartoon about Muhammad is free speech and shouldn’t be apologized for? What is encoded in that claim?

TA: I think one thing that’s encoded there is a certain attitude toward religion in general, toward Islam in particular, and also the attitude that nothing is sacred. But there is also a sense of “these wretched immigrants who don’t understand our culture.” The encoding in this whole cartoon affair was a secularist one, which categorized the cartoons as free speech, even if they were deliberately provocative—not just deliberately provocative, but insulting. Why do it? What’s the motive? I’m talking about speculation and suspicion; what is the motive for wanting to attack Muslims? Why not just say, “If you riot in the streets or kill somebody, I’m afraid you’ll have to suffer the consequences under the law”?

NS: Well, wasn’t there a principle at stake: the right to provoke if one so wishes, and to criticize religious beliefs?

TA: Yes, but why do we want to exercise that right in some cases and not in others? I’m not just after prejudice, but the morphology of our provocative choices. There was much talk, sentimental and romantic, of a duty to fight for the right to free speech. As soon as an incident like this happens, we’re immediately regaled with stories about Bruno at the stake, and the Catholic Church, and so on. One doesn’t quite have to think in these terms. Our problems are not medieval problems. The challenges are not the same. For God’s sake, let’s think clearly! All this complaining about religious dogmatism—we know very well that some of these secular critics are about as closed-minded as you can get on all sorts of issues. Even as eminent a theorist as John Rawls says that certain kinds of reasoning should not be allowed into the domain of politics because all they do is create irresolvable conflict, so that only what liberals deem rational can be allowed to enter public space. Is it the case that religion always produces conflict that can’t be resolved peacefully? Doesn’t secular provocation—“fighting words”—lead to violent conflict? Does every conflict in society have to be “resolvable”? Of course there have to be limits on provocation.

NS: What about the election in the Palestinian territories of Hamas, or even the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood right now in Egypt? There’s this incredible suspicion right now in the West, which views these factions as unpredictable and uncontrollable, and we’ve taken political measures to suppress them. Is that a kind of censorship, too?

TA: Yes, I think you’re right. The need to control and predict non-Western movements is what it’s partly about. But let me give you an example of what I think happens, mistakenly, in the explanations secularists give of the Muslim Brothers. The Brothers’ ideas are really, in many respects, in a state of flux. The younger members often contest or disobey the directives of their leaders. There are different currents within the movement itself. Their present situation is also an expression of the fact that—and most people in the West don’t know this—the Muslim Brotherhood was savagely repressed by past Egyptian governments for 60 years. They have been put in prison, hanged, tortured, exiled. I say this not because I think one should be sympathetic to them because of what they’ve suffered, but because, like so many people who have suffered, they have developed an instinct for mere survival. In my view, having talked to some of them, simply how to survive politically, as an organization, is what their leadership has learnt best over time. Their minds are focused on that aim and have become rigidified. They’re not able to think freely enough yet—about freedom of thought, speech, and action—to take advantage of the new situation.

NS: Perhaps, when repression is involved, suspicion can turn to paranoia.

TA: Yes, for both persecutors and persecuted. Because the Muslim Brothers have contradictory positions and are in many respects confused, my friends in Egypt say, “Ah, you see? They say one thing and mean another! One member says this and another says that!” What could quite reasonably be seen as fluidity, uncertainty, and disagreement on their part gets represented as speaking with a forked tongue. I’ve heard so often the remark: “This is just a game that the Muslim Brothers play.” This makes me wonder whether anybody else in politics plays games! Liberals? Socialists? Conservatives? Don’t they say one thing and then do another, or compromise on their principles for the sake of practical ends? That is, in part, how an obsessive suspicion closes off the mind to any serious attempt at understanding what’s going on. For most of my left-wing friends, the Muslim Brotherhood equals hypocrisy and the hidden determination to establish a totalitarian state. I think this a priori suspicion is wrong. I don’t think, by the way, that there’s even a danger of anything like that happening. In comparison to other groups, like Hamas and Hezbollah—with whom, I should say, I do have sympathies—the Muslim Brothers do not have a militant wing. This hasn’t been sufficiently recognized. In the past they were involved in violence, but for many decades now they’ve moved away from it toward a more or less parliamentary line—like Eurocommunism—rather than a revolutionary one.

NS: But isn’t the concern about what could happen if they were voted into a position of power over the police and the military in Egypt?

TA: Yes, but the point is that they would have to get into that position of power in the first place, and the military isn’t their instrument. There’s always a possibility, of course, that they might become a dominant force in government and that they might use the police repressively, like the Mubarak regime. But would that mean a totalitarian government was imminent? For God’s sake, even in the United States the police are used to harass various kinds of movement—peace movements, ecological movements. The security measures now in place here have deeply invaded our liberties and privacy. Still, the United States is not (yet) a totalitarian state, it’s a secular state and it’s highly unlikely that its secularism will be abandoned anytime soon. In Egypt the Muslim Brothers would have to have a very substantial presence in the national assembly before they could do anything really significant, and I doubt that they will have that. In any case we don’t even know what policies the Muslim Brothers would support as members of a government, because the policies haven’t been sufficiently formulated and agreed upon yet. Let’s bear in mind the difference between the promises made by Obama the candidate and the decisions taken by Obama the president. They tell us that democracy is all about compromise and being realistic.

NS: Consider someone who would oppose a right-wing, religious party in the United States. Is there any difference between opposing such a thing in one’s own country, where one understands what’s at stake and what’s at play, and opposing an ostensibly similar party in a foreign country, just by saying, “I wouldn’t want that myself”?

TA: Yes, I can understand that—

NS: Or is there something different that we have to understand about the other society that makes the two incomparable?

TA: I can understand why many people would equate the religious right here and the religious movements there. But I don’t think that they’re directly comparable. There is a difference, and I thinkpart of it comes from the savage repression in Egypt of the Muslim Brothers, which the religious right in the U.S. has not had to undergo. This doesn’t justify anything in particular, but it’s something that one has to think about. And, connected with that, there’s the fact that the Brotherhood is a movement that has been resisting what I would call Western imperialism, whereas that isn’t true of the religious right in the U.S., which, on the contrary, very often supports it. Now, I don’t want to be understood to be saying that simply because the Muslim Brothers oppose imperialism they’re beyond reproach. What I’m saying is that it’s more complicated. During the Brotherhood’s rise in the 1930s, it was strongly anti-British. And the United States has been constantly intervening in Egypt after the British left—even supporting Mubarak right until the very end—and that’s not going to be lost on the Muslim Brothers, although it’s still an open question as to whether they and the U.S. government will now regard each other as implacable enemies.

NS: How much does the fact of their being religious fuel the suspicion leveled against them in the West and among liberals generally? Should it?

TA: I don’t think, in principle, that just because a movement declares itself to be religious, it should be made the object of special suspicion. In my view, one shouldn’t trust anyone who hankers after state power, whether they call themselves religious or secular. The modern state is at once one of the most brutal sources of oppression and a necessary means for providing common benefits to citizens. Whether it is secular or religious seems to me much less important than the fact that it is a state. If we look back over the twentieth century and this should become obvious.

NS: How does having grown up and having been educated on both sides of the colonial divide affect how you look at situations like this? You often see colonialism where other people are blind to it, it seems.

TA: Yes, but I’m also sometimes irritated by people who would like to explain everything in terms of colonialism. That is just so crude. I also find myself resisting people who say that colonialism has nothing to do with the present situation because colonialism is dead and gone. My own feeling is that what people assert or deny is due to colonialism should be constantly interrogated. In our world, external intervention by strong powers, superpowers, or the superpower, is a fact of life. The United States has been intervening in the Middle East for a long time—it would be surprising if it didn’t!

NS: Is such intervention the same as the old colonialism? Or can it be better than that?

TA: It’s neither better nor worse, but it’s certainly not the same. I recall something Hillary Clinton said, in some conference or other, to the effect that in the end the government is concerned not with promoting democracy, as such, but with promoting America’s national interest. That would have to come first. At the same time, she said she would be the happiest of persons if the two things converged—which of course makes the ideal of democracy into an instrument, not an ideal. But I can understand that. I can see why she would say that, because power is what the modern state is about. I can see why the US would want to have what it calls “stability in the region,” a region in which the US has such immense interests—in its oil, in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, in the confrontation with Iran, and so on. I can see that they would want to have, in every country, some kind of influence, if possible. I might want to attribute everything to colonialism or imperialism, but I think that won’t do. But then nor would I want to say, “Don’t blame imperialism, it’s all your own fault really!” It’s not a question of fault, it’s a question of the way in which various forces collide and intervene and shape what are regarded as national interests.

NS: It’s interesting that you seem so accepting of this interventionist order—

TA: No, I am not accepting of it, certainly not. I’m trying to see things as they really are. But, at the same time, I’m aware that this means not being able to invoke one’s own moral position very easily. Perhaps that’s why I said, early on, that I am a pessimist. I have felt for a long time now that we have gradually—and when I say “we,” I mean everybody in the modern world, and I’ll say more about that—worked ourselves into a situation that is truly tragic, in the Greek sense of having no real resolution. There are the most awful prospects before us, with the kind of technological warfare we now have, with the fantastic extension of consumerism and money, with the consequent growing gap between the very poor and the very rich, with the destruction of the environment, and with the ramifications of climate change and nuclear energy. I really hope that this is simply a sign of my being old. It may well be, because I don’t see things in the way that a younger person would, I’m sure. I see it all as being absolutely disastrous. But people will try to resist, and they should.

NS: How? I think of the Human Terrain Teams that were dispatched in Iraq and Afghanistan, in which anthropologists and other experts in local culture and language would be embedded with military units. Should an anthropologist, someone with a more textured view of what’s happening on the ground, be a part of that process of intervention so as somehow to improve it?

TA: No, certainly not—absolutely not. That’s not resistance, that’s collusion. I remember talking once a long time ago with Edward Said about empire and how it might be defeated. We were just sitting and having coffee, and at one point I responded to some of his suggestions by saying, “No, no, this won’t work. You can’t resist these forces.” So he demanded a little irritably: “What should one do? What would you do?” So I said, “Well, all one can do is to try and make them uncomfortable.” Which was really a very feeble reply, but I couldn’t think of anything else. But it doesn’t follow from a pessimistic outlook that one just has to accept things as they are and ask fellow anthropologists to do the same. In any case, I’m very much against the kind of involvement you mention, making things smoother for empire.

NS: What was it you wanted to say about the “we”?

TA: Oh. When I was a young man, I used to hear and read about the marvels of European civilization, about how Europe had achieved so much, and how the Muslim world, and others, hadn’t. Even China was nowhere then. It was Europe that led the world. People used to speak about “European civilization,” you know, at one time. Then the language gradually shifted, and it’s interesting to trace some of those shifts in language. Now, more and more, one hears people who are very sensitive to our impending disasters talking about how mankind will destroy itself, how mankind has brought itself to a position where it will destroy itself. I find that to be an interesting shift, the move from praising one’s distinctive “civilization” when one thinks of positive things, in order to be able to say to others, “You haven’t been able to achieve these things.” And then, when you’re in a bloody mess to which there may be no solution, you talk about “mankind” having brought itself to the brink of disaster.

NS: “We’re all in it together.”

TA: And in a sense we are—it’s true. But maybe we aren’t all equally responsible. People in villages in India, or Africa, or Latin America—they’re not responsible for climate change. There’s an interesting way in which one says, not only, “We’re all in this together, so let’s work together,” which is fine. But “It’s everybody’s fault”? That’s different. As one used to say in school, trying to spread the blame around, “It’s not only my fault, sir! All of us, we all made this mess!” It’s that kind of cowardly reaction I’m referring to.

NS: Whose fault is it, then?

TA: Again, it’s not a question of fault. There’s a long history of human choices that is leading us all, unintentionally, to where we shall soon be—at a dead end. Some of these choices were more momentous, affecting far more people, than other choices. Some of us now are in a more powerful position to choose than others are. “Mankind” is not an agent.