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Talal Asad Interviewed by Irfan Ahmad

Irfan Ahmad (IA): I intend to discuss your contributions to the anthropology of Islam. Let me begin by asking about your interests in the anthropology of religion. It was in the early 1980s that you published a sustained conceptual engagement with religion, especially its Western, anthropological theorization (Asad 1983). Your critique of Clifford Geertz’s notion of religion is widely discussed. How did you get interested in such aspects of religion?

Talal Asad (TA): Well, there is a theoretical as well as a historical answer to this. I was increasingly dissatisfied with the traditional Marxist view of ideology. It seemed to me that the whole question of ideology wasn’t being sufficiently linked to linguistics and philosophy. Slowly, I shifted away from the traditional Marxist thought on religion. This, in a nutshell, is what I would call a theoretical answer.

Historically, religion was beginning to be important. We’re talking about the 1960s and 1970s, when I visited Egypt often. It seemed too unsatisfactory to take the attitude many did. First of all, it seemed to me, for people who wanted to make contact with the masses, not to have any real interest in and respectful curiosity about the basis of their faith was counterproductive and not sensible. Many friends I talked to had already come to that conclusion. One was Adil Hussain. He had been a Marxist, then a Nasserist, and eventually became interested in the Islamic trend. Then there was Abdul Wahab El- Messiri, a professor who had also taught in the United States. He helped found (in 2004) the movement for change, Kefaya (Enough). He had many young followers with whom he held seminars in his home.

I was also struck by Geertz’s essay (“Religion as a Cultural System,” in Geertz 1973). It seemed to me strange, because I realized, having been brought up as a Muslim, that somehow this didn’t connect with what I experienced: Geertz’s notion of religion as a meaning- giving system, and of belief as central to it, and so on. I thought I would do critiques of such a view in anthropology and sociology

Public Culture 27:2 doi 10.1215/08992363-2841856 Copyright 2015 by Duke University Press

i n t e rv i ew

We thank doctoral candidate Haybatullah Abouzeid and Sunniya Wajahat, both at Monash Uni-versity, for transcribing the interview.

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and offer a historical account. One needed to understand why Geertz and many others tended to think of religion as they did. This was going to be a short book, but it never materialized. Instead, I published articles that then appeared in Gene-alogies of Religion (Asad 1993). So I think that’s part of the answer.

IA: The interest in ideology included religion, which was mainly viewed as a false consciousness. You were trying to move away and take into account what people on the ground thought about religion, not as an illusion.

TA: Exactly right. It seemed to me unacceptable to think of religion that way. Mind you, that view persists even today. So half the time I wonder what is the point of writing critiques when people don’t really seem to change their view.

IA: You argued that “what appears to anthropologists today to be self- evident, namely that religion is essentially a matter of symbolic meanings . . . is in fact a view that has a specific Christian history” and that “Geertz’s treatment of reli-gious belief . . . is a modern, privatized Christian one” (Asad 1993 [1983]: 42, 47; italics added). In your 1999 essay, you dismiss Carl Schmitt’s assertion that most concepts of modern politics are secularized versions of Christianity (Asad 1999: 184; also see 2006: 285). Some may see a bit of similarity between you and Schmitt, however. So my question is twofold. First, might a reader be right in sensing a sort of disjunction between these two propositions of 1983/1993 and of 1999? Second, is outcome unhooked from origin because, discussing Schmitt, you propose that one should direct one’s inquiry into the outcome, not origins, of secularization?

TA: If I dismiss Schmitt here, it is not because I think he has nothing to offer. I think the suggestion of modern political concepts being entirely Christian in origin seems insufficient, especially in understanding the different kind of role that the concepts of secularism, state, sovereignty, and many other associated concepts yet play in modern life. So, to some extent, I agree with him and must have mentioned this approvingly. I can’t remember now. But somewhere I refer to Hans Blumenberg to say that his critique of Schmitt is okay. What is unsatis-factory is that it’s still all at the level of the history of ideas. There isn’t enough about the historical context or the institutions within which this language oper-ated. Although I agree with Blumenberg’s suggestion vis- à- vis Schmitt that there are certain continuities, it doesn’t mean that it is the same thing.

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This brings me to your question about origins and outcomes. It was precisely because of the way in which so many had seen secularism as an outcome of Christian ideas that I felt what was necessary was to look at the way in which these concepts played a very different part rather than at what they might have been originally. I’ve tried to say in several places, certainly in Formations of the Secular (Asad 2003), that there is both continuity and rupture. Even in Europe there is continuity in the way in which certain questions arise and certain concepts are put forward. And there are also ruptures in the part they play in discourses, politics, and religious life. So to talk about a Christian history is not to say that it is a seamless narrative. When I say that “religion” has a Christian history, this is not to say that that’s all there is to it. As you may remember, my discussion of monasticism in Genealogies of Religion is about kinds of embodiment. That is a part of Christianity too, because Christian history, like the history of most other so- called religions, is complex. I think the idea of symbolic meanings has become prominent with the gradual collapse of institutional religion in Europe. The question is asked: Why are even intelligent people still religious? Answer: Because religion gives meaning to life. This struck me as strange because I didn’t remember this from my religious childhood.

It was not meaning that was taught first but just a way of life and a way of inhabiting one’s body, of relating to other people, and of learning certain kinds of rituals. Even when one is taught in words it’s not really the symbolism of rituals that matters. I remember as a child being taught by my father: “You stand like this when you’re doing your prayer; bow down like this and make ruku‘ and then prostrate yourself and make a sajda.” The words themselves were intended to demonstrate and assist, together with actual bodily movements. That was a very important part of one’s learning to be what other people would say was “reli-gious.” This is true at different times in different ways even in Christian history. I would say that there isn’t a radical difference between the early statement and the later one.

IA: So the point is not simply what function concepts might perform, or the struc-tural similarity between, for example, religion and the idea of nation or progress, but the significant transformation they underwent. Schmitt didn’t look at it that way.

TA: That’s right. I wouldn’t say I dismissed Schmitt entirely, but I certainly dis-agreed with the assertion that all these concepts of modern political theory are essentially Christian. History isn’t a “seamless web.” There are all sorts of breaks

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and transformations. One confronts a fluid situation when talking about Christian history or the history of modern life.

IA: Blumenberg (1983) critiqued Schmitt’s position, also Karl Löwith’s, to defend the secular modern age, whose “institutions and practices,” as Annika Thiem (2013:11) paraphrases Blumenberg, “seek recourse only in reason,” their theo-logical origins thereby being inconsequential. How does your critique of Schmitt differ from Blumenberg’s?

TA: For one thing, I do not agree with his attempt to characterize a totality called the “modern age.” He argues that medieval Christianity had questions which it answered in one way, whereas similar questions in modernity were answered dif-ferently, that there was a continuity of questions, not of answers. The insistence on reason, in the way he resorts to it in his account of modernity, I don’t find persuasive. There is no single approach to reason — certainly not in all of modern life. If I had to sum up my disagreement, I would say it’s to do with Blumenberg’s characterization of modernity as a whole, as being based on reason.

I have an article, which came out in Critical Inquiry (Asad 2013), about humanitarianism and violence, where I make quite clear that Christian discourse doesn’t play the same part in political life; politicians don’t resort to it as they did in history earlier. In part this is because the notion of politics itself has changed. In brief, this is one of my main disagreements with Blumenberg. He thinks it is a question of legitimation. His book itself is called The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. My article is concerned also with the way in which there is a temporal line that changes and breaks in the history of what I call “compassionate cruelty.”

IA: You contend that the idea of “natural religion” was central to finding a univer-sal definition of religion as Europe began to dominate the non- West. Central to this definition was a differentiation between the word of God (Scripture) and the work of God as Nature construed through the lens of natural sciences. As I read this, India’s Sayyid Ahmad Khan (d. 1898) came to my mind. To render Islam consistent with European rationalism, he made a similar distinction (Siddiqi 1967: 300). Khan’s critics called him necharı, a votary of Nature (Lelyveld 1978: 111). Have these transformations in the meaning and category of religion influenced Muslims’ (also Hindus’/Buddhists’) self- definition of religion? If so, how?

TA: Sayyid Ahmad Khan is somebody, I am ashamed to say, I don’t know enough about. I know that he was also a “modernizer” who worked for the development of

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Muslims in India both intellectually and politically, primarily through education. Hence the formation of Aligarh College. What was it called originally?

IA: Mohammedan Anglo- Oriental College.

TA: Well, it was famous, of course. Certainly, many reformers in India, the Arab world, and Turkey tried to think about religion through categories derived from Europe. This was not an intellectual exercise only, because it was connected to the formation of a nation, a state (or the determination to form a state), and so on. Muhammad Abduh had ideas that were not totally dissimilar, in that he wanted reform which would also make sense to Europeans. I don’t mean that Khan and Abduh had the ideas they did simply to pander to European taste. But that is how, gradually, the thought of what was possible, progressive, even the idea of prog-ress, had come into Muslim thought. And that’s what I mean when I talk about origins and outcomes. When dealing with ideas of progress or political Islam or whatever, it is useful to assess them not in terms of their origins but in terms of what they do to life now and in the probable future. I would say this of many Mus-lim ideas, such as the idea of the state. Although, as you know, I’m not in favor of the idea of an Islamic state — for reasons which are connected not with Western definitions of religion but with my understanding of what the Islamic tradition is. The danger of a modern state seems to be something that is underestimated among all sorts of people (Muslims or non- Muslims). There has been, without doubt, a transformation in the way in which Muslims and other people have been thinking. There are studies, for example, about the Protestantization of Buddhism and of the Arya Samaj.

IA: Abduh engaged with the French sociologist Auguste Comte.

TA: Oh, yes.

IA: This is interesting. In India the idea of Hindu sociology gained momentum in the nineteenth century (Sarkar 1937). Comte was a figure people engaged with in Egypt as well as in India. Albert Hourani (1983: 138 – 41) wrote about Abduh and Comte. Analyzing Comte’s positive religion (the ultimate stage of science), Abduh held that Islam could fulfill that stage.

TA: Yes, I think that the whole idea of lower and higher stages in the development of religion as well as of society is a nineteenth- century idea. The things moderns

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know are that religion is and essentially should be private and a matter of ethics. People like Immanuel Kant have argued since the eighteenth century that the essence of religion is ethics, morality, good behavior, and so on. So that idea rever-berates in the Muslim and Arab worlds. Even in the “post- Christian world” you have a sense among many people of outrage that religious people can behave in a violent way. Clearly, this is not only a Western idea of what religion should be, its reduction to ethics — a particular conception of ethics as something that individu-als do out of their own belief and conscience. Conscience is the center, and once it is attached to religion it becomes the basis of moral choice. So in these ways, I think, you’re beginning to find transformations in the thinking of many peo-ple. Many of my friends in Cairo keep saying, “My God! All this Islamic sah.wa (awakening); religion is a matter of faith in one’s heart.” Even people who don’t attack religion say, “Religion in public is a danger to politics.” So that way of thinking, which is becoming common among educated people (especially Western- educated), is certainly one of the consequences of the influence we’re talking about.

IA: On a related note, Western scholars, not just orientalists, often write about Islam as sharia, quickly translated as “religious law.” In Mohammad, Washington Irving (2007 [1850]: 221 – 22; also see Heller- Roazen 2006) described the Qur’an as “written law” and Sunna as “oral law.” How would you translate it [sharia] into English?

TA: Well, you may remember I tried to deal with that in Formations of the Secular (Asad 2003), where I argued that the reform in Egypt was based on the premise that you should look at the sharia as law which is separable from “ethics.” Eth-ics concerns personal behavior; law is more general and has external authority (divine or political). I would not try and translate it. In my writings, I use the term sharia. It seems to me that even to talk about it as a combination of law and ethics is a particular way of thinking, of the nineteenth century, where people wanted to make a separation between law and morality and had a particular conception of law as imperative in some sense. So sharia is thought of as being positive and as law, issued by God. But one obvious point about sharia is that most of it is not contained in the Qur’an or even in the Sunna. Various intellectual techniques have been developed to answer practical questions that have arisen over time, techniques that are not easily classifiable either as “law” or as “religion.” But what happens with the incorporation of sharia and the courts into the state is that

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you get sharia defined as law — albeit infused with moral edicts and principles. If you’re not favorably inclined toward sharia and Muslims, you say, “Law and morality are confused in the sharia.” If you are favorably inclined, you say, “It’s a more primitive stage of the development of law, a stage when law was still infused with moral principles.” But the idea that the sharia is the same as law as under-stood in the modern liberal state seems to be problematic. It’s only when you get the modern state that you begin to get the need for a modern category, “law,” and then the need for determining where its authority comes from. Sharia, in brief, is not just concerned with law or morality; it has to do with a whole cultivation and education of the self and a way of relating to others. Abu Hamid al- Ghazalı talks about it through riyadat al- nafs, which is translated as “discipline of the self.” I think it’s “exercise.” Riyad means exercise of various kinds.

IA: Correct. In India, when musicians practice every day — that is called riyaz. .

TA: Oh, is it? And this is also true for Hindu musicians?

IA: Yes, yes.

TA: It means “exercise.” [Scholar of Islamic law] Wael Hallaq refers to it as “disci-pline of the self.” But I think “exercise of the self” is better. “Exercise of the soul.” So you don’t have to translate sharia into English. You have to explain that it is, strictly speaking, neither one nor the other. It has to do with the way in which indi-viduals relate to one another, to family and nonfamily members, to themselves and their souls in the light of God’s expectation of the faithful. The idea that the law requires a certain kind of faith of people sounds very strange when talking about liberal democratic society. You have a duty, an obligation to follow the law and rulers too. In liberal society, following the law is not a matter of what kind of person you are. Morality and law are separated. Anyway, I would not translate sharia by a single term or word.

IA: You alluded to Ghazalı. The other way to put this question is, How would Muslims in premodern times have explained (not translated) sharia to a non- Muslim or to a Muslim who wants to learn religion?

TA: First of all, I wouldn’t say religion. In some contexts the term religion works, in others it doesn’t. At Arafat, the Prophet in his last sermon said, “Al- yaum

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akmaltu lakum dınakum [Today I have completed for you your religion].” That’s what my father used to translate it as.1 But I’m not sure that’s entirely how I would translate it. My point is that whatever was completed is clearly not sharia. Sharia is the attempt of successive generations of Muslims to understand, on the basis of the Qur’an and Sunna, what God’s “law” might be (again, I don’t want to use that term because it begs so many questions), or what God would like one to arrive at. Sharia is built up out of this constant attempt at reasoning with ijma‘ (agree-ment), qiyas (deducing principles not explicitly stated in the Qur’an and Sunna), and ijtihad (employment of reflective reasoning), and these different intellec-tual techniques aim to determine what God would like one to do. That is what fuqaha’ (plural, those who practice fiqh) attempted to do. So, in a sense, the entire structure of sharia is the result of people trying to understand through human reasoning. After all, that is what fiqh actually means. It’s usually translated as “jurisprudence,” but tafaqquh means trying to exert one’s understanding through reason. The idea that sharia doesn’t change has been shown again and again to be incorrect. Things have been changing. Sharia is an ongoing set of deductions of rules, which may be modified and, under certain circumstances, even changed. Muslims believe that the Qur’an can’t be changed, but not that sharia can’t be changed, because it is a human effort.

IA: . . . To revisit your 1986 proposal to see Islam as a discursive tradition (Asad 2009 [1986]), can you give us a sense of its outline? Do you feel the need to revisit it?

TA: Well, no, if “to revisit” means reconsidering my position substantially on the subject. But I have friends who have been urging me to write more about it. Particularly because I have also invoked the Foucauldian idea of genealogy, they want to know how I reconcile it with the idea of a discursive tradition. I’ll do that, at a lecture at Georgetown University, where I gave my lecture “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam” in 1985.

Among other ideas, I want to elaborate the very concept of discursive tradition. Tradition includes sustained argument among ulema as well as modern intellec-tuals who draw on Islam as a tradition. But there is also the problem of under-standing the way language enters into various kinds of practice. These vary from regimes of practice to ritual practices like prayer (s.alat

¨), and it raises the question

of embodiment, especially habit. Because I have treated embodiment differently

1. Muhammad Asad (1900 – 1992) translated the Qur’an into English.

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in different places, there is a need to bring some of what I’ve said together in this “revisiting.” In brief, tradition is the frame for the expression of both intellectual debates (and popular opinion), as well as for the teaching of beliefs and practices that goes on in a more quotidian way.

IA: That makes me ask a related question. Culture is the favorite term for anthro-pologists. In your writings on Islam, one doesn’t see this term appear often.

TA: I have used it very occasionally, but very casually.

IA: But it is not something prominent. It is the idea of tradition you emphasize. Others speak of Islam as a civilization (e.g., Bruce Lawrence [2010]) and a world system (e.g., Richard M. Eaton [1993]). My question is, why this stress on tradi-tion? How does your focus on tradition differ from viewing Islam in terms of culture or civilization?

TA: First of all, I’d say that even for anthropologists the notion of culture is not totally agreed upon. There are different conceptions of “culture” — a system of symbols, a system of customs, and so on. In that sense, “cultural” is simply every-thing that isn’t “natural.” Interestingly, anthropology started off with the notion of culture as something close to the notion of “cultivation” and close, therefore, to the idea of “tradition” as I would like to see it developed. But that notion of culture has tended to get sidelined. What we have now is simply anthropologists refer-ring to customs distinctive of the identity of a particular group or society and so to the meanings held by the members of that society, socially inherited meanings. But there is very little problematization of the inheritance of meanings. How are meanings translated, interpreted, and conveyed from one generation to the next? How are distinctions made between meaningful actions and what actions mean?

That’s why, partly, I haven’t talked explicitly about culture, not because I think culture doesn’t matter, but because I think we need to get at inherited practices and processes from a different point of view that allows one to ask how and why “culture” is contrasted with “religion,” how people think of what is essential to the continuity of beliefs and practices. A sophisticated notion of tradition enables one to raise questions about the connection between certain kinds of continuity as well as rupture.

IA: Which culture as a term doesn’t allow you to . . .

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TA: The notion of culture on the whole doesn’t allow one to address these ques-tions, especially if you see it as a sort of static pattern. Where culture is seen in this way, anthropologists (and sociologists) have tended to see “tradition” as mere repetition, as something passed on from one generation to another unchanged — or at least to see it as the claim that it is unchanged.

My use of tradition derives from the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre (1981), for whom tradition is a space in which things like continuity (and what is essential to it) and change (that becomes necessary) can be argued over and implemented. What the idea of tradition proposes as a question is the idea of a past, how people arrive at what they consider to be “the past,” why they think that something is essential in the present even if it’s from the past, and why some things are regarded as peripheral to what must be preserved. How do arguments within and about tradition take place? For some people, change in the way one lives and thinks has to be radical if the community is to prosper in modern conditions; for others, the necessary changes are “minor,” and so one shouldn’t be making a big fuss about it. There are important questions about continuity and change in collective life, and the idea of tradition helps one to think about them.

IA: Am I right in assuming that culture, the way it is spoken of in the mainstream way, does not offer much space to think of styles of thoughts, practices, and ways of actions diachronically, and, therefore, you want to use tradition, not culture?

TA: In part. Something that is equally important is that what’s happened in recent ways of thinking about culture is that it’s increasingly used in relation to identity — individual and collective. That itself is a “modern” development, insufficiently problematized. I want to stress that it’s not just a question of synchrony opposed to diachrony, but the questions it raises or the uses to which it’s put has to do with questions of identity: “Who am I really? Who are you?” “You say you are a Muslim, why?” Because you have certain practices that you regard as essential and others you don’t regard as essential, and so on. I think of traditions as ask-ing questions about conceptions of the past, change, and what is essential to the tradition, about what kinds of questions people can ask when thinking of their traditions and those of others.

IA: One final question about terms. If you choose the term tradition, not culture, what would be the word in Arabic for that?

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TA: Well, there is a whole variety of terms. I’m writing in English and thinking of it as an analytical term. Certainly, from a religious point of view, there is sunna or hadıth, ‘urf and taqlıd. ‘Ada, meaning “custom,” is also relevant. Interest-ingly, ‘ada is related to ‘awda, meaning “to return” — one comes back again and again to something essential. I’m interested more in the questions enabled by a particular term than in the answer. So one needs to ask, what are people trying to do when they use ‘ada rather than taqlıd? It is the grammar of different terms in use that interests me.

IA: When you use tradition, it is also Islamic tradition. Marshall G. S. Hodgson (1974) uses the term Islamicate. This is probably his way of addressing the issue that everything Muslims do is not connected to Islam as a theology or religion. Thus he uses Islamicate civilization, which includes the religious as well as the nonreligious. If there were a conversation between you and him, what would it look like?

TA: I must confess it’s been a long time since I read The Venture of Islam. But I’m not sure that it’s easy to say which is the more inclusive term, because one doesn’t want to take for granted that religion has an essential meaning. Religion, after all, is not just theology, it’s not just the discourse of the ulema. One of the questions I would have to ask of Hodgson’s wonderful book is whether it rethinks the question of religion itself, how it explains why some things are recognized as religion and others as civilizational. Is civilization at once essentially connected to religion and yet something more? Is this entirely an abstract question, or must it always be present in situations where something valuable is at stake, where people are making claims about the power and fertility of some ways of conceiving for-mations as against others? So to say that “Islam as a religion” consists of such and such and beyond that there is an “Islamic culture” is to make a problematic statement.

It seems to me that often there is a misunderstanding — I have never claimed that tradition is a key to understanding everything Muslims do, think, and experi-ence. I’ve said that tradition is more useful than the way theorists like Max Weber have defined it, as opposed to reason and change. There is nothing startlingly new in what I said, only something more explicit than usual. Thus we talk about “the Marxist tradition” or “the tradition of modern political thought.” To talk about tradition in that way doesn’t exclude politics and economics.

It’s important to talk about tradition in the context of religion because Western-

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ers have a strong prejudice against Islam, and they are skeptical of the possibility of Muslims thinking new things so long as they are attached to Islamic tradition. The person who first led me to think about tradition in a sophisticated way was MacIntyre, who was a Catholic convert.

IA: A Catholic convert from?

TA: Protestantism. He was a Trotskyite at one time and a Protestant originally. Anyway, my point is simply that I’m not worried that insight comes from different traditions and places. After all, the prophet Muhammad says, “Seek knowledge even if you go to China.” So it is not because in China you will find real Islam, but because knowledge is valuable wherever it is found.

IA: Sometimes I hear scholars say that since they wish to focus on political, eco-nomic, and other issues, they don’t find the idea of tradition pertinent and suitable. Can the idea of tradition be rethought in a way that also includes those questions, and if so, how?

TA: I would say that the onus is on people who want to study the economy or politics to decide whether and, if so, in what way the idea of tradition is relevant to their inquiries. I want to stress this as a matter of principle. Tradition is not a magic key for every kind of problem. I want people to rethink and modify it to see what kinds of questions become possible when thinking in terms of tradition — for example, How do people, when discussing economic or political matters, think about the past? What do they mean by a democratic tradition? When we use the term democratic or liberal tradition, how should we account for it histori-cally, and which specific aspects of its past? There is a famous paradox about the liberal tradition: the concept of the subject as detached, cool, rational, unemo-tional, and so on was developed as a result of particular historical conditions. The paradox is, how do you make a society out of a collection of such subjects? Is it possible?

IA: Let me change the subject to the Arab Spring in general and to the toppling of Hosni Mubarak’s regime in particular. What does the Arab Spring signify?2

2. This segment of the conversation took place on April 25, 2013, before the coup d’état in July that year.

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TA: Well, it signifies a number of things. Most immediately, it signifies a sense of terrible betrayal by the Mubarak regime, as well as a sense of desperation about where Egypt was going and not going — that is, its internal and external policies. I think that there were a number of factors that coalesced. Sometimes people have oversimplified it and talked about the Arab Spring as simply the result of economic crises. There were events that occurred earlier on, which radicalized public opinion. There were protests by workers in El Mahalla El Kubra, a town with a public- sector textile factory.

There were also a number of other strikes during the upheavals in 2011. But that’s not the whole story. It is difficult to be certain about what causes a popular, revolutionary outburst. There was a series of events, which then became more definite with people making larger demands. Of course, there was great resent-ment at the Mubarak regime, at the security forces, the Mukhabarat, known for their brutal treatment of opposition figures. Things sort of snowballed into a situ-ation where people were determined that the regime must fall, even to the point of risking their lives. And the rebels or revolutionaries included all sorts of people, and that was really impressive, so it seemed to me at the time. People belonged to various parts of the spectrum, including secularists, [the] religious, Christians, Muslims, liberals, socialists, rich, poor, men, women, and so on. What happened in early 2011 wasn’t simple. No revolution of that kind can be straightforwardly predicted or explained. Many discrete events crystallized into a single powerful event, which is still evolving.

IA: You mentioned that one streak of explanation described it in terms of economic factors, right? And you were saying there was more to it than simply economics.

TA: Absolutely, yes. Many people rushed forward, especially from the Left in Europe and America, and produced an economic explanation. I think they were mistaken — or, rather, they were oversimplifying matters.

IA: In your view, to what extent was Islam a factor? Of course, it is difficult to pin-point, but, analytically, to what extent did Islam play a role in the Arab uprising?

TA: I don’t know that one can claim simply either that Islam was directly con-cerned with it or that it wasn’t. Clearly, various Islamic currents were prominent. The Ikhwan al- Muslimin, the Muslim Brotherhood, began to join the protests very early on. There’s no doubt among people who are not prejudiced against Muslim movements (and many in Egypt are) that the Ikhwan played a key part.

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At certain critical points, its younger members physically defended the protest-ers in Tahrir Square. Of course, the Ikhwan had experienced repression and, like many others, wanted radical change. I don’t say the Islamic movements caused the uprising or led it, but they were a very important element in it; any attempt to deny this is mistaken and politically irresponsible.

IA: Does the Arab Spring inaugurate a shift in thinking about the Middle East and its relation with the West? For a long time the West has spoken about the “Arab mind” (e.g., Raphael Patai’s 1973 book, reissued in 2002 and used by the US military in the Middle East, as Emran Qureshi [2004] noted). What is it? Has the reading of the Arab mind changed in the wake of this momentous event in Egypt and elsewhere?

TA: In Egypt or in the West? If you are asking about the West’s thinking about the Middle East, then I’m not so sure that the shift represented by the “Arab Spring” has been that significant. There are many well- wishers in America and Europe. But as far as governments and foreign policy makers are concerned, I don’t think there has been much of a shift. The people who consider Arabs as being not yet ready for democracy are beginning to talk loudly again, especially now that there are serious political and economic problems emerging since the election of Mohamed Morsi as president and the emergence of an opposition. Many say, “You see, we told you they weren’t ready and, of course, they aren’t ready.” But as I say, the “Arab Spring” is not a single event; it is a continuing series of events (I’m not sure I like the term Arab Spring; it’s borrowed from the specific experi-ence of Eastern Europe). The uprisings in the Arab world are bound to be uncer-tain and fluid, with a population that has not experienced any democratic politics for over fifty years. . . . I don’t think that the majority in the West are saying, “The Arab mind has now dissolved into a collection of mature democrats.”

IA: A long- standing perception in the West has been that Islam and democracy are incompatible (Ahmad 2009). But what we see in the Arab Spring is that Muslims protested and asked for democracy. One element of the so- called Arab mind was perhaps that democracy and Islam are polar opposites. Now that these democratic regimes in Tunisia and Egypt are in place, do you think that the arguments of incompatibility, integral to the Western thinking, have significantly weakened?

TA: I don’t know how significantly they have been weakened. Attention has shifted to the fact that we now have an “Islamic government” of the Brotherhood

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that wants to introduce religion into politics. There has, of course, been quite an outcry from many secularists in Egypt itself. So, to some extent, people in the West who hear this say: “We told you so. What has happened is that the major-ity of the Egyptians have elected a Brotherhood government which shows that democracy is once again imperiled.” Or there are claims that these election results are not representative. Nevertheless, those in the opposition who agree that it was a reasonably fair election say: “But the mass of people in Egypt are themselves so steeped in religion that they are unable to produce a truly democratic government. And therefore the Brotherhood government is not likely to last, or at least it should be vigorously opposed.”

IA: Because the people who have been elected have an attachment to religion?

TA: Because they have a strong attachment to religion which they want to politi-cize and things like that. I think there is this feeling of distrust, and certainly not only in Euro- America but also within Egypt, among people who are aggressively secular in their opposition to the government.

IA: Like Mohamed Mustafa El- Baradei?

TA: Yes, Baradei and lots of other people who are more to the left than Baradei. Even on the right, people like Amr Moussa who collaborated with the Mubarak regime make irresponsible remarks about the government because they think that joining with the militant opposition will give them some political credit.

IA: Is it not the case that religion in America contributed to the growth of democ-racy, as Alexis de Tocqueville (1964 [1835 – 40]) wrote? Here religion becomes a positive force in democracy’s development. Is it the case that the same thing is being denied to Muslims when they employ religious resources to fashion a kind of democracy?

TA: That is a very good question. Most people now forget what Tocqueville wrote. Today they think about the religious Right when they think about religion and politics. For liberals, the fundamentalists in the United States are seen as a great threat, because they believe that the United States was built on the separation of religion from the state. This is not entirely true. But critics of the political situa-tion in Egypt often simply see an illegitimate intrusion of religion into politics. Their assumption is that Islam and democracy are incompatible. Perhaps there are

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more people now in the United States who are willing to say, “Maybe there will be a democratic development of some kind.”

Very few who uphold this alleged incompatibility look carefully at various distorting pressures in this world, not only within the country but internation-ally, both in terms of politics — the foreign policy of the United States, NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization], the European Union, and Israel — on the one hand, and of globalization and the various forces at work in the world’s financial system — including the IMF [International Monetary Fund], World Bank, WTO [World Trade Organization], et cetera — on the other. And there are the Gulf coun-tries (that claim to be “Islamic”), which are close allies of the United States but have their own reasons for intervening in other Middle Eastern countries. And none of these countries are moving in a democratic direction. You have Bahrain, in which there is a lot of upheaval, but because it’s an ally of Saudi Arabia and the United States it easily represses protest movements. The US inaction in Bahrain is an important act. The prospects of democratic development in Egypt and the Middle East as a whole are very complicated; they are not related in any simple fashion to “religion.”

IA: The next thing I want to ask concerns a change Islamists have undergone. Suppressed and disallowed to participate in political processes, now they are no longer in opposition (in Egypt, not fully in power either). Do you now notice some change in Islamists’ conception of politics — for example, the issue of the Coptic minority and the woman question?

TA: There has been the beginning of some kind of a change; there hasn’t been enough. You may remember that Morsi had promised that, if elected, he would appoint several vice presidents, one of whom would be a Copt, another a woman, and so on. But he never kept that promise. This may be due not to him only but to the leadership structure of the Ikhwan. The problem is that the organization has been thrust into a position for which it is not prepared. Worse, it is faced by an opposition that is hostile to any form of political Islam and unwilling to give it any benefit of the doubt but willing to blame it for all that goes wrong with the economy.

And, then, there are remnants of the old regime who engage in conspiracies. The Brotherhood has retained the old authoritative structure. This is unfortunate for the emergence of creative thinking. You know the controversy over the can-didature of Abdel Moneim Abul Futuh, a prominent Ikhwan member. The point is that it is at sixes and sevens. There are elements within, especially the youth,

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who would like to rethink both strategies and the substance of policies. They have sometimes disobeyed orders of the organization, and some have left it.

But it seems to me that the attitudes of the Ikhwan government have also been formed partly in response to an enormous amount of prejudice on the part of many in the opposition. There is another complication, which hasn’t been highlighted in the West: the whole question of Israel and the Palestinians. The Ikhwan is more sympathetic to Palestinians, even to Hamas, than the previous regime was. This has led to anxiety on the part of Israel and its allies in the United States and Europe. There is also the Egyptian military as a powerful factor; it has its own interests, because of which it would certainly not like to antagonize an already suspicious United States.

Then there are the Gulf countries, which don’t like the Ikhwan because they fear the spread of radical politics. At the same time, they hold out the promise of much- needed cash to Egypt. Altogether, I think that for these and other reasons the Ikhwan organization is not encouraged to think independently or creatively.

IA: So you think there are both external and internal factors. Internally it is the structure of the organization, and externally it is the imperial power.

TA: Yes! I would stress the nature of the middle- class opposition inside Egypt, which is strongly antireligious, encouraged, of course, by elements from outside. The imperial factor is very important, though underdiscussed.

IA: In an essay after the Arab Spring (Asad 2012), you pointed toward rethinking the issue of religion and the state, pluralism, loyalty, citizenship, and so on. Can you shed more light on this rethinking?

TA: Yes, I think one of the unfortunate things about Islamic movements (those participating in electoral process) is that they are focused on obtaining state power. There is a need to rethink the nature of politics — not to be simply con-cerned about persuading people that Islam and democracy are compatible. At any rate, one must challenge the idea that you have a choice between two things only: a state dominated by an Islamic party and government (because the majority of the people are Muslims) and some variant of what is called a secular state. People are beginning to think a little more about secularism critically, even in Europe. I think that the Islamic tradition could be, hopefully, expected to rethink the matter of politics, away from the aim of obtaining state power in one way or the other.

We need to rethink the whole business of why we always connect politics to the

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state, to think of it as party politics that are central to electoral systems, to liberal democratic government. Muslims might think more about what democracy — or a just political order — can mean if it is not tied to the state, if it is tied, for example, to grassroots organizations, to movements not simply concerned with dissent or making moral criticisms of the state. In doing that, one should draw not exclusively on the Islamic discursive tradition but also on the experience of non- Muslim societies and traditions. Muslims who refuse to encounter non- Muslim traditions deny themselves a crucial source for understanding the modern world. One imperative, therefore, would be to help create new spaces for political action that transcend constitutional space. The problems humanity is beginning to face can’t be adequately dealt with from within a single state.

IA: Give us examples of the space in which this kind of rethinking could take place.

TA: Well, I was thinking of the need to define more precisely the problems we have at a global level that are not simply economic but moral too. There are ques-tions about the kind of life that we should all be living, and that is in part a spiri-tual as well as an ethical question. We don’t have to accept all the assumptions and concepts of liberal subjectivity and politics. Many of our problems are quite new.

IA: Something like global environment issues?

TA: The global issues of environment include questions of climate change and water shortage, of nuclear waste — waste that is often shifted around from rich to poorer countries — of massive pollution of the seas and destruction of forests. Of course, there are catastrophic effects of the financial system, the growing gap between the very rich and the very poor. Problems like these are not treatable adequately in terms of the autonomous state. There should be openness to other traditions of thinking and acting both within our nation- state and beyond.

IA: You also mean some kind of interfaith alliance?

TA: Yes, that is important. One has to learn to identify what can enrich the lives of everybody, Muslims and non- Muslims, because it’s urgent to think in the broader term even for Muslim- majority countries. Not interfaith with just, you know, how

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we should be tolerant and so on. We can disagree, but in the end we have to learn to act in ways we believe are crucial.

IA: You were probably hinting at more issue- based alliances and dialogues which are not simply limited to theological discussion.

TA: What I’m saying is that it’s necessary for us to think about the predicament we are all in. We are all in an interlocking predicament, whether in the East or the West, for which there are few answers and for which state politics is not enough (sometimes even an obstacle). We can all imagine utopia, yes? How wonderful it would be if everybody was equal, able to live healthily and be looked after when they are children and when they are old, and so on. But how does one get there from here?

IA: A different question: What is the research you plan to do, postretirement?

TA: Well, in general I am concerned about the Arab world (especially Egypt), the Muslim world, also more widely: how one can think responsibly about it. I also have a more academic concern about the story of human rights, both in Europe and in the Arab world. I want to look at that history critically — I think too many things are being assumed in the stories we are told about human rights, interna-tional law, and the kind of future we can look forward to.

Let me say, finally, that I am by temperament a pessimist. I have come to the conclusion that we may not be able to create a really just life for everybody in a sustainable natural environment, as I once hoped. I think we have pushed our-selves gradually into a situation where there may be no solutions, for example, with the problem of climate change. We know what the right thing to do would be, but I can’t see how it can be practically, politically, economically, even ideo-logically, possible to do it. So massive human disasters seem to me a much more likely outcome. Let’s not forget nuclear weapons and powers that create all that nuclear waste. We are all too immersed in a greedy consumerist culture, and we seem to be content in our shortsightedness. I think that the disasters may well lead us into a very unpleasant world, an unpleasant world in which, again, the rich and powerful will be more openly brutal in maintaining their own privileges. But I hope I’m wrong. At any rate, my work is of little value in the light of this kind of expectation. But there we are.

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Talal Asad is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York. His publications include Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (1993), Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003), and over fifty articles.

Irfan Ahmad is associate professor of political anthropology at Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, and has also taught at the University of Amsterdam, Utrecht University, and Monash University, Melbourne. Author of Islamism and Democracy in India (2009), he is currently finishing a book on critique in the Western and Islamic traditions.

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