I N T E R V I E W

The Solitary Analyst of Doxas

An Interview with Talal Asad

Fadi A. Bardawil

Preface

Talal Asad has been interrogating the conceptual infrastructure undergirding anthropological and so-
cial scientific works for more than four decades now. Early on Asad turned the anthropologists gaze
inward, away from the ideologies and practices of the tribes and peoples of anthropologists, and
toward the ideological character of their own knowledges. He carved a distinct position that called into
question the disciplinary claims to neutrality and autonomy from the world of politics, while disagree-
ing with radical critics who saw anthropology as a handmaiden to colonialism and its practitioners as
agents of empire.1 In doing so, Asad was always careful to avoid grounding his arguments in the personal
motives and political beliefs of anthropologists, a move that will become a signature of his style of reason-
ing. Anthropologys relationship to colonial power was much less related to its potential instrumental uses
by political agents than to how the colonial encounter was refracted in the formation of its own objects
of inquiry. Liberals and radicals, functionalists and Marxists may have much more in common when it
comes to the conceptual infrastructure undergirding their accounts despite their stark theoretical and
political divisions.
This early work produced throughout the 1970s inaugurated the critique of Orientalist scholarship
in the English-speaking academy. Asads conceptual interrogations moved beyond disciplinary confines
when he founded the Review of Middle East Studies (1975) with Roger Owen. He coedited alongside Owen
the first three issues (1975, 1976, 1978), which published the proceedings of three conferences he orga-
nized at the University of Hull (1974, 1975, 1976), where he was teaching at the time. This body of work
and the intellectually stimulating experience of the Hull reading group during those years deserve to
be reexamined, particularly because they have regrettably been either neglected or misrepresented in
the wake of the publication of Edward Saids Orientalism (1978) and the wave of postcolonial works that
followed.2 Asads Marxist-influenced critique of Orientalism clearly demarcated itself from relativist and

This interview was conducted in person in New York City on March 26, 1. See Asads introduction to Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, 16.
2013, and revised in the fall of 2013. I would like to thank Alireza Doostdar,
2. For instance, Adam Kuper, who has written widely on the history and
Zeina G. Halabi, Khaled Saghieh, and Junko Yamazaki for their comments
theory of anthropology, reversed the genealogy of the critiques of Ori-
on earlier drafts of the introduction. David Scotts unflinching support
entalism in the Euro-American academy. An obvious example, Kuper
and generosity were pivotal for carrying out this intergenerational con-
writes, is the series of critiques of colonial anthropology which derive
versation, and for this I am grateful.
from the work of Edward Said, such as the volume Anthropology and

152 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Vol. 36, No. 1, 2016 doi 10.1215/1089201x-3482183 2016 by Duke University Press
 Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 153

nationalist/nativist perspectives that underscored In Anthropology and the Analysis of Ideology, a

the European origin of theories to undermine
their validity.3 It also did not concern itself with the
unmasking of biased representations. What preoc-
cupied Asad at the time was the investigation of
the traditional authority of Orientalist scholarship.
This included the examination of their discursive
assumptions and the conditions under which they
were produced, transmitted, and became authori-
tative. The thematic foci of Asads work, his modes
of inquiry and positionality have of course shifted
throughout his career. Having said that, one can
look at Asads workf rom his early critiques of
Orientalists and Elie Kedourie to his polemics
with Salman Rushdie and beyondas constituting
an unswerving challenge to established cultural
smugness, to borrow Michael Herzfleds felicitous
words.4 I dont like bullies, Asad put it bluntly
during our conversation, and I feel that a lot of
people who write, whether they are in academia or
in the media, write as bullies and as people given
to sneering.
Asads investigations are characterized by a
distinct wariness of grand theoretical claims and
political doxas, whether coming from the Left or
the Right. His antitheoreticist style of reasoning
partly indebted to Ludwig Wittgensteins investi-
gationseschews arguing from, and putting for-
ward, a priori general social theories or shooting
down one theory with another. Rather, he has
been concerned with a close examination of the
grammar of concepts and their historical transfor-
mations while keeping a keen eye on the powers
and practices they enable or disable. Among other
things, Asad analyzes the referents of concepts, re-
arranges them to produce different pictures than
the ones that hold us captive, showing us how con-
trasting theoretical positions share much more
than they think they do when one looks at them
from a particular angle. Let me give an example.
hinge essay of his intellectual trajectory, Asad ar-
gues that discourses cannot be said to have an a
priori determinate and universal function, since
their meanings and force shift with societies his-
torical transformations. Asads argument simul-
taneously counters calls for a proper science of
the symbolic (Geertz) and a general theory of
ideology (Marxists).5 He dialectically relates the
historical transformations at the heart of societies
that anthropologists studya nd that sustain or
undermine certain discoursesw ith the historic-
ity of the concepts and theories they use in their
investigations. Asads antitheoreticist position is
very different from, say, the anti-essentialist cri-
tique that will take the social sciences by storm in
the 1980s and 1990s and that substituted the older
ahistorical, homogeneous, and integrated notion
of culture with a theory of culture as always po-
rous, fragmented, and hybrid.
Asad, to my mind, is a profoundly solitary
thinker. As I have been trying to show, he has al-
ways fully engaged contemporary intellectual de-
bates, but he has rarely approached them from ex-
pected angles and rarely adhered comfortably to
established theoretical positions. For instance, he
did not inhabit the Marxist tradition comfortably
at the very same time as a constellation of Marxs
concepts came to undergird his investigations in
the 1970s. His intellectual project drew sustenance
from Marxs fundamental insight that the practice
of men and women produces structuresand their
own cultural meaningst hat come to circum-
scribe their own future practice by extinguishing
certain possibilities and bringing forth new ones.
That said, in numerous writings from the 1970s
through the early 1990s, Asad critically engaged
Marxist thinkers and anthropologists. Asads anal-
ysis homed in again on the conceptual backbone
of the works, showing how French Marxist anthro-

the Colonial Encounter, edited by Talal Asad
(Kuper, Anthropologists and the History of
Anthropology, 131). More recently, Ali Mirse-
passi and Tadd Graham Ferne claimed that
Asad has two lines of intellectual ancestry,
the first being Nietzsches and Heideggers in-
ternal critiques of the West. Talal Asads sec-
ond line of intellectual ancestry, they write, is
more recent but linked to the first. Ever since
Edward Said argued that fictions have their
own logic and their own dialectic of growth
and decline, a new current in scholarly writ-
ing on non-western societies has looked down
with disdain upon the empirical as something
of a lower intellectual order (Mirsepassi and
Ferne, Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitan-
ism, 112).
3. Asad and Owen, Introduction, 3; Fahim
and Helmer, Indigenous Anthropology in Non-
Western Countries, 66162.
4. Herzfeld, Book Review, 694.
5. Asad, Anthropology and the Analysis of Ide-
ology, 620.
154 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36:1 2016

pology reproduced functionalist assumptions and
how certain Marxist analysis of Islam echoed both
Orientalist and functionalist scholarship.6 Asads
historical turn toward medieval Christianity in the
early 1980s, which will later form the main body of
Genealogies of Religion (1993), and his subsequent
work on the anthropology of Islam emerge out of
his misgivings about how functionalist, Marxist,
symbolic, and Orientalist theories conceptualized
the relationship among power, ideology, and prac-
tice and not out of an absorption in the question
of religion per se.
The singularity of Asads authorial voice and
the creativity of his investigations lie partly in his
ability to work simultaneously on several seemingly
unrelated fronts, making unfamiliar conceptual
connections that redraw the conventional divid-
ing lines among fields, theories, and positions. But
therein lies the difficulty of Asads work, its exact-
ing nature, which does not content itself with coun-
tering one thesis with another but functions at a
deeper structural level, asking of its readers to re-
think the parameters that delimit where and how
they usually draw their conceptual distinctions.
His work produces estrangement effects in his
readers, rendering what they take for granted un-
familiaranthropological building blocks, liberal
moral precepts, or tenets of Islamic politicswhile
refusing to domesticate unfamiliar practices and
beliefs such as those of medieval Christians or con-
temporary Muslims. His thinking recoils from the
complacency of dwelling in the familiar.
Asads modes of inquiry since Genealogies of
Religion came to rely on genealogies of Western
knowledges and the powers they authorize coupled
with accounts of the Islamic tradition.7 Asads draw-
ing on genealogy and tradition as modes of moral
and social inquiry, without explicitly articulating
the position he occupies vis--v is the Islamic tradi-
tion and Western societies where he has lived for
most of his adult life, continues to provoke different
responses from his readers. His style was dubbed a
negative dialectic, which stops short of providing
suggestions on how people from diverse cultural
backgrounds might be integrated into a mod-
ern plural state, be it in the post-Christian West,
the Muslim world, or elsewhere.8 He has been
at times charged with sympathizing with Islamic
fundamentalism and nativist positions.9 Asad was
also reproached for holding a reactionary view
of secularism, as he put it in a recent interview,
and for being a mythmaker, not a genealogist, in
a recent polemic.10 The majority of these critical
engagements and misreadings are not unrelated to
the difficulty of pinning down Asads solitaryand
shiftingthought on a plain ideological grid and
his unarticulated moral commitments.
Recently, Asads investigations have moved
beyond social and moral inquiries toward politi-
cal theory. In a recent essay revisiting his fathers
life and thought, Asad sketches an antistatist and
anticapitalist notion of Islamic politics that, un-
like the doxas of many Islamic movements, ought
not be guided by the goal of capturing state power
and applying divinely authorized law.11 Rather, Is-
lamic politics, he proposes, ought to be grounded
in a democratic ethos that seeks to connect living
beings regardless of their political and religious
beliefs.12 Asads intimate authorial voice in this
piece departs from his characteristic skeptical and
reconstructive registers associated with his deploy-
ment of genealogy and tradition. Asad manages
once again to rearticulate cardinal points structur-
ing our contemporary debates while disturbing a
few unshakable doxas. But where does this solitary
thought that eludes appropriation and disturbs
our coordinates come from? Where are you speak-
ing from, Talal Asad, and to whom?

6. For Asads critical engagement with Marxist
anthropology and theory see Asad, The Con-
cept of Rationality; Asad and Wolpe, Con-
cepts of Modes of Production; Asad, Anthro-
pology and the Analysis of Ideology; Asad,
Ideology, Class, and the Origins of the Islamic
State; Asad, Primitive States; Asad, The Idea
of an Anthropology of Islam, 122; Asad, Are
There Histories of Peoples without Europe?;
and Asad, A Comment on Aijaz Ahmad.
7. See David Scotts insightful reading of
Asad as a tragic theorist, which he articulates
through exploring his mutual attachments to,
and deployments of, a Nietzschean and Fou-
cauldian inspired genealogical investigation
and a concept of tradition partially indebted
to MacIntyres philosophy that creates an un-
explored and unresolved tension in his work.
See Scott, The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad.
8. Hefner, Disciplined Manner, 479.
9. See Mufti, Aura of Authenticity. Also see
Talal Asads Romance with Islamism, chap.
3 of Mirsepassi and Ferne, Islam, Democracy,
and Cosmopolitanism, 11234.
10. Martin, Genealogies of Religion, 14; Rob-
bins, Why I Am Not a Postsecularist, 70.
11. Asad, Muhammad Asad between Religion
and Politics, 84.
12. Ibid., 86.

The Interview
Fadi Bardawil: Were starting chronologically. I am
very much interested in the introduction to The
Kababish Arabs (1970).
Talal Asad: God, I havent looked at it for decades!
Bardawil: You state in the introduction that
you are departing from the standards of value-
neutrality in the social sciences. In that period, in
the early 1970s, there is a lot that you are doing that
is related to countering arguments regarding the
ethical neutrality of the social sciences. I am also
thinking of the 1972 essay where you cite Alvin
Gouldner and [Alisdair] MacIntyres Short History
of Ethics.
Asad: In what?
Bardawil: I think that was in Essays in Sudan Eth-
nography (1972), the Festschrift to Evans-Pritchard.
Asad: Oh, I see, which Ive lost. I had a copy of it
but I dont know where it is now.
Bardawil: I can send you a copy of this one. Any-
way, what has been picked up usually from that
period of your work is Anthropology and the Colonial
Encounter (1973) and particularly its treatment of
the epistemological question. But there is also a
call against anthropologys relativism and for a
simultaneous criticism of both anthropological
and indigenous concepts. This criticism is done
very well in the Festschrift where you examine the
triangulation between the colonial administrator,
the anthropologist, and the Kababish themselves
in their usage of the concept of the . . .
Asad: The tribe.
Bardawil: Yes. And in doing so you assert that this
work should reflect back on the moral and political
assumptions of the anthropologist. There is more
there than just the interrogation of the formation
of anthropological concepts. There are moral and
political dimensions at play and a call for an en-
gaged anthropology that you were trying to initi-
ate against functionalism and an older practice of
anthropology. I wonder if you could say a little bit
more about that, particularly that questions of the
normative and the descriptive are at the heart of
it. To go back to The Kababish Arabs, there too you
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 155
tackle this question by noting that the difference
between political theory and anthropology is that
the former, unlike the latter, has always tied a de-
fense of a certain position to a normative one.
Asad: Yes. I think that one of the things that has
been constant in my work, now that you mention
it, and since I looked at your questions in general,
is precisely my very strong skepticism of the idea of
neutrality. What I am constantly concerned to do
in different ways is really to find the very different
kinds of connections that can be made between
certain kinds of analyses or theorizations or em-
pirical research on the one hand and ones moral
position on the other. Because such connections
always exist. And I see them in a kind of a dialecti-
cal way as something that could eventually affect
both sides.
But there is a tension here that I have always
felt. Ive been dissatisfied with straightforward po-
lemical work (and well come back to the question
of polemics in a minute) and with denunciations of
anthropology and denunciations of the West and
so on. While at the same time, I have been very
uncomfortable with the notion that there exists a
position that is unassailable both theoretically and
morally, and that it can therefore be used to mea-
sure and to incite action in a universal fashion. I
think that life is much more complicated.
For me, to be slightly autobiographical, when
I came to Britain from Pakistan I was full of excite-
ment about this wonderful enlightened society, in
which there were (what I would now call) liberal as-
sumptions about freedom, free expression, equal-
ity, lack of prejudice and discrimination against
peoples, and so forth. A kind of postFrench revo-
lutionary view of what a progressive social life is
universally. And it was really being disabused of
that that pushed me into looking more closely at
Marxism as one of the most powerful traditions
critical of liberalism, which had positions that were
at once moral and theoretical, and that criticized
liberalism so very well. This was what attracted me
first to Marxism. And for many years, I was able
to draw on it both to criticize as well as to exam-
ine and analyze various aspects of anthropological
and other knowledges. But over the years, what I
repeatedly found was how much Marxism and lib-
eralism had in common, and that worried me. So
156 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
that my attempt to look again at questions of ideol-
ogy in general and religion in particular was to do
with my dissatisfaction with the common Enlight-
enment heritage that both Marxism and liberalism
enjoy.
Anyway, we will come to that later. I dont
want to go on too much about this here but this
is something that I have been increasingly preoc-
cupied with. They are both traditions or, rather,
branches of a single modern tradition, that are
indispensable for understanding our modern
world. Partly because they have helped create it,
and partly because they constitute extremely im-
portant forms of knowledge for understanding it.
But it is liberalism on the whole that has tended
to espouse the possibility of ethical neutrality in
the social sciences, and I have always been and con-
tinue to be skeptical of that. Marxism, on the other
hand, hasnt been concerned to maintain the ethi-
cal neutrality of the social sciences, but the kind
of assumptions on which it does this are to me not
entirely satisfactory, and thats what Ive been try-
ing to examine and explore.
I was trying to remember when I saw this con-
cern expressed in some of your questions. I used
to lecture on Marx, [Max] Weber, and [mile]
Durkheim for many years in England, and it was
then that I really became very critical of Webers
idea about ethical neutrality. Weber was very much
a liberal but an extremely important thinker for a
range of subjects, including modern politics. But
I think that his notion of freedom, for example, is
shared in many respects by Marxism and liberal-
ism, and I worry about that.
Turning to another side: I have been dissatis-
fied with the work of many people who have taken
over, a bit too readily and too quickly, both liberal
and Marxist ideasthat is, people who come from
the South, our part of the world. Whereas I have
been equally dissatisfied, of course, with people
in the Middle East and in the Islamic world who
are supposed to be opposing Marxism and liberal-
ism. And there, too, I feel that to understand our
world one has to be ready to be critical of both the
thought and public action in the Middle East and
the Islamic world as well as in the West in a dia-
lectical way. So, I think one must do this without
abandoning everything on either side, because you
36:1 2016
know there are aspects of the traditions that are
very important for the way one lives and especially
the way one connects with the past. One cannot
really rest satisfied with the way things are. I am
often amused by accusations of my being a nativ-
ist, which is of course quite incorrect. I have never
argued that the norms in our native lands are in-
evitably superior or better, that they must be pro-
tected at all costs.
I am very pessimistic, as you may know, es-
pecially over the last twenty years or so, about the
way in which our world is drifting, and I am not
at all sure we will beI say we will be, although
I wont be around much longert hat the world
will be able to survive all these crises accumulating
now: financial global capitalism, climate change,
nuclear weapons as well as nuclear energysome-
thing people dont talk about that muchcrises
that threaten absolute disaster. All these crises, I
think, are beginning to merge and together they
seem less and less capable of solution. Anyway,
I am just spelling out my sense of despair about
it all.
But yes, I still believe very much that one
cant be ethically neutral. It doesnt mean that one
should always take up a moral position and hold
on to it through thick and thin. I think one ought
to be questioning oneself, questioning ones tradi-
tion, questioning ones opponents, in order both
to overcome and to recover what I see as the ten-
sion between a desire to know and understand on
the one hand and a desire to act politically on the
other. The two have connections, but they are not
the same, and I think it is important to maintain
that tension.
Bardawil: There is a lot here I would like to ask you
more about, particularly your dissatisfaction with
Marxism, as well as the questions of freedom that
both Marxism and liberalism share and of intel-
lectuals from the South. But since weve been talk-
ing a bit about the question of neutrality and po-
sitionality, I would really like to come back to the
last paragraph in The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam
(1986), which seems to me to be tackling the ques-
tion of positionality from a different perspective. I
will read you a couple of sentences.
Asad: Yes.

Bardawil: To write about a tradition is to be in a
certain narrative relation to it, a relation that will
vary according to whether one supports or opposes
the tradition, or regards it as morally neutral. The
coherence that each party finds, or fails to find,
in that tradition will depend on their particular
historical position. In other words, there clearly
is not, nor can there be, such a thing as a univer-
sally acceptable account of a living tradition. Any
representation of tradition is contestable. What
shape that contestation takes, if it occurs, will be
determined not only by the powers and knowl-
edges each side deploys, but by the collective life
they aspire toor to whose survival they are quite
indifferent. Moral neutrality, here as always, is no
guarantee of political innocence.13
Thats how the essay ends. Again, I think
here you are raising the question of positionality
to avoid falling back on the neutrality of the social
sciences.
Asad: Yes.
Bardawil: And to avoid falling back on an anthro-
pological view of culture as an a priori shared
totality of meanings. It also gestures toward the
performative effect any account of a tradition can
have.
I find this passage thought provoking for a
couple of reasons. I havent seen you take up the
idea of positionality vis--v is accounts of a tradition
and explore it further in your own work and also
because of my own work, which is partly about the
different theoretical and political effects intellec-
tual works produce in different problem-spaces, to
use David Scotts words.14 So this is basically two
questions: First, I would like you to elaborate more
on that question and why is it that . . .
Asad: Which question?
Bardawil: The question of positionality vis--v is a
tradition and if you think about the potentiality of
the multiple interventions that your work may per-
form in different problem-spaces, in an anthropo-
logical context but also in a context that is internal
13. Asad, The Idea of an Anthropology of 15. Asad just published a version of this piece on
Islam, 17. Critical Inquirys website. See Asad, Thinking
about Tradition.
14. Scott, Conscripts of Modernity, 4.
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 157
to the Islamic tradition itself. Has your work been,
or could it be, mobilized in debates, which are in-
ternal to the tradition, not only in disciplinary or
interdisciplinary sites over here in the academy?
This question is linked to what we have
begun our conversation with. What Marxism pro-
vided for your early work is the standpoint from
which you could actually criticize, as you do in
1972, the colonial administrator, the anthropolo-
gist, and the Kabbashi himself. And the way I see
your work evolving since that Marxist moment is
through a bifurcation of modes of inquiry: tradi-
tion, on the one hand, and genealogy, on the other
hand, which are no longer, in a sense, standing on
the same ground. So, I would like to hear you more
on the question of positionality, the reconstruction
of traditions, and the potential that reconstruction
may have for multiple interventions. And that will
also explicate the question of people who accuse
you of being a nativist . . .
Asad: Yes.
Bardawil: Because at the heart of it is the question
of positionality.
Asad: Right, yes. I think youve brought up a num-
ber of very important points. And I should just
mention that Im beginning to think systematically
about them again now, after having done a num-
ber of other things I believed to be part of what
is necessary for self-clarification. Ive been asked
again by Georgetown University to take up, to re-
visit some of the ideas I dealt with in my 1985 lec-
ture there . . .
Bardawil: A sequel?
Asad: Something like that. And I said yes, I would
like to do that. David Scott has also been urging
me for a long time to rethink some of what I said
there and think about them in print, so I would
like to do that.15
I have to some extent to repeat what I said
about the need to step back every now and then
and look at ones exploratory and clarificatory ex-
158 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
ercise on the one hand, and on the other at the
kind of moral position one thinks this work sup-
ports or undermines. And I would like to think
that one of the constant things Ive done is to ask
myself what is the best question to ask in this or
that situation. And that includes the clarification
of some topic that confronts me, and the prelimi-
nary question that for some reason doesnt seem
entirely satisfactory, and I am not quite clear why
this should be. Therefore I try to explore the ques-
tion itself. On the moral side, I try to ask whether
and to what extent the position that I seem to
be forming is ethically defensible in the entire
situation.
Thats how I see positionality. Not neces-
sarily as a singular exercise, but as something that
requires continual reaching out for, on the one
hand, the definition of, the delineation of, a tra-
dition, and the questioning of what seems to be
an existing tradition [on the other]. And the ques-
tioning need not be intellectual, by the way, but
also practicalsome demonstration of the way in
which one lives.
So the questions themselves seem to me
often more important than the answers, so to
speak, and they come out of that interaction be-
tween those two sides, between the empirical and
the moral. In some ways, I think of my work as
making myselfnot deliberately but as time opens
uprepeatedly uncomfortable. I have noticed that
many people who say they are committed to think-
ing freely are reluctant to let themselves be made
intellectually and morally uncomfortable. Should
one look for a Freudian explanation here? I dont
know. At any rate, I find it necessary to make one-
self uncomfortable about what one takes to be a
rational and humane position, to try to make
other people uncomfortable for the same reason,
even if one fails to do so. Thats the challenge (or
dilemma) of a free-floating intellectual I sup-
pose. The point I want to stress is the limit in life
of being an intellectual. Intellectuality (including
critique) is itself a position and not the precondi-
tion for one.
You know my father was an intellectual and
for him becoming a Muslim was an intellectual
36:1 2016
matter, and it seemed to complete his life in cer-
tain ways. Not so for my mother. I mean she was
born a Muslim and somehow couldnt understand
what all this intellectualization was about. For her
being a Muslim was simply living in a certain way,
not thinking critically about her life as a Muslim.
Of course she knew when she had made a mistake,
and said so. But thats not critique as self-conscious
intellectuals think of that term. And so many
things that I now think back on, which for me as
a youth . . . I used to feel rather advanced then in
relation to her, a budding intellectual. I later real-
ized this was simply because at the time I didnt
understand what my mother was. I thought of her
only in terms of a lack. I wasnt able to think
about the limits of critical inquiry itself. You know
the idea that somehow one could engage in criti-
cal inquiry indefinitely, that critical thinking was
the noblest thing in life, and that that made one
superior, is itself an extraordinary assumption, an
assumption that has pushed me further into con-
sidering the different ways one can take a position.
Let me turn to another example. Its now al-
most exactly a year ago I wrote something that ap-
peared online. I dont know whether youve seen
it or not. I was invited to an international confer-
ence in Riyadh on my fathers work when I was in
Cairo in early 2011. Something organized by the
King Faysal Institute of Islamic Research and the
Austrian embassy. They didnt just say come and
talk, they gave me a title on which I was to talk. Did
you see it by any chance?
Bardawil: No, no I didnt.
Asad: Its been around for about a year online on
an Indian site. Islam Interact? No, its not Islam
Interact, but something like that.16 Anyway, I
wrote a short piece for that conference in April of
2011, and friends in Cairo suggested I should elab-
orate it because it was not really very popular at the
actual meeting. I didnt go in the end because my
wife wasnt very well. So I developed the argument
and gave it to the site and Ive had a lot of people
writing to me, some agreeing, some strongly dis-
agreeing, you know, Muslims and non-Muslims. It
has puzzled me a bit, because Ive not been much
16. See Asad, Muhammad Asad between Reli-
gion and Politics, Islam Interactive.

engaged in public political thinking, as you know,
of any kind, but I am finding myself pushed into
that.
Bardawil: What was the title again?
Asad: The title that they gave me was Muhammad
Asad between Religion and Politics.
Bardawil: OK.
Asad: And it is online, I can pass it on to you right
now. So its both a reminiscence of myself as a boy
with my father and his ideas and an interpretation
of them. And also some fundamental disagree-
ment that I developed later as a very young man,
mainly having to do with the idea of an Islamic
state.
Bardawil: Actually, I may have seen this one. Is
this the one where you quote Ikhtilaf Ummati
Rahma? [Disagreement within my community is
a blessing.]
Asad: Perhaps, but I have cited that in other places
too. I will send it to you if you want. Remind me
when we stop talking and I will send you the link.
It also has a lot of quotations that my father used
to cite from the Quran and that he used to elabo-
rate on and what he thought they meant. But the
consequences of that, one of the things that I tried
to do there, which I would like to do more on, is
to argue that there might be a possibility for Mus-
lims to have what is called an Islamic politics but
to separate it from the state. In other words, since
politics has been almost invariably directed at the
capture of the state one should try to think of poli-
tics that goes beyond it. I am not arguing against
the state as such, because I think for good or for
ill we live in states, and I cant see that states will
disappear in the foreseeable future. But one has to
try to think of politics which are not at all depen-
dent on the conception of the state. And, I havent
seen much of that work done. But I do think that
its quite important to try and think of new forms
of politicsrethinking that can draw from or bor-
row from other traditions. I am not worried about
the purity of a tradition, by the way. There are ways
of living a tradition practically, without intellectu-
alizing itand there the issue of how pure the to come and present something. Then they said if
tradition is doesnt arise.
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 159
I think about taking a position there too,
and this has made me wonder whether and in what
way intellectualizing is important. So positional-
ity doesnt always mean that it is a successful posi-
tion, or clearly thought out. You might end up in
a position that makes it even more difficult to re-
late yourself to whats going on and to assess what
is really important and really crucial, or even to
point to ways in which you might reach what is re-
ally important and crucial. But you know thats the
general position that I have been in for a long time
and that sort of dragged me from one thing to an-
other. And mainly, you might say, somewhat self-
ishly, because Ive been trying to clarify for myself
what is the most coherent position. And what that
is shifts too, of course, although I thinka s I said
at the beginningboth Marxism and liberalism
really are in a sense now also part of me, and there-
fore part of what seems to me coherent. I no lon-
ger consider myself, and have not for a long time
considered myself, to be either a liberal or a Marx-
ist. But both are part of how I have been formed,
because their ideas, their questions, and even their
norms have to some extentand in an unsatisfac-
tory waybecome part of my life. So positional-
ity is not as clear-cut as one might think.
Bardawil: But this last piece seems to me a very dif-
ferent kind of intervention than your earlier an-
thropological pieces.
Asad: I suppose yes, thats what David Scott said,
too.
Bardawil: In the sense that you dont have an an-
thropologists hat on.
Asad: No.
Bardawil: You probably inhabit a more internal re-
lation to the tradition in a sense.
Asad: Yes.
Bardawil: Through your comment on your fathers
life and work, basically.
Asad: Yes. I think that happened as a consequence
of, if you like, an accidentand much of life is an
accident, a series of accidentst hat I was invited
you cant come, send it to us anyway. I did, and I
160 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
heard from third parties that it was not very popu-
lar. I am not surprised but still then somebody else
said to me in Egypt, why dont you elaborate on it,
because it was a twenty-minute piece and now it is
much longer. So yes, in that sense it is true, but you
know for example, when I did that review article17
on Sulayman Bashirs book I was also . . .
Bardawil: Yes, I wanted to go back to that actually.
Asad: Yes, go ahead. I just want to finish that
thought. That article was for me again trying to
make sense of something that is central to one tra-
dition, which has been the object of very consider-
able writing by Orientalists, as well as by defenders
and attackers of that tradition. I felt dissatisfied
with both but didnt quite know how to get at that.
And there are some things I wouldnt now put in
quite the way I did in the review article. You know,
I think I would have stressed much more whether
at the very beginning of Islam there was really a
state. A state emerged later on. Just a few months
ago, incidentally, I again came across a reference
to the fact that even the Ottoman Empire called
itself a Dawlat [state]. They didnt call themselves
Imbaraturiyya [empire].
These are indications of some of the ques-
tions one might ask: How are certain political
structures and events named and what does nam-
ing them one way rather than another imply? Any-
way, you were going to ask me something and I in-
terrupted you.
Bardawil: To come back to how Sulayman Bashir
relates to that 2011 piece, it seems to me that there
your concern is mostly a theoretical one with how
to think the questions of ideology, the state, and
religion. You were also very much ill at ease with
the question of mediation between the nondiscur-
sive and the discursive in the Marxist tradition.
That seems to me to be different from the 2011
piece, which is not about a theoretical unease but
rather about staking out a politics that is not con-
fined by the boundaries of the state. That there is
a continuity but also a difference between the two
pieces is what I am trying to get to.
36:1 2016
Asad: Yes, I think youre right. There may well be
continuity and of course its now different. There
is a different question. I am now trying to address
that question: what is it to say that you can have
politics that is not focused on the state at all? Given
that the state is a framework, what does that mean?
And you know that seems to me not very easy to
answer, but I have some beginnings of a direction
and that is also a rethinking of what it might mean
to have a certain ethics that is not just theoretical,
an ethics that is also practical and the need per-
haps to rethink that. Again, I am concerned not
to legislate but to suggest this may be a more fruit-
ful way of thinking, and if one wants to have some
kind of an Islamic politics then perhaps that is a
more useful way to think about it than how you are
going to get control of the state and run it. I mean
look at the mess we now have in Egypt. Its also the
need for questioning something that has become
basic to so much Islamist thought. For example,
the entire process called Al-a mr bil-maruf wal
nahi an al-munkar [Commanding what is right
and forbidding what is wrong] is assumed to be
part of a state structure, as it is in Saudi Arabia. It
is usually thought of as an organization rather than
a processit is supposed that there must be an or-
ganization and that the organization must be part
of a state. I found the activities of the mutawwain
who are part of that organization deeply disturb-
ing when I lived in Saudi Arabia during my moth-
ers last illness.
Bardawil: In 1978?
Asad: 19767 7, I think my mother died in 1977,
and I was there for a year and a half, and having
to listen to all that stuff on television and radio
for a whole year upset me very much. But all that
is taken for granted and it is taken for granted
by many Islamist parties. You know, I dont think
there should be any such thing as an Islamist party.
Things, institutions of that kind, which are funda-
mentally both practical and moral, should not be
thought of as having the power of the state behind
them. And therefore, should not be thought of
as being part of the state. You know, we need to
17. See Asad, Ideology, Class, and the Origins of
the Islamic State.

rethink this matter. I am often asked, so what do
you think we should do? For Gods sake! Try and
think about it yourself. There isnt a final answer
that one human being can give regarding ques-
tions of that kind. They should be part of ongo-
ing work, ongoing thought, ongoing practice and
experimentation.
But I will tell you something that has always
upset me apropos some of the things you were say-
ing about my polemical writing, about, you know,
[Salman] Rushdie and also in a very different
way . . .
Bardawil: Yes and about Elie Kedourie, which I
thought were the harshest polemics you engaged
in.18
Asad: I got very annoyed. Ill tell you what makes
me really angry. I find the arrogance of people
talking about others extremely difficult to bear.
And I found Rushdies judgmentalism toward
all these immigrants, and his lack of any kind of
compassion for people who are already suffering
in all sorts of ways, and his self-adoration, looking
fondly at himself always and preoccupied with his
own experiencesas he still is, dancing around in
New York, endearing himself to New Yorkersall
that difficult to stand. Arrogance seems to me to
apply even to the writing of Orientalists, one of the
things about Orientalism that I dont like.
Bardawil: Which seems to me to be basically also
highlighted in the agenda of the Review for Middle
Eastern Studies and in your review of Edward Saids
Orientalism.19
Asad: Yes.
Bardawil: One of the distinctions between your
earlier critique of Orientalist scholarship and
Saids is that you did not emphasize the Western
origins of concepts per se but the authority behind
these discourses.
In fact in the 1978 introduction to the third
issue of the Review of Middle East Studies that you
cowrote with Roger Owen, you criticize those who
distinguish concepts based on their Western and
18. Elie Kedourie (192692) was an Iraqi-born ment in 1990. See Asad, Politics and Religion
British historian and political scientist of the in Islamic Reform, for a critique of Kedourie,
modern Middle East, who taught at the London and Asad, Genealogies of Religion, for a critique
School of Economics from 1953 until his retire- of Rushdie.
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 1 61
non-Western origins rather than on their author-
ity, and thats a point you go back to in your short
review of Saids Orientalism in the English Historical
Review, where you mention that you wish he had
inquired more about where the authority of these
discourses comes from, since similar discourses
have been deployed against the Irish and working
classes in the West.
So again this question of the West and the
non-West, at that point at least in your intellec-
tual trajectory, is put on the side and what is high-
lighted more is the authority of discourses. Am I
warranted in thinking that that is what you had in
mind?
Asad: Yes, absolutely, and I think that the authority
is often very self-regarding. I am interested in fact
in thinking about authority itself, as you know.
Bardawil: Yes.
Asad: And about discipline but I just dont like . . .
Let me put it very crudely: I dont like bullies and
I feel that a lot of people who write, whether they
are in academia or in the media, write as bullies
and as people given to sneering. They have been
accustomed to writing from positions of power,
and they think that all they need to do is to rest on
that fact, that they have power behind them, and
that they dont need to use their brains or to think,
because they know that if they have the big stick,
figuratively speaking, they will win.
Bardawil: Yes.
Asad: I dont like that. That is one kind of posi-
tion taking that I dont like and you may ask me
why I dont like it and I dont know. In any case,
its not intellectually respectable even in liberal
terms to refuse to think critically of ones own po-
sition. Liberals are supposed to think and supposed
to think critically about imposed limits, but they
often dont. Liberals arent what they claim to be,
and you know Marxists too who want to help eman-
cipate everybody dont always do that, and thats
what worries me too.
So perhaps mine is not a very satisfactory po-
19. See Asad, Review of Orientalism.
1 62 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
sition, but its where I am. And again to come back
to taking a position, it is really partly what I am
that leads me on. Heres a position: I understand
and find myself very sympathetic to the kind of
statement by E. M. Forster: If there is a conflict
between my friends and my country, I hope I will
have the courage to betray my country, rather than
my friends. Now thats a position. Do you know
the statement?
Bardawil: No, I dont know it.
Asad: I somehow immediately warmed to it. I
dont warm to everything hes written although he
is a tremendous novelist. I wonder whether it ap-
pears in a little book or essay he wrote called Two
Cheers for Democracy (1951).
You might want [to check it out]. A very old
book. I remember reading it as a student and being
rather struck by it. It may be in that book, I am not
sure, but there was a certain amount of talk about
the First World War in it.
Bardawil: One last question on this issue: The
kinds of interventions whether in the South or over
here and the question of political practice that you
brought up seem to me quite fruitful to think with
further. I can imagine someone who is in Beirut,
lets say a Marxist, saying, well who is it that you
would like to render uncomfortable? We would
like to render the Salafis more uncomfortable. In
a sense the question of positionality is partially re-
lated to who you are opposing or who is it that you
think is occupying a hegemonic position against
you. So they may say what if your own discourses
travel to Beirut and are put to work against us?
What kind of political effects would they generate?
And in asking this question I have in mind the ve-
hement responses of some Levantine Marxists to
Saids Orientalism in the 1980s. You probably know
the piece by Sadik Jalal Al-A zm (1981)?
Asad: Indeed.
Bardawil: Also, Mahdi Amil, an Althusserian Leba-
nese Marxist, wrote a polemic against Orientalism in
1985. Initially, Saids book was read in Beirut at the
height of the Iranian Revolution, at a point when
some of the 1960s New Left militant intellectuals
were falling under the influence of Khomeinis en-
dogenous revolutionary rhetoric. It is of course a
36:1 2016
more complex moment, but those who remained
attached to the Marxist tradition saw themselves
simultaneously attacked by those under the sway of
the Iranian revolution and militant political Islam
and the New Yorkbased literary critic [Said] who
was warning them of self-Orientalization and por-
traying them as culturally alienated to the West by
dubbing Marx an Orientalist.
The question could be put to you: Who is it
that you want to make uncomfortable?
Asad: First of all, I want just to come back briefly
to what you say Edward said. Did he in fact say
that there were all these alienated people? I dont
remember.
Bardawil: No.
Asad: I dont remember that in Orientalism.
Bardawil: He didnt say cultural alienation but he
mentioned that there is a risk of self-Orientalization.
Thats in the books conclusion.
Asad: Oh, I didnt know that. Yes, well of course,
to take of a part of the question, which you put.
Well of course, things can have effects in multiple
spaces, as David Scott would say, problem-spaces,
even for which they were not intended and this can
often be very fruitful, as it can be undermining
and demoralizing.
First of all, I am not sure that one can re-
strain oneself on the ground that it might have
an unintended effect. Clearly one has to make
some kind of judgment. I mean I can tell you now
that Edward is dead but Ive had lots of disagree-
ments, theoretical disagreements, conceptual dis-
agreements, with the book, which on the whole I
liked and admired very much and which was very
encouraging to all of us who had similar orienta-
tions. I have talked about Edwards work to friends
as well as to students, and I have been urged to
write some of my comments down but I have never
done that. And thats because to do so would mean
to identify with his opponents. What Edward
stood for was a certain defensive position in the
West vis- -v is the Middle East, especially Israel/
Palestine. And therefore to criticize him would be
seen to attack him, which would of course delight
many people and be used by them for their own
polemical purposes. Now thats a kind of judgment

and I did make that judgment. I have no plans for
publishing anything on Edwards work although I
have quite a lot of notes, where exactly I disagree
with Orientalism and why, and so forth. But I dont
think that publishing what I have to say on this
matter is of any significance now either for my own
self-clarification (thats been done) or for the clari-
fication of other people, most of whom will already
have worked out for themselves what I have to say.
So I havent any plans to publish it. But that posi-
tion is the result of an assessment that is itself a
combination of both a moral position and a theo-
retical one.
Of course one is always making decisions of
that kind. So when one talks about positionality
one sometimes forgets that one is always making
decisions for a multiplicity of motives, a multiplic-
ity of reasons, in very different kinds of situations,
which are not permanent. So nothing is fixed in
stone but nothing is without this dimension of
context. And how one acts regarding who to make
uncomfortable include attitudes like one doesnt
do certain things to ones friends. This is not
something I decide on after careful consideration
of arguments pro and con. It is something I have
inherited and everybody has inherited. It is part
of the moral tradition that makes one what one is.
So what does one say in response to the ques-
tion, who do you want to make uncomfortable?
There is no universal answer to that. If one says
something because one judges that the value of
making a criticism in publicparticularly a criti-
cism that urges people to raise certain questions
then this is more important than deciding on who
will be made uncomfortable. But when I first men-
tioned making people uncomfortable I was think-
ing of liberals in general. Anyone who claims that
they are committed as a matter of principle to
critical thought, that critical expression in public
is supremely important (I dont think so but liber-
als generally do) and then doesnt actually practice
this should be made to feel uncomfortable.
But going back to positionality, one of the
things I regret very much is that I am not any lon-
ger very close to my maternal relatives in Saudi
Arabia. This is simply one aspect of the fact that I
live in the West and teach in the West. True, I go
often to the Middle East, far more often to coun-
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 163
tries where I have no relatives but where I have very
close friends, such as Cairo. The result is that, as I
say to my friends there, my heart is in Cairo but my
brain, unfortunately, is here. Where one lives and
works makes all the difference to how one can or
cant actively intervene in public affairsand also
how one is emotionally affected by what goes on in
places where ones heart is. That complicates ones
positionality.
Bardawil: Yes, weve had this discussion.
Asad: Right, have we talked about this?
Bardawil: Yes.
Asad: So you know, it is so difficult living in this
way, but thats our modern world for many of us.
The consequences are often not good, and one
may make mistakesone does make mistakes
but one can only hope that they are not too dam-
aging. I dont have a great deal of confidence in
the value of intellectual work. To the extent that it
does have value, it is more often a matter of people
who are in the wrong place, like [Henry] Kissing-
ers value to state power. Most of us are not likely
to be in that kind of position, of course. So I think
that for most of us it is no more than a matter of
offending the sensibilities of a few people in some
part of the world.
Bardawil: Or disabling their critiques?
Asad: Or disabling their critiques? No, their cri-
tique should be strong enough to withstand a fee-
ble assault, stronger than what I or someone else
might say, and they should be able to accommo-
date and go beyond our criticisms. So there is a
multiplicity of performances, yes, as David [Scott]
says, of different problem-spaces.
Bardawil: A nd in different relationships to
traditions?
Asad: And in different relationships to traditions,
thats a problem with life that one should always be
aware of: one should look carefully at what David
calls problem-spaces to see how they articulate
with traditions and with genealogies. In my view,
164 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36:1 2016

incidentally, tradition and genealogy are not in-
compatible although it is said they are.
Bardawil: One thing that Ive always thought about
concerning your work is not only your skepticism
toward the value of intellectual labor that one can
see at different points but also your skepticism to-
ward political practice or toward what can political
practice realize, and if I may tie that to the ques-
tion of emancipation as well, which you touched
upon very lightly when you said that the Marxist
view of emancipation shares a lot with the liberal
view. Am I warranted, I mean . . .
Asad: Yes. Well let me come back to that in a min-
ute, Fadi.
Bardawil: Sure.
Asad: But I think . . .
Bardawil: The question of politics?
Asad: Yes, or practice. You know, one of the things
that I feel . . . Let me come at it from another angle
and talk about the contemporary situation. I am
deeply pessimistic about the outcome of these
present crises that modern society has landed us
in, and no person has produced them out of ill-w ill
or as the result of a single project that has deliber-
ately brought us here. You know this was the point
about the glacial shifts that I talked about once, a
long time ago, where new landscapes are created,
and where different paths emerge by myriad acci-
dents.20 But this is where weve landed ourselves. It
wasnt predestined from the start that we should
be walking along this path. And what happens to
every culture and civilization, or even to moder-
nity, wasnt necessary from the start, but heres
where we are.
Of course, I am deeply pessimistic. At the
same time, I am hopeful in another way that I am
entirely wrong and that people with a younger time
frame than mine have a longer perspective, and an
energy, which I dont have. Just as the young can-
not feel what it is like to be old, the old no longer
feel the energy and determination of the young.
At any rate, if I stand apart from political practice
its not that I think its something thats all right
for somebody else but not for me. Initially, in my
early years, practice seemed wrong for me because
I was uncertain about many things, and because
as far as the tension between understanding and
political action went, I was more on the side of
trying to understand. In a sense I was always on
the Left: I tended to vote for a socialist party (Old
Labor), and whenever there was some expression
of public opinion, some occasion for solidarity,
I found myself on the Left. So in that minimal
sense, I was involved in political practice. I have
never voted here, by the way, either for [Barack]
Obama or for [George W.] Bush, that is, since I be-
came entitled to vote as an American citizen. But
now the question of practice seems to be beyond
my grasp, I think that it is not out of a principled
desire to have a pure position, to not be involved
in mistakes. I think the possibility of making fatal
mistakes or right choices are no longer there any-
way for somebody my age.
So it is more a question of saying this is how I
see it and I find the solution impossible to envisage.
On a smaller scale, but not therefore painless, this
is what is happening in Syria, right? Many people
feel they dont know what the answer is and they
dont think that supporting one side or the other
is going to produce a humane solution. But I still
hope, in spite of the fact that I feel these crises are
insoluble, and that they are globaland you know
that global financial capitalism is a dangerous
beastI still hope that young people have the en-
ergy and the perspective, and the ability to take up
a position, that they may be able to do something
admirable because they are differently placed gen-
erationally and politically. Anyway, thats how I see
political practice now.
Its not a general position. Its not that I think

20. The second major difficulty with the clas-
sic assumptions about ideology is that they
exaggerate the importance of consciousness
in explaining historical patterns of inequal-
ity: Historical conditions change like land-
scapes created by glaciersusually slowly, al-
ways contingentlyon which old paths that
followed old inequalities become irrelevant
rather than being consciously rejected (Asad,
Are There Histories of Peoples without Eu-
rope?, 607).

everybody should stop being involved in political
practice. I make no claim to higher political wis-
dom. Its an inability to do otherwise, so its hardly
a moral choice (in the Kantian sense) either. But
it is also bound up with a desperate hope that I
am wrong, that something positive will emergea
hope that is fed not by utopianism but by a sense
that we are always predicting history and we are
nearly always wrong, and wrong more often than
not about the big things. Things emerge in ways we
havent imagined or couldnt imagine because we
were at an inappropriate point or because we were
too close in time. And that feeds my hope that in-
deed political practice may be important for some
people. You see what I am saying?
Bardawil: Yes, I do.
Asad: It is not something that I have an absolute
position on at all. So, I dont know whether that
was one question you had.
Bardawil: Yes, I have a question following from
that. Reading through your oeuvre with Marxs
aphorism from The Eighteenth of Brumaire in mind
that people make their own history but not under
conditions of their own choosingyour emphasis,
I think, is always on the structural side: on the con-
ditions and not on their making of their own his-
tory. In your earlier Marxist phase, you highlight
the logics of history that cant be captured by the
face-to-face encounters of ethnography and by a
symbolic anthropology that focuses on a totality of
meanings that negate the transformations at the
structural level.
And with time you stop talking about logics
of history and relations and forces of production,
which are still there prominently in the London
School of Economics Malinowski lecture (1979),
and you start talking about the West as a moral
project, particularly in Conscripts of Western
Civilization (1990).21 But I think whats continu-
ous, and I dont know what you think of this, is
that whether youre talking about the logics of his-
tory or whether youre talking about the West what
21. See Asad, Anthropology and the Analysis
of Ideology, and Asad, Conscripts of Western
Civilization.
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 165
persists is your interest in subterranean historical
transformations that are shaping our lives.
I recall, of course, the review of Eric Wolfes
Europe and the People without History (1987) that you
mentioned right now in which you point out that
historical conditions change like landscapes cre-
ated by glaciers, contingently and most of the time
slowly. I would like to relate that to what I thought
was a different view of historical transformation
in Conscripts of Western Civilization that was
written three years later and emphasizes more of
a sense of a break and a faster one, rather than
the image of shifting glaciers. I dont know if you
agree to . . .
Asad: Yes.
Bardawil: To my structuralist reading.
Asad: Yes, I think so, looking back on it, because
you know I havent really, except for occasions
when Ive had interviewsI havent really thought
of my work overall in this way. I think, I think you
are right. I think, you know, I am still convinced
both that there was a real break and that the break
was a conceptual one, insofar as there is a project.
Collective life is becoming more and more friable
now. It is more and more broken up and implau-
sible, for the present at any rate. This is part of a
gradual shift rather than a revolutionary break.
But there has been until now a certain kind of
project and this is what I think of as the West. But
this friability may be why that project doesnt usu-
ally work, hasnt worked, why it has provoked its
opposites as well, and its defeats. But the process
of working toward a project and a sense that really
there are more fundamental kinds of shifts going
on, often complicating that project, makes one
thinkat least it ought to make one thinkmore
deeply about the old questions of continuity and
change.
And this is partly what Ive tried to think
later on, in relation to secularism, as something ex-
hibiting both continuity with and rupture from the
earlier period. I know, people say its all very well
166 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
making abstract statements of that kind but they
mean very little. But for me theyre basically ori-
enting statements. I try and push forward and say:
What are the questions here that would give ones
understanding further density, make it more use-
ful, questions that one might ask about continuity
and rupture? And I think that in that sense, you
know my later work, which we havent on the whole
touched on, is where I try to think about such ques-
tions.22 My work on religion and secularism tries to
grapple with the question of rupture and of conti-
nuity, of the conscious as well as the unconscious
actions. So its something that I think I have been
concerned with, and I think that one of the best
ways, at least at the moment, is to think through
the question of tradition as somehow providing
a space for both clear-cut ruptures and continu-
ities and gradual shiftsor at any rate, claimed
continuities, or attempted continuities in difficult
circumstances.
But thinking about shifts in my work, I think
of Marxwho was a very important part of my
intellectual formation a s someone who went
through a series of different positions and alli-
ances, out of which, in each case, he developed his
ideas. But you know he was a thinker of a quite
exceptional order so its not surprising that he
should have come out on each occasion with a
clearer theoretical perspective, more dynamic and
powerful than many other thinkers. He starts off
with someone, whether its [Pierre-Joseph] Proud-
hon, or the young Hegelians or whoever, and he
goes through all of them. Hes an ally at one point
and then he attacks them and comes out each time
more interestingly so one forgives him for, as it
were, apparent betrayals. But these were all expe-
riences that were enormously fertile. However, we
cant all be Marx, although we can be inspired by
him, and by his example of working through a se-
ries of quite different positions. Who knows what
Marxism might be today if Marx had lived another
twenty years?
Bardawil: You said that liberalism and Marxism
are part of you. Islam too, I may add, and anthro-
pology as a discipline and its sensibilities that one
36:1 2016
cultivates. I am thinking about the different kinds
of commitments that these traditions require, or
the different kinds of reasonings one deploys in
them. How do you basically think through that
question? A lot of people in the modern world in a
sense inhabit a multiplicity of traditions that may
be conflicting . . .
Asad: You mean how do they?
Bardawil: How do you think through that ques-
tion, maybe for yourself; you do inhabit in a sense
multiple traditions, and of course traditions are
not closed rooms with no windows. There is a back
and forth between them but there may be also
some fundamental tensions.
Asad: Absolutely, there are fundamental tensions.
And you know I think thats a good thing. Cer-
tainly tensions are states we have not always ad-
equately understood. Although you know, one of
the thinkers, a Western thinker who has done so
very productively, is Freud, talking about various
kinds of tensions and ambiguities and the way in
which something pushes them aside or translates
them into other symbolic forms, either finding
oneself blocked or provided with creative energy.
I think that this is something we need to appreci-
ate, even as we attempt to develop a coherent posi-
tion across several traditionsIslamic, anthropo-
logical, socialist, European philosophical thought,
etcetera.
This brings me to the question of the Is-
lamic tradition. I cant for the life of me see why
people thought I was somehow trying to general-
ize about the nature of Muslim experience, or pro-
posing that Salafi Islam was the real Islam, but
some people have claimed just that, which is really
quite extraordinary. You know what I was doing
was to look at ways in which people have tried to
construct an anthropological object of inquiry,
and I say that it doesnt work that way but it could
work this way, if one thinks about it as a tradition.
So what I had to say was certainly not normative.
Both some Muslims as well as some non-Muslims
have claimed that I seek to describe the essence
of real Muslim experience, that I imply ortho-
22. See Asad, Genealogies of Religion, and Asad,
Formations of the Secular.

dox religious beliefs are more important than eco-
nomic and political life, and that I dont allow for
secular experiences, for religious doubts, etcetera.
But thats nonsense. What I say is that Islamic tra
dition is part of the life of Muslims and that think-
ing through tradition is a way of addressing ques-
tions of power and temporality. But fundamentally
tradition is a concept, and as empirical phenomena
traditions are multiple, often inhabited by a single
person, sometimes broken or ignored.
Bardawil: Yes, thats what I meant.
Asad: Yes, there should be other ways of speaking
about conflicts than contradiction because that
immediately introduces the notion of some kind of
discourse within which contradictions occur. In
any case, the requirement to think about various
conditions of existence, and about the language
that we use in them, and the assumptions that are
deducible by others from our language, is com-
plex. There is in any case a difference between liv-
ing in a certain way and living a life within what
one can describe as a tradition, glimpsing oneself
as livingtrying to livea tradition. are very proud of the fact that America is a great
So the very many questions about incommen-
surabilities can be highlighted by self-reflection as
well as by collectivities engaged in a certain way of
life, and life is always full of difference and con-
flict. And the contradictions may not be resolvable
intellectuallyi f at all. I dont know whether I might not be a solutionon the contrary, where
have ever told you of a story from the time my wife
and I first stayed in Cairo for a whole year, which
was in 197172. It was a wonderful period. We re-
ally discovered Cairo at that time. One of the nice
people we met was a taxi driver whom we came
to know quite well, and we went to his home for
meals and he came over to our home. He regularly
took us around Cairo, including areas which were
Ashwaiyyat [Favelas]. You know places were poor
immigrants were . . .
Bardawil: Yes of course.
Asad: And he told us about the people pouring in
from the countryside. When they come here, he
said, there was nothing: no proper roads, no run-
ning water except for one or two public pumps,
open sewers, and so on. And I saidhed stopped
and shown us aroundand I said: Ayh al-hall yani?
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 1 67
[So what is the solution?] So he stopped and he
looked at me, at first he was a bit puzzled, and then
eventually he said, Ma fish hall [There is no solu-
tion] in a casual way. And I thought a lot about
that afterward and I realized he was surprised that
I thought just because there was this big problem
there had to be a solutionin this case a solution
that might consist of private investments or pres-
sure on the government, or whatever.
Bardawil: Yes.
Asad: The point was that I immediately assumed
that because there was a problem there had to be
a solution. We are constantly in problematic social
situations where we think there has to be a solu-
tion. You know, this is again, I think, something
bequeathed to us by modernity. But one of the
things that calls for some thinking is, what are the
implications of thinking that every social problem
has to have a solution? Put another way, why do we
think that so many things we encounter are prob-
lems that call for a solution?
And of course, you know, many Americans
place for get-up-a nd-go people: We are a people
who always find solutions. We will find solutions
to Americas problems, lack of energy, collapse of
the economy, terrorism, whatever. Why not think
about the implications of a situation where there
things can only get worsewhat are the implica-
tions of that? Is it simply a matter of saying, I insist
that we must find a solution? What kind of a posi-
tion is that? What does it mean to do that? What I
want to say is that our lives today consist of differ-
ence, of incommensurabilities, of lacunae, of shifts
and ambiguities that we are not aware of.
Bardawil: Of course.
Asad: In any case, I should stress that tradition
cant cover everything, all aspects of ones life.
Bardawil: It cant cover, as you once mentioned,
how it is that one tradition is stronger than
another.
Asad: Yes.
Bardawil: Or how it is that a particular position
within a tradition gains prominence over others.
168 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
Asad: Yes, exactly.
Bardawil: This question puzzles me.
Asad: Yes, that is a good question, and it is the
source of my dissatisfaction with some of Ma-
cIntyres later work, especially his Three Rival Ver-
sions of Moral Enquiry: Encyclopaedia, Genealogy, and
Tradition (1991). How do we know, as between com-
peting traditions, which is the better? His answer
is, roughly, that the stronger tradition is the one
that can resolve the problems of the tradition that
cant resolve its own problems. This seems to me
too intellectualist.
Bardawil: The strength of a certain tradition may
not be related to what is internal to it but rather to
politico-economic power?
Asad: It may certainly be that, yes.
Bardawil: I am trying to think about the internal
resources of a tradition as well.
Asad: The internal resources of a tradition have
also to do with an embodied commitment. My
point is that the resources need not have to do with
intellectualizing, of being convinced by the power
of an argument made available in a tradition. You
know there is a statement in one of Ghazalis works
that I was struck by in which he talks about em-
bodied commitment. He says something like, Oh
to have the faith of the old women of Nishapur! Do you
know that?
Bardawil: I know that, yes.
Asad: When I first read it a long time ago I
thought, What does he mean? So there is a kind
of embodiment, a kind of being placed and know-
ing that one is placed without having to intellec-
tualize or reason. But even the felt power of an
intellectual argument may depend on something
prior. You know, there is something, in one of my
favorite novelsI dont know whether youve read
itby Jane Austen, called Persuasion.
Bardawil: No, I havent read it.
Asad: You should read it because one of the things
that she shows is how questionable our celebration
36:1 2016
of the idea of persuasion is, because we think of
it as the result of reason as opposed to coercion.
Bardawil: Yes.
Asad: And she shows that persuasion is itself a
very ambiguous form of power. Because the way
in which you can appeal to somebody, the way in
which you can, as it were, persuade them to do
something, to take an attitude that otherwise they
wouldnt, may be very negative, even for the person
concerned. You know this is pre-Freud of course,
but still, it makes one aware yet again that there
isnt a sharp dichotomy between what we think of
as the exercise of power and coercion on the one
hand, and free reason, argument, and being per-
suaded on the other hand. These are ambiguous
conditions that are not always quite distinct.
There is a wonderful book about reminis-
cences I have here somewhere, which I urge you to
read since you are interested in Freud, which you
must be teaching.
Bardawil: Very much so.
Asad: Read it. It is a beautiful book.23 She was an
American writer and Freuds patient. I read it with
great profit. I forget what her name was. I cant
remember. They dont, they dont actually, give it
here. But anyway, it is quite an early book and has
been reprinted.
Bardawil: Her name is H.D.
Asad: Yes, but I think you find out later inside
somewhere her full name.
Bardawil: So what is this book about?
Asad: It suddenly struck me that there was some-
thing remarkable about this womans relationship
to the master, something that Freud himself does
not theorize. Although in some of his critiques of
Freud, Wittgenstein does so. And that is suggest-
ibility. Suggestibility is the preexisting attitude of
H.D. toward Freud. You can see that when Freud
explains something, when he turns her attention
to something shed said or done, she latches on
to that and incorporates it. This is something one
might call suggestibility, and its presence deter-
23. H.D., Tribute to Freud.

mines whether and to what extent we will be per-
suaded. It may or may not be a constant with all of
us. But it is very important for thinking about how
one tradition appears to have greater resources for
dealing with the problems confronting another
tradition than the latter has on its own. I havent
thought adequately about this. But clearly some
people are harder to persuade than others. And
its part of what defines everybodys life, persuades
them that they are living a contradiction, that
they need a solution. But the first precondition is
that they stop and reflect on what they are saying
or doing. There is no contradiction for a person
who doesnt reflect in this way. I dont think that
my mother at any point thought that she was liv-
ing a contradictory life even though she was aware
of and had adopted some Western ways. And even
when she came to London for a couple of years
to live with me she never indicated that she was
confronting a contradiction. She was a totally
unintellectual woman. You know she didnt have
much education. In her time Saudi girls didnt go
to school; she learned how to read and write a little
bit later on in her life.
So contradiction is of course an expression
of reflection of some kind, of directed conscious-
ness of some kind, of the need for an intellectual
solution of some kind. To the extent that your life
is an embodied process, a patterned movement
through places, times, people, then even though
you might sometimes do things that you regret,
or that you think you should have done, you still
do not have a notion of contradiction. And I am
not sure that thats necessarily a bad thing. The as-
sumption that only through intellectual reflection
do we have an entre into something higher, closer
to God, by virtue of reflection, seems to me quite
extraordinary.
Its intellectuals particularlylet me put it
more cautiouslyw ho are aware of living con-
tradictory lives. Lives that are sometimes incom-
mensurable because we have a conception of how
things relate to each other and what is translatable
and what isnt translatable. Questions that become
acute for intellectuals are different from those that
most ordinary people live through in their ordi-
nary lives, in their suffering, in their enjoyment,
and so on. Anyway, you have other questions.
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 1 69
Bardawil: Unless they suffer?
Asad: Unless they sufferwhat do you mean un-
less they suffer?
Bardawil: Unless the contradictions of ordinary
people lead to their suffering.
Asad: I am saying simply that the experience is not
normally intellectualized, whether it is suffering or
enjoyment or boredom. . . . Of course, sometimes
one says, he promised this and yet I suffer. The
government and [Hosni] Mubarak promised us a
better life but we have a miserable life, we havent
enough to eat, we live in fear. Yes, if one raises
questions of that kind, then indeed one can see
that there is a contradiction between somebodys
promise, somebodys claim to do good to you and
somebodys actions that show he isnt concerned
about you at all.
Bardawil: To go back to the question of political
practice, I think ma fish hall [there is no solution]
on the intellectual level may mean something, but
on the political and societal level it is something
else. What we are witnessing now in the Arab world
is probably one of the most important political
events of my generation. No one, or very few peo-
ple, thought that the shattering of these authori-
tarian postcolonial regimes was going to happen
so quickly, particularly because some of them, like
Mubaraks and [Zine El Abidine] Ben Alis, were
quite strong and backed by Western powers.
So, there are a lot of gains on that front. The
ma fish hall seems to me to be skeptical of what can
be done politically for a better life. And here I am
still attached to a notion of emancipation that we
havent talked about yet: an emancipation from
authoritarianism and from economic exploitation.
And it seems to me that you no longer think in
these terms, that youre very critical of emancipa-
tory politics.
Asad: Yes, I am critical of it, which is not to say, of
course, that I dont agree with you when you say
that something really quite astonishing has hap-
pened in the Arab world, particularly in Egypt
and Tunisia, with regard to the fall of regimes that
seemed to be not simply repressive but somehow
a blockage of a certain kind. When I say I am so
struck by the idea that there is no solution, what I
170 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
meant was that I wanted to think more about what
is assumed in difficulties having a solution. For ex-
ample, one of the things increasingly I feeland
I am not there in Egypt, and thats why I feel very
dissatisfied in saying what Im saying. You know I
havent been there since we left.
Bardawil: Last summer?
Asad: The 31st of May of 2011, and a lot has hap-
pened since then. But, you know, maybe there too
we need to think, I mean, apart from various kinds
of repression, of police repression and brutality,
and the need for reform in the ministry of the inte-
rior and the security police. But on a wider canvas,
I am not sure that rushing forward with big solu-
tions to big problems (Freedom and Justice!)
is necessarily right when one does not know all the
questions that need to be pondered. I think that
what is happening, in Egypt, what will happen,
is going to take very considerable time, learning,
and failing to learn. One needs to ponder ques-
tions about the internal circumstances as well as
the pressures from outside the country, which are
very considerable.
One of the things I find difficult about the
situation in Egypt is that its not just a matter of
saying, give it some time and well have a liberal
democratic society, or a revolutionary society. You
know, I would feel unhappy if either began to take
firm shape. But I am not sure what the alternative
to both might look like, and I think there are very
few people, correct me if I am wrong, who would
be prepared to say, we dont know what kind of
society would be best, practicable, and just, and
so on. We dont know yet what these things mean
fully, given the world were in and given the vari-
ous traditions that exist in Egypt. And yes, there
isnt a singular tradition in Egypt in any sense.
Not only are there religious and secular tra-
ditions, but [there are] different kinds of secular
ones, different kinds of religious traditions. I think
that there may be far too quick a reaction among
some people who give the impression that they re-
ally know already what the hall [solution] is, and
what the process of conflict, of bitter disappoint-
ments, of big betrayals and little ones, of foolish
36:1 2016
grandstanding, and so on, will eventually produce.
Is there a single answer to all of that? . . . I must
have sent you, you must have seen that last thing I
wrote on Egypt right?
Bardawil: Yes, I actually have.
Asad: It was written literally in April of . . .
Bardawil: 2011?
Asad: 2012. It was submitted to the journal in April
and it came out in the summer, I think in June.24
But you know there are not enough people wanting
to learn from the experience of what is happening.
There are far too many people who think they al-
ready know the answer. And maybe, you know, it is
all very well for us sitting here to say to Egyptians,
Ah! You should sit down and learn about things
properly! You should do this, you should do that!
Their life is being disrupted. Everyday life is dis-
rupted. So, it is not surprising, although it is rather
disturbing to find, that lots of people are saying,
for Gods sake whatever it takes bring back some
order in our lives and to our economic future.
What we have is continuous turbulence in life. And
then the revolutionaries shout: We need a total
change, a total revolution in order to get freedom,
dignity, bread.
You know I hesitate to say that people ought
to sit down and listen and think. Its not for me, in
any case, to say that. But the fact remains, as we are
sitting here and talking, you and I, that I think, for
good reasons as well as bad, people are not pre-
pared to sit back and think about what this experi-
ence means. What might its limitations be? What
might its lessons be? Whom should we talk further
to, to learn more? What kind of practical politics
should we engage in to gain something of what we
want? What should we not engage in at this stage?
My impression is that this isnt the way most people
are thinking or acting. There are practical issues
and I think that people respond to them in practi-
cal terms.
The grand project of emancipation has a
very rocky history, and I am less eager to see peo-
ple aiming for that. And you know, I dont think
what Ive just said is a liberal view. The liberal view
24. See Asad, Fear and the Ruptured State.

is very much concerned with freedom and with
human rights. What is the commitment of liber-
als to human rights if it isnt based on a grand proj-
ect of emancipation, where truth and reason are
supposed to coincide? The imperative to expand
freedom is central to the liberal tradition, not only
in the market but also in moral and political af-
fairs. In fact it is something that is shared both
by Marxism and by liberalism, a notion that the
human species is in a sense imprisoned in nature
but that it can be freed in history, freed if neces-
sary by force.
This is also paradoxical because they both
agree that there are certain aspects of freedom
that are not allowable: if it is immoral, or if it is ir-
rational, freedom is not allowable. And the issue of
freeing humanity is now addressed by the idea of
human rights. But the language of human rights,
used by revolutionary traditions as well as by lib-
eral ones, has disturbing aspects. But you know,
I am not saying that human rights are impossible
and the attempt to pursue them is wrong. I just
find it deeply disturbing that we assume that we
know what we are doing. I dont think that we have
thought enough about where our drive for free-
dom has brought us. Weve come (to use the old
clich) to various crises in the world as a whole.
You know the freedom of capitalism has given us
not only many good things but also all these fan-
tastic meltdowns. The fact is that we dont know
how to deal with this monster that has the world in
its grip. I dont see how talk about freedom is going
to help us in this crisis. It may even be that many of
those grand projects of freedom have contributed
to creating this megacrisis.
Bardawil: Even freedom from it?
Asad: Well, to some extent, our freedom from it
depends on too many problematic conditions, I
think, because coercion and freedom are closely
connected. Incidentally, do you know that very in-
teresting book by Aziz Rana about freedom?
Bardawil: No.
Asad: Two Faces of American Freedom (2010). I found
the book very interestingvery stimulating but at
the same time not entirely convincing in its con-
clusion. He argues that historically American free-
dom has two aspects, two faces, the face of equality
Fadi A. Bardawil An Interview with Talal Asad 171
and freedom on the one side, and subjection and
exclusion on the other. And he begins with settler
colonialism from the earliest period of settlement
and ends with the present. He argues that the com-
plex notion of freedom that America has inher-
ited has now brought us to things like the global
war against terror. But he thinks that the notion
of equality isshould bemore important and
can be appealed to as the more valuable part of
the American heritage. However, I am not entirely
persuaded of this, although I would like to be. I
think that the connection between the two faces
of American freedomthe positive and the nega-
tiveis not simply contingent. I think that some
connections in the history of the US and in the
history of capitalism are not contingent. I think
they are necessary in some sense, that is, exclusion
and subjection are necessary to the very concept of
freedom. You know [Domenico] Losurdos book,
which is also interesting? It is more polemical but
very informative. It is called Liberalism: A Counter
History (2011).
Bardawil: Oh, yes.
Asad: He talks about slavery and quasi slavery in
connection with liberalism. Hes clearly a Marxist
of some kind. But it alerts one to the fact that you
cant pick out one aspect of freedom and ignore its
tendency to exclude and subordinate people. Such
a move is certainly not supported by the history
of the United States, nor by the history of capital-
ism, which has given rise both to liberalism and
Marxism.
Bardawil: So youre basically unsatisfied with the
Marxist critique of liberal freedom?
Asad: Yes. I am dissatisfied.
Bardawil: I am just worried about what this leaves
us with in terms of political practice.
Asad: Well look, dont worry, this doesnt leave you
anywhere in particular. It leaves you in a situation
of trying to get to where you want to be. It is not
putting you anywhere special. If you are not per-
suaded you can think as freely as anybody. You can
reject (you will reject) whatever you dont like in
what Ive said. I myself would like to think about
something that is both a kind of practice, a kind of
politics if you like, and at the same time an ethics.
172 Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East
A practice to which example (a way of living) may
be more important than producing arguments or
giving orders and forcing people to do something.
I dont know, I dont know what the answer to your
demand for the right kind of political practice
might be if its a general answer youre looking for.
Bardawil: All right, I think I took all of your time.
Asad: Well, not all of it.
Bardawil: Thank you very much.
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