I do not criticize religion as such, but I criticize the concept and the definition of "religion" - as I said in Genealogies.
Talal AsadI'm not criticizing how people experience what they might call spirituality. I am interested in looking critically at something else - at how people use their language to articulate theories about something they call religion, to say, for example, that "in Islam religion and politics necessarily go together," or to insist that "violence has no place in religion," to universalize it.
Talal AsadTradition is not something a man can learn; not a thread he picks up when he feels like it; any more than a man can choose his own ancestors. Someone lacking a tradition who would like to have one is like a man unhappily in love.
Talal AsadI think we need to think about Islamic tradition as a way of asking questions that cut across (and transgress) the assumptions of a purely secular world in which we already know how things stand for individual subjects as well as for societies.
Talal AsadBelievers are often thought of as people who have some kind of private conviction or repudiation of something, whereas "the faithful" refers to a relationship, which was also incidentally the earlier sense of "faith" in premodern, preliberal Christianity. This is not to say, incidentally, that "faith" refers simply to external behavior as opposed to internal belief but that it refers to an act.
Talal AsadAgency has become a catch word. In a way, this intoxication with โagencyโ is the product of liberal individualism. The ability of individuals to fashion themselves, to change their live, is given ideological priority over the relation within which they themselves are actually formed, situated, and sustained.
Talal Asad