Book Reviews

Formations of the Secular
Talal Asad

Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. 269 pages.

This most interesting and ground-breaking study presents a Foucauldian and
Nietzschean genealogical tracing of the concept of the secular, working
back from the present to the contingencies that have coalesced to produce
current certainties. It asks what an “anthropology of secularism” might look
like and examines the connection between the “secular” as an epistemic cat-
egory and “secularism” as a political doctrine. Asad attempts to avoid the
trap of making pronouncements about secularism’s virtues and vices, irre-
spective of its origin, and to proffer instead an anthropological formulation
of its doctrine and practice. 

According to the author, secularism is more than a mere separation of
religious from secular institutions of government, for it presupposes new
concepts of religion, ethics, and politics; as well as the new imperatives
associated with them, and is closely linked to the emergence of the mod-
ern nation-state (pp. 1-2). In contrast to pre-modern mediations of non-
transcended local identities, secularism is a redefining, transcending, and
differentiating political medium (representation of citizenship) of the self,
articulated through class, gender, and religion (p. 5). 

Concomitantly, he questions the secular’s self-evident character even
when admitting the reality of its “presence” (p. 16). His main premise is that
“the secular” is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism, the
secular being that formation caused by a variety of concepts, practices, and
sensibilities that have come together over time (p. 16). He concludes that the
“secular” cannot be viewed as the “rational” successor to “religion,” but
rather as a multilayered historical category related to the major premises of
modernity, democracy, and human rights.

Within the above introductory framework, the book’s seven chapters are
divided into three parts. The first part, comprising three chapters, explores the
epistemic category of the secular. The following three chapters of part 2



examine the doctrinal aspects of secularism. Finally, chapter 7 investigates
the legal and ethical secularization process during the nineteenth and twenti-
eth centuries in Egypt. Chapter 1, which attempts to clarify what is involved
in the anthropology of secularism, explores the secular’s epistemological
assumptions, focusing on the notion of a Christian and liberal “redemptive”
myth that is so central to the modern idea of enchantment (pp. 16 and 25). His
purpose here is to counter the impression that secular political practices sim-
ulate religious ones by arguing that the sacred and the secular depend upon
each other, rather than one coming after the other (p. 26).

Chapters 2 and 3 discuss agency, pain, and cruelty in relation to embod-
iment, thereby addressing such questions as how attitudes to the human
body, which incorporate dimensions of pain and enjoyment as well as struc-
tures of human senses, differ in various forms of life. Agency is designated
as relevant because a better understanding may be offered as to how “the reli-
gious” and “the secular” are continuously formed and re-formed by know-
ing how, by whom, and in what context it is defined and used. (p. 99). Pain,
connected to agency and the sense of passion, is associated with religious
subjectivity (often regarded as adverse to reason) and with suffering, a con-
dition that secular agency purports to eliminate universally (p. 67). 

The agent, in the secular viewpoint, represents and asserts himself. He
is empowered. Failing so, he becomes the victim of chance and cruelty – of
pain (p. 79). This argument is extended into chapter 3, which reflects on pre-
modern and modern understandings and conceptions of cruelty and torture,
thus suggesting that the idea of cruelty in modern discourse has distinctive
characteristics that can be described as aspects of the secular (p. 100). In fact
the secular, despite its own distinct forms of cruelty, claims that both cruelty
and torture are manifestations of inhumane and uncivilized behavior. This is
why both tend to frequently take secretive deniable forms as opposed to pre-
modern public spectacles of power projection. 

This “secular,” as the second part seeks to argue, claims to redeem the
autonomous human subject through the legal and ethical structure of human
rights. In this respect, the latter constitutes an aspect of secularism as a polit-
ical doctrine. Yet there remain inherent contradictions in this secular doctrine
based on the assumption of the “human,” on which human rights stand:
“Nothing essential to a person’s human essence is violated if he or she suf-
fers as a consequence of military action or of market manipulation from
beyond his own state when that is permitted by international law.” In other
words, human suffering as a state’s citizen is distinguished from the suffer-
ing he or she experiences as a human being (p. 129). 

Book Reviews 113



This is further reflected in chapter 5, which discusses the case of Muslim
religious minorities in Europe. Asad argues that Muslims tend to fail to inte-
grate into European societies not necessarily due to reasons intrinsic to their
faith, as many do argue, but due to Europe’s very self-conception. European
notions of “culture,” “civilization,” and “the secular state,” as well as
“majority” and “minority,” make it extremely difficult for Muslims to be
represented satisfactorily (p. 159). This is particularly so when the modern
nation-state, a European historical construction subsequently universalized,
has come to make an enforced claim to the constitution of legitimate social
identities and arenas (p. 200). From this, chapter 7 finally traces how the
European secular experience came to be universalized as a process, through
transformations undertaken in the arenas of state law and morality, the case
of Egypt being a conspicuous example.

Asad’s work, however, despite its profound depth, seems to fall a step
short of sufficiently addressing the relationship between the religious and the
secular. The continuous and fluid redefinitions of both over time tend to mys-
tify concepts and categories away from the existence of essences. This is why
he could state that the sharp separation between both categories goes hand-
in-hand with the paradoxical claim that the secular continuously produces the
religious (p. 193). Asad seems to ignore or reject outright any possibility of a
universal definition or essence that could still underscore the relationship
between both, for it cannot always simply be a matter of each category being
made and re-made. There must be some essence that defines some unchang-
ing relationship between the religious and the secular. Perhaps this essence is
what is missing in Asad’s work. Having said so, Asad’s brilliant study
remains a defining piece of intellectual and scholarly contribution for all of
those interested in exploring the religious and the secular in the modern era.

Amr G. E. Sabet
Department of Public Management

Vaasa University, Vaasa, Finland

114 The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 23:4