Talal Asad was born on 1932 and is a Saudi-born cultural anthropologist who is currently a professor of anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
33 Facts About Talal Asad
2.
Talal Asad is known for his writing calling for an anthropology of secularism.
3.
Talal Asad's work has had a significant influence beyond his home discipline of anthropology.
4.
Talal Asad was born in April 1932 in Medina, Saudi Arabia.
5.
Talal Asad's parents are Muhammad Asad, an Austrian diplomat and writer who converted from Judaism to Islam in his twenties, and Munira Hussein Al Shammari Asad, a Saudi Arabian Muslim.
6.
Talal Asad was born in Saudi Arabia but when he was eight months old his family moved to British India, where his father was part of the Pakistan Movement.
7.
Talal Asad's parents divorced shortly before his father's third marriage.
8.
Talal Asad was raised in Pakistan, and attended a Christian-run missionary boarding school.
9.
Talal Asad is an alumnus of the St Anthony High School in Lahore.
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Talal Asad received his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 1959.
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Talal Asad continued to train as a cultural anthropologist, receiving both a BLitt and PhD from the University of Oxford, which he completed in 1968.
12.
Talal Asad published The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority, and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe in 1970.
13.
Talal Asad became increasingly interested in religiosity, power, and Orientalism throughout his studies.
14.
Talal Asad refers to Edward Said and Michel Foucault as important influences on his work, particularly regarding ideas of power and discipline.
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Talal Asad's first teaching job was at Khartoum University in Sudan, where he spent several years as a lecturer in social anthropology.
16.
Talal Asad returned to the United Kingdom in the early 1970s to lecture at Hull University in Hull, England.
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Talal Asad moved to the United States in 1989, and taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City and Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, before acquiring his current position of Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
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Talal Asad has held visiting professorships at Ain Shams University in Cairo, King Saud University in Riyadh, University of California at Berkeley, and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
19.
Talal Asad's writing portfolio is extensive, and he has been involved in a variety of projects throughout his career.
20.
Talal Asad's books include Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, published in 1973, Genealogies of Religion, published in 1993, Formations of the Secular, published in 2003, and On Suicide Bombing, published in 2007 and written in response to the September 11,2001 attacks.
21.
Talal Asad has said that he wasn't all that interested in this project and that he did it as a favor to a friend.
22.
Talal Asad identifies himself as an anthropologist but states that he is critical of allowing disciplines to be defined by particular techniques.
23.
Talal Asad has expressed frustration with Orientalist assumptions, particularly about religion, which he has said comes from his multicultural Muslim background.
24.
Talal Asad is particularly interested in conceptions of religion as an embodied practice and the role that discipline plays in this practice.
25.
Talal Asad argues for the importance of the historicization of both observer's positions and analytical categories and their insertion within a certain power-knowledge moment and configuration, a theoretical approach he draws from Foucault.
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Talal Asad defines tradition as a set of prescriptive discourses, taught and transmitted, that draw their legitimacy, power and meaning from history.
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Yet, for Talal Asad, there is no such thing as a clear distinction between texts and practices of Islam.
28.
The relationship between Muslims and the texts is what makes Islam, Talal Asad argues, making of orthodoxy 'not just a body of opinion but a relationship of power'.
29.
Talal Asad nonetheless considers that such a confusion reveals the limits of Asad's proposition, which does not explain the articulation between local and global orthodoxies.
30.
Talal Asad argues that the founding of a political tradition is marked by the necessity of violence, and both revolutions and coups use the narrative of necessary violence towards saving and securing the posterity of the nation.
31.
The difference, Arendt and Talal Asad both agree on, is that a revolution involves a vision of beginning anew by founding a new tradition, a new system, whereas a coup is meant to replace individuals in power, therefore conserving a living tradition.
32.
Talal Asad offers several suggestions or potential explanations as to why there is a particular sense of horror when confronted with suicide bombing:.
33.
Talal Asad's goal is to communicate that if there is no such thing as "justified terrorism", there is no such thing as "justified war" and therefore to turn the readers' attention to a critical examination of killing, of dying, and of letting live and letting die in modern global politics.