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THE “SECULAR” AS A TRAGIC CATEGORY:

ON TALAL ASAD, RELIGION AND REPRESENTATION1

C C B

Among current efforts to deconstruct the category “religion” is a tendency to problematize

the secular/sacred distinction with the argument that it is simply the product of the
distinctive history of post-Reformation Western Europe. The “secular,” it is claimed,
is a category employed to legitimize the modern state by establishing a boundary
between the authority of the public sphere, in opposition to the privatized sphere of
the individual religious practitioner. This paper analyses this argument as it is devel-
oped by Talal Asad and contrasts his “genealogy” of the secular with Dominique
Colas’ genealogy of the concept of “civil society”. This comparison raises pragmatic
and political concerns about Asad’s perspective, and problematizes his description of
Islamic subjectivity. The paper concludes by furthering Asad’s reading of Walter
Benjamin’s understanding of allegory, in order to argue for the secular as a tragic
category that continues to represent a vital theoretical and political concept.

1. The “secular”

Just as it has become commonplace to problematize the category of

“religion” in scholarly discourse, in recognition of the difficulty (if not
impossibility) of clearly identifying any trans-cultural essence that might
be labelled “religious,” many scholars now call into question the nature
of “secularism” as a social and political concept.2 A leading exponent
of this trend is the anthropologist Talal Asad. In Genealogies of Religion
(1993) and subsequently Formations of the Secular (2003), Asad undertakes
a Foucaultian critique of the notion that the “secular” represents a neu-
tral category. He explains that liberal political theory conceptualizes the
secular state as signifying an institution that privileges no particular reli-
gion, urges toleration of different traditions within a given society, and

1 An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2003 annual meeting of

the Canadian Society for the Study of Religion, Dalhousie University, Halifax. I
would like to thank the following for their helpful comments and suggestions: Bill
Arnal, Willi Braun, Alyda Faber, Darlene Juschka, Kenneth Mackendrick, Katja
Stößel, Philip Ziegler, and an anonymous reviewer.
2 For such an examination of the category “religion,” see: Smith (1998) and

Arnal (2000).

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Method & Theory in the Study of Religion
Also available online – www.brill.nl 17, 149-165
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refuses to grant authority to any truth claims made on the grounds of

religious belief or tradition. Advocates for the secular state do not neces-
sarily consider it to be anti-religious (although it is sometimes understood
that way), but it is considered to be a non-religious perspective.
Asad’s criticism of the understanding of the category “secular” is pre-
cisely that such a society is not, in fact, neutral. He argues that the
category is laden with numerous cultural and political assumptions that
must first be accepted before a secular worldview is adopted or con-
sidered adequate for public discourse.3 For Asad, the standard under-
standing of the secular is grounded on a Western liberal understanding
of “religion” as a universal, generic, and privatized concept. In Genealogies
of Religion, he describes the function of religion in medieval society to
have been a very different form of cultural expression from what in
the modern age is thought to be “religion”. Christianity in this period,
he argues, functioned as a “great cloak” that defined an adherent’s
entire experience of the world. It possessed an “all-embracing capac-
ity”—a distinctive practice and belief system—that disciplined the reli-
gious subject and nurtured certain virtues. Religion was not some
“thing”—some essentially distinct form of culture, process of reasoning,
or experiential state—that existed apart from other cultural experiences.
It encompassed the cultural horizon of the subject’s practices and assump-
tions about the world. Embodied practices, Asad argues, not beliefs,
represented the precondition for varieties of so-called religious experiences
(1993: 76).
To develop this position, Asad engages Clifford Geertz’s influential
definition of religion as a symbolic system, in order to demonstrate
what he understands to be its problematic assumptions. For Geertz, a
religion involves a system of symbols that shape the moods and moti-
vations of human beings. These serve to construct meaning and order
in human existence. Asad observes two central problems with this con-
strual. First, he argues that Geertz’s theory overemphasizes the cogni-
tive element in religious experience. He refers to Augustine’s conflict
with the Donatists in order to argue that, “it is not mere symbols that
implant true Christian dispositions, but power” (35). Asad concurs with
Geertz’s view that there is a connection between religious theory and
practice. What he objects to is his view that Geertz reduces religion to
a cognitive function by emphasizing the primacy of meaning “without
regard to the processes by which meanings are constructed” (44).

3 The nature of secularism is a particularly intense political debate in India at

present. See Bhargava (1998).

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Asad’s second criticism of theories such as that of Geertz results from

his insistence that there cannot be a universal definition of religion,
“not only because its constituent elements and relationships are histor-
ically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product
of discursive processes” (29). The fact that, in the modern period,
religion has been understood to have an autonomous universal essence
is understood by Asad as being the product of one of two strategies:
either it is employed by secular liberals to confine religion to the private
sphere; or the definition serves a liberal (Protestant) Christian apologetic
defence of religion (28).
The primary focus of Asad’s work is with the former strategy that
modernist definitions of religion serve. He argues that it was not until
the emergence of the modern period that a conceptual split was made
to distinguish between the secular and the religious. This shift involved
re-locating religion in the moods and motivations of the individual
believer, rather than on the practices and rituals that discipline and
form the subject (39-42). Religion, it is claimed, was privatized and
removed from the public sphere, in order to allow for the consolidation
of nation states that incorporated numerous religious traditions, while
preventing the specific truth claims or moral codes of any specific tra-
dition from limiting the state’s power. Asad summarizes his view as fol-
lows: “Scholars are now more aware that religious toleration was a
political means to the formation of strong state power that emerged
from the sectarian wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rather
than the gift of a benign intention to defend pluralism” (206). Asad’s
position throughout this genealogical sketch is two-fold: first, he argues
that the generic notion of “religion” suggested by the category of the
“secular” prevents a recognition of the particularities of cultural difference
absorbed under the label “religious;” secondly, he argues that the secular
state does not in fact guarantee toleration of difference, but is in fact
compatible with intolerance (2003: 7).

2. The secular as intolerant

This second concern is the focus of Asad’s recent book Formations of the
Secular. He examines the idea of an “overlapping consensus”—often a
central element of the doctrine of secularism—which amounts to the
argument that a secular society allows people to have different reasons
for subscribing to the same independent secular ethic (“be kind to your
neighbours,” etc). The notion of an “overlapping consensus” is, of
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course, taken from John Rawls, but Asad focuses on Charles Taylor’s
articulation of the concept. Taylor argues that pluralistic societies can
achieve a certain level of universal acceptance of some political principles,
so long as the underlying particular justifications for these principles
are not prescribed (which he claims is the case in the work of Rawls
and Jürgen Habermas). Thus, Taylor argues, “Let people subscribe for
whatever reasons they find compelling, only let them subscribe” (1998:
52). Of course, if no universal procedures or assumptions are required
to justify the principals that are to be subscribed to, it remains to be
shown how it is these principals will be arrived at. Taylor suggests that
disagreements over what constitute shared political principles and
justifications will be resolved through rhetorical persuasion, negotiation,
and compromise.
It is precisely this position towards justification of political principals
and policy that Asad takes issue with. He argues it fails to recognize
the power that established legal procedures and forms of argumentation
have in enforcing the standards of legitimation in a secular society. In
a situation in which disputing parties are unwilling to compromise, Asad
writes: “negotiation simply amounts to the exchange of unequal concessions
in situations where the weaker party has no choice. What happens, the
citizens asks, to the principles of equality and liberty in the modern
secular imaginary when they are subjected to the necessities of the law?”
(2003: 6).
Rather than associating the secular state with reason and tolerance,
or as a space for negotiations between differences, Asad finds myth and
violence (22). What constitutes a private religious view or experience,
he argues, is defined within a “heterogeneous landscape of power” (36).
Thus, “from the beginning,” Asad continues, “the liberal public sphere
excluded certain kinds of people: women, subjects without property,
and members of religious minorities” (183). He perceives a re-articulation
of the Westernized understanding of “religion” in liberal secularism’s
separation of a “public sphere” from the “private” lives of individuals
and particular community identities. Asad argues that religious identity
can only be isolated in some privatized space if religious belief can be
separated from religious practice. That some forms of discourse are rel-
egated to the private sphere implies that “the domain of free speech
is always shaped by preestablished limits” (184).
From this critique of the limits of liberal political theory, Asad’s argu-
ment continues by advocating that those who are excluded from full
participation in this public sphere ought to be more fully included.
When Asad’s work begins to suggest such political implications, some
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of the problems and weakness of his theorizing become clear. The issues
that emerge can be grouped into two primary areas: political represen-
tation, and individual subjectivity.

3. Political Representation: towards deprivatization?

While inclusion of differences and particularities in contemporary soci-

ety is certainly desirable, Asad’s treatment of political interaction is
somewhat simplistic. To say, as he does, that the introduction of reli-
gious discourses into the public debate “may result in the disruption of
established assumptions structuring debate in the public sphere” surely
understates what is at issue. When he suggests that a religious com-
munity should be permitted to enter political debate “on its own terms,”
it remains unclear what sort of society he imagines this might occur in
(185). If he means that such adherents should have the right to express
their religiously-informed opinions in public, then there is little need to
limit their freedom of expression (leaving aside the issue of hate-speech).
When one considers Asad’s critique of the concept of “overlapping con-
sensus,” however, along with his emphasis on collective practice for
forming individual subjectivity, and his claim that the notion of a secular
public sphere is a value-laden “myth,” the implication can only be that
he requires something beyond toleration of different voices in public
debate.
It is difficult to assess Asad’s own position toward the political impli-
cations of his theorizing. Other scholars who develop arguments simi-
lar to his own, such as William E. Connolly, intend to prevent their
challenge to standard liberal theories of secularism from being reduced
to an abandonment of the category of the secular altogether. Although
convinced that secular models of the public sphere tend to be “consti-
pated” by the dominance of proceduralisms that drive particularity and
difference out of public political deliberations, Connolly’s concern to
cultivate a “public ethos of engagement” among diverse perspectives
results in an effort to refashion secularism, not abandon it altogether
(1999: 5-6).
Asad’s scholarly intentions appear to be similar. In an essay on the
work of Wilfred Cantwell Smith, he writes,
I do not want to criticize secularist ideology here. My concern is simply
to urge that we explore some of the ways in which self-described “reli-
gious” people may subscribe to all or part of this ideological structure no
less than persons who are “irreligious”—and therefore to ask how modern
men and women of faith . . . may be “secular” (2001: 146).
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But despite this claim, Asad’s position leaves few remaining elements
of a “public sphere” that would enable some new form of secularism
to develop. For example, when he emphasises “mutual engagement”
over mere “tolerance” (147), in the absence of a more developed polit-
ical and social theory of communicative action and conflict resolution,
his analysis of religion ends on a sentimental note. For, on those occa-
sions when “engagement” results in disagreement or conflict, some medi-
ating institutions will be required—institutions that claim their legitimacy
based on resources found outside of the culture and traditions of either
religious community in the dispute. And yet, we have already seen in
his critique of Taylor’s “overlapping consensus” that Asad rejects con-
cepts like “negotiation” and Western legal theory.
Asad wants, it would appear, to refashion secular public debate in
democratic societies, and to advocate that the voices of religious adher-
ents marginalized by liberal secularism be included in public debates
as religious adherents. Religion, in other words, is to be de-privatized.
But if such a process is not to be reduced to a re-assertion of univer-
sal authority and orthodoxy on the part of a religious community,4 then
it is difficult to understand how Asad could imagine anything other
than the very secular state whose assumptions he so thoroughly rejects.
The basic question that emerges out of an analysis of the political impli-
cations of Asad’s critique of secularism is: how different is his rejection
of the public/private sphere distinction from a yearning for a form of
collective life free from inner and outer boundaries? To a certain extent,
Asad’s protest against the limits placed upon religious communities in
a secular state echo of the protest that many citizens occasionally make
against the limitations and failures of political representation. This is
not to dismiss the issues he raises, but it does put them into a wider
context.
Asad’s position contains elements that suggest a dualistic “clash of
civilizations” approach—faulting the foreign and flawed institutions of
Western society for oppressing particularity, and validating the distinc-
tiveness of Islamic communities. One cannot deny the racism and ori-
entalism of the West, but the recognition of those realities cannot dissolve
the fact that the political challenges found in multicultural democratic
societies are more profound than Asad’s theory allows for. As Gillian

4 This is exactly the tactic undertaken by some of Asad’s readers. See Milbank

(1990) and Cavanaugh (1995) for Christian versions of this strategy. The Hindu
nationalist ideology of the BJP party in India is an example of a Hindu reasser-
tion of orthodoxy against the Indian secular state.
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Rose writes, “To oppose new ethics to the old city, Jerusalem to Athens,
is to succumb to loss, to refuse to mourn” (1996: 36).

4. Subjectivity

The political issues I raise about Asad’s critique of the secular are also
present in subtle ways in his treatment of religious subjectivity. In his
writing on Islam in the Middle East, Asad contrasts the Western ten-
dency to anchor the category of religion in personal experience and
belief, with modern Islamic orthodoxy. Asad states that, in the Middle
East, religion is constructed much differently, due to its complex his-
tory and culture, but also because modern Islamic orthodoxy is more
self-consciously rooted in practice and tradition. He is careful to clar-
ify that this should not be understood to imply a rigid or unthinking
form of discursive practice, but one that is contested and developed
through “tradition-guided reasoning” (1993: 211). The “virtuous Muslim,”
he continues, “is thus seen not as an autonomous individual who assents
to a set of universalizable maxims but as an individual inhabiting the
moral space shared by all who are bound by God (the umma)” (219).
As such, the subjectivity of adherents to this manner of religious practice
is distinct from that idealized and constructed by North-Atlantic soci-
eties. Asad concludes, “The ideology of political representation in liberal
democracies makes it difficult if not impossible to represent Muslims as
Muslims” (2003: 173). For him, a society that defines citizenship “only
on the basis of what is common to all its members” effectively effaces
the particularities and differences of minorities.
A number of issues emerge out of this suggestion. Firstly, it is note-
worthy that an implication of this view is that those Muslims who are
comfortable with the public/private distinction in their own self-iden-
tity would not be considered a “virtuous Muslim” according to Asad’s
universalized schema. Secondly, this conceptualization of subjectivity
emphasizes being bound to one primary tradition. The identity of the
Muslim is to emerge from a shared Islamic “moral space”. Yet, is it
accurate to describe individuals in pluralistic societies as inhabiting only
one such collective space or “tradition”? Although Asad’s analysis of
Middle Eastern societies does contribute some helpful insights into the
particularities of those cultures, at the same time, “Islam” emerges as
a primary unifying signifier, which serves as a stark contrast to the
“West”. Although Asad’s theory certainly intends to acknowledge diversity
and complexity within the shared “moral space” of Islam, these divisions
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disappear when viewed from without. When confronting Western political

and cultural institutions, Islam serves as a grand metanarrative, that
encompasses the subjectivity of Muslim identity. Should other narratives
and influences interfere with this process (other traditions, experiences,
etc.), they are treated as invaders.
There are moments in Asad’s writing, however, in which he under-
cuts his own criticism of the distinction between private and public
spheres. In his essay, “Reconfigurations of Law and Ethics in Colonial
Egypt,” he focuses particular attention on the distinction between Islamic
shariaa and (European) colonial law. In the nineteenth century, he argues,
colonial powers sought to reform the shariaa in a manner that would
facilitate the introduction of a Westernized secular state (2003: 208ff ).
One aspect of these adaptations involved the introduction of “Mixed
Courts,” autonomous institutions led by European judges that were
established to govern foreign residents in Egypt. Asad interprets this
adaptation, not as a capitulation by a colonised people, but as a shrewd
manoeuvre on the part of Egyptian leaders to consolidate their own
power, and as a way to adapt Islam and its legal system to contem-
porary requirements. The changes did not amount to an abandonment
of the shariaa, but relocated the focus of its authority on personal life,
where it could be clearly codified.
Asad considers part of this transformation to be mimicking the dynam-
ics of secular modernity, in that, as shariaa became primarily something
governing family life, a distinction was opening up between law (the
state) and morality (the responsible subject sustained by the family) (235-
6). He argues that, while the domain of morality is usually constructed
in North-Atlantic societies along lines of individual interior conscience,
the form that shariaa followed within Egypt resisted the notion that the
moral subject was sovereign. Islamic jurists, according to Asad, con-
sider a subject’s ability to distinguish right and wrong to be depend-
ent upon contextual relationships, not individual judgement. The details
of shariaa are not simply acquired by familiarising oneself with its writ-
ten codes; rather, “increasingly correct social practice is a moral pre-
requisite for the acquisition of certain intellectual virtues by the judge”
(249). It is necessary for the subject to be disciplined (i.e. constructed)
through submission to the law. Asad writes: “the tradition is not based
on rationally founded belief but on commitment to a shared way of
life divinely mandated” (249).
While explaining this development in Egypt, Asad notes that it
emerged once people of different traditions and practices became a
prominent presence in Egyptian society. Such circumstances, when peo-
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ple are drawn to associate with others (economically, politically, socially)

from beyond the boundaries of their family, lineage, or religious tra-
dition, are exactly what lead sociologists and political theorists to describe
the emergence of distinct social spheres of activity (see Taylor (2004):
101-107). In the wider “public sphere,” because it is the space of a
coming together of differences and cultures, one cannot expect that all
of the norms and traditions that inform one’s “private sphere” (family,
ethnicity, etc.) will be adopted by one’s conversation partners.
Asad does not deny this directly, and yet, over the course of his dis-
missal of the public/private distinction, he fails to indicate what sort
of politics he would prefer. Furthermore, his suggestion that a man-
dated “shared way of life” is the principal source for constructing moral
space once again seems to suggest a singular form of Islamic identity;
one that is informed by a single primary source, and legitimated by a
single authoritative discourse and practice. In another essay, Asad insists
that those who argue that some particular formalities of a religious tra-
dition are dispensable or unnecessary are representing “the [Christian]
missionary’s standpoint” (2001: 141). He suggests that the formal prac-
tices of a given religious tradition are an essential element of the reli-
gious adherent’s very being. If this is so, then it follows that a religious
community must ensure that all of its members remain observant of
such traditions, and that the boundaries of these orthodox practices are
carefully guarded, for any variation from traditional formalities will
result in an inauthentic adherence. When Asad’s argument evokes such
implications, his defence of the difference of Islamic religious practices
from Western culture becomes one that forecloses on the expression of
divergence Muslim identities.
Furthermore, while Asad effectively does acknowledge the development
of a distinction between public and private social spheres in Muslim
societies, he argues that this dynamic is completely distinct from similar
patterns in North-Atlantic societies. But the only basis he establishes
for this position is his emphasis on the collective authority of Islam
over and against the priority of the individual found in Western political
theory. Although much of Asad’s analysis of the category of religion
serves to underscore and deepen Edward Said’s claim that the Orient
“was almost a European invention” and an imaginary construct of
Western discourse (1979:1-2), once Asad’s argument begins to describe
Islam and Islamic subjectivity as being universally unified by the one
collective form of practice, his work begins to take on a form of ori-
entalism of its own, as it minimizes internal differences for the sake of
external distinctiveness.
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Thus far, this analysis of Asad’s writing has demonstrated that,

although he is correct to suggest a link between the modern concepts
of “religion” and “secularism,” his position involves problematic assump-
tions about Islamic subjectivity and lacks sufficient attention to the com-
plexities of political interaction between communities of difference. It
is one thing to argue for the legitimacy of religious adherents to publicly
voice their particular worldviews; it is quite another matter to suggest
that such voices be granted equal argumentative weight, without medi-
ation, in public debate.5 To further clarify the questions that I raise
about Asad’s treatment of the secular, I will now turn to another theorist
who explores the complex relationships between religion and modern
politics.

5. Dominique Colas on Civil Society and Fanaticism

Another genealogical study of relevance to this discussion is Dominique

Colas’ Civil Society and Fanaticism (1997). This text explores the development
of the concept of “civil society,” noting its many nuanced meanings
throughout Western intellectual history. Colas, like Asad, is concerned
with the relationship that the idea of a “civil society” has with power
and the state. He argues that different conceptions of “civil society”
are usually defined against what he calls “fanaticism”—discourses that
reject the mediating role of existing social representations and authorities.
Colas plots the development of the liberal concept of “toleration,”
focusing much of his attention on the disputes between factions within
the Protestant reform movements of the sixteenth century, particularly
on the competing spheres of influence between church and state. In
an extended chapter on Luther’s struggle with the radical reformers,
Colas notes that Luther’s formulation of a separation between spiritual
and temporal spheres was essential to the development of the modern
state (55). Unlike Asad’s more general comments on this historical
period, however, Colas attends directly to the historical and political
considerations related to Luther’s position. These contextual tensions
are important to attend to prior to asserting an overarching explanation

5 Connolly’s argument for the cultivation “agonistic respect” between different

subjective positions is certainly an attractive concept for a pluralistic democracy,

but such a virtue in no way resolves the issues of legitimation or deliberative pro-
cedure. See Connolly (1999).
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for the relationship between Reformation theology and the emergence

of the modern state.6
To illustrate Luther’s concerns, Colas organizes this study around his
disputes with the Iconoclasts and the peasant revolt of 1525. In both
circumstances, the Reformer’s arguments against papal authority were
developed further and more radically by Luther’s followers in directions
other than those he intended—by the burning of artistic images, and
by rejecting all forms of civil authority. As Colas writes of the dilemma
facing the leaders of the Reformation: “was this not an invitation to
destroy all authorities claiming to regulate the sacred, and did it not
constitute encouragement to abolish all mediations?” (111).
Colas states that Luther did not understand the individual’s new reli-
gious freedom to subvert all other forms of authority, arguing that if
every individual made themselves the authoritative judge of all things,
there could be no order or justice. In response, he developed his the-
ory of the two kingdoms, in which the temporal kingdom (civil author-
ity) was to be granted the power of the temporal sword—the authority
to govern daily life on the basis of the power of law. Those things nec-
essary for salvation lay beyond this temporal sphere, in the particular
jurisdiction of the kingdom of Christ. What was crucial for Luther’s
opposition to radical Reformers like Münster and Karlstadt, was, accord-
ing to Colas, that his notion of the sacred City of God did not abol-
ish completely the kingdoms of the Earth. In order to restore order to
the civil society, Luther felt obliged to support the forceful and brutal
suppression of those who tried to encourage the coming of the Kingdom
through violent actions and a realized eschatological vision.
Here Colas observes elements relevant to the concerns raised by
Asad: the power of the state is employed to violently crush movements
that refused to accept the limitations placed upon their religious claims
in the broader public realm. Colas clearly illustrates that the concept
of toleration in the “civil society” of the sixteenth century was not a
neutral force. Those who refused to accept the limitations for social
behaviour and expression were labelled “fanatics” and harshly punished.
“Fanaticism,” as defined by Colas, is precisely this refusal to accept the
duality of the public and private realms of the social order. Although

6 Asad’s treatment of the Reformation in Europe, and the resulting political insti-
tutions (division between Church and State, etc.) is very brief, and yet a great deal
of his theory relies upon his interpretation of this period. In Genealogies of Religion,
shifts in ecclesiology are reduced to events in the service of the emergence of the
centralized nation state, with little attention to the historical situations shaping those
events (1993: 205-207).
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Colas displays a sympathetic tendency towards the defenders of the lib-

eral ideal of tolerance, he is by no means ignorant of the fact that such
an achievement is not a neutral position. Those who refuse the limi-
tations of the established “civil society” will either have to overthrow
the normative authorities of that society, or concede to operating within
the boundaries of legitimation authorized by the existing power of the
civil authorities. Modern democratic societies have sought to mediate
and limit this power through such institutions as universal suffrage, free
speech, and equality under the law, although few would claim that a
perfect balance has yet been achieved.
The tension between civil authority and the particularity of smaller
communities is the crucial issue at the heart of the debate over the
category of the “secular”. Once the history of development of the idea
of the “secular” is illuminated, and its role as a discursive and politi-
cal power in North-Atlantic societies is shown to be anything but neutral
or universally tolerant, it is important to recognize that the concept
nevertheless remains a necessary and unavoidable category. As a the-
oretical space, it inhabits the same dilemma occupied by the idea of a
“civil society”—inevitably including the formulation of a related notion
of “fanaticism”. The Lutheran Christians and the Iconoclasts of six-
teenth century Wittenburg could not mutually coexist in the same pub-
lic sphere—at least not at the level of enforcing private beliefs onto
public practices. Any compromise position will, admittedly, amount to
privileging certain assumptions against those held by the other. This
act of privileging, in the Wittenburg example, involved the force of law,
at least until the Iconoclasts would agree to limit their particular expres-
sions of their religious practices to the private sphere.
What Colas’ study intends to demonstrate, despite the admission of
the use of power and force in the formulation of the concept of a “civil
society,” is the value of accepting mediating institutions and a recognition
of symbolic efficacy. In the iconoclastic challenge to Luther, he observes
a rejection of symbolic representation, driven by a claim of an immediate
encounter with the truth. Colas argues that a representation presents
an absence, but “the absence of what is represented is not a deficit,
simply a distance” (355).
It is this “distance” that summarizes the function of the secular as
a category: the acceptance that the particularities of one’s individual
moral assumptions and cultural identity cannot be translated into a
broader multi-tradition modern public sphere in an immediate fashion.
Once a subject agrees to enter into a process of argumentation in which
truth claims must be defended by procedures of reasoning that can be
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grasped by individuals from differing traditions, s/he is beginning to

enter into a discursive space in which the norms of family, commu-
nity, and tradition cannot be taken for granted. Participants in such a
discussion will inevitably experience a distance between their own par-
ticular identity and the normative assumptions of others. Although Asad
is correct to alert us to the presence of this problematic in any dis-
cussion of secularism, an analysis of his argument demonstrates that,
even if he does not intend to suggest that the secular is a category we
can dispense with, his position leaves little foundation for a modern
multicultural society.7 His overarching narrative about the Reformation’s
entwinement with the modern state, which neglects to attend to the
relevant historical tensions and events that shape this relationship,
simplifies the political and pragmatic complexities involved in mediating
interactions and disputes between different and occasionally competing
interests and cultures.

6. The Secular as a Tragic Category: on Asad’s reading of Benjamin

The recognition that political representation continually confronts the

individual with incompleteness and absence (divergences between ideals
and lived experience, desired interest and realized achievement, etc.)
does indeed confront the modern subject with a “distance”. Asad has
helped to clarify how this tension impacts upon religious communities,
but he also displays a tendency to decry the existence of this same ten-
sion in contemporary society. Rather than denounce secularism as a
construct based upon a rather simple interpretation of the Reformation,
it is more appropriate to identify the secular as a highly contested and
shifting social space, a site of interaction and engagement between com-
munities of difference. Such an understanding of the category is best
understood, not as an imposition, nor as a covert Western agenda, but
as a flawed attempt to deal with complex historical and political realities.
The “secular” is a tragic category, for it is deeply imperfect and never
absolutely neutral. Yet, as a descriptor for a certain kind of public

7 Asad contrasts the modern legal sense of being “accountable to an authority,

to be prepared to give justifications and excuses for one’s actions” with his pre-
ferred concept of habitus, which “is not something one accepts or rejects” but “is
part of what one essentially is and must do” (2003: 95-96). Such a seamless exis-
tence might be possible within close-knit communities, but few societies today share
a single common habitus (moral and political practice). The assertion of such a polit-
ical subjectivity and theory lacks sufficient attention to the need for a mediatorial
role between communities of differing traditions and practices.
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space, and as a theoretical concept, it refers to those moments and sites

in which individuals and communities wrestle with the “distances” they
encounter in social experience.
In Formations of the Secular, Asad begins to describe secularism in tragic
terms. To assist his effort to offer an account of the secular, he con-
trasts two opposing aesthetic descriptions of the concept: that of Walter
Benjamin’s book The Origin of German Tragic Drama, and Paul de Man’s
essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality”. According to Asad, de Man’s
reading of the romantic movement in literature is one that describes a
reluctant “coming to terms with the secular” (203: 62-3). This process
involves a tension between self and nature, as the once sacred world
becomes disenchanted. A formerly magical environment loses its “hid-
den depths,” and the romantic must learn to accept that the “real
world” is not enchanted.
Asad perceives a different secular vision in Benjamin’s study of German
baroque drama (or Trauerspiel—literally—play of sadness). In Benjamin’s
reading of this period, the secular world is not “discovered,” but is
instead “precariously assembled and lived in contradictory fashion” (63).
The tension that he describes in modern experience is not that between
the self and nature (as in de Man), but is found in the contrast between
different persons. Thus, the drama of the baroque does not assume
that what is experienced and encountered is the “real,” but rather
understands everything to be contested. These plays are driven by a
tension between the dream of a restoration of a lost world, and a fear
of catastrophe. Caught between these two poles, the emphasis of the
characters is on the existing historical world. Asad argues that the
emerging secular world as Benjamin describes it does not represent
the triumph of “common sense,” but the struggle of theatrical rulers
seeking desperately to inhabit an unruly situation by establishing
criteria for legitimizing authority and peaceful existence that their
contemporaries will consider worthy of acceptance.
Here it is important to recall the historical drama of Colas’ account
of Luther’s conflict with the Iconoclasts, and the resulting sadness that
both sides were left with. Although there is much to appreciate about
Asad’s analysis of the secular, his argument neglects to explore the his-
torical and political roots of the category’s development sufficiently. The
tensions he perceives in Benjamin’s literary study are also evident in
the social and political histories of the societies in which secularism
became a political ideal. Asad’s argument occasionally masks this when
it presents the secular as primarily an ideological myth, rather than a
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concept with deep material and social roots. He is correct to argue

that secularism is a construct, but reduces the forces and situations that
gave shape to this construction to his basic metanarrative on the ideology
of the modern state.
Asad summarises Benjamin’s reading of Trauerspiel as follows:
this world is “secular” not because scientific knowledge has replaced reli-
gious belief (that is, because the “real” has at last become apparent) but
because, on the contrary, it must be lived in uncertainty, without fixed
moorings even for the believer, a world in which the real and the imaginary
mirror each other. In this world, the politics of certainty is clearly impos-
sible (64-5).
This aesthetic description of secular experience is an appropriate ori-
entation towards the category of the “secular” in the study of religion.
It recalls Asad’s concern to demonstrate that the “secular” is not a neu-
tral category, wholly distinct from what is taken to be “religious,” but
that it is contested (as Benjamin suggests, the secular is not the “real”
nor the mere result of “common sense”). Such an orientation to the
category of the secular can assist the theorist of religion to address
Asad’s principal concern that the concept functions with an overly
Westernized bias against non-Western religions; a concern related to
the problematic use of the term “fanaticism” that Colas describes. As
Colas reminds us, when Luther employed the term “fanatic” [Schwärmer]
against his more radical opponents, the term meant primarily “false
prophet,” but it also came to mean “intolerant”. Of course these two
meanings conflict with each other—when one denounces another as a
“false prophet,” then this suggests that one is in possession of a superior
position. In other words, an overly comfortable willingness to condemn
another’s position as “fanaticism” may simply represent an affirmation
of one’s own. As Colas argues, “denouncing fanaticism can be the
speaker’s way of claiming to have exclusive rights on truth” (1997: 16).
For this reason, Asad’s use of Benjamin’s analysis of the Trauerspiel
articulates an important insight into the entwinement of the categories
of the secular and the religious. But some aspects of Asad’s argument
are more proximate to a rejection of secularism than to a tragic vision
of the concept. Although he observes that Benjamin’s description of
tragedy is one that has no place for the myth of redemption (neither
for a return to a former “golden age,” nor a final cessation of all ten-
sion and conflict), Asad’s description of Islamic subjectivity suggests
being constructed by a single unified discourse and practice. His treat-
ment of individual and communal identity resists the acceptance of
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inner tension, as he rejects the distinction between a “private” sphere

of particularity, and the space of intersubjective exchange and interac-
tion that political discourse refers to as the “public sphere”. The result
is that Asad’s analysis has no way to address disagreements between
groups such as Colas’ description of Luther’s conflict with the Iconoclasts.
Effectively, his argument dissolves such political complexity by reduc-
ing the history of the Reformation as a tool for the domination of the
modern state.
If all representations—all efforts to arrive at some form of “over-
lapping consensus”—are to be rejected as violent or oppressive, then
there can be no space for the work of negotiation, no forum for the
“engagement” of differences that Asad seeks. By eschewing concepts of
mediation, the tone of Asad’s argument resembles his description of the
“myth of redemption” more than it does the tragic vision of Benjamin.
Given the implications of his position, there can only be an eschato-
logical longing for the arrival of a purer “otherness” from outside of
the given. But the tragic vision of Benjamin that Asad celebrates, “knows
no eschatology” (1977: 66). Critical thought and modern political life
are born out of a melancholic sadness over the failure of ideal visions
and assumptions. In the face of such failures, modern politics and the
many communities that comprise them are offered the humble conso-
lation of further reflection, and renewed practice. If people of differing
worldviews are to undertake these tasks in collaboration with others, a
concept or imagined space is required that can hold them all.
This paper has demonstrated the importance of a number of Talal
Asad’s central concerns, while rejecting some of his conclusions. It
acknowledges that “civil society” might inevitably involve relations of
power that act against those deemed “fanatical,” and it has recognised
that the category of the secular might well limit the public authority
of some cultural-religious expressions and movements. And yet, to sim-
ply dismiss civil society as “totalitarian,” or “secularism” as Western
liberal imperialism, amounts to a dualistic vision that clings to the imag-
ined authenticity of the unrepresented against the mediations of falli-
ble political forms and theoretical tools. Describing the secular as a
tragic category serves to acknowledge the problematic nature of this
contested social space in contemporary multicultural societies, while
retaining the conceptual tools to describe a complex form of human
experience and interaction. In the realm of the secular, all subjects and
communities encounter not only each other, but also the frustrating
“distance” that such engagements take them from familiar norms and
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assumptions. Such is ongoing function of the category of the secular.

That it remains a flawed tool is indeed tragic.

[address]

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