In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his
lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out
the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through
a rich consideration of translatability and untranslatability, exploring
the circuitous movements of ideas between histories and cultures.
In search of meeting points between the language of Islam and the
language of secular reason, Asad gives particular importance to the
translations of religious ideas into nonreligious ones. He discusses the
claim that liberal conceptions of equality represent earlier Christian
ideas translated into secularism; explores the ways that the language
and practice of religious ritual play an important but radically
transformed role as they are translated into modern life; and considers
the history of the idea of the self and its centrality to the project of
the secular state. Secularism is not only an abstract principle that
modern liberal democratic states espouse, he argues, but also a range of
sensibilities. The shifting vocabularies associated with each of these
sensibilities are fundamentally intertwined with different ways of life.
In exploring these entanglements, Asad shows how translation opens the
door for--or requires--the utter transformation of the translated.
Drawing on a diverse set of thinkers ranging from al-Ghazālī to Walter
Benjamin, Secular Translations points toward new possibilities for
intercultural communication, seeking a language for our time beyond the
language of the state.
