Talal Asad Quotes.

1. "Modern sovereignty, whether expressed through killing in battle or the torture of suspects, brings together the desire to build up and the desire to destroy, to let Aid Agencies offer charity (in its original meaning of "love") while the military offers death. The two are intrinsically connected."
- Quote by Talal Asad

2. "لا أحد من المفكرين المعاصرين يضاهي جهابذة المفكرين القدامى مثل الإمام الغزالي الذي قرأت كتاباته وأعيد قراءتها من حين الى آخر"
- Quote by Talal Asad

3. "The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity

4. "The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European poeples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity

5. "The concept of the secular cannot do without the idea of religion."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity

6. "Let me pursue this point briefly with reference to what is described in our media, and by many of our public intellectuals, as the Islamic roots of violence—especially since September 2001. Religion has long been seen as a source of violence,10 and (for ideological reasons) Islam has been represented in the modern West as peculiarly so (undisciplined, arbitrary, singularly oppressive). Experts on Islam, the modern world, and political philosophy have lectured the Muslim world yet again on its failure to embrace secularism and enter modernity and on its inability to break off from its violent roots. Now some reflection would show that violence does not need to be justified by the Qur‘an—or any other scripture for that matter. When General Ali Haidar of Syria, under the orders of his secular president Hafez al-Assad, massacred 30,000 to 40,000 civilians in the rebellious town of Hama in 1982 he did not invoke the Qur’an—nor did the secularist Saddam Hussein when he gassed thousands of Kurds and butchered the Shi’a population in Southern Iraq. Ariel Sharon in his indiscriminate killing and terrorizing of Palestinian civilians did not—so far as is publicly known—invoke passages of the Torah, such as Joshua’s destruction of every living thing in Jericho.11 Nor has any government (and rebel group), whether Western or non-Western, needed to justify its use of indiscriminate cruelty against civilians by appealing to the authority of sacred scripture. They might in some cases do so because that seems to them just—or else expedient. But that’s very different from saying that they are constrained to do so. One need only remind oneself of the banal fact that innumerable pious Muslims, Jews, and Christians read their scriptures without being seized by the need to kill non-believers. My point here is simply to emphasize that the way people engage with such complex and multifaceted texts, translating their sense and relevance, is a complicated business involving disciplines and traditions of reading, personal habit, and temperament, as well as the perceived demands of particular social situations."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity

7. "The secular must not be thought of as the space in which real human life gradually emancipates itself from the controlling power of religion and thus achieves the latter’s relocation. It is this assumption that allows us to think of religion as infecting the secular domain or as replicating within it the structure of theological concepts."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity

8. "The state is not a cause but an articulation of secularization."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity

9. "The secular is conceptually prior to the political doctrine of secularism, that over time a variety of concepts, practices and sensibilities have come together to form the secular."
- Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity