Contesting secularism/s Secularism and Islam in the work of Talal Asad

This essay deals with the influential anthropological work of Prof. Talal Asad on Islam, secularism and the secular. I argue that the binary 'Western-non-Western' which is constitutive for Asad, the relative absence of ethnography in Asad's work, and the state-centred nature of Asad's approach to secularism and the secular has contributed to an anthropological impasse whereby the complex engagement of Muslims living in secular and liberal 'Western' contexts with the secular has become difficult to conceptualize. I argue in favour of the conceptualizations in a nascent body of works which transcend some of these binaries, most notably those of Marsden and Soares and Otayek, and in favour of investigating the secular as a vernacular practice.