Talal Asad

Talal Asad (born 1932) is a Saudi-born cultural anthropologist who is currently Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

His prolific body of work mainly focuses on religiosity, Middle Eastern studies, postcolonialism, and notions of power, law and discipline.

He is also known for his writing calling for an anthropology of secularism.

His work has had a significant influence beyond his home discipline of anthropology.

As Donovan Schaefer writes:"The gravitational field of Asad’s influence has emanated far from his home discipline and reshaped the landscape of other humanistic disciplines around him."

Talal Asad was born in April 1932 in Medina, Saudi Arabia.

His parents are Muhammad Asad, an Austrian diplomat and writer who converted from Judaism to Islam in his twenties, and Munira Hussein Al Shammari, a Saudi Arabian Muslim.

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.

His parents divorced shortly before his father's third marriage.

Talal was raised in Pakistan, and attended a Christian-run missionary boarding school.

He is an alumnus of the St. Anthony High School in Lahore.

Asad moved to the United Kingdom when he was 18 to attend university and studied architecture for two years before discovering anthropology, about which he has said “it was fun, but I was not terribly suited.”

Asad received his undergraduate degree in anthropology from the University of Edinburgh in 1959.

The two married in 1960, and later both completed their doctorate research at Oxford.

After his doctoral studies, Asad completed fieldwork in Northern Sudan on the political structures of the Kababish, a nomadic group that formed under British colonial rule.

In the late 1960s, he formed a reading group that focused on material written in the Middle East.

He recalls being struck by the bias and “theoretical poverty” of Orientalist writing, the assumptions taken for granted, and the questions that were not answered.

Throughout his long and prolific career, Asad has been greatly influenced by a broad spectrum of scholars, including notable figures such as Karl Marx, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, R.G. Collingwood, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Michel Foucault.

He has also cited the invaluable influence of contemporaries and colleagues such as John Milbank, Stanley Hauerwas, Edward Said, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Judith Butler, as well as his former students Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind.

This diverse intellectual network has shaped Asad's unique approach to studying society, culture, and power dynamics, leaving a lasting impact on the field of social sciences.

Asad’s first teaching job was at Khartoum University in Sudan, where he spent several years as a lecturer in social anthropology.

He continued to train as a cultural anthropologist, receiving both a BLitt and PhD from the University of Oxford, which he completed in 1968.

Asad’s mentor while at Oxford was notable social anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard, who Asad has since cited in many of his works.

While attending the University of Edinburgh, he met Tanya Baker, a fellow anthropologist.

He published The Kababish Arabs: Power, Authority, and Consent in a Nomadic Tribe in 1970.

Asad became increasingly interested in religiosity, power, and Orientalism throughout his studies.

He returned to the United Kingdom in the early 1970s to lecture at Hull University in Hull, England.

In 1983, he was a co-editor on The Sociology of Developing Societies: The Middle East with economic historian Roger Owen.

Asad has said that he wasn’t all that interested in this project and that he did it as a favor to a friend.

He 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 Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Asad has also held visiting professorships at Ain Shams University in Cairo, King Saud University in Riyadh, University of California at Berkeley, and Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

Asad’s writing portfolio is extensive, and he has been involved in a variety of projects throughout his career.

His 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.

In 2007 Asad was part of a symposium at the Townsend Center at University of California, Berkeley, at which he spoke on his paper “Is Critique Secular?

Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech.”

Since 2023, the Ibn Haldun University grants the Talal Asad Awards for the best graduate dissertations in sociology.

Asad’s work generally involves taking an anthropological approach to political history and analysis, specifically with regard to colonial history and religion.

Asad identifies himself as an anthropologist but also states that he is critical of allowing disciplines to be defined by particular techniques (such as ethnography or statistics, for example).

He is often critical of progress narratives, believing that “the assumption of social development following a linear path should be problematized.” Another main facet of his work is his public criticism of Orientalism.

He has expressed frustration with Orientalist assumptions, particularly about religion, which he has said comes from his multicultural Muslim background.