Talal Asad

Talal Asad is a Pakistani-born British anthropologist known for his influential work on the anthropology of religion, secularism, and power. In Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003) he argued against treating religion as a universal, trans-historical category and instead traced how the modern concept of religion, along with the supposedly neutral secular sphere set against it, emerged from specific European historical and colonial processes, so that the religious and secular are best understood as historically constructed categories of power rather than natural, self-evident distinctions. Asad's genealogical approach, influenced by Michel Foucault, became a central reference point in postcolonial anthropology and in interdisciplinary secularism studies.