Tradition and Modernity 11historically specifi c, but because that defi nition is itself the historical product of
discursive processes’ (Asad 1993: 29).
‘Religion’ between tradition and modernity
Asad’s critique has not spared Weberian social science. However, we should
acknowledge that Max Weber provided precious elements for defi ning tradition
while steering clear of an essentialising and transhistorical defi nition of religion.
He was not interested in drawing general anthropological conclusions from the
observation of man’s experience of religious awe mediated by a feeling of aliena-
tion from the powers of this world, but rather focused on reconstructing how dif-
ferent religious ways to relate to the world contributed to ground specifi c forms
of life conduct. Weber focused especially on the elaboration of life conduct
performed by specifi c social ‘carriers’ of religious orientations and wider cultural
values. This approach yielded a focus on the formation of criteria of rationalisa-
tion of daily affairs though a privileged attention devoted to the work of cultural
elites (see Sadri 1992).
Weberian theory is important, since it provides a basic repertoire for the for-
mation of the toolkit of categories we still use for making sense of the relationship
between Islam and modernity. But we should also be aware that this Weberian
repertoire is itself incorporated in the historical process through which Western
civilisation gained the upper hand over against Islamic civilisation. Yet one
should not fall victim to a conspiracy theory viewing Orientalism as a discourse
on the Orient in general and on Islam in particular, which merely refl ects the
process of constitution of a Western hegemonic subjectivity. The categories
deployed in the process have been subject to a relentless contestation, and it is to
be welcomed that, especially since the 1960s, this critique has helped to widen
the horizon of analysis to include more fairly balanced comparative views: of
civilisations, of traditions and, lastly, of modernities (Salvatore [1995] 2007b). In
particular, the observations stressing the difference of the Islamic concept of din
from its convenient but reductive translation as ‘religion’ has also contributed to
the expansion of the critical horizons on comparative analysis. Such a critique
has itself a rather Orientalist origin and structure of argument, to the extent that
it is grounded on a view of Islam’s ‘difference’ (Salvatore 1997).
The problem of Orientalism and of the Western study of Islam, evidenced by
the work of Edward Said (1978), should be situated in the wider context deter-
mined by the politically overloaded character of the study of religion, which
occupied the central stage in the genesis of the social sciences in the longer nine-
teenth century in Europe. In the framework of a hardening competition among
various disciplines and approaches that attempted to locate the sources and
explain the modes of human sociability and the nature itself of the social bond,
religion was identifi ed as a key sphere of human endeavour, whose emergence