WILLIAM E. CONNOLLYity that constitutes a nation within a nation which does not honor the Enlightenment
distinction between private faith and public reason.
Talal Asad, an anthropologist of Islamic heritage, studies the religious practices of
both Christians and Muslims. He explores an obscure dimension of contemporary Euro-
pean secularism that unconsciously contributes to the politics of double minoritization
of Muslims.
Consider his critique of Wilfred Cantrell Smith, who sought to distill the essence of
‘‘religion’’ from several world cultures and then drew upon that distillation to compare
Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Smith, Asad says, thinks of a religious tradition ‘‘as a
cognitive framework, not as a practical mode of living, not as techniques for teaching
body and mind to cultivate specific virtues and abilities that have been authorized, passed
on, and reformulated down the generations.’’^21 Smith treats the palpable operation of
ritual in some variants of Islam as a sign of its underdeveloped character. His secular,
Protestant reading of religion in general obscures an important component of culture—its
embodiment in repetitive practices that help to constitute the dispositions, sensibilities, and
ethos through which meaning is lived, intellectual beliefs are settled, and relations between
constituencies are negotiated.Smith’s very distillation of ‘‘religion’’ and ‘‘faith’’ from the
materialities of culture situates them within a secular image of a world divided between
private rituals and publicly articulated beliefs. It treats belief as neatly separable from
ritual practice. This unconscious generalization of one image of religion then sets the
standard he uses to measure one ‘‘religion’’ against others.
The political upshot of Smith’s interpretation becomes visible in Asad’s bookForma-
tions of the Secular. Here Asad traces how the dominant European idea of religion ex-
presses a larger cultural unconscious discernible in Smith’s work. He contrasts this self-
understanding to devotional practices of Christianity in the European Middle Ages. Then
when the Christian ‘‘devotee heard God speak there was a sensuous connection between
the inside and outside, a fusion between signifier and signified. The proper reading of
scripture depended on disciplining the senses (especially hearing, speech, and sight).’’^22
This inner connection between devotional practice and education of the senses gets ob-
scured in secular, Protestant representations of religion: ‘‘where faith [within Europe] had
once been a virtue, it now acquired an epistemological sense. Faith became a way of
knowing supernatural objects, parallel to the knowledge of nature (therealworld) that
reason and observation provided.’’^23 Now, rituals and exercises are understood only to
symbolizea belief or faith already there, not to participate in the very constitution of faith
itself. You can hear echoes of Strauss’s account of the ubiquity of faith in Asad’s genealogy,
even if the sensibility of the two theorists—their sensory orientations and sensual disposi-
tions to diversity—differ.
Of course, if Asad is right, the body/brain/culture network in which we participate
still continues to flow back and forth between human enactment, institutional discipline,
embedded experience, and the constitution of belief. But many secularists, ministers,
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