A Durkheimian Reading of Talal Asad's Idea of an Anthropology of Islam

"The idea of an anthropology of Islam" - an article originally published by Talal Asad in 1986 - is a pivotal text for the study of religions, where Asad proposes the notion of a discursive tradition, i.e. a place of enunciation where forms of life, knowledge and authority are articulated. This way of approaching Islam is opposed both to the nominalist approach asserting the existence of an infinite number of realities of Islam and to the opposite postulate of a Muslim essence at work beyond the meanings that the actors attribute to the historical contexts. Rather, the discursive tradition of Islam is defined by Asad as a partially autonomous space in which modes of religiosity that are inseparably intellectual, ethical and political are aggregated. Underlying " The Idea of an anthropology of Islam" turn of Islamic studies, one of the main criticism to the study of religion is the questioning of symbolism as a privileged way of elucidating human experiences, rather looking at religious piety as a primarly subjective and ethical experience. Yet, the rejection of symbolism is synonymous to the dismissal of the main generalising within the socio-anthropological discipline. In the absence of an alternative for the apprehension of the most collective forms of religious experience, Asad's epistemology leads to a renewed form of methodological individualism. In this paper, I want to re-visit this opposition to symbolism, suggesting a reading inspired by Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. In proposing this reincorporation of religious symbolism within the study of religion, the aim is to include the formation of the self - whether ethical or not - in a chain of translations internal to the religious gesture, which inscribe it throughout in a sociological relationship to the significant totality in which it takes shape.