Talal Asad

The book is a collection of previously published and new material that exposes the meaning of the secular and secularism. The author calls it "an anthropology of the secular." As it is very difficult to develop self-consciousness of one's own culture, the value of this book is that it pushes secular readers to do just that. There are challenges to self-understanding in this book that are well worth the price. The author makes secularists examine their assumptions about what constitutes a human being and the way of being human in a modern context. The book seems to be written for a scholarly audience and as such is loaded with jargon, convoluted sentences, and repetition that sometimes seem to obscure the authors ideas. The text would benefit from considerable editing.… (more)