Talal Asad is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the City University of New York Graduate Center. A renowned anthropologist of religion, particularly religion in the Middle East, he is the author of a number of books including Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christiantity and Islam (1993) and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003).
The ways in which the concept of “religion” operates in that culture as motive and as effect, how it mutates, what it affords and obstructs, what memories it shelters or excludes, are not eternally fixed.