Talal Asad is a Pakistani-American anthropologist who was born to an

Austrian father in Medina, Arabia. He is renowned professor of

anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
He has been an important figure in religion and ritual studies. His
magnum opus, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam,
Modernity has proven to be an extremely important intervention in
problematizing the western experience of secularism. He is famous for
his employment of Nietzsches genealogical method in the same vein as
Foucault. He has worked with Evans-Pritchard and has served as a guide
to Saba Mahmood, a prominent scholar of central and middle eastern
studies.

In his essay in Two European Images of Non-European Rule, Asad

seeks out the basic assumptions of functional anthropology and
orientalism. Tries to illustrate how colonial power structures were
inherently influential in not just the constitution of these disciplines, but
in their methodology and rhetoric as well. The encounter of the west and
east with the advent of imperialism, created a legacy of unequal power
structures that we can now spot in anthropology. In the introduction to
the collection of essays, Asad identifies the grave issue British
anthropology is facing at the turn of the new millennia: functional
anthropology has begun to reach its logical end. The claim that
Anthropology was close to a science in the way it aimed to produce
generalities about civilisations through an extended research period
began to be contested. It was becoming increasingly clear that
anthropology had left the reasons for its own conception unquestioned
and assumed it to be a natural state of progression.

He also claims that while anthropologists in the 1940s took pride in a

self-sufficient methodology comprised of ethnography and statistical
analysis. However, by the end of the Second World War, disciplines such
as political science and economics had begun to bleed into it. This
became a necessity in light of the mounting criticism of the cosy
relationship between anthropology and colonial rule. As the sun began to
set on the empire, it began to become clearer that the anthropologist had
taken the European existence as the normal or common and the
civilisations under study always stood in sharp opposition to that
experience: either in contrast or in a way to understand the European-
self better. Much like the enlightenment from which anthropology
borrows its core principles, it uncritically assumes that the two parties
that negotiated this encounter were equals; it was undoubtedly an
unequal encounter between the ruled and the ruler and must be taken
into account in order to understand the societies in question. Therefore
Asad urges us to question the use of this intellectual tradition, and the
anthropologists claim of political neutrality.

Asad tries to investigate how anthropology and orientalism helped in the

construction of the necessarily dichotomous civilised west and
barbaric east and unwittingly manufactured the justification for the
white mans burden. The epistemological violence as Cohn had claimed
in his extremely insightful work, An Anthropologist among Historians,
was operationalized ever since the renaissance to create a devalued
monolith of the other. Asad writes that this was done through the
employment of consent in case of small African tribal communities
studied by anthropologists while repression was employed to
understand the working of Islamic rule.

Using the work of Evans-Pritchard and Fortes, African Political

Systems, Asad explains how the African clans were seen as containing
an inherent balance of power: one side employed in authority and
control while the other employed in responsibility and duty. There was a
general consensus about all decisions that were taken. The decisions
were made in everyones general interest because of this mutual
understanding of consent. The traditional system gets it due legitimacy
from the very fact that section of the community is well represented.

While the orientalist view of the Islamic world was quite different. The
ruler is characterised as whimsical and his authority as absolute,
unyielding and violent. His demands are illegitimate in the eyes of holy
law as well as practical good. The citizenry follows through in a general
state of apathy, moved to rebel in a unreasonable moment which is then
violently squashed.

However, the colonial authority is curiously missing from the scenario.

Islamic rule was in constant battle with imperialist forces and a large
European military presence existed at the time these works were written.
In two distinct ways, the anthropologists have relegated the colonial
authority to the background. First, the encounters with colonial rule was
either ignored or briefly addressed. Even when it was directly dealt with,
the colonial authorities were seen as messengers or negotiators that
enforced existing practices. Second, a false binary of anthropological
issues as opposed to administrative issues was constructed to avoid
including colonial interventions within the narrative. European
colonialism was tagged as social change which was simultaneously
divorced from African political structures and a natural state of
progression in these societies.

With regard to the orientalist monolith of the Islamic rule, Asad points
out that there were several well documented instances of revolt in the
Islamic world which became agentive and created space of negotiations.
This contested both the oriental assumptions of Islamic rulers being
exceptionally cruel and that the Islamic citizen was indifferent. Asad
argues that the orientalists relied only on textual material that was
brought to Europe after voyages and never spent time with the
populations. The textual data comprised mostly of mercantile records
that saw revolts as disturbing to the political and social order that
allowed profitable trade and therefore were dismissive of them.
However, orientalists accepted these views as the authentic view which
led to their conclusions.

Asad tries to draw a parallel between the two by questioning the

ahistorical, synchronic character given to both African tribal societies
and Islamic rule. Asad claims that functional anthropology was
inherently incapable of dealing with questions of change and progress
therefore it couldnt account for the constant changes that the colonial
intervention resulted in. As for the orientalist, it saw Islam as the
unifying albeit violence force and therefore in the attempt to tease out an
authentic understanding of the religion, vested upon it the same static
synchronicity. This was quite similar to the anthropologists claim that
the age old customs of the African tribal system, had helped in the
overall cohesion of the society at large. The functional approach
therefore, renders societies immobile and impervious to change.

Finally, Asad points out the historical moment in which the two
disciplines burgeoned. As for functional anthropology, unlike the
conception of anthropology, it emerged in the period of routine
colonialism where it didnt have to justify or establish itself. It emerged
in the lap of an imperial power that had already established its
supremacy and wasnt in the process of expansion. Therefore it
functioned more as a tool to accrue information rather than dispense
ideology. The oriental project was informed by a long legacy of
Christendom that needed to demonise Islam for its own ends and the
colonial project that looked disparagingly at the Islamic empire because
of the constant trade wars that they had to keep fighting with a highly
militaristic regime.

In perhaps his most thought provoking contention, Asad goes on to

argue that this image of the Islamic rule that had been built by
orientalists, of being barbaric and unrelenting, was employed by Islamic
rulers when social solidarity began to wane at the turn of the century in
order to legitimise the rigidity in the face against change harping on a
constructed history that was employed for their own subordination.

Asads contribution in invoking a more critical perspective, of a self-

reflexive exercise in anthropology has had far reaching consequences for
the field of anthropology that has had to reinvent itself to let go the
baggage of a deeply colonial past. Post-colonial anthropologists have
made an important intervention in the process and truly re-imagined the
field.