KABOBfest: Talal Asad: Thinking about Religion Belief and Politics

The blog entry Jacob Lassner and Nadia Abu el Haj contained the following brief reference to Talal Asad:

Lassner starts his attempt to demolish Abu el-Haj with the following false claim.

Abu el-Haj, an anthropologist at Barnard College of Columbia University, explores in this interesting study how archeology has shaped the social and political imagination of Israel and served the aims of the state. The blurb on the back cover of the book by Talal Asad, another anthropologist, succinctly captures Abu el-Haj's project: "She presents the first critical account of Israeli archeological practice while tracing the dynamic relationships among science, colonization, nation-state building, and territorial expansion."

Facts on the Ground begins with the pre-state period before there was a State of Israel with aims. Talal Asad makes no such overreaching assertion on the back cover. He actually states the following.

A fascinating and important study. Factually detailed and theoretically informed by the latest thinking in the anthropology and sociology of science, Nadia Abu El-Haj has provided us with an understanding of precisely how archeology has contributed so crucially to the formation of nationalist sensibilities in a settler-colonial society.

The quotation to which Lassner refers is the publisher's description and was probably written by someone in marketing communications, who at most skimmed a few chapters of the book, but it does serve the purpose of motivating Jewish Columbia and Barnard alumni to write nasty letters to the administration by ascribing such a statement to someone with an Arabic sounding name.

The blog entry KABOBfest: Talal Asad: Thinking about Religion Belief and Politics links to a recent public lecture by Talal Asad at UC Berkeley. He discusses a perhaps more controversial topic when he addresses the Western discourse on authenticity and inauthenticity in religious belief as well as the politics of defining religion.

Here is Talal Asad's address:

Tala Asad is the son of Muhammad Asad (Leopold Weiss), who is the author of my favorite English language interpretation of the Quran, which is entitled The Message of the Qur'an Translated and Explained by Muhammad Asad. Sphere: Related Content