A Comparative Study to Talal Assad and Charles Taylor’s Approaches to Secularization

Abstract

is true that religion has ideologically essentialized itself through history; however, this does not mean that it has a de facto existing essence. The historical demystification of the human understanding of the world, the gradual decrease of religion in the public sphere and the privatization of religious beliefs characterize our modern secular age. However, the assumed linear progression of religion’s decline has been challenged by a resurgence of religion and belief in both western and non-western societies, especially in the latter where religion is entangled with questions of the authority of knowledge and culture. This proves that the secularization thesis of religion’s inexorable decline cannot remain unquestioned. We must explain the continuous development of religion in modern life. What are the theoretical frameworks that explain the Abstract: To critique the traditional thesis of secularization, which prioritizes secularism over religion, I shall refer to both Charles Taylor and Talal Assad’s significant contributions to secularization studies. Taylor’s proposition examines the historical narrative of secularity and provides an in-depth philosophical understanding of secularization theory. He justifies the reemergence of religion by the fact that religion does not disappear but rather it adapts itself to the secular age. However, Assad adopts an anthropological approach that seeks to disclose the contradictions of secular modernity and liberal democratic states. Assad is more interested in the formation of the secular as an epistemic category than secularization as a historical process or secularism as a political doctrine. His main concern is to problematize the concept of the secular through a genealogical method that seeks to consider different sensibilities and practices like the myth, the sacred and pain in the formation of the secular. These striking examples provide helpful materials in the construction of the secular from other non-secular or religious practices. They also prove that there has been always a relationship between religion and the secular. Therefore, I argue that the concept of the secular cannot be analyzed in isolation from the religious, nor can it be universally identified as a totality. My intention here is to underscore the idea that any rigid division between religion and the secular or any attempt to put them in sequential, linear or dichotomous positions will only impoverish both. I argue also that the more secularism identifies itself with reason and supposedly Eurocentric universal attributes the more religion reinforces its ‘essence’ against secularism. Religion’s reactive response to secularism is simply the outcome of secularism’s alliance with reason and science.