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

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 re-emergence 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.