Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason

In Secular Translations, the anthropologist Talal Asad reflects on his lifelong engagement with secularism and its contradictions. He draws out the ambiguities in our concepts of the religious and the secular through a rich consideration of translatability and untranslatability, exploring the circuitous movements of ideas between histories and cultures.

In search of meeting points between the language of Islam and the language of secular reason, Asad gives particular importance to the transl...