Folowing a pointer from Musings here is an interview with Talal Asad on Modernity and Religion.
It seems that you are using the term tradition differently here than it is commonly understood in the humanities and social sciences. Even the idea of “hybrid societies/cultures,” which has gained ascendancy in certain intellectual circles, implies a coexistence of modern and traditional elements without necessarily decentering the normative meaning of these concepts.
Yes, many writers do describe certain societies as hybrids, part modern and part traditional. I don’t agree with them, however. I think that one needs to recognize that when one talks about tradition, one should be talking about, in a sense, a dimension of social life and not a stage of social development. In an important sense, tradition and modernity are not really two mutually exclusive states of a culture or society but different aspects of historicity. Many of the things that are thought of as modern belong to traditions which have their roots in Western history. A changing tradition is often developing rapidly but a tradition nevertheless. When people talk about liberalism as a tradition, they recognize that it is a tradition in which there are possibilities of argument, reformulation, and encounter with other traditions, that there is a possibility of addressing contemporary problems through the liberal tradition. So one thinks of liberalism as a tradition central to modernity. How is it that one has something that is a tradition but that is also central to modernity? Clearly, liberalism is not a mixture of the traditional and the modern. It is a tradition that defines one central aspect of Western modernity. It is no less modern by virtue of being a tradition than anything else is modern. It has its critics, both within the West and outside, but it is perhaps the dominant tradition of political and moral thought and practice. And yet this is not the way in which most social scientists have talked about so-called “traditional” societies/cultures in the non-European world generally, and in the Islamic world in particular. So this is partly what I mean when I say that we must rethink the concept of tradition. In this sense, I think, we can regard the contemporary Islamic revival as consisting of attempts at articulating Islamic traditions that are adequate to the modern condition as experienced in the Muslim world, but also as attempts at formulating encounters with Western as well as Islamic history. This doesn’t mean that they succeed. But at least they try in different ways.
