"A Man for All Seasons, Regions, and Religions"

Talal Asad, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center, who will moderate the discussion, was born in Saudi Arabia, brought up in Pakistan, and educated at Oxford University in England. He speaks in the first of three videos about his family background and the influence it had on him. His father was an Austrian Jew who converted to Islam as a young man, worked as a foreign correspondent in Saudi Arabia and India, and married a traditional Saudi Arabia-born Muslim, Assad’s mother, who was raised in India and Pakistan.

Asad’s long-term research concerns the transformation of religious law (the shari'ah) in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt, concentrating on what constitutes secular and progressive reform. Among his many notable books, his most recent, On Suicide Bombing, scrutinizes the idea of a "clash of civilizations"; the claim that "Islamic jihadism" is the essence of modern terror; and the arguments put forward by liberals to justify war in our time.

Asad speaks in the second video about the relationship of Islam and Christianity to modernity and secularity, a subject he addressed in another of his books, Formations of the Secular. In the third video, he discusses European contradictions in its approach both to Islam and secularism, and to religion in general.

http://www.gc.cuny.edu/index.htm