Tradition is not merely the inheritance of the past nor is it in opposition to modernity. In fact, tradition itself is a modern concept that emerges out of Englightenment (Scott 1999). Historical anthropologist Talal Asad best articulates the importance of resisting the binary opposition of tradition and modernity in the study of Islam in his now classic and oft-cited literature review "The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam" (1986). [...]
Following MacIntre, Asad defines the Islamic tradition as a set of discourses connected to an exemplary past and to interpretations of foundational texts that Muslims draw on in their ordinary lives.
A tradition consists essentially of discourses that seek to instruct practitioners regrading the correct form and purpose of a given practice that, precisely because it is established, has a history. These discourses relate conceptually to a past (when the practice was instituted, and from which the knowledge of its point and proper performance has been transmitted) and a future (how the point of that practice can best be secured in the short or long term, or why it should be modified or abandoned), through a present (how it is linked to other practices, institutions, and social conditions). An Islamic discursive tradition is simply a tradition of Muslim discourse that addresses itself to conceptions of the Islamic past and future, with reference to a particular Islamic practice in the present...[Tradition is not] necessarily imitative of what was done in the past. For even where traditional practices appear to the anthropologist to be imitative of what has gone before, it will be the practitioners' concepts of what is apt performance, and of how the past is related to present practices, that will be crucial for tradition, not the apparent repetition of an old form. (Asad 1986: 14-5)
-from pg. 24-29 of Zareena Grewal's "Imagined Cartographies: Crisis, Displacement, and Islam in America" (2006 University of Michigan PhD dissertation)
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