"Using a genealogical method

 developed by Friedrich Nietzsche and made prominent by Michel Foucault, Asad "complicates terms of comparison that many anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and political scientists receive as the unexamined background of thinking, judgment, and action as such. By doing so, he creates clearings, opening new possibilities for communication, connection, and creative invention where opposition or studied indifference prevailed.

--William E. Connolly in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, Stanford University Press, 2006, p. 75.