In this talk I consider various explanations of the global religious revival - especially the notion that it is a response to social deprivation and instability. I examine this idea with special attention to conditions and debates in Egypt. I argue against general explanations in this context, and suggest that one major difficulty with them is that they tend to assume uncritically a secularist teleology. What needs to be addressed, I propose finally, is the question of secularism itself.

TALAL ASAD is University Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). He has conducted extensive research on the phenomenon of religion and secularism and is an expert on religious revival in the Middle East, which is usually called Islamism in Western literature. He has published more than fifty articles and five books, and his work has contributed to anthropology, history, works on modernity, as well as religious studies.

His well-known Formation of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (published in the series "Cultural Memory in the Present" by Stanford University Press in 2003) explores the notions, practices, and political formations of secularism, emphasizing the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. In his previous, widely-read book, Genealogies of Religion (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), he traces the ways in which the notion "religion" has come to be constructed historically. He is currently working on the secularization of law in the Middle East.