Annotation: Recent decades have shown that religion not only survived the 20th century, but also remains an important factor in political and social life around the world. The relevance of religion raises the question of the relationship between the secular and the religious in discursive practices that set the trajectories of development of modern societies. “What might an anthropology of secularism look like?” With this question, Talal Asad, an anthropologist of religion and a contributing scholar to postcolonial studies, inaugurates work on the concepts and practices of secularism in the West and the Middle East. As a unique mediator between the cultures of the East and West, Asad was one of the first scholars to engage in an anthropology of Islam and proposed examining it with the help of and in relation to concepts at play within the Islamic discursive tradition. Turning to the history of the reform of religious law (sharia), the author offers an alternative view of the history of the secularization process in the Islamic world. Asad's criticism of the familiar opposition between the secular and the religious allows us to view “the secular” as a concept that connects certain types of behavior, knowledge, and emotionality in the modern world.