Practices and Knowledges

Abstract

Talal Asad argues that, in tradition, religion is embodied in practices geared to producing particular virtues. This cultivates a subjectivity profoundly different to that engendered by modernity with its view of religion as privatised belief. This essay elaborates this Asadian theme. But it also argues, as a corollary to this theme, that these practices and virtues produce new states of the self, that is, new “knowledges”, with their own metaphysic that implicitly challenges the metaphysic of modernity. In Islam, Sufism provides the vocabulary for these states of the self and our argument is illustrated by drawing upon the experiences of Sufi order members in South Africa.