Fundamentalist Islamic myth operates as commanding law invisible as myth

Evidence

Although the fundamentalist (asu¯li) form of Islamic thought that prevails today is itself mythic, he argues, it is a form of myth that has acquired for believers the character of law—of commandment—and so is not apparent to them as myth. For Adonis myth is plural, even anarchic, while the religious law is monotheistic and totalitarian. In marking the unconscious truth of contemporary religious discourse, myth clearly has a very different function from the one modernist European poets give it when they use it to ground secular experience. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 278

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s goal of understanding why Islam (but not Christianity) gets coded as premodern: Adonis’s own framework from within Arab letters reinscribes that binary, treating Islamic law as totalitarian monothestic myth versus European myth as anarchic/creative.