Myth functions differently for religious believers than for modernist poets.

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

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Clarifies Adonis’s distinction between myth as plural/anarchic vs. religious law as monotheistic/totalitarian, and the divergent functions of myth.
• XREF: Connects to the chapter’s overall argument about the secular, and contrasts with modernist European poetic uses of myth; echoes ideas about ideology becoming invisible.

Related

• Fundamentalist Islamic myth operates as commanding law invisible as myth (similarity 0.91)
• Myth is conventionally opposed to the secular even by myth’s defenders (similarity 0.82)
• Myth functioned as action-shaping material, not just representation (similarity 0.81)
• Religious myth shaped modern historical knowledge without making it religious. (similarity 0.79)