Tradition links practitioners across past, present, and future through embodied pedagogy.

Evidence

Talal Asad, in drawing upon the work of Alisdair Macintyre (Macintyre 1984, 1988 ), proposes a notion of tradition that is commensurable with Michel Foucault’s work on discursive formations (T. Asad 1986) . Asad suggests that Islam is best regarded as a “discursive tradition” whose pedagogical practices ar.. ticulate a conceptual relationship with the past, through an engagement with a set of foundational texts (the Quran and the Q. ), commentaries thereon, and the conduct of exemplary fi . Tradition, in this sense, may be con.. ceived as a particular modality of Foucault’s discursive formation in which re.. fl upon the past is a constitutive condition for the understanding and re.. formulation of the present and the future . Islamic discursive practices, in this view, link practitioners across the temporal modalities of past, present, and fu.. ture through pedagogy of practical, scholarly, and embodied forms of knowl.. edges and virtues deemed central to the tradition (T. Asad 1986 , 14) . Clearly indebted to Foucault’s conception of power and discourse, Asad’s formulation of tradition draws attention both to micropractices of interpersonal pedagogy, through which the truth of a particular discursive practice is established, and to the macrolevel of historically sedimented discourses, which determine the pos.. sibility of what is debatable, enunciable, and doable in the present. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 812

Categorization

• DEFINE: Asad’s ‘discursive tradition’ merges Macintyre and Foucault to theorize Islam’s self-referential pedagogy.
• DEEPTHINKING: The two-level model — micro pedagogical practice establishing truth alongside macro sedimented discourse — is a genuinely powerful analytic frame worth sitting with.
• XREF: connects to: Fire building links contemporary practitioners to ancestral identity — Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom,…, 1330