What does Talal Asad mean by “Islamic Discursive Tradition”?

To understand what exactly “Islamic discursive tradition” means, this section elaborates on what problem Talal Asad wanted to resolve by introducing this term. He believes that till the time when he first developed his article, anthropologists tried to justify “Islam” as an object of this field based on three approaches; contextualism, culturalism and essentialism. The first one claims that no such reality can be called Islam. There are just different contexts that differ socially, historically, politically and even linguistically. Therefore, the anthropology of Islam is just an anthropological study of some contexts, like all contexts. The Anthropology of Islam is just anthropology, like all other anthropological studies, not a field with some distinct and specific subject matter. The second approach confirms that there is some distinct and specific subject matter as “Islam”; however, as isolated atomic cultures, behaviours and customs of believers, which means Muslims. Thus, an anthropology of Islam is an anthropology of Muslimness. The third approach conceptualises “Islam” as a unified totality in which all behaviours, structures and beliefs interact with each other in its realm and are related to it.<a href="https://medium.com/@ho.musavi/what-does-talal-asad-mean-by-islamic-discursive-tradition-d811af65e1a3#_ftn1" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">[1]</a> <a href="https://medium.com/@ho.musavi/what-does-talal-asad-mean-by-islamic-discursive-tradition-d811af65e1a3">Website</a>