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The question of how to conceptualize Islam has haunted both Muslim intellectual life and Western scholarship since the decline of Muslim political sovereignty. The collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate, the imposition of colonial epistemologies, and the entrenchment of secular modernity have each dislocated Islam from its historical institutions of meaning. In this dislocation, two dominant modes of representing Islam emerged. On one hand, Orientalism universalized Islam into a static civilizational essence, a monolith that could be studied, defined, and contained. On the other hand, cultural relativism and anthropological pluralism fractured Islam into countless “local Islams,” dissolving its civilizational unity into ethnographic fragments. Both gestures, essentialization and fragmentation, deprived Muslims of their own interpretive authority.

In the late twentieth century, two major intellectual responses emerged to reclaim that authority. Talal Asad’s formulation of Islam as a discursive tradition (1986) and Salman Sayyid’s theorization of Islam as a master signifier (1997) represent two critical attempts to think Islam beyond these impasses. While Asad reestablishes Islam as an internally coherent tradition of moral reasoning and textual engagement, Sayyid reasserts Islam as a politically unifying symbol in a postcolonial and Islamophobic world. Both, however, resist the secular epistemologies that reduce Islam either to private belief or a sociological phenomenon.

The central question, then, is not merely definitional, what Islam is, but functional: how Islam operates as a structure of meaning, belonging, and power in modernity. Can Islam be understood as a living tradition that transmits ethical reasoning, or must it be seen as a master signifier that sutures fragmented Muslim subjectivities into a political totality? This essay argues that the difference between Asad and Sayyid represents a historical and theoretical shift, from the epistemic reclamation of Islam’s moral reason to the political reassertion of Islam’s global agency.

Talal Asad and the Anthropology of Islam: The Discursive Tradition

The anthropology of Islam emerged during a moment of disciplinary anxiety. Earlier scholars such as Clifford Geertz and Ernest Gellner had treated Islam either as a “cultural system” or as a sociological formation of belief and ritual. Their attempts to theorize Islam fell into two traps: essentialism and relativism. Geertz’s Islam Observed (1968) proposed a universal structure of symbols that explained Muslim behavior, while Abdul Hamid El-Zein’s 1977 critique argued for “multiple Islams,” emphasizing contextual diversity. Yet this debate, whether there is one Islam or many, remained confined within Western epistemic categories, detached from how Muslims themselves understood Islam.

It was against this background that Talal Asad, in his 1986 essay “The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam,” intervened with conceptual precision. He rejected both the universalist assumption of a single, timeless Islam and the relativist fragmentation into “many Islams.” Instead, Asad proposed that Islam should be understood as a discursive tradition, a historically extended, socially embodied argument about the proper form and purpose of human life as defined by the Qur’an and the Prophet’s example. A discursive tradition is not a fixed doctrine but a continuing conversation within which authoritative texts and practices are interpreted, contested, and reaffirmed.

For Asad, Islam is sustained through moral reasoning and embodied practice rather than abstract belief. The ulama, jurists, and community of believers participate in ongoing deliberations about divine commands (amr), ethical responsibility (taklif), and social order (adl). These discourses are not static reproductions of the past; they are genealogical, each generation reinterpreting inherited concepts in response to new historical circumstances. The Qur’an and Sunnah remain the authoritative sources, but their meaning is continuously negotiated through practice and reasoning. Thus, Islam’s continuity lies not in fixed content but in the grammar of reasoning that sustains its coherence over time.

By introducing discursive tradition, Asad fundamentally altered the anthropological study of Islam. He insisted that Islam could not be studied as a mere belief system divorced from its authoritative texts, institutions, and disciplines of formation. Instead of describing what Muslims “believe,” anthropology must analyze how Muslims reason and how that reasoning is shaped by power, history, and tradition. In this way, Asad reclaims Islam as a living epistemology, a structure of meaning that produces and disciplines Muslim subjectivities. His project is not only anthropological but also decolonial: it restores Muslims' right to define the grammar of their own knowledge.

In short, Asad’s Islam is an ethical and epistemic tradition, anchored in revelation, sustained by reasoning, and continuously renewed through history. It resists reduction to an object of study, insisting instead that Islam is a mode of life and discourse that interprets the world through divine guidance.

Salman Sayyid and the Political Reassertion of Islam: The Master Signifier 

If Asad’s intervention reclaimed Islam’s intellectual dignity, Salman Sayyid’s work aimed to restore Islam’s political agency. His book A Fundamental Fear: Eurocentrism and the Emergence of Islamism (1997) appeared at a time when Islam had become the global sign of crisis. The Cold War had ended, the Soviet Union had collapsed, and the West, no longer defined by its rivalry with communism, reconstituted itself through the discourse of Islamophobia. Events such as the Rushdie Affair (1989) and the Gulf War (1991) intensified Islam’s image as the new “Other” of global order. In this atmosphere, Islamism was pathologized as extremism—an irrational residue of premodern faith rebelling against secular modernity.

Sayyid’s project was to challenge this narrative by re-centering Islam within the field of global politics. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis and Laclau and Mouffe’s post-Marxist discourse theory, he formulated Islam as a master signifier, a central symbolic term that unifies diverse and potentially conflicting discourses. In Lacanian terms, the master signifier halts the endless “sliding of the signified,” anchoring meaning within a discourse. For Sayyid, Islam performs precisely this role within Muslim societies. It is the signifier that gathers together various social, moral, and political elements, din (faith), dunya (life), dawla (state), into a single field of intelligibility.

Islamism, in this sense, is not a fanatic distortion of religion but a hegemonic project that seeks to transform Islam from a nodal point within Muslim discourse into a master signifier of political identity. The slogan “Islam is the solution” expresses this ambition: it is not a theological statement but a political act that attempts to re-order the entire discursive field around Islam. Through this act, Islam becomes the symbolic name of Muslim universality—the site where fragmented Muslim communities reimagine themselves as a coherent global subject.

Sayyid’s Islamism, therefore, is not limited to establishing an Islamic state; it is about recovering the right to name the political. He argues that Islam’s decline after colonialism represents not merely the loss of empire but the loss of Muslim subjectivity, the capacity to speak and act politically as Muslims. Eurocentrism functions by denying this capacity, by defining Muslims only as objects of governance or violence. To make Islam the master signifier is to resist this denial; it is to say that Muslims can define the meaning of justice, freedom, and modernity on their own terms.

Importantly, Sayyid’s theory is not an abandonment of discourse but an extension of it into the political. He transforms Asad’s discursive Islam into a hegemonic Islam, a symbolic totality that resists both Orientalist essentialism and liberal pluralism. If Orientalism universalized Islam as essence and anti-Orientalism fragmented it into “many Islams,” Sayyid’s master signifier preserves unity without essentialism. It allows Islam to integrate diversity under a shared name, much as “the nation” does in modern Europe.

For Sayyid, then, Islam is the name of political restoration after epistemic collapse. It functions as a rallying point for Muslims to imagine a post-Eurocentric world order. Islam as a master signifier marks the threshold where politics and ethics converge—the space where faith reclaims the right to define the future.

Comparative Paradigm: Continuity, Power, and the Question of Definition

The distinction between Asad’s discursive tradition and Sayyid’s master signifier can be understood as a shift from epistemological continuity to political reconstitution. Both are post-Orientalist projects that resist the fragmentation and objectification of Islam, yet they diverge on the question of what sustains Islam’s coherence. For Asad, continuity lies in the moral and discursive practices through which Muslims interpret revelation; for Sayyid, it lies in the political mobilization that transforms Islam into a symbol of collective identity.

In Asad’s view, Islam is a living argument; its vitality depends on a community’s participation in reasoning grounded in the Qur’an and Sunnah. Authority arises from disciplinary tradition: ulama, jurists, and communities of practice who perpetuate and reformulate Islam’s moral grammar. For Sayyid, however, this internal continuity is insufficient in the face of global epistemicide, the annihilation of Muslim sovereignty and representation under Eurocentrism, in a postcolonial world where the West monopolizes the universal. Asad’s ethical reasoning risks remaining private or apolitical. Thus, Sayyid reconfigures Islam as a symbolic totality that can restore Muslim presence within global discourse.

Both thinkers confront the same dilemma: how can Islam remain unified without becoming essentialist? Asad’s solution is genealogical—continuity without fixity—while Sayyid’s is hegemonic—unity without homogeneity. Yet each faces a limit. Asad’s discursive Islam preserves meaning but not necessarily power; Sayyid’s master signifier restores power but risks abstraction. Asad emphasizes Islamic reasoning as a mode of life; Sayyid emphasizes Islamic naming as a mode of politics.

In synthesis, the comparative paradigm reveals two complementary responses to the crisis of Muslim modernity: Asad’s Islam reclaims the right to reason ethically, and Sayyid’s Islam reclaims the right to exist politically. Together, they form a dialectic between meaning and sovereignty, between Islam as the tradition that speaks, and Islam as the signifier that gathers the speech of a people.

Intersection: From Discursive Continuity to Political Totality

The intersection between Asad and Sayyid lies in their shared recognition that Islam is not an essence but a site of articulation—a field where meanings are produced, contested, and stabilized. Both understand Islam as inter-discursive: it carries traces of past articulations (Qur’an, Sunnah, juristic reasoning) and is continuously redefined through its engagement with power. Yet they differ in the level of this articulation.

For Asad, articulation occurs within tradition, the moral, textual, and ritual practices that transmit Islamic reasoning through time. The Qur’an and Sunnah are not merely sources but discursive anchors that orient the Muslim’s ethical life. Islam’s power lies in its capacity to generate meaning and discipline through embodied practice.

Sayyid, however, operates at the level of hegemony, the struggle over who names Islam and how it structures the social. For him, articulation is not confined within the ummah’s internal discourse but extends into the global field of representation. Islam becomes a master signifier precisely because it can integrate diverse social and political identities under its name, turning fragmentation into solidarity.

In this way, Sayyid politicizes Asad’s insight. In Sayyid's framework, the continuity of discursive Islam becomes a resource for resistance, a way to reclaim Islam’s visibility in the global symbolic order. Yet, the two projects converge in their rejection of secular epistemology: both deny that Islam can be reduced to either culture or ideology. Islam is a dynamic locus of meaning and belonging that transcends the secular dichotomy of religion and politics.

Thus, the intersection between Asad and Sayyid marks a movement from discursive continuity (the preservation of reasoning) to political totality (the restoration of subjectivity). Asad provides Islam with its inner grammar; Sayyid restores its outer sovereignty.

Muslimness and Political Subjectivity

At the heart of both Asad’s and Sayyid’s projects lies the question of Muslimness, what it means to exist as a Muslim subject in a world defined by secular modernity. In Asad’s anthropology, Muslimness emerges through disciplined formation within a tradition of reasoning and virtue. The Muslim subject is shaped by practices such as prayer, fasting, and juristic deliberation that internalize divine command into moral habit. Muslim identity here is ethical rather than political; it is an ongoing project of cultivating taqwa through participation in a historical community of reasoning.

Sayyid, in contrast, redefines Muslimness in the register of political ontology. The modern Muslim is not simply a believer but a subject denied, a political identity excluded from the universal category of “the human” under Eurocentric modernity. Islamophobia, for Sayyid, is not mere prejudice but a structural mechanism that polices the limits of the political by rendering Muslimness unrepresentable. To say “Islam is the solution” is therefore an act of ontological rebellion; it reclaims the right to define humanity, justice, and progress from within the horizon of Islam.

Thus, Sayyid’s Islamism is not only about state formation but about restoring Muslim selfhood. It reconstructs the ummah as a global political subject after centuries of colonial dismemberment. Without such a political rearticulation, Islam remains what Sayyid calls a nodal point, a dispersed symbol within fragmented local discourses. With Islamism, it becomes a master signifier, a symbolic totality that gives coherence to Muslim being-in-the-world.

In this light, Muslimness is not simply belief but agency, the ability to act, speak, and imagine under the name of Islam. Asad gives this agency its ethical substance; Sayyid gives it its political direction. Muslimness thus oscillates between discursive tradition and master signifier: between the intimate cultivation of meaning and the global struggle for representation.

In conclusion, the debate between Islam as a discursive tradition and Islam as a master signifier is not a rivalry but a continuum of recovery. Talal Asad restores the epistemic dignity of Islam as a reasoning tradition that endures through its moral grammar, while Salman Sayyid reclaims its political dignity as a symbol of collective sovereignty. Both respond to the exact condition of postcolonial rupture, the disinheritance of Muslims from their interpretive and political authority.

To reconcile them is to see Islam not as essence or plurality but as a living discourse animated by power, memory, and struggle. Islam remains at once the site of reasoning and the name of resistance, the grammar of faith and the banner of renewal. In Asad, Islam speaks; in Sayyid, Islam acts. Together, they mark the double movement of decolonial thought: from epistemic justice to political becoming.

About the Author

Muhammed Najil k k studies at Darul Uloom Islamic Dawa College Thootha, affiliated to Darul Huda Islamic University.

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