The idea of tradition and language: thinking through Talal Asad

This essay examines the relationship between tradition and language by thinking through Talal Asad’s concept of discursive tradition. Rather than treating tradition as a static inheritance or an obstacle to critical reasoning, the paper approaches it as a historically situated mode of life constituted through disciplined linguistic practices. By tracing the modern valorization of doubt—particularly through Cartesian skepticism, Protestant hermeneutics, and secular epistemology—the essay shows how modernity recasts language as a neutral instrument and positions tradition as irrational or obsolete. Drawing on Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and anthropological debates in the study of religion, the paper argues that doubt itself has a genealogy and cannot be understood outside specific forms of life. The essay concludes by suggesting that tradition and doubt are not oppositional but dialectically related within discursive practices, and that attending to this relationship allows for a more grounded understanding of religious life beyond modern secular assumptions.