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By Nathan Schneider Not long after his return from Cairo, where he was doing fieldwork, I spoke with Talal Asad at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, where he is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology. Distinguished indeed: with books like Genealogies of Religion and Formations of the Secular, as well as numerous articles, Asad’s work has been formative for current scholarly conversation about religion and secularity, stressing both

   As long as I can remember, I have loved writing. I turned those "make a sentence with your spelling words" assignments into short stories. My science reports read like episodes of Wild Kingdom ("brought to you by Mutual of Omaha".) Book reports allowed me to pick apart the language and logic of adults who write for children. If it involved putting words on paper in some creative fashion, I was in the Zone (a phenomena I understood long before it had a name.)
    What didn't I love about writing?
     Revision.
   "Revision" meant everything was spelled and punctuated correctly, the nouns and verbs agreeing. All sentences must be complete; no fragments or run-ons allowed.
     I was a lousy speller, in those pre-Spellcheck days.  Teachers liked papers with tidy margins, perfect Palmer Method cursive, and no erasures.  My papers looked like grey Swiss cheese with streaks of not-quite-erased words, and holes where I'd erased a little too hard. I wrote assignments over and over to achieve the required neatness.  No matter how good my writing, it was never neat or legible enough to win the attention I thought I deserved.
     Thanks to my early teachers, I learned to confuse revision with "following the rules"(grammar, spelling, neatness). Because I liked making good grades, I eventually forced myself to check every other word in the dictionary and slavishly follow the punctuation sections of my grammar book.
     There is absolutely nothing wrong with grammatically correct, well-spelled writing.  But in my case, "learning the rules" came at the expense of creative re-thinking. Not once did anyone mention "revision" as a way to make your writing better.
     There are kids who don't mind doing things over and over, and there are kids who would rather eat flies than do something a second time. The former kids are the ones who become Olympians, win the National Spelling Bee, solo with the New York Philharmonic at age seven.
     I was not one of those kids. Since I had mastered the art of being "a teacher pleaser" (ie, spelled right and neatly written), I saw absolutely no reason to re-write anything to make it better.  It was already
"better";  the teacher could read it and I got an A. Good, right?
     I continued my policy of Get it Right the First Time into high school. I won several state and national writing contests by never revising. I was under the impression that "good" writers always got it right the first time. If I got stuck after the first two paragraphs (which was happening with alarming frequency), I would tear up the story. If I couldn't write that third paragraph, the idea was no good, right?
     Then I met the Famous Southern Writer. (Because memories have a way of revising themselves, I cannot swear that this is absolutely the way things happened, so no names will be mentioned.)
     One of my writing contest prizes was lunch with Famous Southern Writer. I was fifteen and had absolutely no idea how gifted and famous this writer was. I was much more interested in the prize money that the Writer was to present me at the luncheon.
    The Writer liked to talk. A lot. Mostly about how hard writing was. "I write two pages and tear three up.  I write the same page over and over."
     I didn't think the Writer was making much of a case for writing as a career, to say nothing of being a monotonous lunch partner. So when the Writer took a break to actually eat, I chirped up and said, "Wow. You really re-write stuff a lot. I never write anything more than once."
     I might have