Recent decades show that religion not only survived the 20th century, but also remains an important factor in political and social life around the world. The relevance of religion raises the question of the relationship between secular and religious in discursive practices that set the trajectories of the development of modern societies. What might the anthropology of secularism look like? With this question, Talal Assad - an anthropologist of religion and a classic of postcolonial studies - opens a work on the concepts and practices of secularism in the West and the Middle East. As a unique mediator for the cultures of East and West, Assad was one of the first to take up the anthropology of Islam and proposed to consider it using the concept of the Islamic discursive tradition. Turning to the history of reform of sharia courts, the author offers an alternative view of the history of the process of secularization in the Islamic world. Assad's criticism of the usual opposition of secular and religious forces us to look at secular as a concept that connects certain types of behavior, knowledge and emotionality of the modern world.