The 2003 publication of Talal Asad's Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity was a landmark in contemporary anthropology. An intervention into late modern debates over secularism, the book subjected triumphalist narratives to critical scrutiny while reworking their fundamental elements. It articulated unregarded questions, reframing the terms of secularist discourse with reference to the powers they harness and disable. And amid the multitude of contemporary polemics over the religious and the secular, it worked “back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties” (Asad 2003: 16).