Islamic encounters in consumption and marketing

Abstract

Cataloged from PDF version of article.In recent years, Islam has become highly visible in media, politics, and the marketplace. The increasing popular and academic attention to Islam is partly driven by the events of 9/11 and the related imperative to ‘‘better’’ understand Muslims. The interest is also stimulated by broader socioeconomic developments, in particular neoliberal transformation and the so-called Islamic resurgence. Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, Islamization has become a major social and political force impacting the Muslim world and beyond. Studies conducted in various fields of social sciences discussed the rise of Islamist movements and the spread of political Islam in connection to globalization and as an expression of resistance to Western-style modernization and secular modernity (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; Dekmejian, 1995; Esposito, 1998). For example, in his influential book,\ud Globalized Islam , Olivier Roy (2004) linked the rise of contemporary Islamism to cultural disruptions and dislocations of a globalizing world, which made people,\ud uprooted from their original cultures, susceptible to ‘‘fundamentalist’’ forms of Isla

The ontological pitfalls of Islamic exceptionalism: A re-inquiry on El-Bassiouny's (2014, 2015) conceptualization of “Islamic marketing”

“…In conclusion, El-Bassiouny shows more flexibility towards understanding religiosity in cultural contexts, the same notion we put forward in our previous work (Sandıkcı, 2011;Jafari, 2012;Sandıkcı & Jafari, 2013;Jafari & Sandıkcı, 2015a).…”

“…In Section 3 of the article, a particular interest in the scripture determines the author's preference for conceiving Islam as a religion over understanding Islam as culture. In this section, inaccurate engagement with our work (Sandıkcı, 2011;Jafari, 2012;Sandıkcı & Jafari, 2013;2015a) renders the discussion less effective as the author strives to prove that religion-oriented research is valuable, as if we had said otherwise. The technical problem here is that El-Bassiouny misinterprets our thesis on exceptionalism (to be discussed in Section 4 of this essay).…”

“…El-Bassiouny's attempt to position her research (and Islamic marketing) in the general field of marketing is problematic because she continues to build her argument on marginalization, a discourse we (Sandıkcı, 2011;Jafari, 2012;Sandıkcı & Jafari, 2013;Jafari & Sandıkcı, 2015a) critiqued for its restrictive nature. Marginalization is not a neutral term; on the contrary, it is a highly political discourse intertwined with power relations in a Foucauldian (1980,1991) sense (see also Tadajewski & Jafari's (2012) edited collection on power and knowledge in marketing).…”

“…(1) Marginalization: we provided numerous examples to demonstrate that Moslem consumers are not as marginalized as claimed by El-Bassiouny. We proposed that the marginalization discourse be systematically analyzed in an interdisciplinary manner and in the light of many interrelated critical factors such as the post-911 identity anxieties (McGinty, 2012;Kabir, 2012;Sandıkcı & Jafari, 2013), globalization's acceleration of self-reflexivity (Beck, 2011;Jafari & Goulding, 2013) and the policies and politics of commoditizing and commercializing Islam in the age of neoliberalism (Jones, 2010;Süerdem, 2013). 4 (2) Exceptionalism: from an 'ontological' perspective, we questioned El-Bassiouny's exceptionalist depiction of Moslems as a collectivistic set of "distinct" and "unique" market actors (e.g., Moslem consumers as a market segment as well as Moslem marketers and educators) whose market behaviors are essentially ruled by the Shari'ah.…”

Routledge Handbook on Consumption

“…There is ample evidence that neither religion nor nationalism pose a challenge to global marketization and consumerism. The growth of Islamic markets, marketing, and fashions (Gökarıksel and Secor, 2009;Sandikci and Jafari, 2013;Ger, 2007, 2011;Sandikci and Rice, 2011), at the junction of global capitalism and global Islam, is an instantiation of the global condition and part and parcel of global capitalism and consumerism. Islam is very much embedded in and coexists with global markets, consumption, and, politics (Ger, 2013).…”