Religion and the marketplace: constructing the ‘new’ Muslim consumer

ABSTRACT

Despite the prediction that modernization would lead to secularization, the past 30 years brought a global resurgence of religion. As many scholars note, religion has gained a new visibility in the contemporary political economy and become firmly embedded within the identity politics. The changing role of religion is linked to the growing influence of neoliberalism and the expansion of the market logic. In this study, I look at the intersections between Islam, consumption, and market and trace the shifts in the conceptualizations of Muslims in relation to the changing market dynamics and the broader socio-political and economic structures. I discuss three phases through which the view of Muslims as modern consumers in search of distinction and propriety comes to dominate the view of Muslims as non- or anti-consumers: exclusion, identification, and stylization. I conclude by discussing the implications of the study for the current understandings of the marketization of religion.

KEYWORDS:

• Consumerism and religion
• market and marketization
• consumer subjectivity
• neoliberalism
• Islam

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributors

Özlem Sandıkcı is a Professor of Marketing at the School of Management and Administrative Sciences, Istanbul Şehir University, Turkey. Her research addresses socio-cultural dimensions of consumption and focuses on the relationship between globalization, markets, and culture. Her work is published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Business Research, Marketing Theory, Business History Review, and Fashion Theory, and several other journals and edited collections. She is the co-editor of the Handbook of Islamic Marketing (Edward Elgar, 2011) and Islam, Marketing and Consumption: Critical Perspectives on the Intersections (Routledge, 2016).