Consuming Islam: media, ritual, and identity in the making of a brotherhood

ABSTRACT

Research on Islam and consumption focuses mostly on commercialisation of Islam. This article studies Islam-consumption interaction in the context of religious competition within Islam. It discusses the role of religious consumption in Pakistan where Islamic organisations belonging to different Sunni denominations seek to expand while maintaining ideological boundaries. Through an ethnographic study of Dawat-e-Islami, which belongs to the Barelvi denomination within Sunni Islam, it argues that religious consumption within the media and ritual settings of the organisation help to reify a subcultural, denominational identity. Capitalising on the cultural repertoires at its disposal, Dawat-e-Islami has commodified its call to Madina into artefacts, signs, symbols, and names and offered them for consumption to its followers through its media and ritual settings. Collective and expressive acts of consumption, enabled as such, serve to construct a unique, subcultural collective identity within Sunnism – the Madani Brotherhood. This brotherhood contributes to the expansion of DI’s Madani mission while guarding ideological boundaries. In the context of competing visions of Sunni Islam, collective and expressive acts of religious consumption reinforce symbolic and ideological boundaries.

KEYWORDS:

• Religious competition
• consumption
• Islam
• Barelvi

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Islamism is understood as ‘ideologies and movements that strive to establish some kind of an Islamic order – a religious state, sharia law and moral codes in Muslim societies’ (Bayat 2013, 4).

2. Schools of Law or Jurisprudence comprise a body of legal knowledge which is followed by Muslims across the world. This is different from schools based on ideological orientations.

3. A detailed analysis of these disputes is given in (Gugler 2015). Also Tareen (2020) offers a detailed analysis of theological debates between the two Maslaks.

4. This research was approved by the Research Ethics Committee of the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies at Free University of Berlin. Formal permission was received from the organisation’s office bearer and interviewees for conducting this research.

5. Dawat-e-Islami runs several websites which can be accessed through https://www.dawateislami.org/ and https://www.dawateislami.net/ where followers and volunteers download books sermons etc. and access organisational resources.

6. It must be noted that the repudiation of these practices by some Deobandi groups was not merely rhetorical: militant organisations belonging to Deobandi Maslak have carried out bomb attacks on Barelvi mosques, shrines, and ritual gatherings. See Pio et al. (2016).

7. Milad is an annual celebration of the Prophet’s birth. Although it is widely celebrated in the Muslim world, some strands of Deobandis and Wahhabis contest to the validity of this ritual. The contestations have not only remained restricted to theological debates, rather, some militant groups have also attacked Milad celebrations in Pakistan.

8. https://www.dawateislami.net/downloads/islamic-apps/madani-channel-application.

9. For example, in 2002 MMA (Muttahida Majilis‐e‐Amal) emerged as a coalition of six Islamist political parties belonging to different sects and sub-sects.

Additional information

Funding

I would like to thank the German Academic Exchange Services (DAAD) for funding the initial fieldwork for this project.

Notes on contributors

Sumrin Kalia

Sumrin Kalia is a post-doctoral fellow at University College London and an associated lecturer at the Institute of Business Administration in Karachi, Pakistan. She did her PhD in Political Science from Freie Universität Berlin where she examined the political role of Islamic civil society organisations in Pakistan. Her research examines civil society and political culture from a socio-historical, postcolonial perspective and she focuses on processes of (de)democratisation from below.