Abstract
This essay explores Islamic marketing at the intersection of global capitalism and global Islam and argues that Islamic marketing is one case in point that global capitalism lives and thrives with religions rather than replace them. I review briefly the global rise of religions and the different accounts of that resurgence and point to the political nature of religions. Besides politics, the global search for community bolsters the value of religion and the opportunity for Islamic marketing. Given the multiplicity of capitalisms and the embeddedness of marketing in the nexus of global markets, religions, and politics, I suggest that the emergent arena of Islamic marketing is ripe for studies grounded in the particular context and history as well as in recent social theory. Research can potentially generate theory about markets and marketing if and only if marketing scholars regard the phenomena of Islamic marketing as part and parcel of the logics of the market, capitalism, and globalization and examine the locally specific links among religion (and communality), markets, and politics. Critical ethnography and political economy analyses are some of the promising approaches for that end.
“Islamic marketing” (Jafari, 2012; Sandıkcı and Rice, 2011) may appear at first sight to be an enigmatic phenomenon. Such a conundrum surfaces especially if one thinks that “Jihad and McWorld are moral antinomies.… individuals cannot live in both domains at once and are compelled to choose” (Barber, 1995: 216) or espouses notions such as Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” or views that Islam is opposed to consumerism. Instead, I will argue that Islamic marketing is one instantiation of the global condition and part and parcel of global capitalism. Islamic marketing emerged at the junction of global capitalism and global Islam—one among the numerous globally rising religions—as a manifestation of the desecularization (and accompanying politics) of the market and society. Accordingly, I suggest that future research recognize that religion occupies a significant position in modern lives and markets and thus should investigate locally specific nexus of global markets–religions–politics in order to develop theory about markets and consumption.
Global rise of religions: desecularization, reflexive religiosity, and politics of religions
The secularization of the age of enlightenment entailed three elements: declining relevance of religious knowledge in the public sphere (disenchantment and the rise of rational knowledge), decline of church affiliation and practiced religiosity in daily life, and transformation of faith from a natural custom into a matter of individual choice (Taylor, 2007). However, today there are indications of upsurge in religiosity around the world—United States, South America, large areas of Africa, and Asia (Casanova, 1994; Hefner, 1998; Speck, 2012). Christian evangelican movements are exploding—there are 300 million Pentecostalists around the world; Catholism has been rising in Eastern Europe and Orthodox Christianity in the other former Soviet Union republics after 1989; liberation theology and second reformation are growing in Latin America; and Islam has been escalating in Islamic geographies as well as in Western Europe, with increased migration. Consider for example the North African Muslim immigrants—consumers and entrepreneurs—in France or the Asian Muslims in the UK and their identity politics focusing on religious identity. Moreover, there is another trend. Luckmann (1967) notes the rise of a new market of religions such as Zen Buddhism, New Age, Esotericism, and the like and suggests that religiosity has been taking more individualized and spiritual forms. Luckmann argues that such a booming market for individualized belief products points to structural changes in religiosity. In addition to the rise in religions, exemplified by the political rise of the religious right in the United States, the Islamist politics in secular Turkey, and Hindu politics in India, the influence of religious institutions has been growing in public politics and cultures around the world. This resurgence challenges long held assumptions about the secular nature of modernization and modernity (see also Eickelman, 2000). Religion, which was expected to disappear or lose its power as societies became more modern, is in fact prevalent and potent.
There are different accounts of this resurgence of religions. One view is that “secularist modernization theories … consider the place of religion in modern society to be vacant” but that is not possible (Deutschmann, 2012: 10). Reformulating Durkheim’s view that “religion is the symbolic reflection of the collective unity of society,” Deutschmann (2012: 20) argues that the function of collective representation of society must be filled and can be filled either by religions themselves or by social symbols—such as the capital form of money—which are not religious per se but are religious in a latent sense.
Another view is that the upsurge in religiosity is a reaction to the politics of secularism. For example, Spohn (2003) argues that in the exceptional case of Western Europe, where secularism is alive and well, secular nationalisms entail, in actuality, Christian components in differing combinations. He explains the contemporary rise of religious and ethnic nationalism as a reaction to the previous authoritarian imposition of such a Western European model of state secularism within predominantly religious and multiethnic societies.
Yet a third view is that, while modernity has indeed been desecularizing, religiosity itself has been transforming and becoming more individualized and reflexive (Beck, 2010). This respiritualization and desecularization entail believers drawing on “traditions which are not merely invoked but ‘reflexively’ mined for reasons” (Speck, 2012: 162). Drawing on Turner (2011), Speck argues that in the global south and among diasporic communities, a reflexive religiosity embodied by piety movements has been emerging. This pietization of everyday life applies religiosity reflexively to novel situations that arise and are “world-accommodating” (Turner, 2011: 280). Moreover, believers “impact upon the public sphere as they seek to open up spaces for the realization of their goals and the full public expression of a ‘private’ faith” (Speck, 2012: 168).
The diversity in these accounts is apt to reflect the differences in particular local conditions that inform the scholars. Regardless, such discussions indicate that accompanying the worldwide upsurge of religion has been a parallel rise in the presence of religion in social theory. For example, Speck (2012) notes that Beck’s views changed from regarding reflexive modernity to be a project of secularization to recognizing the constitutive role of religion and “religious reflexivity” in reflexive modernity. This “religious turn” (Beck, 2010; Habermas, 2008; Speck, 2012) in social theory underscores the rise of religion to public import. Individualization of religion and religious reflexivity (Beck, 2010) drives believers into action in the public sphere—local and global. Thus, “impelled by events and the ‘post-secular’ shift across social theory” (Speck, 2012: 165), we now encounter a desecularized reflexive modernity, which has decisive implications for politics of religion.
The increasing public presence of religion—beyond the private sphere—and its political power reminds us that religion is not apolitical. Religion has always been political throughout history. Consider the Crusades, religious wars within Europe (such as the Thirty Years’ War and the French Wars of Religion), and colonialization and the accompanying “civilizing” Christian missions in South America, Africa, and elsewhere. Today, religion remains political as evidenced in the politization of the issues of abortion and gay marriages—decisions that should have been individual choices have become issues mined by political parties. Consider, for example, the Christian Democratic Parties in Europe, the political rise of the religious right in the United States, the political, cultural, and economic rise of Islam in Turkey, Hindu nationalism in India, and Muslim Brotherhood seeking political power in Egypt.
The politics of religion calls for an economic (as well as social, symbolic, and cultural) resource base. In the case of Islam, its rise coincided with the emergence of Islamic economics. Kuran (2004) argues that the emergent field called Islamic economics, in part a response to contemporary grievances, is also an instrument to advance the political agenda of Islamism. Despite its rhetoric, Islamic economics exhibits a lot of readiness to accept market realities and works within the logic of contemporary capitalism to enhance economic and political power of Islam.
In the case of Turkey—a legally secular country where secular modernization used to be the ideal, now at least in the parliament—modernization is Islam-laden and economic/political Islam has been challenging secularism. Keyman (2007) discusses how Islam in Turkey has become a powerful economic actor and appears to aim to promote a morally loaded economic modernization founded upon a combination of free market and religious values. A network of Islamic enterprises use Islam as a basis for cooperation and solidarity among both local and international producers, as a tool for competition—local and global (Buğra, 1998). With a strengthened economic base, the Islamist party has been in the government in Turkey for over a decade now. Especially given the economic growth Turkey has been experiencing (thanks at least partially due to the abundant financial support by global powers in the West (in the hopes of taming Islam or propagating “moderate” Islam) and the East (in the hopes of spreading the influence of Islam)), the Islamist political economy in Turkey has been hailed as a role model for the Muslim brotherhoods and other Islamists in North Africa and the Middle East, particularly after the so-called “Arab Spring.” However, the recent “Diren Taksim” protests - which started late May 3013 and have been going on at the time of proofreading this essay - and the government's and the police forces' responses to them may tarnish that image and reveal the challenges of an alliance between Islamist neoliberal economics and democratic governance, at least in Turkey.
Globalization and multiple capitalisms
The above discussion implies that local as well as transnational dynamics and relations have important implications for decularization and its politics. First, globalization is as much about a renewed concern with belonging, community, and commitment as mobility and deterritorialization (Bude and Durrschmidt, 2010; Cova, 1997; Maffesoli, 1993). Termed “the search for the social link” or “the return of the community” (Cova, 1997) or “neotribalism” (Maffesoli, 1993), the rise of the collectivity is a phenomenon of the contemporary world and a reaction to globalizing forces. The postmodern community has been argued to entail transient, fluid, and symbolic collectivities of individual choice, held together through shared emotions, styles of life, moral beliefs, and consumption practices. Cova suggests that ethnic diasporas are one example of such a community. The Islamic immigrant communities in Europe constitute a collectivity who shares a web of meanings, symbols, a subculture, a vision of life, as well as a material culture, the so-called Islamic products. If things objectify relationships (Miller, 1987), then Islamic products serve to materialize and mark Islamic collectivities in Europe as well as empowering them economically and politically. One example is the headscarf—the potent marker making difference visible and objectifying Islamic identity (e.g., Ammann, 2002; Sandıkcı and Ger, 2010). Sandikci and Ger demonstrate empirically that seeking belongingness to a community was a significant factor in the process of adopting the scarf by modern women who were socialized with secular values and whose mothers did not wear the scarf and, acccordingly, in the formation of politically Islamist nontraditional communities in Turkey. Islamic things and consumption practices serve to objectify relationships with Islamic communities and mark difference from the so-called secular communities not only in Muslim immigrant communities in Europe but also in the so-called Muslim countries, where Islamist movements have been gaining power. Islamic products provide linking value (Cova, 1997) among the Islamic communities in Europe or in other countries where Islamist collectivities live side by side yet in tension with secular collectivities.
Second, the global logic entails interconnections, interactions, and mutual constitutions rather than a unidirectional impact of the “global” on the “local” (Appadurai, 1990; Hannerz, 1996; Hart, 2004). Thus, Islamic marketing is much more than a mere reaction to global marketing. While we tend to treat “marketing” as if it were a standard and universal set of activities involving value creation and exchange, marketing is embedded in and thus necessarily shaped by the historical, political, and ethical texture of a particular marketplace. Thus, Islamic marketing manifests specific global–local encounters in the particular spaces it operates.
We have long been aware that markets cannot be disembedded from their contexts—the institutions, ideologies, and the discourses at a specific time and space. Since Gramsci and Polanyi, we realize that the economy, the state, and the society are all intimately and deeply interrelated. Such embeddedness brings historically and spatially specific forms of markets and capitalisms, which are simultaneously rooted in transnational flows and interconnections. While many tend to refer to capitalism in the singular, it is a complex, contradictory, and heterogeneous process mobilized by the actions of multiple agents. The literature on multiple capitalisms and multiple modernities (or varieties of capitalisms and modernities) indicates that, set in global interconnections, capitalism comes in diverse forms around the world (Boyer, 2005; Campbell and Burton, 2013; Hall and Soskice, 2001; Hart, 2004; Schmidt, 2003, 2006; Stark and Bruszt, 2001; Whitley, 1999; Wong, 2007). Analysts differentiate among Anglosaxon, Western European, Eastern European, and Asian capitalisms. Studying the diversity of contemporary national economies and their capitalisms based on macroeconomic systems and regulations Boyer (2005) identifies at least four brands of capitalism: market-led, meso-corporatist, social democrat, and state-led. Hall and Soskice (2001), on the other hand, distinguish between liberal—United States and UK—and coordinated—continental Europe, the Scandinavian countries, and Japan —market economies. Regardless of particular typologies, comparative political economy analyses find that despite the pressures for convergence generated by globalization and technological innovations, institutional and contextual differences persist and shape diverse capitalisms.
The literature in comparative political economy has not yet examined Islamic capitalism. Islamic capitalism, unlike the American, Japanese, or the Scandinavian one, is not hemmed in by national or regional boundaries. It operates in different countries, with different institutional and regulatory structures. Islamic capitalism and markets not only emerge in Muslim geographies but also in Europe. Given the global flows of immigrants and expatriates, even within a particular national macroeconomic structure, ethnic/Islamic markets flourish globally, aided by transnational linkages. Consider, for example, the North African Muslim consumers and entrepreneurs in France or the Asian Muslims in the UK. Whether in Malasia, in Turkey, or in the UK, navigating multiple structural forms, Islamic capitalism takes advantage of the multiplicity in capitalisms. If capitalism “has no singular logic or essence; it survives parasitically through other forces, logics, and desires that ensure both its powers and its failures” (Hart, 2004: 94–95), Islamic marketing and capitalism benefit from each other mutually.
We live in a world where neoliberal globalization has gained hegemony. “The current neoliberal modality of globalization polarizes, excludes, and differentiates even as it generates certain configurations of translocal integration and cultural homogenization” (Coronil, 2000: 352). Coronil argues that neoliberal globalization connects powerful centers to subordinate peripheries and generates a world “sharply divided by reconfigured relations of domination” (2000: 352). Islamic marketing and capitalism have emerged and now operate within such a network of dominance relations.
The global condition of interconnectivity and global flows of people and images and ideas helps us understand the upsurge of transnational religious activism that has swept through many world religions. Christian, Islamist, or Hindu religious activism entails local responses to particular political–economic and historical local and global cultural forces. Islam encounters other religions and spiritualities through the global flow of ideas and images; Muslims around the world encounter non-Muslims through the flow of people. Such encounters have obvious implications for identity politics. Islamist activism—economic as well as noneconomic—is not divorced from the history of East–West or Muslim–Christian encounters though centuries, and a Western desire for global hegemony, which in earlier eras was represented by imperialism and colonialism. If contemporary globalization connotes a new form of Western hegemony, this time “globalcentric” (Coronil, 2000), global Islamic capitalism is one among the multiple forces in that field. Rather than replacing religions, global capitalism lives and thrives with religions. Islamic marketing is one case in point. What such alliance between global neoliberalism and religion implies for human lives, freedoms, and rights is another matter.
Implications for research
The above discussion suggests that investigations of Islamic markets, marketing, and consumption should be grounded in the particular context and history of specific sites as well as in recent social theory. Ethnography of the lived experience of globalization and perhaps multisited ethnography—given global interactions—provides a fertile approach in order to produce novel insights. Formation and transformation of market cultures and marketing practices in interplay with particular political ideologies and religious or spiritual moralities would be worthwhile to study. Research on Muslim geographies or diasporas can potentially generate theory about markets and marketing if and only if marketing scholars regard the phenomena of Islamic marketing as part and parcel of the logics of the market, capitalism, and globalization and examine the specific links between religion (and morality and communality) and markets and politics in a specific site. Critical ethnography (e.g. Hart, 2004) together with political economy (see Arndt, 1983) analyses is a promising approach. It is time marketing scholars go back to the fundamental Weberian and Marxian connections among culture, religion, politics, and economics. It is also time to attend to the human and societal welfare consequences of such logics, systems, and connections of markets.