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Modern Sufis and the State: The Politics of Islam in South Asia and Beyond, edited by Katherine Pratt Ewing and Rosemary R. Corbett. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020. 360 pp., £108 (hb), £28 (pb). ISBN 9780231195744 (hb), 9780231195751 (pb).

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This essay addresses the intersection between the Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Tik-Tok and Pinterest social media platforms and a contemporary religious leader/teacher who exploited them to rise from subalternity to the status of a deified celebrity. It examines his underprivileged disciples and followers and rival formal and informal levels, within Indian Sufi circles. Employing a combined perspective of ethnography, media studies and textual analysis, I discuss the transformations engendered by this social media celebrity and the impact of neo-liberalism on religious teacher–disciple (peeri–mureedi) relations. I show that this transformation involved a commodification of peeri–mureedi relations, leading to a neoliberal morphing of religious practices into marketable products. In so doing, I provide a critical reading of Mazzarella’s social media as “re-enlightened” or “inclusive capitalism” that gives voice, agency and new economic possibilities to capitalism’s most marginal subjects, who aspire to break the grip of what I term the “economies of despair”.

This article presents an analysis of an iconographical series that has recently emerged in video compact discs (VCDs) devoted to Sufi Chishtiyya shrines (dargahs) in central and north India. This series superimposes the image of the important shrine of Ajmer onto the map of India, hinting at and employing the popular iconography of Goddess Bharat Mata, especially in its relatively recent versions employed by the Hindu right as a significant agent for constituting a Hinduised nation and public space. What significance does the application of this loaded Hindu formula hold in the spaces of popular Islam? Following Bourdieu’s (1985) theory of the Social Space, I address this iconography as an economy of signs hinting at the shifting contours of Hindu nationhood while simultaneously endowing Islamic symbols with a powerful position, claiming for enhanced political participation and, at times, for authority over the Indian nation-space.