Yes my name is Ahmet, but please don’t target me. Islamic marketing: Marketing Islam^TM?

Abstract

The coupling of consumerism with Islamic cultural movements is cherished as providing counterevidence to Orientalist stereotypes. Although this coupling may be celebrated like the cultural recognition of Muslims, this commentary highlights some reserves against a premature conclusion for the emancipatory role of the Islamic consumerism. Liaising marketing and Islamic may be a dangerous liaison articulating an important discursive function related to the production of profits, ideology, power, and identity. Critical consumer studies up to now have emphasized the role of everyday religious and cultural practices as a form of resistance against the disciplinary role of modern institutions, state, and administrative apparatus. However, the disciplinary role of populist cultural movements has been relatively underemphasized. A critical position should keep its distance to rigid dichotomizations depicting popular as excluded subalterns struggling against the technologies of domination. The relations between the popular and domination are not so clear cut if we evoke that truth games perform within a matrix of complex relations between the self and structure. Branding neo-populist Islamist movements as more “humane”, ethical ways of modernity tend to reduce complex political societal strategies struggling for cultural hegemony simply to a moralizing discourse. These movements tend to create an emulation of community and charity rather than the decommodification of the sociality dissected and atomized by neoliberal commodification. Public display of conspicuous charity and morality serves more to branding of Islam rather than the modesty of Islam. Marketing an emulated Islamic identity for self-branding of Muslims and excommunicating the internal other can be as dangerous as Orientalist ideology.

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

“…By using this analogy between CCT and Islamic marketing streams, we want to draw attention to a less visible dimension of the legitimacy of an academic field: that is, a discipline's emergence and legitimacy may be facilitated by forces and conditions outside its own scholarly institution. Süerdem (2013), Sandıkcı and Jafari (2013) and Jafari and Sandıkcı Here, we should emphasize that we are not against firms addressing Moslem consumers' needs, as this is a basic condition for the existence of the market. Neither do we mean to undermine the importance of the existing empirical evidence that alludes to the growth of interest in 'the Islamic' in markets.…”

“…The author does not really explain whether or not, how, why, where and under which macro (social, cultural, political, ideological and economic) systems and conditions her proposed "percept" of Maqasid Ash Shari'ah (objectives of Shari'ah) can work better than non-Islamic ones. And this is specifically the kind of questions critics (see Rice, 1999;Jafari, 2012;Süerdem, 2013;Jafari & Sandıkcı, 2015b;and Saatçioğlu, Sandıkcı & Jafari, in press) ask about various marketmediated structural deficiencies (e.g., poverty and socioeconomic inequalities, cronyism, unethical labor conditions, and absence of consumer protection, to name but a few) that exist in Moslem geographies where Islamic knowledge should naturally be present.…”

“…(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.…”

Mediterranean marketing and southern thinking: retrospects and prospects

“…In his view, Celtic Marketing contrasts with the mainstream approach, including many aspects that the latter overlooks, and offering companies new means to understand and act in the market. In the wake of Brown's work, other types of cultural approaches to consumption and marketing have been investigated such as Islamic marketing (Sandicki and Jafari, ; Süerdem, ).…”

Book Review: Religions as Brands: New Perspectives on the Marketization of Religion and Spirituality

“…Within the existing literature on the religion-market nexus, including this present book I have reviewed, issues of politics and ideology are significantly overlooked. Such pressing matters have been the subjects of a series of calls (e.g., Ger, 2013;Süerdem, 2013;Jafari et al, 2014) for new research generation that would problematize the very notion of religion and religiosity. As Bruce's critical account in this edited volume reminds us, the way religions function in different societies highly depends on how religiosity is perceived and authorized in a given context.…”