Islamic encounters in consumption and marketing

Abstract

In recent years, Islam has become highly visible in media, politics, and the marketplace. The increasing popular and academic attention to Islam is partly driven by the events of 9/11 and the related imperative to ‘‘better’’ understand Muslims. The interest is also stimulated by broader socioeconomic developments, in particular neoliberal transformation and the so-called Islamic resurgence. Beginning in the late 1970s and accelerating in the 1980s and 1990s, Islamization has become a major social and political force impacting the Muslim world and beyond. Studies conducted in various fields of social sciences discussed the rise of Islamist movements and the spread of political Islam in connection to globalization and as an expression of resistance to Western-style modernization and secular modernity (e.g. Comaroff and Comaroff, 2000; Dekmejian, 1995; Esposito, 1998). For example, in his influential book, Globalized Islam , Olivier Roy (2004) linked the rise of contemporary Islamism to cultural disruptions and dislocations of a globalizing world, which made people, uprooted from their original cultures, susceptible to ‘‘fundamentalist’’ forms of Islam