Market Cultures, the Middle Classes and Islam: Consuming the Market?

Abstract

In discussions of Islam and consumer practices, there is a tendency to focus exclusively on the “clash of cultures”, particularly that between Islam and the “west”. In Islamic societies, consumer culture is often portrayed as a threat, harmful to religion as it privileges hedonism, pleasure, individualism and an expressive lifestyle. To counter the influences of the market and “deislamisation”, Islamic fundamentalists and revivalists have posited Islam as an innoculative pill against decadent western values. Such analyses, however, do not add very much to our knowledge of contemporary modernist Islamic societies undergoing rapid social and economic transformation. In examining the case of Malaysia, the paper seeks to shed some light on how the various interpretations of Islam impacts on modern Malaysian Muslims. The paper starts with an examination of the central concept of Islam as a discursive tradition and its continuing legacy in the Malaysian social and political formation. The paper next examines the role of the state and how its ability to affect a national vision of high‐modernist development and growing affluence has created a new Malay middle class. Increasing wealth and a growing middle class have seen an intensification of new consumption patterns and practices. At the same time, there is a growing Islamisation, and culturally and politically the urban Malay middle classes are split as they are both sympathetic to the Islamic revivalist tradition and are active consumers of middle‐class lifestyle. These contradictions played themselves out in the public sphere and percolate down into everyday life and practice, affecting power structures and discourses. Classes, identities, entrepreneurship, the nature of capitalism, civil society and dissent are consequently all affected. The paper therefore argues that the differing interpretations in Islam enable different understandings of consumption and identity formation and that such analysis can engender richer and greater analytical insights in the context of Islamisation, modernity and consumption.