Abstract
Very little research has examined the emergence of Western Muslims into the elite professions that are central to the operation of the capitalist free market and that serve as a central location of economic and political power. Less research still has examined how this is shaping citizenship among Muslims and the future of Islam in the West. These professions include finance, trade and auditing and supporting free market infrastructure including commercial law, consulting and the entrepreneurial arms of government public service. Many Muslim men and women in these professions maintain a commitment to their faith and are often at the forefront of identifying opportunities for the application of Islamic principles to the free market through the development of social engineering mechanisms such as Islamic finance and home loans, Islamic wills, marriage contracts, businesses and context-specific solutions for Muslim clients. These may have a potentially profound impact on belonging and practice for current and future generations of Western Muslims. The political and economic clout (and broader potential public appeal) of these new Muslim elites often significantly outweighs that of Imams and Sheikhs and thus challenges traditional textually based Islam. This article, grounded in empirical research, seeks to build upon very limited research looking at Muslim elites, exploring these developments with specific reference to professionals working in Islamic finance and law across the Western contexts of Australia and the United States, two countries with capitalist free markets and significant Muslim minorities.
Highlights
With the overwhelming political and scholarly emphasis upon the development and evolution of Islam in Muslim majority nations, this article seeks to make a case for looking much closer at the important development in Islam’s intellectual, economic and political trajectories in Western contexts
Muslims to develop new economic structures in the Western social landscape. It engages with the inherent challenges of such a project and considers literature on the commodification of religion to explore whether the spaces exist within the neoliberal economic system, to which it is opposed, for it to develop
The article reveals the emergence of a new class of Muslim professional elites, wielding significantly more political and economic power than traditional Islamic authorities, who are engineering Islamic solutions and products that are shaping the development of Islam in Western contexts
Summary
With the overwhelming political and scholarly emphasis upon the development and evolution of Islam in Muslim majority nations, this article seeks to make a case for looking much closer at the important development in Islam’s intellectual, economic and political trajectories in Western contexts. The article reveals the emergence of a new class of Muslim professional elites, wielding significantly more political and economic power than traditional Islamic authorities, who are engineering Islamic solutions and products that are shaping the development of Islam in Western contexts. This is contributing to changing the nature of religious authority within Islam and its global practice. The article argues that despite the positive possibilities of this project, in order to carve a space, Islam has to become a point of distinction in the free market, commodified so that Muslim consumers might be targeted on the basis of their faith The article explores both the development of Islamic products by Religions 2020, 11, 347; doi:10.3390/rel11070347 www.mdpi.com/journal/religions. To this extent. the article seeks to make a small, but substantive, contribution and calls for further research in the area
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