“This Year We Will Ski in Dubai:” Halal Tourism and Good Religiosity Among Abidjan’s Upper-Class Muslims

Abstract

In this article, I propose to look at how class belonging, and shared notions of good religiosity are intertwined in the context of current ways to assert oneself as a “good Muslim.” Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2019 in the city of Abidjan, Ivory Coast, this article presents a series of portraits of women and their families. These portraits emphasize how the growing popularity of tourist travels towards so-called “Muslim societies” in the Arab world, and more recently in Morocco, plays a role in the construction of “good religiosity” as it is enmeshed in social class relations. The ethnographic data discussed in this article shows that travel consumption asserts class belonging as well as shared notions of “good religiosity.” To draw out this argument, I propose to revisit in a critical way Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of conspicuous consumption as processes of social distinction.