Yes my name is Ahmet, but please don't target me. Islamic marketing: Marketing Islam

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.