Viola Thimm

Shopping with Allah illustrates the ways in which religion is mobilised in package tourism and how spiritual, economic and gendered practices are combined in a form of tourism where the goal is not purely leisure but also ethical and spiritual cultivation. Focusing on the intersection of gender and Islam, Viola Thimm shows how this intersection develops and changes in a pilgrimage-tourism nexus as part of capitalist and halal consumer markets. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates and Oman, Thimm sheds light on how Islam and gender frame Malaysian religious tourism and pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula, but she raises many issues that are of great importance beyond these regional contexts. This book also offers an innovative methodological-analytical toolkit to research mobility and intersectionality across socio-geographic scales ‘Scaling Holistic Intersectionality’. By bringing methodological holism into a fruitful engagement with the antiracist-feminist framework intersectionality, Thimm argues that hierarchical relationships, i.e. marginalisation, power and empowerment, can shift for an individual or a social group depending upon the social sphere. Shopping with Allah will primarily be of interest to readers within the anthropology of gender, the anthropology of Islam and the anthropology of religion more broadly.

Muslim pilgrimage, gender and consumption in a globalised world

Shopping with Allah

Marjo Buitelaar

Manja Stephan-Emmrich

This book investigates female Muslims pilgrimage practices and how these relate to women’s mobility, social relations, identities, and the power structures that shape women’s lives. Bringing together scholars from different disciplines and regional expertise, it offers in-depth investigation of the gendered dimensions of Muslim pilgrimage and the life-worlds of female pilgrims. With a variety of case studies, the contributors explore the experiences of female pilgrims to Mecca and other pilgrimage sites, and how these are embedded in historical and current contexts of globalisation and transnational mobility. This volume will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across pilgrimage, gender, religious, and Islamic studies.

Viola Thimm

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