Book Review: Shopping with Allah

Shopping with Allah: Muslim Pilgrimage in a Globalised World, by Viola Thimm (2023). London: UCL Press.

Viola Thimm’s new ethnography of Islamic travel and consumption in—or, more accurately, originating from—Malaysia does a masterful job of illustrating just what anthropology can contribute to the study of contemporary consumption patterns. Shopping with Allah focuses on the concept of “pilgrimage”—a topic extensively explored by anthropologists of religion, albeit primarily within Western and Christian contexts. However, she notes that in Malay—and in Arabic —there is no single term equivalent to “pilgrimage.”  Instead, three key terms are used: hajj, umrah, and ziarah. Hajj refers to the obligatory journey to Mecca at a specific time each year, while umrah denotes a visit to Mecca outside the official hajj season. To “perform hajj/umrah,” a central focus of the book, can refer to any visit, including those for tourism purposes, but is particularly associated with religious significance or sacred places. Unlike hajj and umrah, ziarah does not necessarily involve a physical location or carry the same performance connotation.

In the first chapter, Thimm examines gender, highlighting the interplay between gender and religion through the concept of intersectionality. Indeed, this gender/religion intersectionality is coupled with the issue of scale—from household to nation to international—since the voyages she discusses tend to take Malaysians to Middle Eastern locations such as Dubai and Mecca. This chapter does an unusually thorough job of setting the research agenda by explaining the scaling of intersectionality, along with relevant anthropological concepts such as materiality, multi-sited ethnography, and embodiment.

Another conventional line that is blurred by the study, and by anthropology more generally, is that between religion and economy—the latter entailing material objects, expenditure and consumption, and, dare we say, shopping. However, anthropologists have recognized for several years that shopping is a serious cultural issue (and often a highly gendered one) and that religion—including but not only pilgrimage—commonly if not essentially involves consumption, in such forms as arranging travel, paying for food and lodging, or buying objects for religious use or as mementos.

The second chapter depicts how umrah and ziarah have become commercialized in Malaysia, literally in the form of “umrah and ziarah” packages sold by travel agents. The country even has a governmental institution, Tabung Haji, that manages hajj travel, regulating and subsidizing it. This reflects the broader formalization and institutionalization of halal industries in Muslim-majority countries. Beyond the hajj, the Malaysian government recently established an Islamic Tourism Center (https://itc.gov.my) to promote religious travel. The chapter also highlights the significant role of women in modern Islamic travel and examines the influence of class and economic prosperity on these practices.

These themes are developed further in the third chapter, on the “marketization of pilgrimage.” There is no contradiction, as Thimm asserts, in religion becoming more economic or the economy becoming more religious. She offers a compelling analysis of this tendency by contrasting the perspectives of travel agents and tour guides, who often view ziarah or umrah and ziarah as purely tourism or shopping ventures, with those of travelers themselves. These travelers reinterpret what agents see as “a strategic journey into a religious act” (124).

All of the central variables of the study intersect in the abaya, that iconic piece of women’s clothing that has become symbolic of Islam. Thimm discusses at length and from diverse angles the importance of what is seen by many Malay (and other) Muslim women as “a modern, high-class yet modest and traditional garment from the Gulf” (128). A stylish abaya is one of the most sought-after items while shopping on ziarah, which leads Thimm to many productive insights about spirituality, gendered space, self-formation, and gift-giving (as an abaya along with other goods are often bought to distribute to friends and family back home). At the nexus of these processes is the fact that both men and women “feel a deeper connection with God through pilgrimage and… women start wearing an abaya upon returning home in order to preserve a modesty that only evolved during the religious journey” (180). Indeed, by highlighting their modesty under a cloak, women back from umrah or ziarah proudly proclaim their religiosity in public.

Along the way in this rich ethnography, Thimm introduces and examines many facets of religion and culture among Malay Malaysians (singling out Malays because Malaysia is a multi-ethnic country). These include Islam, women, travel, and shopping, but also men and men’s clothing, marriage and family, gift-exchange practices, and the aforementioned national and transnational agencies and institutions that make contemporary Islamic travel possible—even if the traveler’s motivation is not fully understood.

Shopping with Allah contributes to the growing literature on lived Islam (and lived religion more broadly) and especially on Muslim women’s piety. It advances the points made by Abu-Lughod (2013), Mahmood (2005), and others that “the veil” cannot be simply construed as a technology or symbol of female subjugation, as well as works by Tarlo (2010), Bucar (2017), and Thimm (2021) herself on Muslim women’s fashion. Indeed, Shopping with Allah reveals how diverse and dynamic Islam is as an Asadian discursive tradition—far more so than Western assumptions grasp. This book is one of the rare texts that is simultaneously valuable to professional scholars and potentially useful for students studying religion and gender. Thimm provides ample summaries of methods and concepts, mixed with ethnography, history, and descriptions of life in contemporary Malaysia. As such, this would be of interest to audiences in diverse fields and at varying levels of expertise. Finally, Shopping with Allah was published in open-access format as a free download (see https://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/91229?show=full), making it attractive for classroom purposes.

References

Abu-Lughod, Lila. 2013. Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press.

Bucar, Elizabeth. 2017. Pious Fashion: How Muslim Women Dress. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press

Mahmood, Saba. 2005. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject. Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Tarlo, Emma. 2010. Visibly Muslim: Fashion, Politics, Faith. Oxford and New York: Berg.

Thimm, Viola, ed. 2021. (Re-)Claiming Bodies Through Fashion and Style: Gendered Configurations in Muslim Contexts. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.

Author Biography

Jack David Eller is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology for Woxsen University, Hyderabad, India. He is a cultural anthropologist specializing in anthropology of religion and author of Introducing Anthropology of Religion and co-editor (with Natalie Khazaal) of Nonbelievers, Apostates, and Atheists in the Muslim World.