*Article* **The New Muslim Ethical Elite: "Silent Revolution" or the Commodification of Islam?**

## **Joshua M. Roose**

Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Victoria 3125, Australia; Josh.Roose@deakin.edu.au

Received: 20 May 2020; Accepted: 6 July 2020; Published: 10 July 2020

**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.

**Keywords:** Islam in the West; Muslim professionals; *Shari'a*; religious authority; citizenship; Islamic finance; neoliberalism; religion

## **1. Introduction**

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 commences by considering the dimensions of Tariq Ramadan's call for Western 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 then 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 ultimately contributing to changing the nature of religious authority within Islam and its global practice. Based on fieldwork in Sydney and New York and with broader reference to London. 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

entrepreneurial Muslim professionals and the engagement of renowned Islamic scholars as expert consultants who are paid on retainer for their services (though peripheral to the everyday operations of the business). The article then explores how the end products of these arrangements are viewed by Imams and community leaders in wider Muslim communities and their impact in shaping structures of authority in Western Muslim communities.

The logic of the free market emphasis upon financial gain and profit appears to have created an opportunity for Muslim entrepreneurs to build upon their Islamic and cultural capital to develop new mechanisms based upon *Shari'a* principles that could have a positive net benefit for Muslim communities and wider society. However, no study has engaged in adequate detail with how these new Muslim professional and "ethical" elites are negotiating between Islamic principles and neoliberal economic principles, particularly where these principles might have a political or civic dimension. To this extent. the article seeks to make a small, but substantive, contribution and calls for further research in the area.

#### **2. Ramadan's "Silent Revolution"**

The challenges facing the approximately 50 million Muslims living as minorities in Western contexts (Pew Research Centre 2012) have been very well documented. The "war on terror," negative media representations, governmental pressure and surveillance, counter-terrorism laws and policing (including entrapment) and wider anti-Muslim racism and discrimination have combined to create an often-hostile social climate for Muslims. This is particularly the case in old-world Europe where national identity is considered by many, particularly on the political right, to be under threat from migration and multiculturalism. Writing almost fifteen years ago, Nilüfer Göle (Göle 2006, p. 11) observed, "anxiety is growing amongst both Muslims and Europeans about a perceived breakdown of borders, a loss of identities that accompanies the dynamics of this encounter and is leading to the reinforcement of national and religious identities." Over a decade later, these anxieties have only heightened, spurred on by the emergence of the Islamic State movement, Syrian civil war and refugee crisis and jihadist attacks in European capitals including London, Manchester, Paris, Nice, Stockholm and Berlin. Far-right populist movements have sought to capitalize on fear and uncertainty and have rapidly increased their supporter bases across the continent and even reached the highest echelons of government (Roose 2020).

It is in the shadow of 9/11, this hostile social climate and the Iraq invasion in 2003 that Tariq Ramadan, one of the most influential and controversial Western Muslim intellectuals wrote arguably his most defining work, *Western Muslims and the Future of Islam* (Ramadan 2004). In this work, Ramadan (who was banned from travelling to the United States between 2004 and 2010 and who currently contests charges in the French legal system) sought to "synthesize a global and coherent vision of Islamic principles, juridical instruments and the means of employing them" (Ibid., p. 3), and to "concentrate on the practical application of these reflections in Western society" (Ibid., p. 4). Ramadan sets out three core propositions of interest here. The first, that a new form of Muslim citizenship, based on Islam as a primary identity marker, was beginning to emerge, stating:

We are currently living through a veritable silent revolution in Muslim communities in the West: more and more young people and intellectuals are looking for a way to live in harmony with their faith while participating in the societies that are their societies ... This grassroots movement will soon exert considerable influence over worldwide Islam (Ibid.).

The second proposition advanced by Ramadan is that this project is antithetically opposed to neoliberal capitalism. Ramadan goes so far as to refer to a vaguely defined "neoliberalism" as the *Dar al Harb*—"abode of war." Ramadan is outspoken in his critique of neoliberalism as an unjust system antagonistic to Islamic value propositions. He states Islamic teachings are intrinsically opposed to the basic premises and logic of the neoliberal capitalist system (Ibid., p. 177) and considers it to be defined by "an economic logic responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of human beings every day" (Ibid., p. 195). To the extent that the economy of a nation and society cannot be differentiated from the everyday life of its citizens, Ramadan, on initial impression, would appear to suggest that Muslims are living within an economic system against which Islam stands in opposition. Ramadan, however, takes this further, setting out a project based upon Muslims working within the Western political and financial system, while seeking to set themselves "free of the capitalist logic of speculation and interest" (Ibid., p. 198). For Ramadan then, Muslims must work within society to change it in accordance with Islamic principles.

The third proposition is that Western Muslims must be "intellectually, politically and financially independent" (Ibid., p. 6). Ramadan argues that "by acquiring the conviction that they can be faithful to their principles while being fully immersed in the life of wider society" (Ibid., p. 6), Muslims would then find the means to confront and resolve the challenges faced, remedying tensions and inconsistencies through practice. This implies considerable faith in the younger, locally-born and raised generation. In effect Ramadan sets out a political and economic challenge for Western Muslims:

American and European Muslims have an urgent need today to develop their economic structures within the Western landscape. They need to create enterprises, businesses and insurance and other companies that will make it possible for them to live and develop in their respective societies ... It is precisely when we confront these problems that we understand how much we still need all the creativity of Muslim economists, entrepreneurs, managers, business leaders, and association leaders (Ibid., p. 197).

This is, in effect, an embracing of what has been termed the "emancipatory potential of entrepreneurial activity" (Rindova et al. 2009), pushing for Western Muslims to break free from established constraints inhibiting their practice, creating positive living environments for Western Muslims and, through the declaration about intended change, seeking to build ongoing momentum.

Those familiar with the success of immigrant Muslim communities in the United States, who have not only integrated, but very often thrived in educational and business pursuits, might argue as Joppke and Thorpey (Joppke and Thorpey 2013) and Bilici (Bilici 2012) have, that Muslims are already engaging successfully as citizens. Outside the United States, Harris and Roose (Harris and Roose 2014) have argued that even where traditional indicators of civic engagement reveal lower levels of participation, migrant Muslim communities, and in particular young Muslims, are contributing to their communities though mechanisms not picked up by conventional measures such as formal volunteering, yet that have considerable impact on the communities around them. However, there is one significant difference between the scholarly approaches and what might be considered Ramadan's activism and advocacy; Ramadan seeks to place Islam at the fore of this global project. In effect, Ramadan proposed the need for a Muslim professional and ethical "elite"—leaders with the requisite cultural and symbolic capital that could, through their actions, shape the development of a politically and economically empowered Muslim community. However, beyond a critique of neoliberalism as the "enemy" of Islam, Ramadan does not engage in adequate depth about how Islamic principles might be enacted in a capitalist system where Muslims live as minorities without being compromised, leaving it to those on the ground to work out in practice.

#### **3. Islam, Entrepreneurship and Commodification**

Islamic financial instruments often preceded developments in Western contexts. The *waqf* (trust), a key element of law in contemporary Western contexts, may have been imported into England by Franciscan Friars returning from the Crusades in the twelfth century (Avini 1995, p. 70).

Muslim communities in minority contexts have historically enacted the *Shari'a* in their daily lives whilst simultaneously seeking to develop Islamic projects that extend beyond the secular (or religious) state. Soares and Seesemann document, for example, how Muslim leaders in French West Africa created an "Islamic sphere" that lead to "standardized ways of being Muslim", intra-community debates notwithstanding (Soares and Seesemann 2009, p. 93). Muslims stood opposed to the introduction of

individual representation in British Colonial India in the belief that it undermined their communal cohesion and claimed to be an "exclusive community with exclusive interests" (Shaikh 1986, p. 541). Such historical examples demonstrate the adaptation of Islam and Muslims to local contexts and customs that has enabled Islam to thrive and indeed, grow across the globe irrespective of the challenges of local contexts. However, contemporary free market capitalism has posed a greater depth of challenges, particularly so far as the development of an alternate approach to a dominant global system of trade and exchange.

A number of scholars have noted the mercantile dispositions of Islam (Essid 1987; Hosseini 1995; Rodinson 1978; Koehler 2014) and so it may be understood that trading enterprises are, conceptually speaking, possible and evident throughout history in Muslim majority contexts, though debate persists about whether these constitute "capitalist enterprises" (Turner 1974; Kuran 2004). Crow observes that some Muslim scholars consider that Islamic capitalism has "always been an historical reality which may offer a potentially viable alternative" (Crow 2013) to what is considered an unjust global economic system.

In arguably the definitive work on the relationship between Islam and contemporary capitalism, Charles Tripp identifies efforts by the Islamic world to develop an alternative form of exchange:

For many ... the prime concern has been for the moral economy as a whole—often based upon an idealized picture of the past, both recent and ancient. This has prompted efforts in the Islamic world to devise a discourse of equal power that would break the circle of capital–market-exchange–profit–capital which so dominates social life and dictates the culture of exchange under capitalism. (Tripp 2006, p. 6)

The Global Financial Crisis of 2008–2009 increased the momentum for those advocating Islamic finance, with many scholars arguing that the preconditions necessary—lack of oversight, faulty risk management and accounting and speculation—would not have occurred in a system strictly regulated by moral principles (Kayed and Hassan 2011). However, as Alqahtani and Mayes claim, this is a matter of scale, with smaller banks in the Gulf states withstanding the crisis more effectively than larger banks, suggesting that enactment in local context and close oversight is important (Alqahtani and Mayes 2018).

A key question as to how Muslims in Western contexts are enacting these approaches emerges. Amel Boubekeur has tracked the emergence of Muslim entrepreneurs in Europe for well over a decade, finding that a reinvigorated Islamic identity amongst second and third generation European Muslims has created opportunities for Muslim entrepreneurs. In contrast to the first generation of Muslim migrants importing primarily apolitical, practice related artifacts from the Muslim world that bestowed an "authentic, traditional historical sensibility to the exiled body" (Boubekeur 2016, p. 422). the second and subsequent generations are innovating and developing their own "ethi-Islamic" products that are "more engaged with the political, social and cultural realities of life for Western Muslims" (Ibid.). Boubekeur sees these entrepreneurs and their products as contributing to the formulation of an Islamic ethic in the public sphere and simultaneously developing a transnational Islamic business solidarity connecting Muslims across geographical, national and political divides, reconstituting a sense of dignity. However, such practices may be alternatively understood as concerned less with the maintenance of solidaristic bonds than as turning Islamic artifacts into products to be bought and sold; a process commonly referred to as the "commodification of religion."

A number of works exploring the commodification of religion in the United States have appeared in the past few decades. R. Laurence Moore's *Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace* is a particularly influential book, exploring entrepreneurial activity by religious actors aimed at growing their respective Christian denominations. Moore argued that religion had been commodified by churches (Moore 1993, p. 5). His study explored the role of religious influence in "determining the taste of people who were learning purchase 'culture' as a means of self-relaxation and improvement." The commodification of religion is defined more formally by Ornella as a process of the "recontextualization of religious symbols, language and ideas from their original religious context to the media and consumer culture" (Ornella 2013). In relation to Western Muslims, on whom there is comparatively very little scholarship on the commodification of religion. the act of consumption may be understood to serve as a "fundamental marker" of reinvigorated Muslim identify and self-esteem (Dawson 2013). Dawson goes so far as to argue that those fully involved in consuming these products could be considered to have been "commodified selves," merging with the commodification given by its socio-cultural environment to the extent that the objects provided "function as dynamic elements of an extended self" (Ibid., p. 136); Muslim identity in this frame thus becomes conflated with the consumption of "Islamic" products. This finding supports research by Cesari on the individualization of religious belief amongst Muslims as they settle in the West. Cesari notes that as the normative Islamic tradition transforms and evolves in local contexts, a new "Muslim individual" emerges (Cesari 2003, p. 259). Similarly to Ramadan, Cesari terms this a "silent revolution."

In *Brand Islam*, one of very few works exploring the commodification of Islam, Faegheh Shirazi Shirazi explores the marketing of products as *halal* or "Islamic" to Muslim consumers, noting that the production of such commodities is profit driven and exploits "the rise of a new Islamic economic paradigm" and are "not necessarily created with the objective of honoring religious practice and sentiment." (Shirazi 2016, p. 1). Shirazi notes, similarly to Boubekeur, that for at least some Muslims, consuming such items heightens their sense of connectedness to the *Ummah* (global community of believers), though also reveals the commodification of important aspects of Islam into a profit making enterprise, stating, "from the very air we breathe to the bottled water we drink, no doubt the halal industry will transmute even the most mundane products into Islamic commodities and, in doing so, continue transforming piety into profit" (Ibid., pp. 212–13).

As hinted at by Shirazi, at the theoretical and normative level there appears to be important fundamental differences between the foundations of Islamic ethics (and business ethics) and those of economic neoliberalism that make conciliation of the ethical and practical imperative difficult, if not impossible. Islamic principles are both an ethos and set of guiding rules based on the *Shari'a*. the "totality" of guidance contained in the *Quran* and *Sunna* (Saeed 2006, p. 45). While Islam and trade have been shown to be mutually complimentary and indeed beneficial to the development of each other through adaptation to local culture and custom, neoliberal economic approaches move beyond a notion of mere economic exchange, focusing on maximizing efficiency and profit at any cost; a proposition arguably at odds with Islamic financial principles including a concern with *Zakat* (charitable tax) and the forbidding of *riba* (interest). Indeed, as an economic approach, neoliberalism "holds that the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions, and it seeks to bring all human action into the domain of the market" (Harvey 2007, p. 3).

Neoliberalism as a guiding principle "values market exchange as an ethic in itself, capable of acting as a guide to all human activities and substituting for all previously held ethical beliefs" (Harvey 2007, p. 3). Bourdieu has described neoliberalism as "a programme for destroying collective structures which impede pure market logic" and understands it as "tending on the whole to favor severing the economy from social realities and thereby constructing, in reality, an economic system conforming to its description in pure theory ... " (Bourdieu 1998). This is a project that finds parallels in efforts by Islamists to develop a "pure" Islam based on a universal "truth." The *Shari'a* and neoliberalism then consist of two competing sources, one grounded in the word of god and one grounded in the logic of the "godless" free market. The question may be asked then, in what social space is such an Islamic political and economic project possible without undermining the integrity of this social intent? Tripp identified two responses that have emerged in response in the Islamic world: Islamic economics and Islamic finance:

In both areas—the theoretical and the practical—there is an impulse to distinguish an Islamic sphere of transactions from a capitalist sphere. If measured by some abstracted and restrictive notion of 'Islamic authenticity'. the endeavour would appear to have had very limited success. However, both areas have provided examples of the ways in which Muslim intellectuals have delineated for Muslims various forms of effective engagement with a world shaped

by a particular capitalist modernity, whilst adhering to the spirit and even the letter of the Islamic *Shari'a*. (Tripp 2006, p. 105)

For Tripp. the Islamic banking sector in particular has gained recognition as an established part of the global economy (Ibid., p. 199); however, it is "now seen as a means of engaging successfully with the forces of global capital, rather than the first step on the road to the undermining and overthrow of the capitalist system" (Ibid.). It is argued here that a core factor shaping its successful integration has been the manner in which Islamic finance—and more broadly, business services—have built a key market segment that can be readily exploited (in capitalist parlance) or developed (in Islamic banking parlance).
