Shopping with Allah

A study of how the intersection of gender and Islam develops and changes in a pilgrimage-tourism nexus as part of capitalist and halal consumer markets. Shopping with Allah illustrates the ways in which religion is mobilized 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. Drawing 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 and 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 sociogeographic scales. By bringing methodological holism into a fruitful engagement with the antiracist-feminist framework intersectionality, Thimm argues that hierarchical relationships, such as marginalization, power, and empowerment, can shift for an individual or a social group depending upon the social sphere.