ABSTRACT
This chapter critiques the extant literature’s lack of attention to poverty and socioeconomic injustice in Muslim geographies and offers a research agenda to critically examine these phenomena in the context of Islamic consumptionscapes. The authors locate the recent interest in understanding the connections between Islam, consumption and markets within the neoliberal political economy and argue that the subject of the existing research has mostly been the relatively wealthy, educated and urban Muslim consumers. Noting that a significant portion of Muslim geographies are characterized by poverty, underdevelopment and socioeconomic inequality, the authors advocate a critical research perspective on poor Muslim consumers.
This chapter presents an overview of the marketing scholarship on poverty. It reviews different conceptualizations and causes of poverty and outlines coping strategies and poverty alleviation mechanisms identified in the literature. The chapter focuses on how socioeconomic justice is conceptualized in the Islamic texts and discusses how these conceptualizations inform Islamic approaches to the challenge of poverty. The chapter offers a critical research agenda to further our understanding of how markets are/can be implicated in the production, reproduction and eradication of poverty and socioeconomic injustice in Muslim geographies. The role of communities in coping with poverty also offers research opportunities. Religious organizations have always been involved in charity and poverty relief. However, there is increasing evidence that they have taken a distinctly moral and political character lately and become an important actor of aid and development.
