American Journal of Islam and Society Vol 39 No 3-4.indb 198 Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace L O N D O N : O N E W O R L D , 2 0 2 0 . 3 2 0 P A G E S . S O P H I A R O S E A R J A N A In this topically and theoretically eclectic project, Sophia Rose Arjana ana- lyzes the way that religious consumption perpetuates Orientalism. Arjana focuses on the consumption habits of Nones and New Agers, two amor- phous groups linked by their avowed disregard for the strictures of religious traditions. She contends that their clothing, travel, and self-care practices commodify “the Orient” for Western consumers. Arjana terms this field of consumption the “mystical marketplace,” a network of symbols, figures, and objects that circulate non-Christian religious traditions to those desperate for enchantment. Within the mystical marketplace, tourism to Bali or Rumi translations stripped of their Islamic content (220-21) are not, as they might appear, means for learning from other religious traditions. Rather, the mysti- cal marketplace in Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi dislocates religious symbols and entrenches Orientalism. Arjana’s postscript explicates her intention to expose the hegemonies—of whiteness, of coloniality, of Protestant norma- tivity—which structure these forms of consumption. Her engaging concepts and case studies do just that, all in a broadly accessible register. Arjana substantiates the mystical marketplace through virtual eth- nography, site visits, and archival research. Ethnographic data collection B O O K R E V i E W S  199 provides contemporary examples of “muddled Orientalism,” or the “mixing of images, terms, and tropes from the imagined Orient” (3). Archival work fills in the gaps by linking the mystical marketplace to Orientalist knowledge production from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Arjana generally employs discursive analysis to interpret these sources, alongside a visual analysis of the symbolic meaning of images. Conceptually, Arjana brings critical approaches to religious consumption (Jain 2014; Shirazi 2016; Lofton 2017) into conversation with Edward Said and Michel Foucault. Said elucidates how the imagination of “the Orient” is made real through knowledge production; Arjana shows how contemporary consumption perpetuates this process. Foucault’s notion of heterotopia illustrates how festivals and mystical tourism leverage the enchantment of an imagined Orient to draw in consumers (13; 44-45). Throughout, Arjana engages theories like these to tease out the racial, socio-economic, and gendered implications of the mystical marketplace. Arjana opts for breadth rather than depth when engaging her case studies. Given the sprawling nature of muddled Orientalism and com- mercial markets, this decision arises as much from necessity as it does choice. Arjana finds a seemingly limitless number of case studies from social media, online retail, and international tourism. Her analysis sutures them together by their repetition of terms like “mystical” and symbols like the lotus flower. The advantages and disadvantages of this mode of analysis are evident. For example, on page 142, Arjana links a treatise from 1869 that frames Sufism as Aryan, neo-Sufi thinkers in the mid-twentieth century, and contemporary proponents of Sufi psy- chology on the basis of their shared distinction between Sufism and Islamic tradition. This line of thinking clearly suggests the relationship between Orientalist knowledge production and Sufi-influenced wellness programs. However, without direct historical connections, the reader is left to wonder whether the resemblance between these examples is the result of causation or coincidence. In cases with such temporal and spatial distance, additional evidence would have strengthened Arjana’s case for the colonial roots of the mystical marketplace. The early chapters contain Arjana’s overarching arguments about Orientalism, consumption, and modernity. The Introduction outlines the 200  A M E R i C A N J O U R N A L O F i S L A M A N d S O C i E t Y 3 9 : 3 - 4 main arguments of the book: a search for enlightenment drives mystical consumption; the mystical marketplace perpetuates colonialism and cap- italism; and “muddled Orientalism” erases religious traditions. Chapter 1 argues that concepts like “mysticism” took form through colonial knowl- edge production and identifies Orientalist tropes that are widespread in the mystical marketplace. In this line of thinking, Arjana extends Richard King’s genealogy of “mysticism” (1999) and J. Z. Smith’s claim that scholars produced the category of “religion” (1998). Chapter 2 examines cultural colonialism—according to Arjana, the extraction of symbols and practices from a tradition (72)—and shows how this process effaces the religious tra- ditions that it ostensibly engages. Arjana identifies several consequences of cultural colonialism, such as the conflation of non-Christian traditions and the valorized poverty of mystical tourism workers (108-12). The following chapter argues that the excess of choices provided by secular modernity disenchant consumers, which increases the appeal of products that prom- ise enchantment. A survey of the branding of tourism, fashion, exercise, and beauty products evidences the prevalence of this marketing strategy. The final three chapters describe more specific instances of muddled Orientalism. All three chapters contextualize their main subject—religious traditions in Chapters 4 and 5, and popular English-language entertain- ment in Chapter 6—before detailing the Orientalist dynamics found in relevant products, marketing strategies, and narratives. The fourth chap- ter surveys the muddled Orientalism of Hinduism and Buddhism in, for example, wellness resorts that blend yoga and Ayurvedic medicine or the separation of Zen practice from Buddhism. Chapter 5 paints the Orientalist disassociation of Sufism from Islam in broad strokes before transitioning to more specific examples of misattributed Sufi couplets and the industries which profit from them. The final chapter ties the mystical marketplace to the diffuse Orientalist tropes in popular media like the Star Wars films and the television show Lost. While these chap- ters offer value to a wide range of scholars, the entirety of Chapter 5 and Chapter 6’s examination of landscapes and costuming in Star Wars will be the most relevant to specialists of Islam. As with any monograph that is so ambitious in its scope and varied in its theoretical engagements, there are several aspects of the book B O O K R E V i E W S  201 which would have benefitted from further attention. Most centrally, Arjana’s analysis generally represents religion and commerce as mutu- ally exclusive. Take, for example, Arjana’s statement that, “the question arises whether Shambhala is more of a religion or business model” (185). This question forecloses the possibility that “Shambhala” (pre- sumably Shambhala International) is both business model and religion. According to a recent assessment of scholarship on religious consump- tion, Arjana’s bifurcation of commerce and religion may inadvertently adopt a Protestant framework of religion (McLaughlin et al., 2020). Beyond imposing Protestant norms onto her case studies—a significant concern given Arjana’s critique of “mysticism” on similar grounds (24- 32)—the delineation of religion and business undercuts Arjana’s analysis of the hegemonies that fuel consumption in the mystical marketplace. Asking whether Shambhala is a business or a religion prevents more inci- sive questions, like how the religious ethics of Shambhala International facilitate extractive institutional practices. Arjana unpacks how profit motive affects religious traditions. But this misses a similarly important force in the mystical marketplace: the potential of religious formations to structure economic exploitation. Additionally, Arjana’s approach to religion and mysticism as primar- ily categories of knowledge occludes their embodied dimensions. This framework of religion perpetuates what Donovan Schaefer has called the “linguistic fallacy” (2015), or the problematic assumption that religion is essentially cognitive and rational. Practically speaking, the linguis- tic fallacy misapprehends the material aspects of religion as discursive (Schaefer 2015: 4-10). For instance, Arjana mentions David Morgan’s illuminating notion of visual piety (1997) on page 160, but her analysis only focuses on the meaning of symbols. Star Wars and Lost become “visual texts” (232) and lotus images turn into signs of “the East” (11). One wonders what insights Arjana might have drawn had she also attended to the ritual practices, embodied relationships, and social structures which images mediate, as Morgan suggests in his work. Nonetheless, its engaging subject matter and plethora of case studies make Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi a useful teaching resource, especially for under- graduates in courses that touch on Orientalism, consumption, or pop 202  A M E R i C A N J O U R N A L O F i S L A M A N d S O C i E t Y 3 9 : 3 - 4 culture. Given the vitality of these topics, Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi is a welcome entry in a growing stream of scholarship on the forces that motivate religious consumption. Max Johnson Dugan PhD Candidate, Department of Religious Studies University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA doi: 10.35632/ajis.v39i3-4.3154 B O O K R E V i E W S  203 Works Cited Jain, Andrea. Selling Yoga: From Counterculture to Pop Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. King, Richard. Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘the Mystic East’. New York: Routledge, 1999. Lofton, Kathryn. Consuming Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. McLaughlin, Levi, Aike P. Rots and Jolyon Thomas and Chika Watanabe. “Why Scholars of Religion Must Investigate the Corporate Form.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 88, no. 3 (September 2020): 693–725. Morgan, David. Visual Piety: A History and Theory of Popular Religious Images. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Schaefer, Donovan O. Religious Affects: Animality, Evolution, and Power. Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. Shirazi, Faegheh. Brand Islam: The Marketing and Commodification of Piety. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Smith, Jonathan Z. “Religion, Religions, Religious.” In Critical Terms for Religious Studies, edited by Mark C. Taylor, 269-84. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.