Meredith is a hot mess’s Reviews > Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi: Orientalism and the Mystical Marketplace > Status Update

Some will say that I have been too harsh on those who adopt and follow these different brandings of modern mysticism, but they are missing the main point; I have tried to show here how unconscious these adoptions are. Magic and wonder are great things, but in modern mysticism, their sacred qualities are often overruled by a commitment to capital.

I'm starting to burn out this is so wordy

Sufi music is often marketed as universalistic.The appeal to spirituality is not just stylistic, but is seen in the vocabulary used in the lyrics. In some cases, the erasure of Islam from Sufi music is achieved through marketing, where it is cast as yet another “spiritual” or “mystical” tradition, played in spas alongside other musical styles sold as “world music.”

Like other spiritual teachers who offer Islam as a commodity, she may be a true believer who wants to bring the benefits of her religion to others. However, in a modern state where Islam is often vilified, the popularity of Sufism raises interesting questions.

Starting with Said, the enterprise of postcolonial theory has unpacked the notion of neutral academic expertise and highlighted how Western knowledge and representations of the non-Western world are neither innocent nor based on some pre-existing ‘reality,’ but implicated in the West’s will to power, and its imperial adventures.”

Hinduism is a challenging topic whose framing in the study of religion is complicated by its colonial history. Like other religious traditions, Hinduism has been subject to regimes of power that have constructed knowledge in ways that are less objective than one would hope for.

During the Chicago riots in 1968 where [Allen Ginsberg] had chanted “Om” for seven hours to calm everyone down, an Indian gentleman has passed him a note telling him his pronunciation was all wrong

Charles Bukowski would've appreciated this. Man, I am so over my Jack Kerouac/Allen Ginsberg phase.

The very act of denial is colonialism—by creating the illusion that one is not a tourist consumer, the mystical tourist denies all of the colonial attributes of the industry—the gaze, the inequitable relationships, and the stealing of culture, which is often renamed, repackaged, and distributed for the consumer.

It is tourism that destroys (in the very process by which it constructs) the authenticity of the tourist object; and every tourist thus at some level denies belonging to the class of tourists.”135 Mystical tourists do this through claims that they aren’t tourists but students or participants in a spiritual practice. This is a distancing move

As scholars have pointed out: “Particularly for members of dominant racial groups who have felt a lack of ethnic community, identity, or pride, the global New Age movement and marketplace can provide an alternative type of symbolic, holistic (but nonspecific) ethnicity that also certainly marks a position of privilege relative to those who cannot ‘choose’ their ethnic ascription so easily.”