Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi - Orientalism And The Mystical Marketplace

English306About The BookFrom jewellery to meditation pillows to tourist retreats, religious traditions - especially those of the East - are being commodified as never before. Imitated and rebranded as New Age' or spiritual', they are marketed to secular Westerners as an answer to suffering in the modern world, the mystical' and exotic' East promising a path to enlightenment and inner peace.In Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi, Sophia Rose Arjana examines the appropriation and sale of Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam in the West today, the role of mysticism and Orientalism in the religious marketplace, and how the commodification of religion impacts people's lives.About the AuthorSophia Rose Arjana is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at Western Kentucky University. Her previous books include Pilgrimage in Islam, also published by Oneworld, and Muslims in the Western Imagination, which was a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Year. She lives in Bowling Green, Kentucky.IntroductionThe search for enchantment in the modern world rarely entails the decades-long religious labor of the early Christian desert fathers or the Buddha's lifetime struggle to achieve enlightenment. More commonly, modern mysticism is characterized by a kind of dilettantism, a lifestyle that consists of a CD of Deepak Chopra meditations on Rumi, a subscription to Oprah's magazine, and a yoga retreat in Bali. As we shall learn, Orientalism often plays a powerful role in these products and practices, seen in everything from Buddhist sex toys to the mystical tourism found in Thailand, Indonesia, and Morocco.This book examines mysticism from several vantage historically, as a concept invented in Western academia; theoretically, in