The consecration of neoliberalism: Islam, financialisation and the production of symbolic value

Similar to other efforts to organise spheres of social life around Islamic norms as part of the process of Islamisation, from its beginnings in the 1970s the Islamic finance project has sought to establish an autonomous space within the modern financial economy liberated from the influence of Western capitalist hegemony. However, the emergence of Islamic finance has coincided with the ascendency of neoliberalism and the extension of its market logic into all aspects of social life, including the religious. While Islamic finance was conceived of as a new paradigm to promote socio-economic justice and equity based on the idealised principles of Islamic economics, these objectives have transformed as market actors have been drawn into a neoliberal logic of competition. By means of a case study of the emergent Islamic finance field in South Africa and utilising a framework inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, it is this transformed logic of practice that I explore in this thesis. I analyse the role of the state and market actors from the conventional finance field during the emergence of the Islamic finance field in order to explore how the practice of Islamic finance came to be shaped by a neoliberal market logic. Moreover, focussing on the discourse of Muslim Islamic finance practitioners in the field, I investigate their attempts to make dominant modes of market practice adequate with Islam. Scholars have tended to assume that because there is a disjuncture between the theory of Islamic finance and market practice, Muslim practitioners have abandoned Islamic ethics. To the contrary, this thesis reveals how Islamic ethics have not been abandoned, but rather transformed as part of a process I term the “Islamic consecration of neoliberalism.” The consecration of neoliberalism represents the accommodation of neoliberalism by religion, and the construction of a new Islamic financial discourse in the neoliberal context. This discourse not only reveals how Muslim practitioners have mobilised Islamic tropes and ethical idioms found in contemporary expressions of Islamic resurgence to infuse forms of Islamic finance with symbolic value, but also how they have consecrated the dominant neoliberal logic that has taken hold of the field