Buying Buddha, Selling Rumi

From 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.

Sophia 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.

Introduction

1 Histories of Religion and Mysticism

2 Cultural Colonialism, Muddled Orientalism, and the Mystic Poor

3 Mysticism, Incorporated

4 Hindu Hippies and Boulder Buddhists

5 Rumimaniacs

6 Lost, Star Wars, and Mystical Hollywood

Postscript

Notes

Bibliography

Index