Call for Papers: Contemporary Muslim Travel Culture: Practices, Complexities & Emerging Issues

It seeks contributions that will help provide a more comprehensive account of Muslim travel cultures and provide a greater understanding of the current debates associated with Muslim leisure behavior while travelling in the context of businesses, communities, destinations, and the wider socio-political context.

Contributions are therefore invited for theoretically and empirically informed chapters on contemporary Muslim tourism cultures and the consumption practices of Muslims while travelling. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are warmly welcomed but the application of methods must be rigorous.

Important Data

Abstract/ Proposal submission deadline: 20 July, 2019

Proposal acceptance notification: 5 August, 2019

Chapter submission deadline: 31 January, 2020

Email: (siamak.seyfi@etu.univ-paris1.fr & siamak.seifi@yahoo.com )

Website: calenda.org

As of 2017, there are about 1.8 billion Muslims in the world, comprising nearly one-fourth of the world’s population, making Islam the world’s second largest religion after Christianity (Pew Research Center, 2017). While the world’s population is projected to grow 32% in the coming decades, the number of Muslims is expected to increase by 70% to nearly three billion in 2060 (Pew Research Center, 2017) with growth due primarily to the young age and high fertility rates of Muslims (Grim & Karim, 2011). However, the Muslim population is a diverse community of peoples from diverse ethnic backgrounds and languages, and different sharia traditions (Seyfi & Hall, 2019), spanning the globe. Muslims make up a majority of the population in 49 countries around the world and, by far, the Asia-Pacific region contains the highest number of Muslims in the world, followed by the Middle East and North Africa. Russia, China, India and the USA also have sizable Muslim populations with growing populations in Australasia and Europe.

These staggering numbers together with the emergence of large middle-classes in many Muslim majority countries help illustrate why Muslim travel is a fast-growing market attracting the interest of the tourism and hospitality industry worldwide (Henderson, 2016; Scott & Jafari, 2010). Variously described as halal tourism, sharia tourism or Islamic tourism (Jafari & Scott, 2014; Battour & Ismail, 2016; Mohsin et al., 2016; Hall & Prayag, 2020), according to the World Travel Market (2019), the outbound tourism expenditure by Muslims is predicted to reach US$ 274 billion by 2023, up from US$ 177 billion in 2017 (excluding Hajj and Umrah).

The growing significance of intra-Muslim traffic as well as domestic tourism has led to both Islamic majority countries such as Malaysia, the United Arab Emirates, Indonesia and Turkey and non-Islamic majority countries, e.g. Japan, to develop campaigns to attract the Muslim market (Al-Hamarneh & Steiner, 2004). However, the Islamic market is much more diverse than what is often portrayed in both national marketing campaigns and in academic literatures. Although there is growing demand for new travel products and services these cover a wide range of offerings. For example, many international hotels in some Muslim majority countries often providing products that would normally not be regarded as halal, such as alcohol, and often do not explicitly promote themselves as halal. There are emerging demands for domestic and international tourism opportunities from emerging Islamic middle classes, Muslim millennial travellers and second and third generation Muslim communities in Europe and North America, each with their own characteristics. To these consumer demands can be added the implications of the development of Islamic consumer cultures, the role of gender in Islamic travel cultures, and the growth of Islamic cosmopolitanism as a result of greater mobility, including study abroad.

Despite the significance of Islamic tourism consumption, there is relative paucity of knowledge on Muslim leisure activities while travelling (Oktadiana et al., 2016; Jafari & Scott, 2014), understanding the needs of Muslim tourists (Eid & El-Gohary, 2015; Kim et al., 2015) and the cultural context of Muslim tourist behavior (Reisinger & Moufakkir, 2015), especially from more critical perspectives (Hall & Prayag 2020). Accordingly, there is a need to develop a far more sophisticated and empirically grounded critical assessment of Islamic tourism than what has previously usually been the case.

Given this context we seek contributions that will help provide a more comprehensive account of Muslim travel cultures and provide a greater understanding of the current debates associated with Muslim leisure behavior while travelling in the context of businesses, communities, destinations, and the wider socio-political context. Contributions are therefore invited for theoretically and empirically informed chapters on contemporary Muslim tourism cultures and the consumption practices of Muslims while travelling. Both qualitative and quantitative methods are warmly welcomed but the application of methods must be rigorous.

Chapter proposals in the form of abstracts of up to 500 words should be provided on the following topics, but not limited to:

• Tourism in the Muslim world, concepts, definitions and characteristics
• Muslim traveller behavior and decision-making
• The Islamic market in different cultural, political and geographical contexts
• Islamic tourism and different interpretations of sharia
• Typology of Muslim travelers
• Host–guest relationships
• Interactions between Muslim and non-Muslim travellers
• Domestic tourism and travel, including day tripping
• Culture, heritage and tourism destinations in Muslim world
• Muslim diasporas and tourism
• The influence of religiosity on Islamic travel
• Inter-generational and historical accounts of Islamic travel
• Muslim travel behaviour in different spaces, e.g. heritage attractions, mosques, restaurants, accommodation providers and theme parks
• Family and VFR tourism
• Islamic tourism and market culture
• Tourism and the commodification of Islam
• Travel behaviours of Muslim students studying abroad
• Travel and tourism consumption of Muslims living in Islamic and non-Islamic majority countries
• Gender dimensions of Islamic tourism
• The practices of Islamic tourism marketing and consumer behaviour research
• Islamic green travel consumption
• Is there a secular Islamic tourist?
• The political dimensions of Islamic tourism
• Pilgrimage, including Hajj and Umrah
• Consumption practices, especially in relation to food, embodiment and identity, including reflexive and autoethnographic accounts of consumption.

The proposed book is therefore intended to be of interest not only to academics in the various disciplines of Tourism, Hospitality, Leisure, Services, Consumption, Marketing, Cultural Studies, Religious Studies, Geography, Sociology, and Islamic Studies, but industry actors, marketers, and policy-makers involving with this substantial and increasingly growing travel market.

Submission Procedure

Interested authors should email their abstract (350-500 words) to Siamak Seyfi

(siamak.seyfi@etu.univ-paris1.fr & siamak.seifi@yahoo.com )

Your proposal should include:

• 350-500 word abstract which details the research questions, research significance, method and findings;
• Author(s)’ biography (50-75 words) and contact information (name, role, institution, email and mail);
• If accepted, full contributions are expected to be a maximum of 6000 words including references;

Each contribution must be original and unpublished work, not submitted for publication elsewhere.