Feeding Secularism: Consuming Halal among the Malays in London

In: Diaspora: a journal of transnational studies, Volume 14, Issue 2, p. 275-297

Abstract

Fischer begins with the observation that in the wake of Islamic
revivalism, halal (lawful or permitted) markets are expanding on a
global scale, and that London has emerged as a center for halal production,
trade, and consumption at a time when its meaning and
practices are being transformed and contested. He argues that in
the eyes of many Muslims in Britain, this proliferation of halal calls
attention to a form of impotent state secularism: the more the culture
of Islamic consumption asserts itself, the more the state's incapacity to define what is legitimate in the community's life is felt.
Discussing ethnographic material from fieldwork among Malay
Muslim migrants living in London, Fischer shows how halal evokes
a range of sensibilities, attitudes, assumptions, and behavior that
may support or undermine secularism as a political doctrine and
"the secular" as an epistemic category in everyday life. He shows
how Islamic organizations in Britain claim authority through halal
in the interfaces of expanding markets, secularism, and the rights
and demands of a growing group of Muslim consumers. These claims
emerge in a society where powerful political discourses identify the
veiling of Muslim women as an undesirable Islamic practice in public
life, whereas halal is undergoing a revolution in a discursive
vacuum.