Being and Doing ‘Bengali-Muslims’ in Sydney: The Construction of Halal and Haram

By

Raasheed Mahmood

A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Arts by Research degree at the School of Sociology and Anthropology, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 2006

DEDICATION

To the memory of the love-beggar Lalan Shah, the heretic philosopher of Bengal, who believed that it is through self- revelation that one can reach God. There are no other ways, no other rituals, and no other institutionally organised religion that can take one to the realm of God.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There is a convention, while a researcher acknowledges her/his gratitude to the research supervisor, to say that the thesis would not have been possible without receiving the supervisor’s keen interest and critical suggestions in the process of writing the thesis. But it would reflect my miserliness if I express my gratitude to Professor Grant McCall, the supervisor of this research, with these few words. Because he has not only stepped into the rites of passages incumbent on a supervisor, he also stepped into my personal life as a guardian who possesses a sound knowledge about the problems an overseas fee paying student, particularly from a developing country, may encounter. Under his dynamic supervision I have become able to discover a hidden strength of mine that is the power of self-motivation. I acknowledge my indebtedness to Professor Grant McCall for hours of thought provoking discussion which guided me incalculably in clarifying my theoretical and methodological perspectives on the intended research issue. I express my earnest gratitude for his sincere involvement.

A good number of Bengali-Muslim migrants responded to my research questions and all of them showed their heartfelt attachment to their Bengali informed sense of hospitality by accepting me as one of them. I extend my gratitude to all of them for their trust in me.

I am specifically thankful to my co-supervisor the late Frances Lovejoy for encouraging me while conducting the research. I recall her generous comments while evaluating my annual progress as a postgraduate research student, which served as my source of inspiration.

The University of Dhaka, Bangladesh awarded me a postgraduate scholarship which covered a part of my tuition fees at the University of New South Wales. I am grateful for this support without which I could not make the decision to come to Australia.

I do appreciate my wife and son who were deprived of the great affection and care of other members of their extended family during my stay in Australia. Finally I am most grateful to my parents who have always been the ultimate source of my spirit.

i ABSTRACT

This is a study against essentialist generalisations. Empirically, the study has been conducted to understand the food related practices among the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney based on the dichotomy of Halal (permitted in Islam) and Haram (prohibited in Islam). Instead of evaluating Islam and Muslim communities as monolithic and undifferentiated this study reveals the localised actualisation of Islam which serves as a conditioning factor for these Bengali-Muslim migrants. Adopting a naturalistic methodological approach a number of ethnographic tools have been used to reveal the complex multifaceted processes through which Sydney’s Bengali- Muslim migrants negotiate the situational convergence and divergence between their ethnic identity as Bengali and their religious identity as Muslim. As a significant site of this interplay this study discovers from their food related practices that the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney construct the notion of Halal-Haram food rules and regulations through the dialectics of their Bengali-informed Islam. The Bengali version of Islam poses considerable challenge to the modernist opposition between secularism and religion which is quite inadequate to understand the way the Bengali- Muslims historically negotiate both of these in the form of overlapping consensus. The findings of the study exhibit that this situationally shifting emphasis on their secular Bengali identity at one point of time and on their religious Muslim identity at another determines their decisive practices regarding food consumption in a Western cultural milieu. The Bengali-Muslim migrant participants of this study tend to perceive the notion of Halal-Haram in multiple ways so as to fit the pragmatic realities of their migrant life, which eventually leads them to reconstruct, renegotiate or even discard the scriptural/theological/authoritative discourse. Such underlying properties of food practices vindicate the argument that any stereotypically standardised notion of ‘Islam’ is inadequate to understand varied Muslim migrant communities across the globe. Rather specific Muslim migrant community should be studied along with a profound understanding of their very contextual nature and historical formations.

ii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS i

ABSTRACT ii

TABLE OF CONTENT S iii

LIST OF FIGURES v

LIST OF TABLES v

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS v

CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION 1

CHAPTER II: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 20

CHAPTER III: METHODOLOGY: ARGUING 38 AGAINST GENERALISATION

CHAPTER IV: ISLAM IN BANGLADESH: 60 BENGALI-MUSLIM IDENTITY IN SOCIO- HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

CHAPTER V: MIGRATION AND ITS ASSOCIATED 94 TERMINOLOGIES: LOOKING BEYOND GENERALISATION

CHAPTER VI: HYBRIDITY IN THE STOMACH: 113 AUTHORITATIVE AND EVERY DAY

iii CONSTRUCTIONS OF HALAL-HARAM

CHAPTER VII: CONCLUSION 141

REFERENCES 152

APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY OF LOCAL WORDS 175

APPENDIX B: CHECK-LIST/GUIDELINE 177

APPENDIX C: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE BENGALI 180 MIGRANTS IN SYDNEY

APPENDIX D: COPY OF EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE 184 BETWEEN TWO BENGALI-MUSLIM FRIENDS OF BANGLADESH

iv

LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1: A typology of Muslim Societies

Fig. 2: The oppositions and linguistic category in Bengali-Muslim Rank

LIST OF TABLES

Table 1: Percentage of vote as secured by the Islam-based parties of Bangladesh Table 2: Percentage of vote secured by the Islam-based parties of Bangladesh in 2001 Table 3: Increasing Bangladeshi population in Australia Table 4: All Indian votes secured by Congress and the Muslim League in the General Election of 1945-46

LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS

Photograph 1: A prostitute is being blessed and purified by a fakir (holy man) Photograph 2: Gae-Holud of a Bengali-bride Photograph 3: Male and female are dancing together with live music while celebrating the groom’s Gae-Holud Photograph 4: Registration of marriage (Switch to the religious mode) Photograph 5: Eid fashion 2006 Photograph 6: Celebrating the onset of Spring in the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh Photograph 7: Celebrating Valentines Day by the youths of Bangladesh on February 14, 2007 Photograph 8: Dance performance by two Bengali migrants while celebrating the Bengali New Year in Sydney Photograph 9: Bengali migrants are dancing together while celebrating the Bengali New Year in Sydney Photograph 10: Second generation Bengali-Muslims in Sydney Photograph 11: First generation Bengali-Muslim women gathered together at a park in Sydney Photograph 12: Three second generation Bengali-Muslim girls sharing kitchen work with first generation women

v Photograph 13: Modern Bengali dance performance by a first generation migrant girl while observing the Victory Day of Bangladesh Photograph 14: Bengali migrants watching the Victory Day function in Sydney Photograph 15: Bengali women migrants selling dresses at the fair organised to celebrate the Victory Day of Bangladesh

vi Chapter I Introduction

At the heart of the diversity lies a difference in the reading of the relationship between the ‘text’ and the ‘context’ (Yasmeen 2005:166).

This is a study about Bengali-Muslim1 migrants in Sydney. In this study I will try to explore the dynamics of Bengali-Muslims’ identity construction, which I believe is reflected in the interplay between their secular ethnic identity as Bengali and their religious identity as Muslims. The central hypothesis that works behind this research is that instead of projecting any absolute opposition between secularism and religion the Bengali-Muslim migrants of Bangladesh perceive these two phenomena in the form of overlapping consensus characterised by a historical and contemporary blending of secularism and religion. There are many practices and associated beliefs through which we can demonstrate the multiplicity, temporality and contextuality of the Bengali-Muslim migrants’ identities. For this research I will investigate their practices and beliefs attached to the notion of Islamic food rules and regulations which is commonly denominated by the terms ‘Halal’ (permitted by Islam) and ‘Haram’ (prohibited by Islam). The interplay between the secular Bengali identity and the religious Islamic identity among the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney will eventually help us to counteract the ways Islam and Muslim communities have largely been depicted by certain Western scholars2 and Islamic fundamentalists as

1 Though the West-Bengal of India also has Bengali-Muslims, in this research I have excluded them since my focus is exclusively on the Bengali-Muslim migrants of Bangladesh. Also note that during the mid 1970s the term ‘Bangladeshi’ had been invented in the course of the Islamisation of the secular ‘Bengali’ nationalism and to distinguish the Bangladeshi citizenry from the greater common ethnic background that the people of Bangladesh share with those of the West-Bengal. However, pragmatically, the notion ‘Bangladeshi’ that connotes the territorial nationalism and the notion ‘Bengali’ that connotes the ethnic nationalism have been used interchangeably in this research regadless of those associated political significations.

2 Here we can mention the name of Samuel P. Huntington’s influential book ‘The clash of civilizations: Remaking of world order’ (1997) where he reproduces the ‘orientalist’ mission of the west which always looks forward to hunt a ‘them’ for placing in opposition to the ‘self’. Thus we find that Huntington’s main protagonists are the West and the Islamic world. ‘Most of the argument in the pages that followed relied on a vague notion of something Huntington called “civilization identity” and “the interactions among seven or eight [sic] major civilizations,” of which the conflict between two of them, Islam and the West, gets the lion's share of his attention (Said 2001a:1). Huntington overstates his case by lapsing into a civilisational essentialism where internal dynamics among cultures has remained unfocused. Under the rubric of civilisational essentialism he eventually essentialises Islam as suffering from stagnation. Said finds Huntington’s accentuation towards the ‘orientalist’ tent while, for exploring

1 monolithic, changeless and static (Humphrey 2001:34-5, Stark 2003:174, Cesari 2002:36).

Halal-Haram among Bengali-Muslims: Coping with paradoxes Before we proceed further it should be clarified why I have picked up the conception of Halal-Haram based food rules. Actually, from my experience of being a Bengali- Muslim I have encountered a wide range of paradoxes among the Bengali-Muslims which reflect their adherence to the Bengali informed Islam enabling themselves to reconstruct and remodify Koranic rules and regulations as befitting to their existential realities. One particular observation emanating from my life long attachment to Bengali-Muslim life has exposed me to such reconstructions. While it is said in Koran that ‘lawful to you is the pursuit of water-game and its use for food, for the benefit of yourselves and those who travel’ (Al-Koran, Sura: Al Mâ'idah, Chapter: 5 Verse: 96; Ali [trans.] 1983), most of the Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh avoid shell fishes like turtle and crab as Makhrooh- a food which falls in between Halal (permitted) and Haram (forbidden)- prior to having a self-contradictory preference for shrimp which is also by definition a shell fish and Makhrooh as well.

The paradox mentioned above indicates that though Muslims generally use the notion of Halal-Haram to describe and classify their food and drink it is not solely grounded in theological principles of Islam, nor the boundaries drawn between Halal and Haram foods implicate the preference of certain foods and avoidance of others on the basis of their nutritional values. Thus the popular conviction that Muslims are loyal only to their religion and consider the Koran more sacred than any other set of laws deserves closer examination on the basis of their nominal and virtual identity. The distinction made by Jenkins (1996: 24), between nominal identity as mere name and virtual identity as the experience of an identity, is relevant to my problem field.

the nature of Islam and Muslims, taking resort to the veteran orientalist Bernard Lewis and criticises both of them for making a readymade monolithic portrait of Islam (Said 2001a:1). Following Said we can find a wide range of orientalist, who pretend to be experts and authorities on Islam but eventually produce a wide range of misconceptions about Islam by demonstrating Islam as binding and a world- wide religion which is everywhere the same. Thus we come across plenty of publications by these orientalists where the title of the book is enough to produce hatred towards Islam and Muslims. For instance John Laffin’s ‘The dagger of Islam’ (1979) and/or G.H. Jansen’s ‘Militant Islam’ (1979). Huntington, allegedly in the same vein, portraits Islam as militant, bloody and violent (Huntington 1997:254-58). Though he begins his book to portray how the West has produced an antagonism between the ‘West’ and the ‘rest’ he eventually concludes that ‘at the micro level the primary clash of civilization is between Islam and the others’ (Huntington 1997:255).

2 Becoming Bengali-Muslim implies the orientation to share the same nominal identity but being Bengali-Muslim, as virtual identity, means very different things to such people in practice, and may have different consequences and experiences for them in relation to the context of praxis.

Following such a line of understanding my research interest will focus on the construction and reconstruction of Bengali-Muslim identity in the light of their adherence to Halal food, which emerged out of their migrant status in Sydney. Cross cultural studies (Goody 1982, Douglas 1972, Douglas & Isherwood 1979) show that food is an expression of cultural and social boundaries. Food reflects and symbolises social relations and can be a powerful means of inclusion or exclusion from social groups of what is otherwise stated by Douglas and Isherwood as the necessity ‘…to give marking services and to get marking services’ (1979: 56). Having this argument in mind my research will embark upon the idea that dietary concepts, based on the dichotomy of Halal and Haram, are neither the only necessary outcomes of religious dimensions, nor are they the simple by-products of a timeless cultural pattern.

Paradoxes justified: Facts observed Thus it would be misleading to think that the hyphenated identity of ‘Bengali- Muslim’ leaves them in such a state where there is no option left for them but to find this Bengali ethnicity-Muslim dialectic either as a conflicting or as a cohesive relationship. Rather I believe it would be pertinent to quote Hussin Mutalib’s (1990) study about the role of Islam and ethnicity in Malay society. His study convincingly demonstrates the fact that Islam always has to struggle with ‘traditional norms, practices, and conventions already well entrenched in Malay culture, commonly referred to as adat’ (Mutalib 1990:12)3. And this fusion of Islamic and un-Islamic practices has produced a kind of hybrid or variegated Islamic doctrine (Mutalib 1990:13). While observing the strong foothold of ‘these non-Islamic or un-Islamic values in Malay culture’ Mutalib thus expects that ‘the role of Islam in Malay life and politics would be necessarily limited…In many ways, this strong Malay attachment to

3 As expressions of adat Mutalib has listed some markers though which one can feel the essence of the presence of adat in Malay society. These are ‘magic, superstitions, spirit-worship, taboos, resort to the power of the shamans and medicine-man (pawing and bomoh), jin and iblis (evil spirits)’ (Alwi bin Sheikh al-Hady 1962; Josselin de Jong 1960; Knappert 1980; and Winstedt 1982 cited in Mutalib 1990:13).

3 non-Islamic values …has not undergone any epochal or radical change’ (Mutalib 1990:14). On the other hand, the Bengali ethnicity-Muslim dialectic also resembles the situation of Indonesia as depicted by Anthony H. Johns (1987:202-29). Despite observing the presence of the Muslim education system running parallel with the secular educational system, along with the recent rise of Islamic extremism in Indonesia, Johns is of the opinion that an Iran-like Islamic revolution is unlikely to happen in Indonesia (Johns 1987:225). Among the various reasons the one which closely resembles that of Bangladesh is the cultural traditions of the Indonesian people, which has long been influenced by the Indic religious overlay, ‘through which they perceive Islam’ (Johns 1987:226). It does not imply that, as I believe, the people of Malaysia and Indonesia feel themselves less Muslim and hence less religious. Rather they perceive their Islamic practices with the standard of evaluation as emanated from their understanding of their society and culture. And this evaluation, therefore, enables them to make a dichotomy of religion as a private matter and religion as a political force along with a well manifested inclination to the former rather than the latter. As proof of this claim we can take a look over the 1971 general election, when religion-based political parties were allowed, of Indonesia, and find the fact that the ‘Muslim parties won less then one third of the seats contested’ (Indonesian Official Handbook 1979 cited in Johns 1987:203). A similar condition is very much prevalent in Bangladesh where the popular vote for Islam-based parties has gradually declined since 1991. The following table illustrates this fact:

Table 1: Percentage of vote as secured by the Islam-based parties of Bangladesh Year of election Vote secured by the Islam-based parties 1991 12% 1996 8.6%f 2001 4.26%

Source: Weekly Dhaka Courier, September 27, 2002 cited in Rashid 2004:6.

Hiranmay Karlekar (2006) presents an almost similar picture of the last election held in 2001. Karlekar’s estimation is given below:

4 Table 2: Percentage of vote secured by the Islam-based parties of Bangladesh in 2001

Name of Islamist Parties Seat secured (out of 300) Vote secured (%) Jamaat-e-Islami 17 4.28 Islami Oikya Jote 2 0.68 Jammat-e-Ulema Islam Bangladesh 0 0.03 Bangladesh Khelafat Andolon 0 0.02 Islami Shashantantra Andolan 0 0.01 (Islamic Constitution Movement)

Source: Hiranmay Karlekar (2006:203)

The same appraisal of the popular notion of Islam held by the Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh has aptly been described by Tazneen M. Murshid (1995) in her book ‘The sacred and the secular: Bengal Muslim discourses, 1871-1977’. In her view ‘although a religious ideology permeated the authoritarian state machinery of Bangladesh from 1975 to 1990, it was not a response to the demand of a popular will’ (Murshid 1995:4). She goes on to say that the profound tendency found among Bengali- Muslims ‘is to reject the politicisation of Islam which is seen to serve only party politics and individual self-interest’ (Murshid 1995:4). Sufia M. Uddin (2006:178), while evaluating the major Bangladeshi perception about the prime Islam-based political party that is the Jamat-i-Islami, also says in the same vein that ‘many Bangladeshis view the group as violent and have accused it of using violent tactics’. Instead of adhering to any universalised and static notion of Islam and Muslim community, Sufia M. Uddin (2006:48), therefore, suggests that ‘Islam is regionally informed’ and this particular notion, as he hopes, ‘defies popular assumptions that “Islam” represents a monolithic culture. It also defies arguments that any diversity in global tradition suggests that some members maintain inauthentic practices. Interpretation of Qur’an and Sunna vary by period, as Talal Asad has argued, as well as by region’. The aforementioned discussion thus indicates the fact that it would be misleading to evaluate the ‘Bengali informed Islam’ and define ‘Bengali informed Muslim community’ with reference to the acts of some individuals and groups who on account of being politically powerful ‘have access to the instruments of authority, coercion and control…especially in a country like Bangladesh where democratic institutions are not in operation’ (Murshid 1995:4).

5 Thus following Mutalib’s assessment of the Malay-Islam relationship I would like to borrow his contention prior to claiming that the Bengali-Islam relationship is ‘one which can be mutually supportive at a given time or in a particular situation, and contradictory at another’ (Mutalib 1990:2). It means that instead of developing any fixed and immutable contradictory or cohesive relationship, the Bengali-Islam relationship exists in Bangladesh as an overlapping consensus which will be discussed in subsequent chapters. But before proceeding further let me justify once more the comparison that has been made, while discussing the relationship between locally informed ethnic and religious identity, between Bangladesh and Malaysia, and then between Bangladesh and Indonesia. Not only do Mutalib’s and Johns’ studies provide me with relevant material to make such a comparison, along with those Riaz Hassan’s (2002) construction of a typology of Muslim societies, based on a well documented comparative study of a vast range of Muslim societies, enables me to embark upon my justification of such a comparison. While analysing a wide range of Muslim societies’ religious and political orientation Hassan (2002:139) finds a close positioning of Bangladesh, Indonesia and Malaysia. To crystallise the fact let us have a look over the typology as outlined by Hassan.

Fig. 1: A typology of Muslim Societies (Source Hassan 2002: 139).

The above mentioned typology of Muslim societies signifies that Muslims around the world can have diverse norms and value systems, diverse practices, attitudes and

6 beliefs towards Islam as a religion. But unfortunately instead of considering the fact that ‘there can also be vast differences in the social behaviour of different persons belonging to the same religion, even in fields often thought to be closely linked with religion’ (Sen 2006:62) these diversities have been reduced to a unified whole which has eventually led towards the construction of a monolithic and static images of Islam and Muslim communities. This common misinterpretation stems from our generalisation that tends ‘to take at face value the ideological claim by some Muslims’ (Eickelman & Piscatori 1996:28) and thus ignores the fact that multiple and overlapping notions of actualising Islam may exist not only among different nations but also even within a particular nation (to find this internal dynamics of Bangladesh, as evidence of the claim, see Murshid 1995, Uddin 2006). Not only does this essentialising tendency ignore the inter and intra regional contexts of actualising Islam, but it also blurs the reality that ‘people are religious in one way does not mean that they will be religious in other ways’ (Hassan 2002:40). Sufia M. Uddin (2006) delves far into this fact and finds that the stereotypical image of Islam has largely been constructed on the basis of the perspectives held either by the Islamists or by the extremists. He (Uddin 2006:5-6) claims that the extremists’ violent tactics are assumed to be the strategies of all Islamists, and this stereotyping of Islamists is wrongly applied to the majority of Muslims. This indicates that the manifestation of Islam and Muslim communities has largely been based upon an attempt to ‘uncover a universal essence, the real Islam’ (el-Zein 1977:227).

Islam and Muslims: Beyond the homogenisations The tendency to conflate the everyday experiential reality of ordinary Muslims with the institutionally organised reality of Islamists and/or extremists, as stated above, tends to assume and produce monolithic and homogenous conceptualisations of Islam and Muslimness (the processes of being a Muslim). What is ignored in this way is the fact that the idealised image of Islam and Muslim communities as emanated from the Islamic dogmas, its rigid monotheism, well defined scriptures, traditions, and decisions of jurists, will do nothing but help us to produce a monolithic facade and to underplay the vivid inner social and cultural asymmetries of both an inter and intra- regional nature (Roy 1983:5). With this essentialising tone those who have conducted studies on Islam are found to essentialise Islam as confined only within the scriptural restrictions of the Koran or Hadith (description about the life of the Prophet

7 Muhammad). For instance Geertz, in his widely cited book ‘Islam Observed’, though aptly points out the multivocality underlying Indonesian Islam (1968:12) and subsequently draws attention to the constructedness of religion as a ‘…social institution, worship a social activity, and faith a social force’ (1968:19), he eventually essentialises Islam as ‘universal, in theory standardized and essentially unchangeable’ (1968:14). Anthropologist Abdul Hamid el-Zein (1977) also unfolds a similar shortcoming in Geertz’s observation of Islam and Muslim communities in Indonesia and Morocco. At the beginning el-Zein (1977) properly recognises Geertz’s sincere effort to put considerable emphasis upon the particularity and historicity of these religious experiences, but soon after he criticises Geertz for indicating these vast and diverse experiences ‘collectively as “Islamic”’ (1977:231) and for speaking of “Islamic consciousness” and “Islamic reform” (1977:231). Geertz is also found to be confined in his search of an universal essence of Islam as he believes, according to el- Zein, (el-Zein 1977:232) ‘for all men, the lived-in-world is an experienced world constituted through symbolically expressed meanings which are intersubjectively or socially shared. Geertz establishes not only the reality of shared experience but also the forms in which it is expressed’. This excessive concentration upon shared meanings, which is thought to be the ‘delicately related developments of an initial symbolic base linked by the social process’ (el-Zein 1977:232), thus understates the significance of distinct realities of overlapping features as reflected by individuals’ actual experiences. Reductionism4 of this kind, as stated above, may help us to build our theoretical imagination but plays down the fact that

The mode of reflection and its intensity varies form the passive reflection on the socially given world to an active and critical reflection in which the world is not taken for granted but questioned, reinterpreted, and sometimes uprooted…it is essential for man, in order to continue to produce meaning, to reflect upon his taken-for-granted reality, to modify it, to transform it, and even deny it (el-Zein 1977:234).

4 Surprising enough is the fact that even an erudite sociologist like Max Weber, as Bryan S. Turner (1974:23) informs, by accepting unquestionably the common nineteenth-century reductionist interpretation of Islam ignores Muslim’s interpretations of events and abandons some of the essential principles of his own verstehende sociology.

8 It means that in our search for a shared meaning of reality we have become excessively preoccupied with the collective representation of culture and its meaning that eventually leads towards a generalised version of our understanding, which is principally formulated to satisfy ‘the self-declared superior scientific community which remains in isolation from the common sense world’ (el-Zein 1977:246 emphasis added). In this search what remains unnoticed is that there can be possible disparities between collective representations on the one hand, and individual experience and thought on the other, or differences between received tradition and its reproduction (Barth 1987:83). Observing such an unwarranted preoccupation with the self-declared superior scientific community we, therefore, can arrive at the corollary that the studies of changes in society do not result from the experiential reality of the individual, but from the changing perspectives, as adopted by the scientific community, to changes. In the same vein anthropologist Dale F. Eickelman (1976) also criticises the limitation of anthropological understanding of social change and continues his criticism by saying that there exists a tendency in anthropological analysis to place social conduct and cultural or symbolic systems in perfect correspondence, which in reality lack fit and this lack, according to Eickelman (1976), serves as the force of change in any society. But instead of figuring out this asymmetry between these two dimensions, in anthropological literatures, as Eickelman (Eickelman 1976 cited in el-Zein 1977:240) says, ‘either the social structure is considered the essentially stable domain and the symbolic system becomes its reflection, or vice versa. In these cases, the problem of historical change is avoided’. To demonstrate these disparities and asymmetries, Eickelman (1976) in his analysis of Maraboutism, a particular version of Moroccan Islam, thus prefers the individual as his basic unit of analysis and challenges the notion of religion’s inherently static form which, he believes, like all cultural or symbolic systems exists in a continuous state of change and flux (Eickelman 1976 cited in el-Zein 1977:239). I agree with Eickelman’s (1976) proposition about the changing features of religion and its subjective meanings in terms of time and space and hence would like to argue that any kind of essentialising notion thus leaves little space to think that ‘Muslims are- like everybody else-subject to the laws that characterise socio-political change’ (Dassetto & Bastenier 1984; Etienne 1989 cited in Cesari 2002:41).

9 On the other hand a group of thinkers are witnessed as profoundly obsessive towards the imagination of a ‘pan-Islamic’ idiom. For example, Baba (1988, 1994) dreams of ‘pan-Islamism’ while confronting the inaugural hey-day of the Organisation of Islamic Conference (OIC), which has become a moribund reality of the day5. Moreover, it appears to be fashionable among intelligentsia6 to use the term ‘Muslim World’ so repeatedly and unwittingly that it has become difficult for someone to resist this all encompassing, fixed, irreducible and indisputable notion. To counteract this essentialising trend we can rest upon Rafiuddin Ahmed’s (ed.) book ‘Understanding the Bengal Muslims: Interpretative essays’ (2001). In his introductory note he proposes a distinction between imagination of believers about community and the meaningful articulation of that community. With this distinction he evaluates the historical positioning of Bengali-Muslims and then disagrees with what Benedict Anderson (1983:20) attempts to argue about the role of the sacred language in creating communities. To prop up his claim he argues,

5 The ineffective nature of the OIC has appropriately been grasped by Shahram Akbarzadeh (2005). He clearly states that beyond the issue of Palestine the OIC has been unable to put forward any agenda common to all Muslims of the world. Though the concept of ummah constitutes the central theme and destination of the organisation, it has failed to demonstrate itself different from other international bodies. ‘As a result the OIC has been unable to present a unified position over and above the lowest common denominator that is acceptable to all member states. The list of the OIC failures includes its inability to resolve the war between its two member states, Iran and Iraq (1980-88), its inaction in response to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the subsequent war to eject Iraqi forces (1990-91), and- perhaps most important of all – its virtual irrelevance to various peace plans to resolve the ongoing Israel-Palestine dispute’ (Akbarzadeh 2005:6). A similar argument has also been voiced in the editorial of the Daily Excelsior (2005). The editorial note clearly poses substantial suspicion about the real concerns of the OIC and says that the OIC has hardly been observed to initiate any attempt for the development of common Muslims. The editorial also finds that the OIC’s untoward interference, in the context of the Indian sub-continent, has always heightened the prevalent tension and crisis between India and Pakistan. Fayaz Khan (2003), in the same vein, in his letter to the editor of the Daily Star, the most prominent English newspaper of Bangladesh, places his critical evaluation about the ineffective and dubious role played by the OIC in 1971 when Bangladeshi people had been mercilessly and inhumanely killed by the Pakistani army (Khan 2003). Also, while analysing Indonesia’s involvement in the OIC during Suharto’s reign Anak Agung Banyu Perwita (1999:2) observes that ‘Indonesia perceived that the OIC is not reliable enough in settling all issues related to Islam.’ And he (1999) finds the reason behind the internal weakness of the OIC that couldn’t show considerable success to usher any feeling of strong internal cohesion among its members.

6 Here again, I would like to mention the name of the book ‘The clash of civilizations: Remaking of world order’ (1997) produced by Samuel P. Huntington. In his entire book he is found to lump together some countries as Islamic while he cleverly avoids marking the countries of the ‘West’ as Christian. He sounds like the British colonial rulers who, when they colonised India and wanted to rule it by the ‘divide and rule’ policy, referred to the ancient period of ancient Indian history as the ‘Hindu period’ and the medieval period of the Indian history as the ‘Muslim period’, but never referred to their period in India as the ‘Christian period’.

10 Ironically, Arabic as the sacred language could not even ease rivalries between Muslims of different races and cultures, far less create a community of believers; the historic conflict between the Arabs and the Persians exemplifies this (2001: 3).

Ahmed’s (2001) realisation of the fact appears more evident if we see the formation of Indian Muslim Association in 1923 whose members posed vehement opposition against the pan-Islamic agenda as set forth by Muslim League Leaders (Shah 2001:106). The fault line of the creation of so called ‘ummah’ (community) based on sacred Arabic scripts comes more evident if we evaluate the inhumane life that the Bihari-Muslims are living in regimented camps in some demarcated locations in Bangladesh. Jawaharlal Nehru (1963) rightly observes the absence of the ‘ummah’ ideology in the day to day lives of the ordinary Muslims in the context of the undivided Indian sub-continent (cited in Madan 2004c:404). Olivier Roy (2004:30- 40) investigates the attempt of constructing the notion of ‘ummah’ on a global scale and opines that it is nothing but a utopia that is adopted by the neofundamentalists as their strategy to counteract Westernisation and, this way, according to him, both appear against the very concept of a given culture, which in reality is not manifested in the religiosity7 of the actual actors. He (2004:11) thus questions the very notion of ‘group feeling’ and argues that ‘if the anthropological prevalence of ‘group feeling’ (asabiyya) in loyalty to the state is linked with Islam, why does this model prevail in Sicily and not in southern Spain, which was under Muslim control for much longer?’. Following Roy I would therefore like to ask that what conceptual and methodological tools we have to analyse ‘the religiosity of a Tunisian shopkeeper who attends mosque but also sells wine…late in the evening on a Persian street corner’ (Roy 2004:6). The answer of this question leads us towards an unfortunate finding since Islam and Muslim communities around the world have largely been neglected in sociological and anthropological literatures. Bryan S. Turner (1974:1) confirms the fact by saying that ‘an examination of any sociology of religion text-book published

7 In his famous book ‘Globalized Islam’ (2004) Olivier Roy aptly persuades us to be aware of the differences between religion and religiosity while studying Islam. For her ‘the key question is not what the Koran actually says, but what Muslims say the Koran says’ (Roy 2004:10). While religion connotes institutionalisation of religious doctrine through a theological corpus, religiosity embodies the discourses and practices of individuals (ibid; emphasis added). According to Roy, thus, ‘the self and hence the individual is at the core of religiosity’ (Roy 2004:31).

11 in the last fifty years will show the recurrent and depressing fact that sociologists are either not interested in Islam or have nothing to contribute to Islamic scholarship’8. The concept of ummah has also been evaluated as a ‘flawed sense’ by the Saudi Arabian political scientist and educationist Abu Sulayman (1977), which he believes serves as a tool in favour of the coercion and authoritarianism of the political elites (cited in Hassan 2002:2-3; 84-5).

The discussion as outlined above enables us to suppose that Islam and Muslim communities have been essentialised in sundry ways. Also, various authors help us in deciphering this essentialising agenda. But still very few attempts have been made to discover the reasons behind such essentialism. Eickelman’s (1976) analysis tries to show how our excessive preoccupation to find symmetry between social conduct and symbolic systems keeps us far away from the experiential reality of every life, which actually lacks fit and thus serves as the motor of social change (cited in el-Zein 1977:240). Olivier Roy (2004), in the same vein, also criticises our confinement with the discussion about Islam as religion that doesn’t consider the discursive features of religiosity as practised by average Muslims. Sufia M. Uddin (2006) in his turn draws our attention to the fact that essentialisation of Islam and Muslim communities takes place, particularly in the West, due to the erroneous attempt to explain Islam and Muslim communities through the activities of the Islamists and extremists, which is then wrongly applied to majority of Muslims. Along with these I would like to add one more factor that I think is crucial in understanding the potential reasons responsible for the essentialisation of Islam and Muslim communities. This factor is very much embedded in the difference between Western, and East-Asian and South Asian populations’ conceptualisation, characterisation and manifestation of selfhood. While for the Western populace the notion of selfhood is centred around the concept of individualism, for the East and South Asians it is centred around the concept of relationalism. Dorothy Angell (1999) confirms this relationalism, as she finds, embedded in the notion of selfhood of the migrant Bangladeshis settled in America. Angell (1999:180) informs us that for the Bangladeshi migrants, especially those who belong to the first generation, ‘one’s identity is formed through relatedness, not

8 It is not the fact that Turner doesn’t recognise the attempt made by some sociologists and anthropologists to analyse Islam and Muslim communities. Rather he marks them as exceptions. (To view these names see Turner 1974:185-6).

12 through individuation’. Steven J. Heine (200:884), in his examination of the difference between East-Asian and North-American ‘selves’, finds the East-Asian self as reflecting the significant role of relationships. With this finding Heine (2001 890- 91) goes on to claim that the prevalent view in the West is that the ‘individual has potential control of shaping the world to fit his or her own desires’ since the self is perceived here as ‘an immutable entity, working within the context of mutable world, highlights a particular perception of individual agency’ (Heine 2001:891). Contrarily the East-Asian notion of selfhood is constituted with the conviction that ‘the social world is not at the individual’s disposal to alter to fit his or her needs. Rather, the flexible individual must accommodate to the inflexible social world and must learn what aspects of themselves need to be changed in order to fit in’ (Heine 2001:891). Thus, according to Heine (2001:887-8), while presented with two contradictory arguments the Americans eliminate the contradiction by selecting the better argument. On the other hand, while facing similar contradictory arguments the Chinese accept both the arguments as part of the ongoing processes of life and hence don’t attempt to resolve the inconsistency. Following this line of argument, I believe, the notion of Western selfhood hinders Western academia to think that instead of making any effort to eliminate the contradiction between Islamic and the secular ethnic identity, a Muslim society can accept both in the form of an overlapping consensus. Such failure thus heightens the misconceptions about Muslim societies since in most of Western academic literature, as we have already seen, religion and secularism are seen as mirror opposites which can not coexist. At this juncture Tambiah (1990:153) extends his understanding to help us to claim that religion and secularisation are interwoven in Eastern thought. Last but not the least, the inadequacy of emphasis upon the regionally informed culture and religion, as indicated by Sufia M. Uddin (2006) and the limited effort given to examine the historical changes of the particular society under study, as unfolded by Eickelman (1976 cited in el-Zein 1977) lead towards the essentialisation of Islam and Muslim societies. Under these circumstances, and considering all these drawbacks stated above, I therefore would like to investigate the preference of Halal food along with an avoidance of Haram food among the Bengali- Muslim migrants of Sydney, premised upon the hypothesis that any analysis of such practice devoid of historical analysis will lead us to believe Islam as an active agent and Bengali society as merely a passive or, to borrow a term from linguistics, patient recipient.

13 But it would be misleading to say that it is Islam and Muslim communities that have only been essentialised. On the other side of these idealist and Islamist visions there exists an abundance of literature, mostly based upon the hypothesis that religion and secularism can not coexist, where exaggerated stress has been given only upon the secularistic cultural realms of Bengaliness of Bengali-Muslims and thus have pushed Islam into the back seat as an invisible factor. Rafiuddin Ahmed (1988:138-9) in his another contribution marks the rise of Bengali local culture in the resistance movement set forth by the Bengali populace of then East-Pakistan against the pan- Islamic claim of the West-Pakistani Muslim League leaders. Another well-known Muslim literary personage, S. Wajed Ali (1890-1941), in his younger days, was inclined towards pan-Islamism, but in his later life became an advocate of secular Bengali nationalism (Qadir 1977:115-116). Most of these writers seem to be influenced by the Western thought, science and learning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who ignored the fact that secularism as a philosophy of life as it is understood in the West differs much from the secularism practiced by the Bengali- Muslims of Bangladesh. Western secularism ‘rejects the place of the supernatural and the sacred in the affairs of man. Man, not God, is the central focus of secularism’ (Maniruzzaman 1986: 44). The basic tenet of Western secularism is materialism, rationalism i.e. accepting reason as ultimate authority, scientism-the belief in natural causation, and humanism-the right of every person irrespective of birth to equal opportunity and liberty (Maniruzzaman 1986: 44). Further, in a secular state there is a clear-cut distinction between the power of religious institutions and that of the state. In contrast, in Bangladesh there is no sharp distinction between the political sphere and the religious sphere. The blending of religious and secularistic creeds is clearly embodied in a speech of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the Prime Minister of the post-liberation Bangladesh, where he pointed out ‘secularism does not mean absence of religion…Our only objection is that nobody will be allowed to use religion as a political weapon’ (Maniruzzaman 1986: 49).

Thus neither the pan-Islamists nor the ethno-national chauvinists consider the complex composite of a strong secular stream and an equally, if not more, potent Islamic current that characterises the Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh. Moreover, the failure to understand the divergent impacts of Islam on different regions in different periods is underpinned by the ignorance of the fact that the effect of the impact of

14 Islam on a given region was the cultural maturity of Islam and the region in question at the point of time when they are encountering each other. For example, when Islam entered Black Africa, Islam was ‘fully developed and acted as a strong factor in unifying culture’ (Trimingham 1971:219). On the other hand when it entered Iran, ‘Islam had behind it millennia of advanced culture, and Iranians, receiving the impact of primitive Arab Islam, contributed significantly towards the formation of Islamic culture proper’ (Trimingham 1971:219).

The Disembodiment of Halal-Haram Considering the various literature discussed above we can come upon the corollary that most of the studies on Bengali-Muslim identity fail to understand the multiplicities and variations of meanings that the actors produce when negotiating the taken-for-granted cultural tradition in a more individualised way. This understanding has persuaded me to outline the hypothesis that there is a wide gap between the prescriptions given by the Islamic principles related to food as reflected in the dichotomy of Halal and Haram and the actual consumption by the actors, in this case the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney, as reflected in their every day practices. Social scientists of various disciplines (Douglas 1997; Harris 1997; Hunter 1997) while talking about food ideology and food status, keep in view the culture and the interaction patterns which allow the use of particular foods as a means through which people of different cultures and religions maintain their belongingness to their religious identities. But what seems problematic, as will be discussed elaborately in Chapter Two, is that these studies perceive religious food rules and prohibitions as essential and static since their understandings of identity are still influenced by essentialist beliefs- identity is natural and fixed. My research will thus attempt to counteract these essentialised perceptions of identity, which will be expressed in the food consumption practices of Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants with the view that food related practices are a dynamic process, always changing with some modifications over time and space. Thus there is no reason to think that the meanings of Halal and Haram are completely theologically determined and free of subjective interpretations, constructions, contestations, and negotiations. In so doing, I would like to rest upon the constructivist theoretical framework of Hobsbawm (1983) and the experientialism of Barth (1991) with an aim to look into the subjective meanings and treatment of the categories of Halal and Haram among ‘Bengali-Muslims’ in

15 Sydney. The constructivist framework will assist the research to discover the purificatory traditions and religious injunctions invented by a group of Muslim intelligentsia during the last millennium, and particularly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to dissociate the customs of their pre-conversion Hindu origin. Such a discovery of the inventedness of traditions will in turn help us to find how this inventedness of traditions and religious injunctions ‘was confined largely to intellectual circles and did not usually affect common people who were disinterested in the finer nuances of meaning’ (Murshid 1995:382). Furthermore the constructivist perspective will also guide the research to embark upon the notion that meaning of identity and that of Halal-Haram are not given rather these are constantly constructed and reconstructed in everyday reflexive practices of the individual Bengali-Muslim migrant. And this fluidity, multiplicity, contextuality, and complexity of the reconstruction of meaning will be explored through the individual’s subjective experiences prior to holding the conviction that people show much differences in their absorption of knowledge while interpreting and acting on the world (Barth 1991:86). The combination of these theoretical frameworks will help the research to embark upon the idea that the real life of people is endorsed with complexity in which actors are variously positioned and this empirical variation in social positioning has direct bearing upon the divergence of encompassing ideas, knowledge, experience and imagination of the people. This diversity in positioning provides the premises for people’s interpretation of events and construction of the meaning to fabricate their own framework of options and constraints in the making of strategic decisions. Eventually, my learning experience from the Bengali-Migrants of Sydney has led me to a similar logic, which characterises a reality that is sanctioned with discrepancy in interpretations and multiplicity in constructed meanings that people make to understand the world.

The core thrust of the research lies in its attempt to explore whether there is such thing as a monolithic ‘Muslim mind’ that works in a way peculiar to itself while constructing and reconstructing the definitions of Halal and Haram and drawing boundaries between the two. My study offers a micro-view of the diverse experiences and attitudes of Bengali-Muslims in the context of their migrant status in Sydney, Australia. It is not a study of Islam per se, that is the theological definitions and descriptions of Halal and Halal won’t be the focus of my research. Rather the

16 research will attempt to explore diversities of every day negotiations and constructions of meanings guided by the contention as put forth by Borofsky (1994:315) who claims that ‘in considering the subtle relation between diversity and sharing, we need keep in mind the possibility…of studying diversity in an of itself, without analysing it in the context of cultural units, without committing ourselves to groups as the central focus of investigation’. Following this line of reasoning this study will investigate the heterogeneities of contexts and meanings as emanated from the day to day encounter of pragmatic realities by the actors while negotiating and recontextualising the canonical/authoritative/theological constructions of Halal and Haram.

The overview The present thesis contains seven chapters. Chapter One describes my intention to conduct the research on Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants of Bangladesh. Throughout this chapter I have tried to demonstrate the necessity of conducting research on a migrant Muslim population considering their home country’s socio- historical, political, religious and economic factors. This way of approaching Muslim migrants will help us, I believe, to remove numerous misconceptions and stereotypes about Islam and Muslim communities. Among the vast list of ethno-religious rituals observed by Sydney’s Bengali-Muslims I have focused on the notion of Halal-Haram to show how the rules associated with this conception are grounded more in their Bengali informed Islam and hence how it is different from the theological/authoritative constructions of the said notion.

Chapter Two focuses on my theoretical understandings which have emerged from my academic leaning towards anti-essentialist theoretical fervour. Constructionist and experientialist theoretical propositions are explored to support my anti-essentialist position in dealing with different theories concerned with identity and food rules. I investigate the multiplicity and contextuality of Bengali-Muslims’ negotiation and construction of identities and demonstrate that why the anti-essentialist theories are best suited to grasp the flux and flexibility embedded in Bengali-Muslims’ identities. Theories concerned with religious food rules are investigated with a belief that if peoples’ identities are fluid and in flux then there should be subsequent flexibility in observing food rules associated with the constructions of those identities.

17

Research methodology is the theme of Chapter Three. Before illustrating the data collection methods I have used for this research, an attempt is made to approach the limitations of existing anthropological understandings of human being with all their inconsistencies, behavioural variables and actualities. Various research methods including participant observation, in-depth interviews and open conversations are conducted with various categories of Bengali-Muslim migrants with an aim not to make simplistic generalisations about their lives but rather to combat generalisations.

Chapter Four examines the adoption of Islam in Bangladesh and the subsequent interplay between the secular ethnic identity and the religious identity of Bengali- Muslims. The discussion shows how Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh are historically exposed to multiplicity and contextuality in constructing their identities. The inclusion of these socio-historical trajectories seems unique since very few migration studies seriously consider the migrants’ home countries’ social-history. And this ignorance eventually helps essentialising the internal dynamics of migrants’ lives and living. This chapter in a sense is the hub of the research which produces the researcher’s theoretical and methodological underpinnings.

Chapter Five examines existing theories about globalisation, translationalism and multiculturalism, which propose a significant focus on migration and migrants. This chapter discovers the limitations of existing theories in the sense that most of the theories have stemmed from scholars’ privileged positions which are more rooted in their lives and living in developed countries. Instead of conducting the present research on the migrants from above, whose lives are easy to generalise, the migrants from below receive attention which shows considerable difference with existing theoretical paradigms.

The Sixth Chapter looks at the difference between institutionally organised realities and everyday constructions of realities. In doing so the notion of Halal-Haram has been examined. First the case of the Australian Federation of Islamic Council, as a site where peoples’ diverse realities are intended to manage in some monolithic and institutionalised ways, has been observed and then as a site of multiplicity and flexibility the Bengali-Muslim migrants’ constructions of everyday realities have been

18 investigated. A comparison of these two kinds of realities reinforces the research’s claim to avoid the generalisations in social science literature.

The concluding chapter analyses and identifies the basic findings of the research. At the end what I suggest is that the Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh evaluate the food rules associated with the conception of Halal-Haram through their negotiations of their Bengali-Muslim identity dialectics which in turn poses considerable challenges to the ways Islam and Muslim communities around the world have been essentialised.

19 Chapter II

Theoretical framework

As the aim of my research is to explore the discourses derived from the overlapping consensus between the secular ethnic identity (being Bengali) and the religious identity (being Muslim) of Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants, which I believe is played out in their reconstructions and remodifications of the authoritative and theological definitions of Islamic food rules and practices, two interrelated areas and existing associated theoretical discussions about them demand re-evaluation. These two are identity and food rules. The notion of identity is central to the individuals since it helps them to describe a sense of belongingness to those things (ethnic, religious, national, international, familial) which help create a sense of self. But instead of perceiving that the individual possesses a singular, stable, mapable and reducible identity which can easily be studied through some simplistic generalisations, this research will view identity as plural, unstable and inconsistent which can not be reduced to a unitary and essentialised version. This emphasis to resist essentialisation seems important for this study since we have already gained much knowledge in the introductory chapter about the ways the Islamist or the secularist interpretation of Bengali-Muslims’ identity always try to essentialise either the Islamic or the ethnic identity which eventually fail to accommodate the diverse experiences of peoples as they change through time in the form of shifting emphasis on different layers of their identities. This is why at this juncture it would be pertinent to evaluate the causes responsible for the failure to consider the inner-dynamics and popular values operating in a Muslim society like Bangladesh in the light of the theories of ethnicity. This evaluation, I believe, will help us to reveal the fact that the intellectualist construction of Bengali-Muslim identity has heavily been influenced by ‘the old fashioned Western outlook of a “stationary Asiatic society”’ (Kagaya 1966:70) coupled with the modernist notion of identity as fixed, static and homogenous. The evaluation will also assist us to unmask the fact that for the Muslim population of Bangladesh, the Bengali-Muslim identity dialectic is a complex and changing notion which (for historical, political and economic reasons I will try to explore later) they modify constantly in order to adapt to the current situation.

20 I will then try to apply the anti-essentialist theoretical framework to some studies, pertinent to my research topic, particularly those which attempt to analyse food rules and regulations either of Muslims or of any other religious group that possesses a dichotomy between religiously prohibited and permitted foods close to that of Muslims. In doing so I will try to counteract the structural and cultural materialist theoretical paradigms which, I believe, pay little attention to variations and hence has become confined only within the realm of the ideal, not the action, or in other words excessive importance has been given to doctrine, not performance. The central aim here would be to prove the limitations of the theoretical underpinnings as taken by these theoretical persuasions which perceive food rules and regulations as ordered with fixed cultural or religious codes, immutable and hence beyond individuals’ manipulation. In this way emphasis has been given to draw broad categorisations under which diverse experiences of people, in renegotiating the rules, could be reduced to a generalisable phenomenon so that it can be showed that there is a culture of common rules, values, norms and beliefs to which all the practitioners equally adhere without any internal modification.

Ethnicity and identity: Looking through an anti-essentialist perspective

We know that in contemporary societies identities are more flexible, more open, more labile, more fluid, less predictable, more dramaturgical, more dependent on performance, less dependent on –as it were- inherited tradition (Hall 1996b:129).

In this section I am going to explore the causes responsible for developing the essentialised notions about ethnicity and identity with particular emphasis on Bengali- Muslims of Bangladesh. I would like to place the construction of Bengali-Muslim identity on the theoretical plane of the anti-essential perspective and demonstrate the ways their identity construction is continuously in a state of making rather than in a state of being. In doing so I would agree with what Jenkins claims, that ‘identity can in fact only be understood as a process… one’s social identity- indeed, one’s social identities, for who we are is always singular and plural- is never a final or a settled matter. Not even death can freeze the picture: there is always a possibility of a post

21 mortem revision of identity’ (Jenkins 1996: 4). Considering identity as a process, we should be guided by the actual behaviour of actors and follow the consequences (Vayda 1994:323). In this context, the anti-essentialist perspective can provide powerful insights into reality and refuses to adopt the view of society as a system of articulated parts as well as the myth of an ordered, coherent society/culture/reality. Adopting an anti-essentialist perspective this study thus holds the view that identity in general, and ethnic identity, in particular, is likely to be influenced both by many internal and external contextual forces.

The above mentioned discussion thus enables us to claim that the theories that make an attempt to explicate the identity construction of Bengali-Muslims and also those theories that tend to depict Islam and Muslim communities as monolithic can be said to be influenced by the essentialist paradigm of the primordial school of thought that mystifies a ‘social reality of stunning diversity’ (Ranger 1996:1). Due to this inclination they have failed to realise that socially constructed ethnic categorisations are not fixed and static since identities are characterised by multiple complexities. However, before we find out more about the ways the primordialist concept of ethnicity and identity imposes its essentialist paradigm let us have a look at the development of this particular school of thought in anthropology.

Shils (1963) and Geertz (1963) introduced the term primordialism in anthropology. Geertz notes that in the recently independent countries primordial sentiments are usually very strong and associated with aspects of cultural pluralism such as race, caste, tribe, religion, language or locality; and these pose a major challenge to the new states (Geertz 1963:108-9, 111). Edward Shils has written:

The constituent societies on which the new states rest are, taken separately, not civil societies, and, taken together, they certainly do not form a single civil society…They are constellations of kinship groups, castes, tribes, feudalities-even smaller territorial societies-but they are not civil societies. The sense of identity is rudimentary, even where it exists. (1963:22)

In short these views are based upon descent and are biological and genetic in nature. Moreover, the primordialists hold that identities are given and embedded in the past of

22 the concerned groups. They believe that since identities are attached through some ‘givens’, these ‘givens’ have produced ethnic groups as universal, innate, fixed, stagnant, and immutable (Geertz 1963:109). It means for the primordialists ethnic groups and identities are given, not something to be alterable through choice. Another staunch proponent of the primordialist position is Isaacs (1975). According to him

Individual has a ‘basic group identity’ attained at the moment of birth. A person acquires the cultural stuff-such as language, history, customs and religion-that is characteristic of the family into which he/she is born. The basic group identity derives from the ethnic group, composed of primordial attachments, to which he/she belongs (cited in Siapkas 2003:42).

This means for Isaacs identity is immutable, fixed, durable, persistent, natural, and rooted in the unalterable circumstances of birth. This is how the primordialists’ position leads toward the essentialisation of internal and external identity that is individual and social/cultural/ethnic identity. In this way they are found to be confined within ‘the assumption that groups, categories or classes of objects have one or several defining features exclusive to all members of that society’ (Ashcroft et al. 1998:77). It means that by adopting these features as the core essences of all individuals we fail to grasp the disparities between collective representation and the individual experiences. In short, we have become excessively preoccupied with the manifestation of an ethnically/nationally/religionally patterned and centred version of culture and identity, which Gilroy (1992:60) condemns as ‘culturalism’ or ‘ethnic absolutism’ since according to Gilroy (1987:13) ‘culture does not develop along ethnically absolute lines, but in complex, dynamic patterns of syncretism’. Gilroy’s criticism paves the way for us to understand that the primordialists try to distinguish the ethnic community and its constituent identities ‘by a social and cultural essence which is available for empirical investigation by the outside observer. The essential characteristics of ethnic groups are revealed in their social and cultural institutions which were seen as primordial’ (Eade 1996:61). Also Pnina Werbner (1991) warns us about the fact that there can be much differences between the actors of the centres, that is primordial institutions and those of the peripheries (cited in Eade 1996:61). Werbner goes on to say,

23 Modern day ethnic groups in capitalist societies are defined publicly by their centre or centres rather than by their peripheries. At the centre are the cultural experts and communal activists, the organic intellectuals who compete among themselves for moral, aesthetic or religious hegemony. The periphery consists of ethnic consumers who often straddle ambiguous boundaries (1996:73).

This absence of processes and practices emanated from the ambiguous and oscillating boundaries of the actors in studies of ethnicity and identity, therefore, ushers a profound ignorance of the discursiveness and transgressions of everyday life practices since there is a paucity of attention given to ‘the individual, the self, and the divided self’ (Werbner 1996:72). And this is how those of us, who are academics, have turned the subjects of our study into the victims of our fictions of representations (Werbner 1996:67). But what has remained unrecognised in these accounts, as sugested in the introductory section, is the fact that there can be many disparities between doctrine and action. Eickelman & Piscatori (1996:16), while discussing about Muslim politics, are of the opinion that the fixity of doctrine itself is a conceptual fiction and there is no reason to think that ‘doctrine invariably motivates action’. Thus following Aziz Al-Azmeh (1994 cited in Ranger 1996:2) I would like to hold the conviction that this kind of essentialisation of individuals’ identity along ethnic/national/religious lines have resulted in either an ‘over-Islamicisation’ or an ‘over-Bengalicisation’ of Bengali-Muslims. The essentialised perspective that is found active in the search for a completely unified, stable, uniform and coherent group and identity thus obfuscates ‘the relational aspects of identity’ (Werbner 1996:71). And this ignorance of the relational features of identity, as has also been discussed earlier in the context of the difference between Western, and East-Asian and South Asian populations’ conceptualisation, characterisation and manifestation of selfhood, eventually loses sight ovof the multiple, overlapping, and often contradictory nature of identity formation. In these ways, finally, the essentialised notions, as found embedded in the primordial perspective, pay little attention to historical and social particularities.

From this line of understanding ethnic identity, I believe, is not a thing in itself (sui generis). Nor can be it attributed to blood ties or a set of cultural traits since there are very few groups in the world today whose members can lay any serious claim to a

24 known common origin. So it is not the ‘givens’ that are considered essential to the definition of an ethnic group. Ethnicity refers to both shared background as well as shared culture which embrace blood, race, common ancestry, language, religion, culture, values, history, national or political identification (Weiner 1984:63-4; Glazer & Moyniyan 1975:4,8; Barth 1969: 10-1; Young 1976:47-9). It means the way the individual and groups characterise themselves on the basis of some imagined objective criteria mentioned above. In any given case one or more of these factors may even be absent. It involves solidarity and loyalty of individual members to such groups to which they belong to, and different from members of other groups. This feeling of distinctiveness leads to intimate social interaction within the group. Ethnic differences may not necessarily lead to the creation of ethnic groups nor that ethnic identities are fixed for all time (Bell 1975:169, 174). So ethnicity is an elusive concept and is very difficult to define in a precise way. Indeed, the definitions and boundaries of ethnicity are fluid. Thus it ‘has no single meaning which applies equally to every ethnic group’ (McCall et al. 1985:9).

Based on this notion of ethnicity as fluid and situational in nature Fredrik Barth (1969), with his colleagues, in a seminal collection ‘Ethnic groups and boundaries’, treated ethnicity as a continuing ascription which classifies a person in terms of their most general and inclusive identity, presumptively determined by origin and background (Barth 1969:13); as well as a form of social organisation maintained by inter-group boundary mechanism, based not on possession of a cultural inventory but on the manipulation of identities and their situational characters. Barth’s (1969) emphasis is to abandon the idea that ethnicity can develop in isolation. In reality, he stresses that ethnic groups define their identity by contrasting it with that of others. It is a product not of isolation but of interaction with outsiders. This way of evaluating ethnicity can be termed ‘instrumentalist’, for whom ethnicity is primarily a strategic phenomenon. But the problem in the instrumentalist claim is its ahistoric nature. They assume ethnicity a tool to maximise one’s interest based on the evaluation of the situation and thus ‘delimits (or a specific form of ethnicity) to be relevant to specific context only’ (Siapkas 2003:187). Moreover, their axiomatic assumption about human behaviour as rational, always driven by an intention to maximise interest both in individual (social, political, religious, economic and so on) and collective (as the organisation of interest group) levels. ‘Essentially this means that all members of a

25 group pull in the same direction. Conflicting interest within a group, perhaps due to power structures, are ignored’ (Siapkas 2003:187).

To fulfil this gap generated by the instrumentalists with their negligence of the past, a group of ‘constructionists’ has come up with ideas such as ‘invention of tradition’ (Hobsbawm & Ranger 1983) to analyse how ethnic groups are mobilised on the basis of an imagined or perceived past that has been invented only quite recently by various political actors as part of a political struggle. Moreover, in recent years ethnicity has emerged or more correctly re-emerged in modern democratic states both in the developed as well as in developing countries. This condition paves the way for the ‘primordialists’ to claim that ‘people did not abandon their deep-seated primordial sentiments and souls triumphed over society’ (McCall et al. 1985:24). Keeping this scenario in mind the constructivists, while aligning towards the primordialists’, view ethnic identities as cultural endowment, but at the same time in keeping with the instrumentalists they conceptualise ethnic identities as malleable. Thus the ‘constructivist’ approach can be perceived as anti-essential since for them identity is not dependent on any fixed essence or nature, but rather it is socially constructed. Instead of viewing identity as predefined the constructionist approach guides us to conceptualise identity as a contingency. Eade (1996:62) rightly points out that these kinds of investigations ‘share an emphasis upon the social construction of individuals and groups through discursive narratives and practices, a relational, de-centred and non-possessive approach towards power and resistance and an insistence on discontinuity, divergence and heterogeneity’. What is important for the constructivists is the changing complexity of the construction of identity. Keeping the fluidity of identity in mind Stuart Hall (1996a) even calls for giving up the use of the word ‘identity’ since for him it also connotes the image of a stagnant identity. Hall (1996a:4-5) thus suggests replacing the word ‘identity’ with ‘identification’ since it signifies the ‘dynamic processes of identification’ which is always incomplete. And this incomplete nature of identity enables people ‘to live with hybridity, to live with impurity, to live with the fact that there are no pure origins left’ (Hall 1996b:134). A similar claim is found in Homi Bhabha’s contention when he argues that: ‘“The people” always exist as a multiple form of identification, waiting to be created and constructed’ (Rutherford 1990:220). This constructionist and anti-essentialist position helps us in conceptualising identity and identification as dynamic processes that are

26 continuously evolving and informed by individuals’ life experiences. With this theoretical guideline I would like to hold the conviction that my study is not going to find a unifying Bengali-Muslim identity. Rather my study will demonstrate the multiplicity of meanings and contexts that underlie Bengali-Muslim identity. It means the study is based on the persuasion that there is no single unifying meaning of Bengali-Muslim identity applicable to all Bengali-Muslims at all times and places; rather there can be divergent meanings of it across generation, time and space. I believe people hold discursive and different meanings of Bengali-Muslim identity. This will be examined through the subjective constructions of the notion of Halal- Haram as perceived and negotiated by the Bengali-Muslim migrants’ residing in Sydney, Australia.

At this juncture I would like to make it clear that the constructionist approach of ethnicity and identity fits better to the Bengali-Muslim identity not only in their local context but also in their overseas contexts as well, since it first revises and then accommodates both the primordial and the instrumentalist claims in its theoretical underpinnings. Thus this synthetic theoretical tradition can be considered to interpret three different stages of world history. The primordialist theories can be employed to know how during the pre-colonial period the non-Western and/or pre-modern societies articulated their ethnic identity. The instrumentalists have brought the concept like nation and nation-state into discussion. They bring in light how among multiple identities a specific one comes to the surface and becomes the shifting ideological bases of nation-state. An example can be drawn from Bengali-Muslim nationalism where a fixed ethnic identity always stands for a myth. While the colonial rulers handed over power to the local elites they prioritised their Muslim identity that emerged from the encounter with the Hindus who received institutional support from the British colonisers and thus were perceived as antagonistic to Muslim interests. After independence the then East-Pakistanis (that is Bengali-Muslims) brought another element of their identity to the surface, Bengali language, and united against the West-Pakistanis as Bengali ethnic community, which ultimately led towards the birth of Bangladesh in 1971. On the other hand the constructionists help us to take the discussion of ethnicity beyond the boundary of nation-state. They intend to conceptualise ethnicity not on the basis of geography but on the basis of people’s cultural identities which is global in nature but mediated through local meanings.

27 Consequently language and religion have become two profound phenomena of ethnicity. And between the two, religion in recent years draws much attention since it is global in its theological principles but very much local in its practice and individual construction.

Based on the above assumption, I would like to conceptualise the Bengali-Muslim migrants’, who are residing in Sydney, preference for Halal (permitted) food which I believe is not only rooted in strict scriptural prescriptions of Islamic theology but is connected to their pre-Islamic status hierarchies, the colonial history of Bengali- Muslims and the experience of identity in a foreign land. As the experience of identity in an overseas life such as in Australia and its relation to the notion of Halal-Haram will be discussed in Chapter Six in details, in Chapter Four I am going to glimpse over the historical journey of the Bengali-Islam through which Islam had been incorporated in the local cultural milieu and the consequences that have followed. But before going to the next chapter, which is about the methodology that the research has adopted, clarification is required of my dissatisfaction with some existing theoretical understandings that attempt to analyse food rules and regulations where emphasis was given not upon the practices of the practitioners as derived from individual agency and the conditions of everyday life, but rather a kind of homogenising tendency has been found so that some immutable rules can be constructed as befitting specific theoretical fervour.

Food rules and prohibitions: Evaluating theoretical considerations

That man, that rational creature, often behave unreasonably…Indeed the area of food choices has seemed often as an area of great unreason (Cussler & de Give 1952:17)

Here I will try to evaluate some important studies conducted on food behaviour that attempt to find out the socio-cultural factors that influence food preference and food avoidance. In doing so I will mainly concentrate on Mary Douglas’ (1966) theory of classificatory anomalies through which she attempts to evaluate Jewish dietary rules from a structuralist point of view. I believe that such a focus is necessary since my

28 research is also related to dietary rules negotiated by Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh. Then I will try to evaluate the theories of Marvin Harris (1997) and Hunter (1997) who have made valuable contributions to studying Muslim dietary rules. My theoretical underpinning based on the anti-essentialist school of thought has enabled me to counteract the positions taken by Douglas (1966), Harris (1997) and Hunter (1997) since all of them have taken dietary rules and associated prohibitions as unproblematic and objectively given and hence have failed to observe the contradictions between the dietary rules and the actual consumption of foods by the practitioners. Instead of taking food rules and prohibitions as static and immutable my study will view food rules and principles as a dynamic process, always changing, based on the circumstances individuals encounter in their day to day affairs.

In evaluating Mary Douglas’ theory on Jewish dietary rules and prohibitions it is inevitable to start by discussing her theoretical orientation. Her study on Jewish dietary rules associates herself with the structural school of thought which analyses food habits as language (Beardworth & Keil 1997:63). Along with Levi-Strauss she maintains the conviction that ‘research into the cultural aspects of food habits will eventually enable us at least to discover the principles and ranking of tastes and smells’ (Mennell 1985:10). Based on this theoretical foundation she attempts to discover the Jewish dietary rules and principles that govern the ways in which food items are classified. She is of the opinion that ‘the dietary prohibitions of Leviticus are based on a fear of anomaly’ (Vos 1975:79). According to Mary Douglas (1966: 35-6), Leviticus, a chapter of the Torah, prohibits animals that are out-of-place; that is, they do not fit the classification system and this prohibition serves as the clue to observe the development of a Jewish thought pattern prior to attaching a notion of pollution to those animals that are not befitting the classificatory schemata which eventually makes these animals tabooed for consumption. Let us have a brief look at her interpretation. Her thesis holds the conviction that the major domesticated animals-cattle, sheep, and goats-have a split hoof and chew the cud; an animal that does not have both of these traits is out-of-place and is therefore considered impure and not to be eaten. Sea creatures should have fins and scales to enable them to swim easily through the water; those marine animals that do not, such as molluscs and crustaceans, are once more out-of-place and thus may not be eaten. Birds are meant to fly and have tiny legs; those that can not fly, such as the ostrich, or those that have

29 large legs with talons, such as the eagle, or those animals that fly but are not birds at all, such as the bat, are all non-kosher. The non-kosher animals, therefore, are all out- of-place; they thus elicit disgust (Douglas 1966:41-57). Her theory argues that ‘dietary prohibitions make sense in relation to a systematic ordering of ideas (a classificatory system) as exemplified for example by the abominations of Leviticus’ (Tambiah 1969:424).

What seems problematic in Douglas’s theory is that she fails to draw any distinction between mode of classification and mode of participation. Her preoccupation with mode of classification persuades her to explore a form of thought that underlies the Jewish dietary rules, but it leaves the process of thought unexplained which, I believe, is more complex than mode of classification since it contains several different levels: (1) engagement by virtue of knowledge; (2) engagement by virtue of belief; and (3) engagement by virtue of practice. Moreover, her approach seems to be based on the principle that the classificatory scheme does exists in itself as a self-perpetuating one, is transmitted from generation to generation, and is the ultimate explanatory model of any society. This way of finding out a patterned form of human thought, therefore, leaves no room to accommodate and consider ‘significant behavioural variables’ (Vos 1975:77) and it simply imposes a static ‘pattern on an inherently untidy experience’ (Mennell 1985:14) of the actor. Such an understanding will guide us to acknowledge the fact that ‘the individual is also active in socializing himself or herself, and we should beware of accepting an “oversocialized” view of the human individual, since there is always leeway for a degree of choice, deviance or innovation, and there may be conflicting pressures from different agencies’ (Beardsworth & Keil 1997: 54). Tambiah (1969:452), in his evaluation of Douglas’s theory of classificatory anomalies, criticises her structuralist position as ‘simple intellectual deduction’ and Mennell (1985), while analysing the structuralist assumption of food ‘refers to the point made by Elias that structuralism is based upon an assumption fundamental to Western thought, namely, the idea that underlying the surface changes of the everyday world there are deep-seated relationships which are unchanging. The tendency to allocate overriding significance to such hypothetical underlying entities is referred to by Elias as “process-reduction”’ (Mennell 1985 cited in Beardsworth & Keil 1997:64). At this juncture the critical evaluation of structural anthropologists as put forth by E.B. Ross (1978) would be worth mentioning. According to him, they

30 (structural anthropologists) take the prescriptions and proscriptions as given (Ross 1978 cited in Mennell 1985:13), understate the fluxes, processes and changes in order to justify their preoccupation to discover a static, changeless and constant structure, and hence their cultural descriptions of food rules fail to contribute any explanation (Mennell 1985:13). It means the structuralist analysis of food rules fails to see food as an event and thus pays no attention to differing priorities where the notion of food rules is continuously disputed among actors. The above mentioned criticism thus reminds us of the fact that instead of looking for a form of thought we should place the process of thought at the centre of our discussion that will expose us to the moveable positions individuals may take while negotiating between the scripturalist version of food prohibition and the lived reality of their individual preferences that may not revolve around the ideas put forth by religious script. Moreover, such an unchanging and reductionist approach proposed by Douglas, will cause the demolition of other interpretations of dietary prohibitions as proposed by many other anthropologists (Tambiah 1969:453). Thus, while Douglas (1966: 54-5) is of the opinion that as a cloven-hoofed animal that is not ruminant, the pig slips ambiguously between classes and thus treated as incomplete and unholy; it can be treated as one of the possible interpretations about the thematic origin of Jewish avoidance of pork, not the only one. For example, Bennett (1970) in his brilliant article ‘Aspects of the pig’ informs us that ‘some suppose that pig in some long-past millennium may have been sacred to the Jews and caused them to forbid its use’ (1970:229). Again, ‘there are some curious statements in Isaiah, in sections probably added to the book from 400 to 200 B.C., which suggests that the Jews had secret religious meetings at which they ate pork’ (Simoons 1967:16). These examples clearly indicate the fact that there is no simple one to one deducible reason that exists there to think that avoidance of pork, in everyday lived reality, is related only to the unholy and unclean nature of the pig. Instead, respect for it can be another reason.

The above mentioned discussion has brought us to one important question to be addressed with much care. Can we interpret Muslim dietary rules, as reflected in the notion of Halal-Haram, in the same manner as proposed by Mary Douglas in her theory of classificatory anomalies? We will try to approach the answer with some logical arguments. Let us accept the fact, for argument sake, that pig is considered by Muslims as unholy and polluted that has led towards the avoidance of it. But Bennett

31 (1970:223) lets us know that ‘the mature pig stands alone among the world’s larger domestic animals as unloved when adult and alive but well-regarded when dead and cooked’. If this is true then what would be wrong if Muslims would keep abhorring the pig but would consume it when dead and cooked? Maybe, logically, there would be nothing wrong, and Abu Ishaq al Shirazi (1976) demonstrates the fact that ‘pigs are the archetype of unclean things, but eating pork does not by itself prevent one from performing ritual worship’ (Shirazi 1976 cited in Reinhart 1990:9). Thus for Muslims pig is ‘merely dirty;…but not ritually impure’ (Reinhart 1990:9). Thus instead of looking for any logical explanation, applicable to all Muslims of the world, for discerning the notion of Halal-Haram in Islam, we should explain it socio- historically, since these rules may differ across time and space (Reinhart 1990:4, 8). A noteworthy example of this difference and its socio-historical basis can be cited from Johnson’s (2002) study on the Mandinga people of Guinea-Bissau. In that study we find that there are a number of popular myths that attempt to explain the reason behind the avoidance of pork by the Mandinga people. According to one version, the Mandinga people don’t eat pork out of their respect for the pig since once in an ancient time it saved a group of Muslim people by showing them a water hole in the desert (Johnson 2002:154). Lewis (1980) notes in the same vein that ‘in some areas around the world, the Muslim taboo on pork has been “invented” such that the pig comes to be associated in a special way with the Prophet Mohammed. As such, it is regarded not as a despised animal but as a sacred one’ (Lewis 1980 cited in Johnson 2002:155). As part of this socio-historical explanation we can get back to Reinhart (1990) who rather says that things that are considered unclean ‘serve as shibboleths to distinguish Muslims from non-Muslims’ (Reinhart 1990:8). Thus we find that for the Mandinga people, one explanation about the observance of pork avoidance is that it separates and distinguishes them from Christians (Johnson 2002:156). In the same vein, for the Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh, the avoidance of pork can work as an identity marker through which they have wanted to distinguish themselves from their low-caste and tribal Hindu kin since most of the Bengali-Muslims were converted to Islam from the low-caste and tribal Hindu stock (Ahmed 1981:1-38; 1988:118-21; Roy 1983:22-31). And Simoons (1967:29-30) shows that in the Indian subcontinent many tribal and low caste Hindus raise and eat pigs, and those who have given up pigs and pork have done this for the sake of upward social mobility. Niehoff (1960), while studying the Indians in the Oropuche Lagoon area of Trinidad, has also found

32 that pork is considered a proper food only for the lower castes (cited in Debyshing 1986:69). Thus we can claim that we should address the dietary rules of a particular Muslim population with an actor-oriented approach that will enable us to look beyond the static logical explanation, and thus persuades us to explore many other important factors, such as whether, in a particular context, Muslims are a majority or a minority; whether they are farmers or merchants; and so on (Reinhart 1990:21). Thus Reinhart (1990:22) reminds us of the fact that if we want to ‘understand the bodily cosmology of a fourteenth-century Indian Muslim, one must know the sum of his or her practices, which will always exceed the matters included in Shariah’, and with this understanding of the distinction between ritualistic life and ordinary life he finds Douglas’s work difficult to apply while discussing the notions related to Muslim appraisal of purity and impurity since ‘its application is limited to particular communities in particular places and times’ (Reinhart 1990:21).

In contrast to structural determinism Marvin Harris (1997) offers an ecological explanation to discover the reason for pork avoidance among the Muslim and Jewish populations. According to Harris (1997:71) in the Middle East region, the home of Israelites and early Muslims, pig raising was costlier than raising cattle, sheep and goats since pigs don’t have sweat gland and hence ‘pigs must be provided with artificial shade and extra water for wallowing’. What is more important for Harris (1997:70) is the fact that pigs share the same ecological niche with human being for their fodder. On the other hand cattle, goat, sheep and so on live on grass, straw, hay, stubble, bushes and leaves which are not suitable for human consumption and hence they don’t form any competitive relationship with the human being. Thus the ancient Middle Eastern population who lived with a paucity of vegetation, and high temperatures had developed a taboo against eating pork as a practical and positive function in their adaptation to that particular habitat. But Simoons (1967) unequivocally rejects any kind of ecological determinism in finding out the origin of pork avoidance among the Middle Eastern population. His comments clearly poses a considerable challenge to Harris (1997) as Simoons (1967:37) claims, prior to indicating the case of Palestine, that ‘temperatures in Palestine are no higher than many other areas where pork is commonly eaten’. However, I am not going to make any probe into the emergence of ‘pig taboo’ among the Israelites and Middle Eastern Muslim populations since they are not my concern in this research. Rather I will try to

33 show why environmental determinism doesn’t fit the situation of the Indian subcontinent. It is commonly known that most regions of Indian subcontinent, except some regions of western India, north eastern Pakistan and the north western Pakistan, don’t lack water sources, or have scant vegetation, lack of forests and high temperatures. In this context one can ask how does ecological determinism explain the avoidance of pork among the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. Harris may, in this particular instance, go for the idea of diffusion to claim that since Islam was spread in the Indian subcontinent by Middle Eastern Muslim preachers, the idea of pork taboo had been imposed over the Muslims of the subcontinent. But the idea of diffusion is not tenable since in the Indian subcontinent ‘pork was forbidden in pre- Moslem times’ (Simoons 1967:36). Simoons (1967:36) therefore sees no hope in determining any specific reason for pork avoidance among the vast population of this continent. I am also not least interested in finding any such reason for pork avoidance among my respondents which can not be explained in the present day context. Moreover, Harris’s ecological determinism is no less overgeneralised than that of Douglas (1966) as none of their discussions view individuals as active agents and hence leave no provision to think that ‘in practice taboos are highly flexible and subject to individual manipulation’ (Buckley & Gottlieb eds. 1988; Lawrence 1988 cited in Johnson 2002:153).

On the other hand, Hunter’s (1997) study mainly concentrates on showing the scripturalist definitions of Halal and Haram foods and takes these definitions as given and static for all Muslims of the world. He also tries to shed light on the production procedures of Halal food which he thinks is important for consumers. But my fieldwork observation demonstrates that none of my respondents are aware of the production procedures of Halal foods. When they wish to buy Halal meat they simply rely on the shops that advertise the Halal status of their meat by hanging a signboard with ‘Halal’ written on it. Bergeaud-Blackler’s (2004) study among the Maghrebi Muslims in France also supports my findings as her study similarly claims that ‘consumers know little about the process of the production of halal meat’ (Bergeaud- Blackler 2004:99). Thus, her call for the social definition of Halal and Haram is highly relevant to my research of the reconstruction of the notion of Halal-Haram among my Bengali-Muslim migrants. Moreover, Hunter’s (1997) study tends to claim that ‘food is considered one of the most important factors that unites various Islamic

34 ethnic and religious groups’-seems to be problematic and running out of ground since my research has already showed in the introductory chapter (the case of OIC and the inhumane life of the Bihari Muslims of Bangladesh), that the notion of a single World-Muslim community exists only in the psyches of some orintalists and Islamists while the ordinary people are not ready to celebrate any polarised and essentialised version of identity. Moreover, Hunter (1997) also presents statistics to claim that 75% of Muslims residing in the USA follow the Halal practice and he has been given this statistics by the Centre for American Muslim Research and Information (Hunter 1997:14). It is no wonder that an organisation like this would be highly purposive in its findings and hence help essentialising the ordinary life of people that may not be supported by the findings of social scientists. For instance, look at the findings of Ahmed (2000) in Japan. His study shows that out of his 101 South-Asian Muslim migrant respondents in Japan 42 % buy both Halal and non-Halal meat (Ahmed 2000:69). Now it is easy for an organisation, having specific organisational objectives and goals, to purposively highlight only one aspect of these respondents, that is they are having only Halal meat. But it would simply be a case of statistical manipulation that would eventually conceal the diverse practices and the competing interpretations arising out of the circumstances of the individuals that they encounter in everyday life situations.

Both Douglas (1966) and Hunter (1997) therefore base their studies on the definitions set down by the scripturalist and authoritative version of food rules and leave little room for us to think that individuals may, in various ways, resist, negotiate or reconfigure this authoritative version in their own ways. For example, the authoritative constructions of Halal-Haram may help us to ‘determine “cultural truth” by establishing on what, amidst variations, there is consensus among informants’ (Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986; Boster 1986 cited in Vayda 1994:320) which would lead us to overemphasise ‘typical cultural patterning’ (Pelto & Pelto 1975 cited in Vayda 1994:320) and thus we would fail to apprehend the fact that Halal and Haram may be negotiated by the actors, with numerous variations, while encountering the multiplicities of their identities and realities as well, which I believe is possible to decipher if we take the practitioners’ particular social and historical trajectories into consideration. These variations will be examined in Chapter Six by investigating the authoritative definition of Halal and Haram as outlined by the

35 Australian Federation of Islamic Councils and the everyday realities of Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants. The basis of such a claim will be substantiated with historical analysis in Chapter Four of this research where it will be showed that instead of any rigid grammar of religious faith there exists diverse contesting notions of faith among the practitioners of popular culture, in this case the Bengali informed culture, for which practice is not dependent upon religion rather religion is dependent on practice. At this juncture, I would rather argue that food, like the body that’s functioning depends on food, is directly related to political field and to power relations (Foucault 1977:25-6) and hence there can be much difference between the textual and authoritative versions of Halal and Haram and the everyday versions of individual actors. This individualised construction would be easier to reveal if we consider the fact that an individual is always in the position of becoming rather than simple being. This consideration will enable us to move away from the static and essentialised notion of identity and will eventually help us in conceptualising identity and identification as dynamic processes which are continuously evolving and informed by individuals’ life experiences. To understand the processes through which an individual deploys her/his personal experience we should look over the processes through which our experiences constitute the base of our knowledge. While addressing this issue it can easily be assumed that our knowledge is rooted in our experiences that we gather when interpreting and acting on the world. This way of approaching our knowledge tradition, which stems from experiences, will enable us to see that ‘knowledge, as a modality of culture, is shaped by processes of reproduction and flux; it is taught, learned, borrowed, created and discarded’ (Barth 1991: 86). Despite the recent realisation of the fact that culture is not bounded and static, we are still more concerned with how it is taught, learned and borrowed. We find no satisfactory attempt which has tried to explore how it is constantly created, and more importantly, discarded. It happens, as I understand, due to our excessive preoccupation with the collective representation of culture that will lead towards a generalised version of our understanding. I therefore believe that our attention to ponder peoples’ creativity, agency and multidimensionality will assist us, while studying the practice of Halal and Haram, to explore the ways practitioners continuously reconstruct received knowledge, as well as to explore how they simultaneously redefine, and renegotiate their relationship to the collective representation of Halal and Haram, more broadly to their religion (Islam). Thus my

36 observation of Halal and Haram will not solely be based on their representation of institutional and constitutive rules, rather much emphasis will be given to understand the ways the practitioners, in their day-to-day life, recreate and reconfigure these rules.

We therefore can say that an anthropological inquiry about the dietary rules practised by a specific group of Muslims should start not with an intention to find any form of thought that can be universally applicable to all Muslims of the world irrespective of their ethnic identity, socio-historical background, political upheavals, customary laws, linguistic stocks, and many such parameters. Instead, our exploration should strive for analysing the process of thought since in our day-to-day life we are always reconstructing and renegotiating our received traditions and thus there remain ambiguities, uncertainties, paradoxes and dilemmas that go beyond the scriptural and authoritative definition, and generalisation of Halal and Haram. And this subjective construction and configuration of Halal and Haram can be explained if we consider the fact that people, while confronting the necessities of life, may develop a pragmatic version of Islam. This consideration would be possible only if we think of the Muslim dietary rules not as objectively given but as subjectively negotiated since these can be contested and even discarded while the actors, based on their experience, re-evaluate and reconstruct the rules according to the situation confronted. It means individuals do not simply and passively learn and abide by the rules of behaviour associated with particular roles, rather they are active agents who posses the capacity to improvise, mould, change and if necessary even to deny these rules.

37 Chapter III

Methodology: Arguing against generalisation

All too often, non-Muslims think of Islam as providing an all-encompassing identity and set of motives, such that “religion” serves to “explain” everything about the Middle East. Inconvenient facts such as Yasir Arafat’s attendance at midnight mass with his Christian wife, or the secular status of Iraq’s Baath party, are quickly forgotten by most non-Muslims, for they do not fit the native theory at work: that Muslims base everything on religious identity and religious separatism (Bowen 1998:259).

The above mentioned quotation clearly demonstrates how Islam and Muslim communities are generalised with some formal and textual denominators and hence the ‘Islam in practice’ has been neglected since most of it doesn’t conform to the dominant theoretical pattern devised to study Islam and Muslim communities. We have already shown in Chapter One that how scholars, studying Islam and Muslim communities, often derive their notions of the core beliefs of Islam (or the great tradition) from the works of the Islamist scholars and treat these beliefs as if they are understood in the same way everywhere regardless of time and space. Theoretical discussions on ethnicity and identity, prior to adopting an anti-essentialist perspective, have also outlined the reasons for such essentialisation. And not surprisingly Muslim migrants, who have migrated to the Western world, have also been described as vehemently religious for whom religion constitutes the prime overriding identity marker. As evidence of my claim let us have a look over the book ‘Religion and ethnicity’ (Coward & Kawamura eds.1978) where two articles attempt to describe Islam and Muslim communities in Canada. In his article anthropologist Harold Barclay takes it for granted that ‘Muslims in Canada should experience more difficulties than other immigrants in adapting to a new and non-Muslim socio-cultural milieu since Islam is a highly rigid and legalistic religious system which imposes such specific requirements on its adherents as to allow for little flexibility or adjustment to varying cultural conditions’ (Barclay 1978:101). The media has also heightened these misconceptions by portraying only images of those extremists and Islamists who

38 adhere to ‘high Islam’9 and hence the large majority of Muslims who practice ‘folk Islam’10 are ignored. Thus we find that the media is busy portraying mosques, mullahs, menacing Muslim crowds, and burqa (veil)-clad women to prove how irrational, fanatic, and intolerant Muslim communities are (Brasted 2001:206). But what remains unnoticed in all these portrayals, as suggested in the introductory chapter of this research, is the fact that intellectual circles may hold the scriptural version of Islam to be followed like a strict code of life which may be differently readapted in the life of ordinary people, without the exact and patterned tones of meaning.

The decision to conduct research on the construction of Halal and Haram among Bengali-Muslim migrants of Sydney has heavily been influenced by an aim to counteract these monistic misconceptions. I believe that I have already developed a sound theoretical platform to substantiate my hypothesis. But theoretical underpinnings alone look meaningless unless we draw a methodological stance through which data will be collected and analysed in the intended research. Again the methodology itself should bear significant links with theoretical rigour since these two are interdependent on each other. Keeping this understanding in mind I would rather start with a methodological point which is about the appropriate unit of my research that entails one of the fundamental problems for studying Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney. Should I concentrate on the individual? Or I should go for the collective representation which will help me to be near the ‘complex whole’ notion of culture? Which one will guide me to capture reality or is reality capturable at all? Is there a real world out there independent of individual manifestation? For argument sake, if we think that there exists a real world independent of individual manifestation then can we grasp that world by discovering an objective list of traits? At this juncture I believe our knowledge of that world is our abstraction or whatever we say construction, and thus, subjectively influenced and created by the knower. That means

9 ‘High Islam’ is a term used by Gellner (1969:7-8) to denote the inflexible attitude held by Islamists who prefer to promote and exercise a scripturalist, rule-oriented, puritanical, anti-ecstatic and literal version of Islam.

10 According to Gellner (1969:7-8) folk Islam is the Islam of the masses which is deeply influenced by their needs and proclivities. Folk Islam is superstitious, ecstatic, mystical, saint worshipping, mediationist, hierarchical, joyous, emotional and festival-worthy. Instead of rule observance, loyalty thus constitutes the ethical strength of folk Islam.

39 we can never know reality apart from the concepts we use. All knowledge of reality is influenced and constructed by the knower from the traditions of knowledge she/he has been exposed to and thus facts or truths can never be fully understood. We can only attempt for precision ‘as old explanations are knocked down and are replaced by better ones’ (Bernard 1994:168).

Based on these anti-essentialist theoretical premises I would like to ask once more about the cause of such essentialised generalisations of Islam and Muslim communities as indicated by Bowen’s above statement. And I agree with Gilroy (1992:60) who labels this problem as ‘culturalism’, which is more eager to highlight the collective representation followed by the belief that there is a generalisable correspondence between doctrine and action and/or between ideal and reality. To counteract this generalising tendency of ‘culturalism’ I decide to fall back on Abu- Lughod (1991) whose critique seems illuminating to me since she shows that far from being consensual, culture is composed of conflicting discourses. Abu-Lughod’s position, from the concept of culture, is very clear from the start:

I will argue that “culture” operates in anthropological discourse to enforce separations that inevitably carry a sense of hierarchy. Therefore, anthropologists should now pursue, without exaggerated hopes for the power of their texts to change the world, a variety of strategies for writing against culture (Abu-Lughod 1991: 138).

Not only is culture portrayed as an ‘inevitable evil’ but also the inevitable association between ‘culture’ and ‘anthropology’ is self-evident. Anthropology and culture reinforce each other in a dialectic of survival and reproduction. Elsewhere (Abu- Lughod 1993) a coinage between culture and race was suggested. Race, which was popular in the nineteenth century, used to be a means of establishing essential differences between groups of people. Now the concept of race is much discredited and even abhorred. On the other hand, culture also establishes differences between groups of people but unlike race, culture is a positive concept because, according to Abu-Lughod (1993: 9), ‘it seemed at first to solve the moral and analytical difficulties inherent in race by removing difference from the realm of the natural or innate’. The suggestion is that, unlike race, the current concept of culture allows for multiple rather

40 than binary differences. For Abu-Lughod, the most important of culture’s advantages is that it removes the difference from the realm of natural and innate. Moreover,

whether conceived of as a set of behaviours, customs, traditions, rules, recipes, instructions, or programmes (to list the range of definitions Geertz [1973: 44] furnishes), culture is learned and can change (1991: 144).

But despite the above positive aspects of culture (it is learned and can change), and despite its anti-essentialist intent the culture concept retains some of the tendencies to make difference looks innate (thus approaching the race concept). The reasons for this are many, but the important ones include the persistent axiomatic association that anthropologists readily construct between culture, territory, and people (such as the. ‘Javanese culture’, ‘Bengali culture’ and so on), and portraying culture as an aspect of ‘sharedness’. Culture’s predication on shared meaning has been rejected by those calling for greater recognition of diversity in knowledge, values, and orientations among members of the same culture. Its essentialism has become routinely questioned (Wilson 1977, Barth 1987, Vayda 1994). Vayda (1994) informs us about the study of Wilson (1977) who describes the people (Tsimihety) whom he studied in some of the villages in Madagascar ‘as flexibly, pragmatically, and unspectacularly going about their lives without the constraints or aesthetics of a systematic, ordering structure’ (Wilson 1977 cited in Vayda 1994:231). Moreover,

some villages irrigated their fields while others relied upon rain. Some organised co-operatives that exchanged labour; others worked on their own. Some men performed a certain ritual using a prayer; others omitted the prayer or used a different one (Wilson 1977 cited in Vayda 1994:321).

According to Vayda (1994), Wilson (1977) argues that there is ‘no reason to suppose that such variation is the result of cultural disintegration’ (cited in Vayda 1994:321). Wilson’s (1977) point is very clear: we can not talk about ‘Tsimihety culture’ or ‘way of life’. By way of an extension, we can not talk about Bengali, Australian or American ‘culture’ or ‘ethnographic trade-mark’. Almost by definition, a notion such as Bengali, Australian and American culture has become as untenable as it was once axiomatic. It is now apparent that, on the one hand, Bengali, Australian and

41 Americans share a good deal and that, on the other, any such group will differ a great deal among themselves, to such an extent that it becomes facile to speak of the Bengali view of any particular notion or any other thing.

Although the culture concept is said to be better than the race concept (Abu-Lughod 1993: 9-10), in so far as it transcends the binary distinction, still one wonders whether culture is really far from race.11 In cultural anthropology the distinction is clearly made between the ‘self’ and the ‘other’. Is this not a binary distinction? Even if the terms are put in their plural form, the obvious binary distinction can not be escaped. So the difference between culture and race should be sought elsewhere but not on the binary distinction the two concepts furnish between the self and the other, or even between ‘selves’ and ‘others’. Whether this is confined to anthropology only, or not, ‘culture’ is a convenient and popular concept, despite its possibly terrible implications, for making the other, and anthropologists use it without any feeling of embarrassment that would otherwise arise if they use the race concept. The culture concept is passing a period of widespread and indiscriminate use, but also, ironically, it is receiving a tough attack and criticism from within the discipline of anthropology itself. The belief is that the concept is useful in naming and solving social problems which, in fact, it can not possibly help to solve. The consequence is that the concept is bestowed with talismanic abilities, which in fact it does not have.

11 There is, most of the time, confusion between culture, ethnicity and race. Barth (1969: 14) offered a differentiation between culture and ethnicity: ‘ we can assume no simple one-to-one relationship between ethnic units and cultural similarities and differences. The features that are taken into account are not the sum of objective differences, but only those which the actors themselves regard as significant … some cultural features are used by the actors as signals and emblems of differences, others are ignored and in some relationships radical differences are played down and denied’. The relationship between ethnicity and race is also difficult to elicit clearly. Jenkins (1998: 49) quoting Michael Banton believes that ‘race is a categorical identification denoting ‘them’, based on physical or phenotypical characteristics, while ethnicity is the cultural group identification of ‘us’. So race is constructed here as something ‘physical’ or ‘biological’. Nevertheless, ‘race is not a biological category, it is a process- a social and political process whereby ethnic differences are translated into pseudo-biological racial deficits’ (Thompson 1997: 61). Some scholars (Harrison 1995:47-49) believe that ‘critiques of the biological concept of race have led many anthropologists to adopt a “no-race” posture and an approach to intergroup difference highlighting ethnicity-based principles of classification and organisation. Often, however, the singular focus on ethnicity has left unaddressed the persistence of racism and its invidious impact on local communities, nation-states, and the global system’. On the other hand, the relationship between culture and race is much more difficult to gauge (see Mitchell 1988). But if race is not a biological category, then it can be argued that culture and race are not very much dissimilar and in that case writing against culture might as well be writing against race.

42 The reasons why the talismanic abilities of culture proved to be non-existent or lethargic are many. To start with, the culture concept splits at first touch into multiple positionings, according to gender, age, class, ethnicity, and so on. To the extent that this is the case, what does it mean to have a ‘cultural’ identity? It may not mean a lot. Looking at the present interminable precipitation of cultural studies one is tempted to believe that ‘culture’ is merely a false intellectual construction or, to quote Werbner (1997: 4) ‘a manipulative invocation by unscrupulous elites’. Such temptation can not, however, stand in the face of a simple test or scrutiny: the apparent destructive or revitalising power of identities based on cultural symbols or diacritica. Culture is not a false construction. But perhaps the way it is formulated by anthropologists and put to use by ‘unscrupulous elites’ is the problem that is causing much of the current havoc and confusion.

While reviewing the literature produced to describe Muslim migrants, who have migrated to Western countries, I have come across similar unwarranted dependence by the anthropologists on the elitist construction of migrant communities which simply helps understating the other competing, conflicting and diverging discourses and practices. One of the reasons for this extensive dependence can be the fact that most of the studies conducted on Muslim migrant communities are done by scholars who are not native to that community. Thus, while looking for respondents these scholars are found to be dependent upon some migrants’ Muslim associations which have been considered the sole representatives of all migrants, irrespective of their country of origin, class, gender, present situation in host country and so on. Bowen’s (2004:881) study of French Muslim migrants clearly demonstrates that Islamic religious movements have received the most attention in the studies of Islam. For example Lewis’s (2002) study of Islam in Britain has emphasised the links between local mosques or associations and home country institutions (Lewis 2002 cited in Bowen 2004:881). Schiffauer’s (1999) study of Islam in Germany has paid enormous attention to the connections between Islamic organisations in Germany and Turkish political parties (Schiffauer 1999 cited in Bowen 2004:881). In the same vein, Raymond Williams (1988) while studying the religions of immigrants from India and Pakistan concentrated on the ways religious organisations shape and are shaped by the life of Asian-Indian and Pakistani immigrant communities in the United States. In this way these studies are profoundly confined only within the homogenising and elitist

43 forces of ‘migration from above’, close to that of the essentialising tendency of ‘culturalism’ that tends to culturalise anything and everything in social interactions, where the non-elitist notion of ‘migration from below’ has profoundly been discarded. The question that came to mind is how representative of the entire migrant populations are these associations and the members of these associations? I have found only two studies that attempt to answer these questions. One study has been conducted by Imtiaz Ahmed (2000) on Bengali migrants staying in Japan. He clearly states that ‘in the context of migrants, an association is simply a complex combination of constructed life and living, not of the group, but of one or two well off key individuals. In this sense, it is more a personalized thing than a group thing!’ (Ahmed 2000:118). Ahmed (2000:120) therefore is of the opinion that the migrant community is seldom represented by these associations. The other study is done by Pickus (1995) which attempts to analyse Jewish identity in Germany. He points out some limitations of depending on migrant centered organisations. First of all, membership in an organisation denotes only one part of a person’s identity and hence leads to the failure of seeing other epithets. Secondly, not all Jewish migrants take part in these organisations. The third and final limitation stems from the second one; it is that emphasising the patterned continuities by focusing only some organisational structures may fail to grasp the paradigms of self-definition fashioned by individuals who are not involved in these organisations (Pickus 1995:74-5). It means that by adopting some migrant centered associations as the starting point of our research there remains every possibility to overlook the everyday realities of ordinary lives. Apart from the reason I have tried to sketch about this dependence on the migrant centered organisations and their movements, Bowen’s (2004) argument epitomises another reason. According to him these ‘provide a sociologically clear entity to study, with members, leaders and group activities’ (Bowen 2004:881). That means we are taking much care of our personal and academic privileges at the cost of the vast majority who remain detached from these organisations and their movements, and hence in a way helping these organisations in their attempt to mute other competing visions.

The theoretical realisation sketched above leads me to another question, which is, how can we combat any sorts of essentialisation? The search for an answer leads me towards Abu-Lughod (1996) again who calls for ‘ethnographies of the particular’, ‘against generalisation’, or, to use Jackson’s (1996: 23) characterisation, ‘ethnography

44 of the lifeworld’. This is believed to be one powerful tool for unsettling the culture concept and subverting the process of othering it entails. Generalisation as a mode in the social scientific discourse is blamed for facilitating abstraction and reification.

Two reasons were cited by Abu-Lughod (1996) as constituting the premises for writing against generalisation (i) generalisation is inevitably a language of power because it is part of the professional discourse of objectivity and expertise; and (ii) the effects of homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness it tends to produce. When one generalises from experiences and conversations with a number of specific people in a community, one tends to flatten out differences among them and to homogenise them. Moreover, ‘the effort to produce general ethnographic descriptions of people’s beliefs or actions tends to smooth over contradictions, conflicts of interests, and doubts and arguments, not to mention changing motivations and circumstances’ (Abu-Lughod 1996:153). This is a sufficient ground for Abu-Lughod to refuse generalising the other’s life. By refusing to generalise we will be able to show the actual circumstances and detailed histories of individuals. For Abu-Lughod, such histories and particulars are always crucial and important in the constitution of experience.

Abu-Lughod (1991) forcibly rejects any notion of ‘Bedouin culture’ on the ground that such a notion can not make any sense when one tries to piece together and convey the life-world of an old Bedouin matriarch. The story of this old woman manifests all sorts of conflicting practices and discourses and unequivocally rejects any unitary notion of culture. According to Abu-Lughod (1991: 154),

when you ask her to tell the story of her life, she responds that one should only think about God. Yet she tells vivid stories, fixed in memory in particular ways, about the resistances to arranged marriages, her deliveries of children… She also tells about weddings she attended.. and trips in crowded taxi where she pinched a man’s bottom to get him off her lap. The most regular aspect of her daily life is her wait for prayer times. Is it noon yet? Not yet. Is it afternoon yet? Not yet. Is it sunset yet? Grandmother, you have not prayed yet? It is already past sunset. She spreads her prayer rug in front of her and prays out loud. At the end, as she folds up her prayer rug, she beseeches God to protect all Muslims. She recites God’s name as she goes through her string of prayer

45 beads. The only decoration in her room is a photograph on the wall of herself and her son as pilgrims in Mecca.

The picture one gets from this story is a pious old woman. She is very much concerned and preoccupied with her religious duties. Nevertheless, being pious does not seem to deter her from relishing an outrageous story on an immoral tale. One such tale is about an old husband and his wife who decide to go visit their daughters. The tale depicted a world where people did the unthinkable. A full quotation of that story is relevant here.

Instead of the usual candy and biscuits, the couple brought their daughters sacks of dung for gifts. When the first daughter they stayed with went off to draw water from the well, they started dumping out all the large containers of honey and oil in her merchant husband’s house. She returned to find them spilling everything and threw them out. So they headed off to visit the second daughter. When she left them minding her baby for a while, the old man killed it just to stop it from crying. She came back, discovered this and threw them out. Next they came across a house with a slaughtered sheep in it. They made belts out of the intestines and caps out of the stomachs and tried them on, admiring each other in their new finery. But when the old woman asked her husband if she did not look pretty in her new belt he answered, “you’d be really pretty, except for that fly sitting on your nose”. With that he smacked the fly, killing his wife. As he wailed in grief he began to fart. Furious at his anus for farting over his dead wife, he heated up a stake and shoved it in, killing himself (Abu-Lughod 1991: 155).

What can culture mean, given this old woman’s complex responses? And how do these senses of humour and the bizarre desire of telling immoral tales go with devotion to religion, attending to prayers and valuing honour? Culture, in its unitary conception, means very little to this kind of experience. But then is it just enough to tell people’s stories? Does it really matter to be ‘a halfie’12 anthropologist in order to write these stories? What is the relevance of this kind of academic discourse on the anthropological reform currently underway? I will try to answer these questions prior

12 Abu-Lughod defines the halfies as those ‘people whose national or cultural identity is mixed by virtue of migration, overseas education or parentage’ (1991: 137). In her critique Abu-Lughod coined halfies with feminists. I will not be dealing with feminists here, for that can not be afforded here and it might as well be distracting..

46 to reflecting on my preliminary field notes about Bengali-Muslims in Sydney, Australia.

Bengali-Muslims in Sydney: Some important notes

The Bengali-Muslims in this study are migrants13 to Australia. Their migration to Australia is a recent phenomenon. The first Bangladeshi migration wave to Australia began in the 1970s and by the early 1980s it was estimated that there were 200 migrants in Australia from Bangladesh (Bitel 2005:6). During the mid-1980s they were joined by some students seeking tertiary education (Imran 2005). Earlier Australia adopted a discriminatory immigration policy (Immigration Restriction Act 1901) which was based on the ideal of a ‘British cultural purity’ (Economou 2004: 361) and hence the people of Asia were not welcome since their racial complexion contradicted the ‘White Australia Policy’ (Zelinka 1996:9; also see Economou 2004). However, soon after the Japanese attack on Darwin and Sydney during the Second World War the Australian government had become conscious about Australia’s regional vulnerability - characterised by a small population in a large country (Zelinka 1996:9; Economou 2004:362). Moreover, the desperate shortage of labour that followed the war was also a compelling factor to invite migrants not only from Britain and Ireland, as was the case earlier, but also from other European nations. A decline in the number of migrants from the British Isles also contributed the need for such revision. During the 70’s The Australia government - prior to taking the international human rights question - started thinking of abandoning the ‘White Australia Policy’ and a non-racial immigration policy was introduced in 1973 by the Labour Government led by Gough Whitlam (Zelinka 1996:10; Economou 2004:364). Furthermore, by the mid-1970s Australia also began to promote multiculturalism (Kukathas 1993:152) to create a sense of the equal importance of all cultures, and so, the equality of all people, no matter what their cultural origins. This meant that Bangladeshis along with other South Asians started to settle in Australia after it began to reverse its previously discriminatory policies.

According to 2001 Census, conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, Bangladesh-born individuals in Australia, on whom there has been nothing

13 I use the term ‘migrants’ as an inclusive concept that embraces many categories of people (immigrants, students, refugees, and so on.).

47 approaching an academic literature in Australia till to date, numbered 9,078 where 5,446 persons were male and 3,632 were female (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 2001 Census). In 1981 the number of Bangladesh-born people in Australia was 991 which was increased to 1,226 in 1986 and in 1991 they numbered 2,339 (Walmsley et al. 1996:22). The figures indicate that the number of Bangladesh-born people in Australia almost doubled between 1986 and 1991. The number also doubled between 1991 and 1996 as the Census in 1996 recorded 5,077 Bangladesh-born people in Australia (Source: DIMA 2003). Most of them are concentrated in New South Wales. The census report of 1986 estimated 464 Bangladesh born individuals in New South Wales, Australia (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 1986 census cited in Hugo 1992:197). This concentration in New South Wales, particularly in Sydney, highly increased by the year 1996. Walmsley et al. (1996) report that 1,055 Bangladesh-born people live in Inner Sydney, 316 in Central Western Sydney and 310 in the Eastern Suburbs (Walmsley et al.1996:16). The increasing trend of concentration in Sydney continues as the Census in 2001 shows that 5,916 Bangladesh-born people live in Sydney (Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics 2001 Census), which represents 65.17 per cent of the total Bangladesh-born people living in Australia. The following table, taken from the sources mentioned above, will help show the increasing settlement of Bangladeshi people in Australia.

Table 3: Increasing Bangladeshi population in Australia

Bangladesh-born Population in Australia

Year Total Number

1981 991

1986 1,226

1991 2,339

1996 5,087

2001 9,078

48 According to Walmsley et al. (1996:16) the population of Bangladesh-born is dominated by those aged 24-49 (68.2 per cent). From the estimation of the dominant age group, their concentration in Sydney, and my personal encounters it can easily be assumed that most of the people from Bangladesh are now migrating to Australia to study first, with an ultimate aim to gain the permanent residency (PR). The high concentration of Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh has also served as one of the reasons for conducting this research in Sydney. Moreover, my attachment as a postgraduate research student with the University of New South Wales has also been a prime reason. However, as I am interested in unfolding the multiplicity, contextuality, and contradiction among the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney in their reconstruction and renegotiation of the notion of Halal-Haram in everyday lives, rather than drawing upon any generalised pattern, I have decided to take the individual, instead of collective behaviour, as my research unit to decipher individual perceptions. Thus I didn’t fix up any actual size of respondents. Instead I was conscious about the level when it seemed to me that a considerable number of respondents had been interviewed enabling me to explore the whole range of their realities prior to having cautionary thoughts in mind that that ‘we, the observers, usually with the benefit of hindsight, calculate the consequences of a particular course of action and then assume that the actor must have made the same calculations’ (Bailey 1996:121). These cautionary ideas, as outlined by Bailey (1996), have guided me, in my counteraction against generalisation, to look for the unreflective and habitual actions of the individual, which are not the products of an ideology. The realisation that I have grasped from Bailey has paved the way for differentiating ideologies and habitual action, since for Bailey (1996:122) ideologies reflect exalted levels of intellectual and emotional awareness, which are not seen in habitual action. With these theoretical underpinnings I began to build my hypothesis that the individual has her/his own construction and configuration of the notion of Halal-Haram which is far away from the authoritative discourses centred around the notion since ‘the actors involved, so long as they act out of habit, do not question the rightness or wrongness of what they are doing: they simply do it’ (Bailey 1996:122). My encounters with the field situations have exposed me to a variety of individuals: professionals, refugees, students, skilled and unskilled labourers, male and female, individuals from rural and urban areas of Bangladesh, young and elderly people and so on. All these categories have different motives for migrating to Australia. These motives corroborate different

49 experiences which render any generalised notion like ‘Bengali-Muslim migrants’ experience’ as useless.

While the Bangladesh-born people in New South Wales are predominantly Muslims (81.7 % in 1996 Census), there are also Hindus and Christians, 6.1% and 3.0 % respectively, according to the 1996 Census (Walmsley et al.1996:17). They may have different strategies to negotiate their migratory experiences due to their different lived realities in their home country (Bangladesh). Such differentiation of positionings has aptly been reflected by Santi Rozario (1992) who argues that despite being relatively powerless in relation to local Muslims, Christians in the village of Dorian in Bangladesh felt a sense of cultural superiority because of their identification with Western culture. ‘The logic is that Christianity is a religion of the West, whose members are “superior” to the Muslims of Bangladesh’ (Rozario 1992:76). It means a Christian migrant from this village may constitute a different experiential reality which demands another research to be conducted. Moreover, there are old-timers who attained the status of immigrants either through long residence or marriage. Among members of the Bengali-Muslims in Sydney, there is a practice of keeping in touch with their fellow country people-who they would have known back in Bangladesh as kin, friends, colleagues, neighbours and so on. or who they have come to know after coming in Australia-through the exchange of visits during weekends or in other social/religious/familial occasions. Such relationships include pre-acquainted people staying in different parts of Australia. ‘You know, today a new guy arrived in Sydney, he came from Comilla, Bangladesh’. ‘My friend in Melbourne asked me if I could provide some help to one of his acquaintances who will arrive this evening’. ‘The day before I met one new Bangladeshi in the downtown’. These kinds of statements are normal among members of the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney. What is obvious then is that being in Australia avails the opportunity for the Bengali-Muslim folk to know each other; an opportunity that might never have happened had not they come to Sydney.

Fascinating stories14 are told by individuals in relation to how they get access to Australia. Some individuals came directly from home as professionals, skilled

14 Here lie many methodological, practical and ethical problems in relying on storytelling as a form of fieldwork-based writing (Abu-Lughod 1993, Jackson 1996). For instance, how can we not feel anxious about making private words public, revealing confidential statements made in the context of a

50 labourer, students or as part of family reunion; while others have been to many other overseas countries before finally settling in Australia. Some came as students and then they decided to be something else, and others decided to stay after they finished their studies. One of the Bengali-Muslims, in his early thirties, tells the following:

Man! It is 8 years since I left home [Bangladesh] and that was in 1998. You see how time is running! I went to Engalnd for four years. I did not like the situation there at all, and I do not think I am gonna go there again. Then I decided to leave that place. A friend of mine helped me to make it to Australia and here I am since then. I am doing fine here and now I am continuing my studies.

For those pleading for asylum status, they have to make their case very strong to the immigration authorities, and normally they do that with the assistance of lawyers. They have to maintain credibility during the waiting period and to maintain a consistent version of the story told to authorities from the start. The stories they tell to the immigration authorities may not be true in the essentialist sense. Indeed, the very notion of ‘story’ renders it as an imagined state of affairs but, of course, it is not imaginary. Nevertheless, such stories become true to the extent they tell about unfolding circumstances or affect and shape the individual life-worlds.15

Individuals’ life-worlds or their living experiences vary enormously as do the stories they tell too. Individual migrant encounters with immigration authorities, in being considered to be allowed to stay in Australia as permanent residents, differ from one person to another. For example, some individuals wait for as long as one year and a half to get the response from immigration authorities, while others do not have to wait for such a long period of time.

relationship based on a trust that can only be established between two individuals? As anthropologists, we have to protect the people who confided in us by telling us their stories and life experience, if only some of these stories and experiences can be made public. But then does not this bring other dilemmas to the anthropological writing? Does not it render bleak the otherwise popular storytelling method?

15The concept ‘life-world’ (Schutz 1972) is becoming very popular in phenomenological anthropology. Jackson (1996: 7-8) defines it as ‘that domain of everyday, immediate social existence and practical activity, with all its habituality, its crises, its vernacular and idiomatic character, its biological particularities, its decisive events and indecisive strategies, which theoretical knowledge addresses but does not determine, from which conceptual understanding arises but on which it does not primarily depend’.

51 There are apparent similarities among Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants in essentialist terms. Bengali identity and Islam are two common factors that invite a thought of similarity among them. But being a Muslim means different things to different persons to such an extent that it would be untenable to talk about ‘Islam’ as a theoretical object (Abu-Lughod 1989, Asad 1993). But this view should neither be allowed to represent a denial of the efficacy of Islam in the empirical life of Muslims nor underestimate the symbolic power of Islam in forging identities known as Muslim. However, one point to which I would like to allude to is that the statements and actions of ordinary individuals are neither internally consistent nor consistent among individuals or social groups. Moreover, individual actions are certainly not consistent in any straightforward way with learned or scriptural Islamic statements. Rich and complex experiences can not be simplified or collapsed into a unified ideological construct like ‘Bengali-Muslim culture’, ‘Bengali-Muslim experience in Australia’, ‘Muslim way of life’, and so on. But in a rather authoritative way, Akbar Ahmed (1999: 6) argues that ‘there is one Islam only’ and he thus downplays the differences inherent in Muslim societies. For him, what explain the current differences among Muslims are history, culture, and ecology. These are the factors that have affected how Muslims live their lives.

For Bengali-Muslims in Sydney, the mosque is an Islamic identity marker. Ideally, the five daily prayers should be performed in the mosque. But practically very few Muslims do that. However, attendance in the mosque is conspicuous during Fridays’ prayers. For some, the kind of procession during Fridays’ prayers is highly politicised. Furthermore, some of my respondents argued: ‘actually we do not feel bad about drinking or dancing’, while another said ‘I do not drink and thanks God I never did. I don’t expose myself to seductive atmospheres and I would not compromise my original scale of value’.

Though I do not consider myself to be categorically a ‘halfie anthropologist’, some of the immediate difficulties I faced basically related to a combination of two traditionally opposing yet related fieldwork realities: being both an insider and an outsider at the same time. Neither of these positions bestowed me with any kind of privilege. On the contrary I found myself in a difficult situation and I started thinking about how could I possibly accomplish my fieldwork. Indeed, I wondered how

52 anthropologists, whether insiders or outsiders, doing fieldwork on aspects of culture and identity come out with those neat monographs.

Being an insider, one of the basic problems that faced me from the beginning is how to counteract prejudices and essentialising tendencies; that is, the problem of taking things for granted. One such thing that I took for granted was the adjective ‘Bengali- Muslim’. It is only when one of my subjects challenged me with the question ‘what do you mean by Bengali-Muslim?’ that I realised the extent of my own predicament.

In that specific encounter with the above respondent, I had an inspiring conversation though most of the time I was just listening. The conversation was about Bengali- Muslim identity, values, norms, religion and so on. The following are some excerpts of that conversation and I will refer him as A:

After having a long conversation with you I have got an impression about your research agenda. I can draw an easy conclusion by telling you a popular joke and I hope that will help you to understand me. Let us share the joke:

Parents of a young boy, being curious to know his future career, put some money, a Koran and a bottle of wine in his room. They (parents) hide in a place near that room so that they can see which one, among the three items, their son picks up. They also had a prior calculation: if their son takes the money then he would be a businessman in future, if he goes for the Koran he would be a pious man. But if he picks up the wine then it would indicate that he would derail in the future. In fact they were not willing to indulge themselves to think about the last one. Suddenly their son enters in his room. He puts the money in his wallet, puts the Koran in his bag and takes the bottle of wine in his hand.

Soon after finishing the joke A said to me: Does it make any sense to you? If not, I don’t care. But this is the way I think of myself. I believe myself a Muslim by religion and I try to offer prayer whenever I feel to do so. But at the same time I feel I am free to reject what I think is not suitable. For example, I don’t mind to drink alcohol. It is not the fact that I started drinking alcohol after stepping in Australia. I used to drink back in Bangladesh with my friends whenever we had any special occasion like Nababarsha (Bengali New Year),

53 English New year, Eid (Muslim religious festival) etcetera. But that doesn’t mean that I am a damn alcoholic person. Still I do drink very infrequently whenever I find a good occasion to do so.

Shortly I realised that the problem was the result of my unconscious assumption that being a Bengali-Muslim anthropologist would readily avail an insider’s information on the nature of problems and experiences of peoples known as Bengali-Muslim.

The above mentioned conversation with ‘A’ thus indicates that the lived experiences of Bengali-Muslims in Sydney are so diverse to such an extent that being a Bengali- Muslim person may be of a very little interest analytically. For some people the idea of a unified self or unified identity is sort of a dream. Hence,

[i]f we feel we have a unified identity … it is only because we construct a comforting story or ‘narrative of the self’ about ourselves. … The fully unified, completed, secure, and coherent identity is a fantasy. Instead, as the systems of meaning and cultural representation multiply, we are confronted by a bewildering, fleeting multiplicity of possible identities, any of which we could identify with- at least temporarily (Hall 1992: 277).

However, it is not yet clear how anthropologists can design methodologies that would help to study the prevalent connections and interconnections in which anthropology is enmeshed. Although there is now much discussion about the need for ‘reflexivity’ on the part of social science researchers who use qualitative methods, there has been little written about the way in which research is understood by the participants and the impact this might have on fieldwork strategies. For example, most of my respondents were well educated and were aware of the concept of social research. ‘Make sure you are not jeopardising people’s lives’, ‘are you really gonna study us’, ‘please don’t manipulate my opinion in such a way so as to fit your own purpose’ are some of the reactions of my respondents. Deploying concepts like ‘practice’ and ‘discourse’ looks to be promising, but the lack of clarity surrounding the terms themselves is one problem that anthropologists need to come to terms with. The above conversation with respondent ‘A’ denotes a possible discrepancy not only between practice and discourse but also the fact that each has its own discrepancies. Interestingly, these

54 discrepancies are held by Abu-Lughod to be a resource and not a liability for the concepts because our aim is to disturb the generalisations the culture concept readily assumes. Prior to taking the discrepancies of the lifeworld as resources of my fieldwork I thus arrived at the conviction that there is no ideal type of doing things anthropologically.

To contribute my understanding to the ongoing tradition of anti-essentialism I have thus decided to focus the experiential knowledge of individuals which, I believe, is important to understand the different manifestations of Halal-Haram. Such knowledge is useful, I believe, to raise one’s own consciousness regarding the impact of pragmatic factors on one’s life.

The basis for most of the information collected for my research was participant observation combined with face to face in-depth interviews and free conversations. Though complete participation and observation on my part can be a questionable issue I can justify my involvement from a different angle. Soon after arriving in Sydney I was offered accommodation by a Bengali-Muslim family with whom I, along with my wife and child, had a friendship16 back in Bangladesh. I stayed with them for a few months, shared food with them despite all their hardships (that a newly migrated family usually faces). Afterward we shifted to a suburb of south-west Sydney due to communication facilities and I have been staying their till now with two other Bengali-Muslim families with whom I also had longstanding friendships. These families have given me an enormous opportunity to observe their daily life practices and to be more specific we have been living in such manner in an apartment that there is nothing to hide from each other. Gradually I have come to know more Bengali- Muslim migrants with whom these families have kin relations and/or friendships. Moreover, I have also discovered some of my distant relatives staying in Sydney for

16 The importance and centrality of friendship in Bangladesh has been considerably depicted by Angell (1999: 180-2). She describes the Bangladeshi notion of personhood as charged with emotion and feelings. They (Bangladeshis) are free to express their sorrows and joys with whom they feel emotionally close (Angell 1999:180).

My friendship, developed before and after coming to Sydney, with a number of my respondents has also enabled me to participate and observe their life practices, with particular emphasis upon the reconstruction and reconfiguration of the notion of Halal-Haram, as much as I could. In this connection it must be said that my reliance upon their information has also been influenced by the emotional bondage that I still feel to them. Thus instead of considering myself as a complete objective observer I would rather like to denominate myself as a conscious subjective observer.

55 years. There are some occasions when they rather discovered me. For example, one of my fellow villagers (we are from the same village in Bangladesh), who has been staying in Sydney for the last ten years and who is a taxi driver by profession, has been a regular client of a gas station where one of my respondents works as a customer service officer. Thus they have developed a close relationship with each other. One day while chatting with each other my respondent told him about me. My fellow villager, after knowing my name and place of origin in Bangladesh, wanted to know my father’s name and some other details. After having all of my details he assured my respondent that he knew me very well since he was my uncle. Without sparing a single moment there he just rushed to my apartment with heaps of gifts. I also felt glad to see him after a ten year break. Since then I have stayed at his home on various occasions. Whenever, he has held a party at his home he invited me and when the party was over he never allowed me to go back to my apartment on that very day. The nights I stayed there have been enormously informative since I was allowed, (and I still am), to move around any part of his house. His wife, my chachi (aunt), has become so close and concerned about methat whenever she has been invited to other Bengali-Muslim migrants places she tries to take me along with them. These invitations have also provided me with insightful information about the Bengali- Muslim version of Halal-Haram. Thus, I must say that being a native researcher I haven’t found remarkable constraints in finding respondents for the intended research. I haven’t provided the names of my research participants due to the issue of confidentiality. Instead I have used the English alphabet to denominate them. I did fieldwork over a six-month period, from September 2006 to February 2007. Data for this study was collected through in-depth interviews with a set of unstructured questions followed by open-ended dialogue with the informants. The open-ended dialogue has given me the opportunity to shift the conversation from one subject to another. Nevertheless, the constraints, in the sense of the impossibility of following individuals in all their capacities, remained. In-depth interviews have helped me to grasp people’s stories, memories and associated experiences. What seems to be most useful is the blending of an unstructured questionnaire and open ended dialogue is that I have found a gap in some of my respondents’ comments on a given issue in two different settings. For example, what they said on a given issue at the time of an open ended conversation turned out to be contradictory with the opinions they revealed on that same issue during the unstructured questionnaire session. But I have never tried

56 to resolve these contradictions as my theoretical orientation has taught me to take these discrepancies as the strength of my research instead of a liability.

Snowball technique was relied on to determine the sample. My initial respondents assisted me in recruiting the other respondents. I was not purposive in selecting my participants nor did I devise any scrutinisation process to evaluate some participants as more informative and some as less, because I didn’t want to employ any kind of authoritative scholarly ‘power of classificatory priority’ (Sen 2006:11) to categorise people as more and/or less informative. I equally valued them all since all of them had their distinct opinions, perceptions and experiences regarding identity, ethnicity and the notion of Halal-Haram food rules. I invited everybody to participate in my research whenever I came across someone through my personal networks. But I tried to include people from different political and ideological backgrounds and from different classes and generations to receive multiple perspectives about the notion related to Halal and Haram. The number of participants was twenty. Eight of them were females and twelve were males. In this context it can be said that the proportion of participants from both these sexes closely reflects the overall proportion of Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney. Walmsley et al. (1996:16) show that one of the most unusual features of the Bangladesh-born population is that ‘males greatly outnumber the females with over 150 males for every 100 females’, which is not seen in most other Asian communities. Among the respondents four were second generation from two different families. Their parents were also included in the first generation category of those who had migrated to Australia during the early 80s. While the rest (twelve respondents) of the first generation migrants came here during the 90s and mostly during the beginning of the present decade. The interviews were held according to the participants’ preference in terms of time and place. Most of the time I was invited by them to their homes. However, there were times when I wanted to join them for lunch or dinner at a restaurant or café close to their employment during their lunch time or dinner breaks. Most of our conversations have been recorded with their permission. But there were times when I suddenly received phone calls from respondents’ to join them and I had to rush to the designated places after

57 finishing my own job17, without having proper fieldwork preparation (if we want to mean fieldwork in a strict sense). A few of my respondents felt comfortable without a tape-recorder and I was convinced by the reasons they put forth. For them, having a tape-recorder switched on might have made them over conscious of their statements and hence they might have lost the natural pace of their conversations. In these cases I used a field diary to note down important comments and opinions.. The field diary was also used to note down the recorded interviews and conversations. This way of participating in their day to day affairs complemented the in-depth interviews and hence produced the opportunity for me to be engaged in the streams of meanings and consciousness embedded in their everyday experiences.

In addition to these methods, the socio-historical method has also been employed with the presumption that identity is not only a conscious construct of the practitioners but is perpetually influenced and redefined through the mediation of various historical and socio-politico-economic circumstances. Various books and journals were consulted to understand the emergence of the notion of Halal-Haram in the Bengali informed local cultural milieu and the consequences that followed. At his juncture, I acknowledge the influence of the anthropologist Eickelman, whose book ‘Moroccan Islam: Tradition and society in a pilgrimage centre’ (1976) showed me the way to take the historicity of a particular Muslim community into consideration. Eickelman (1976:6) eloquently places his methodological stance here and claims that ‘my argument is occasionally more detailed ethnography and historically than may appear immediately necessary for my implicit theoretical argument’. He thus calls for a ‘fuller presentation’ (Eickelman 1976:6) of a particular Muslim community and in this research I am also following his style of producing a fuller representation. Another thought provoking statement by Eickelman and Piscatori (1990) seems relevant and worth mentioning here. I have already discussed in the introductory section that both of them try to make us aware of our erroneous attempt to make generalisation about ordinary Muslim people prior to taking the ideological claims of the Islamicist as the only representation of Islam and Muslim communities around the world. It means instead of taking the behaviour of Muslims as a fore-granted and thus bounded reality characterised by a correspondence between doctrine and action we

17 As I have pursued my postgraduate (research) degree as an international fee paying student I had to do jobs in various places to finance my livelihood expenditures and, more importantly, to pool as much money as I could to pay the tuition fees.

58 should concentrate on the minute details of the individuals’ life practices-which will in turn assist us to follow Abu-Lughod in our attempt to counteract generalisations. Eickelman and Piscatori (1990) while drawing the concluding remarks of their work in their book ‘Muslim travellers: Pilgrimage, migration, and the religious imagination’ strive to challenge the notion of a fixed, stable and bounded Muslim culture and problematise their understanding as:

We have been concerned with discerning how instances of social action can be understood and illuminated within religious traditions, specifically, within Muslim religious traditions. The deliberate use of “traditions’ in the plural suggests the view that “historical Islam” does not neatly coincides with doctrinal “Islam” and that the practice and significance of Islamic faith in any given historical setting can not readily be predicated from first principles of dogma and belief (Eickelman & Piscatori 1990:18).

This way of investigating Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants and their perceptions about the notion of Halal-Haram along with associated food rules will enable us, I assume, to take any discrepancy between doctrine and action, if there emerges any, as part of their lives stemming from their own points of view.

59 Chapter IV Islam in Bangladesh: Bengali-Muslim identity in socio-historical perspective

Although the Ashrafs or a handful of Muslim aristocrats of Bengal nurtured feeling of extra-Indianness, yet the majority of the Atrafs or subalterns had represented a kind of cultural pattern which was highly secular and had its foundation in prevalent folk culture (Wadud 1951 cited in De 1998:163).

In this chapter I will attempt to highlight the fact that the Bengali-Islam dialectics have manifested shifting emphasis on their Muslim consciousness at a given point of time and secular Bengali identity at the other. Before proceeding further it should be clearly stated that the materials that the succeeding discussion is going to examine will be historical, but the intention won’t be to write any historical interpretation of the events concerned. Thus I would again like to reiterate that the following discussion won’t provide either any comprehensive historical description or any political history of Bengal; instead, it will offer a glimpse of some selective critical moments that led to the Bengali-Islam dialectical historical process. Moreover, these selective moments, I assume, will unfold the fact that the Bengali-Muslim intelligentsias cum elites have invented various customs, rituals, or traditions as a whole, which in turn have attempted to essentialise one side of the dialectics and muted other ‘competing visions of community’ (Uddin 2006:14). In this regard the research rests upon Eric Hobsbawm’s (1983:13) contention which states that ‘the history which became part of the fund of knowledge or the ideology of nation, state or movement is not what has actually been preserved in popular memory, but what has been selected, written, pictured, popularised, and institutionalised by those whose function it is to do so’. This means there remains a wide gap between the intelligentsias led institutionalised form of traditions and the non-institutionalised diffused form of popular traditions. This way of approaching history will enable us to decipher that the leaders, elites, politicians and intellectuals of new nation states, worried about the policies to defend their existing interest, are always in constant search of the material and moral resources through which they can claim a historical

60 rootedness of yesterday’s conventions and customs with the help of today’s apparatus available to be exploited. What is more interesting in this construction process is not only the fact that the elites invent traditions; to prop up their claims they develop new symbols, icons, masonry, monuments, literature having twisted connections with the old and confirm the new traditions to be engraved in peoples’ psychic maps through repeated and ritualistic celebration of these new traditions. This is how ideology comes up as a more soft and easy means to bring people into the realm of hegemonic ruling dictums and thus ensures the surreptitious shift of peoples’ original condition from free individual to subject. But that should not be taken as the ‘whole story’ of history. A careful analysis of the historical material will also demonstrate that the popular form of traditions in Bengal never allowed the invented traditions to go uncontested. Rather, the overlapping consensus marked by a juxtaposition of secularism and religion has always posed considerable challenge to any polarised version of ‘only secularist’ or ‘only religious’ identity. In short, traditions are not only created by the power wielders; these inventions can be contested, renegotiated or even discarded by the masses who prefer to live with the co-existence of various competing visions and multiple meanings of ethnicity and identity.

Islam was spread to Bangladesh by the Sufi missionaries, Saints and Fakirs in the thirteenth and fourteenth century. Moreover, the conquest of Bengal by the Turkish adventurer Ikhtiaruddin Muhammad bin Bakhtiyar Khilji in 1204 A.D. also contributed in the spread of Islam in this region. Some would like to argue that Islam had come to Bengal during the eighth and ninth centuries when some Arab Muslim traders established trade links with the coastal regions of Bengal, particularly with that of Chittagong18. However, our aim here is not to resolve that debate, rather we will attempt to discern the nature of pre- and post-conversion features of Islam adopted by the converted population. In this context it would be apt to remember that the conquest of Bengal by Khilji in 1204 A.D. does not mean that Islam was introduced in this region by force of fire and sword. In his census report of 1901 Gait

18 A.K.M. Ayub Ali (1980:9-10) notes ‘This trade relations and commercial connection maintained by the Arabs between Bengal and other parts of the world of eighth century must have caused a continual stream of Islamic influence to flow in upon some inland river ports, towns and commercial centres in Bengal…This trade relation also provided facilities for the Sufi saints and devoted Muslim missionaries to visit this part of the world long before the establishment of the Muslim rule in the thirteenth century. It is known through historical evidences, that a large number of Muslim saints, savants and tourists from Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan and upper India came to the regions now comprising Bangladesh between the 8th and 13th century’.

61 informs us that it is ‘probable that very many of the ancestors of the Bengali Muhammadans voluntarily gave their adhesion to Islam’ (cited in Roy 1983:22). Mainly the low caste Hindus were converted into Islam (Prindle 1988:260). This conversion of low caste Hindus helps us to reject any contention that tends to claim that the vast number of Muslims was converted to Islam by the power of the sword during Muslim rule. Because if this was the case then places near Delhi, Agra, and other parts of North India would have also possibly constituted Muslim majority areas since these were places where the Turkish, Afghan, and Persian rulers established their capitals. It is thus more plausible that since Bengali society during the pre- Islamic period was characterised by an oppressive, iron-clad caste system, a great number of people from the lower strata embraced Islam to escape the caste system and other social injustices practiced by the then dominant Brahminical religious order (Karim 1961:142).

This does not mean that the Bengali-Muslim people appeared as a single monolithic body; rather they were divided into two broad distinct groups along with other occupational categories (which will be discussed shortly). At the top was the aristocratic upper class that called themselves the ‘Ashraf’ and believed that they were the descendants of the preachers who came to Bengal from outside and had settled there. This group of people lived in towns and spoke mostly Urdu and had little contact with the Muslim rural population whose language was Bengali19. At the bottom were the common people who were called as ‘Atraf’- converted Muslims. Karim (1956) in his study also finds another category ‘Arzul’ which he claims forms a ‘Muslim counterpart of the Hindu untouchable’ (cited in Murshid 1995:36). However, the local converts were Bengali speaking and were culturally closer to the Hindus. Observing them in 1860 Colesworthy Grant remarks that the masses were so intermixed with their Hindu neighbours in cultural features as to be treated as ‘half- amalgamated’ (cited in Roy 1983:24-5). But this reality was under-communicated by the adherents of high Islam and by the Orientalists as well. For instance Syed Ameer Ali, a nineteenth century reformer, claims that the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent constitute ‘the only homogenous people numbering fifty millions and having a common language and religion’ (Aziz 1968 cited in Ahmed 1981:5). But the reality

19 For a detailed discussion on this issue, see Ahmed, R. 1981. The Bengal Muslims 1871-1906: A quest for identity. Chapter 1.

62 was that, according to Ahmed (1981:6-7) in their names, dresses and manners these two groups differed fundamentally.

But there is also no reason to think that the Ashraf population represent a homogenous group of people. They were also divided into various sub-categories of which the Syed, Pathans, Mughals and Sheikhs constituted four major divisions. The Syeds claimed their ancestry from the Prophet Muhammad, Pathans claimed Afghan descent; Mughals traced their lineage to Central Asian Mongols and the Sheikhs constituted the coverts from upper caste Hindus (Karim 1956 cited in Murshid 1995:36). In fact, in many respects the cultures of the elites (Ashrafs) and their Hindu counterparts were similar (Ahmed 1965:17). Interesting to note that instead of maintaining a caste structure in the same manner as did their Hindu counterparts, Bengali-Muslims followed it in a more flexible manner where one’s upward mobility is not restricted by birth or religious sanction, but rather upward social mobility was dependent on economic advancement and change in occupation which is reflected in the popular saying, ‘last year I was a Jolaha, this year I am a Sheikh, next year if prices rise I shall be a Syed’ (Khan 1962 cited in Murshid 1995:41 italics mine). This finding assists us in coming to the decision that any emulation of scriptural Islamic practices by the Atrafs, which has been a reality throughout the nineteenth century and continuing to this day of Bangladesh (Murshid 1995:38), should not be treated completely as their inclination to hold a rigid Islamic life pattern, instead Ashrafisation that is upward social mobility served as the fundamental reason behind the zealous preference for Islamic way of life among those who could accumulate considerable wealth20. But still, unlike the Ashrafs this newly upwardly mobile

20 It is not the fact that this Ashrafisation tendency has been withered away over the period of history. Katy Gardner (1995) in her study among the Bengali-Muslim migrants of London and the people of Talpukur [a village of Bangladesh], as a site from where a large number of people migrate to London and thus remains linked with the process of migration, claims that the notion of pardah (the veil) as practiced by some of the women does not connote the same image as prevalent in Western description. She suggests that like other local practices, the values attached to pardah is also fluid, constantly negotiated and redefined. Apart from the hegemony of men, pardah can reflect the hegemony of wealthy women-the power relations between women of unequal economic status. (Gardner 1995:18; 198-99).

Gardner (1995) thus clearly makes us aware of the findings, which also closely resembles the central thrust of my thesis, that the increasing prevalence of pardah-related beliefs and practices among the South Asian Muslims has been clearly linked to upward social mobility (Gardner 1995:210). That means pardah related beliefs and practices are not that much influenced by the aspiration to achieve a scriptural Islamic way of life. Rather a certain practice of Islam has been utilised here as a means to ensure progress in the social ladder.

63 population retained their language of expression as Bengali with a strong sense of attachment to local cultural values in their submerged consciousness (De 1998:8). This group of people, that are designated by Uddin (2006:25) as ‘lesser Ashraf’, eventually formed the middle class in Bengal who, during the nineteenth century, were found to be disturbed equally by over secularisation, as wanted by some of Muslim leaders enlightened by Bengali-Renaissance, and also by the over religionisation of Islamists21. In fact, it was this trend that largely contributed to the development of a new secular Bengali national consciousness22 which provided the main inspiration for the struggle for freedom of Bangladesh.

The aforementioned description, backed by socio-historical materials, thus clearly indicates that the great majority of Bengali Muslims embraced Islam due to the influence of the Sufi mysticism and their spiritual humanist stream which had been far more effective than those of the orthodox and fundamentalist mullahs (Haq 1975:260-316). The practice of venerating the Pirs (mystic leaders), as a mark of popular Islam, is so widespread a phenomenon in Bangladesh that Asim Roy (1983) diligently dedicates a whole chapter of his book, written on the Islamic syncretistic tradition in Bengal, on the culture of Pir cult. Katy Gardner (1995) too, while doing her research on the nature of migration, globalisation and localisation processes among Bengali-Muslim migrants along with a considerable emphasis upon a rural village of Bangladesh that is linked with migration as a migrants sending site, pays adequate attention to the impacts of Pirs, Sufi-saints, and other agents of un-orthodox libertarian Islam upon the life-philosophy of Bengali-Muslims. She also dedicates a whole chapter about the discussion of the mystics and the differences they have with the purists as well23. The cult of Pir constitutes a wide range of activities that has always been declared as un-Islamic by Islamists (Uddin 2006:147). It covers practices

21 For a detailed description of this fact see Blunt, Wilfrid Scawen 1909. India under Ripon. A private diary. T. Fisher Unwin, London, p. 103-6.

22 At his juncture I would like to reiterate once again the fact that secularism as practiced by Bengali- Muslims differs much in its connotation from that of Western thought which is clearly reflected in the contention of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman (as discussed in the introductory section). The nature of secularism in this part of the world has been aptly grasped by Murshid (1995). According to Murshid (1995:13), secularism is meant to be: ‘one as opposed to communal, implying a tolerance of other religious groups; and two, as opposed to the religious, implying a lack of concern with religious perceptions and sanctions at least in matters affecting public life’.

23 To have a look at this interesting discussion please see Chapter 8 in Gardner, Katy 1995. Global migrants, local lives: Travel and transformation in rural Bangladesh. Clarendon Press, Oxford.

64 like ‘mediation to trantricism, the use of intoxicants24, or song and dance...’. It involves such beliefs and practices which don’t have the most distant link with Koranic teachings, since tantric means25 are used here to reach God having the Pirs (living or dead) as the catalyst. The Pirs are also believed to hold special spiritual powers which they can exploit as a vehicle for miracles (Gardner 1995:231). Gardner, while conducting her fieldwork in Talpukur village of Sylhet district (a district considered as the land of the saints and hence sacred), finds that the Urus (festival held in commemoration of the death anniversary of the Pirs) of Shah Jalal, one of the most important pirs who came to Bangladesh to preach Islam, ‘usually involves singing into the night, drumming, and ecstatic dancing’ (Gardner 1995:233). These kinds of practices are so abhorred by the fundamentalists that at the annual Urus on January 12, 2004, while mystic leaders from around the country gathered at Shah Jalal’s shrine to perform songs (Marfati), a bomb explosion killed two people and injured another 37 (The Daily Star 2004:1). Katy Gardner (1995), in her study in Talpukur also finds that many women (mainly landless) offer shinni (sweetmeat made of rice, milk and sugar which is distributed among the masses on ritual occasions) to Ghor Loki [a variant of Lakshmi who stands for the Hindu goddess of wealth] (Gardner 1995:106; 243-244). But it would be unjustifiable to draw any hypothesis that Pirism along with other local practices described above are confined only within the impoverished segments as Gardner (1995) herself makes us aware of the fact that beliefs and practices may also change in accordance to the situations that people encounter everyday. Thus a woman who declared herself as having no belief in pir was found visiting a local Pir to ensure a quick and suitable marriage for her daughter (Gardner 1995:244 emphasis added). This is why I do believe that instead of looking for any structured pattern of human behaviour we should rather discuss it as a process

24 Also note here that the Koran proclaims a strong injunction against using any intoxicants by saying that: ‘O ye who believe! Intoxicants and gambling, (dedication of) stones, and (divination by) arrows, are an abomination,- of Satan's handwork: Eschew such (abomination), that ye may prosper’ (Al- Koran, Sura: Al Mâ'idah, Chapter: 5 Verse: 90; Ali [trans.] 1983). Among a good number of Suras that prohibit the use of intoxicants, verse 219 of Sura al-Baqarah is noteworthy. It proclaims: ‘They ask thee concerning wine and gambling. Say: “In them is great sin, and some profit, for men; but the sin is greater than the profit”’ (Al-Koran, Sura: Al Baqarah, Chapter: 2 Verse: 219; Ali [trans.] 1983) But the local accommodation of Islam has happened in such way that it even allows the use of intoxicants and the practice of being intoxicated at a religious sphere!

25 ‘Tantric practices involve the notion of Hinduism that enlightened devotees may achieve salvation through the very acts which cause ordinary people to burn in Hell. Tantricism thus inverts normal morally correct behaviour’ (Gardner 1995:231).

65 that represents human beings more as active agents rather than passive victims of our theory building zeal.

The reformist movements The whole period of the nineteenth century and the earlier part of the twentieth century served as a very important time frame in the history of Bengali-Muslim dialectics since this is the time when the denunciation of the syncretistic tradition of Bengal by Muslim aristocrats gained political and economic momentum. According to Rafiuddin Ahmed (Ahmed 1988 cited in Prindle 1988:260), it was not until the nineteenth century that the Islamic movements, Islamisation, of the average Bengali- Muslim began. Prindle goes on to say:

This was the outcome of the Islamic revivalist movements, which swept through India at this time. Leaders of the revivalist movements…tried to purify Islam through the exclusion of non-Islamic accretions or elements of belief and practice having no foundation in Shariat (1988:260).

This condition thus indicates that in the Indian subcontinent, ‘this means only the exclusion of Hindu belief and practices’ (Prindle 1988:260). Consequentially, such revivalism induced a novel feeling of community solidarity, drew a valid boundary with Hindu neighbourhoods and most importantly led to an invented imaginary root of identity, that is the Islamic civilisation in the middle-east. This switch from one civilisation to another as a historical root of tradition is evident in the adoption of Arabic orthography by the Urdu language, claiming a link by descent with the middle- east and segregation of the community it self on the basis of these.

But it would be an historical error to guess that these reformist movements followed a unilineal direction where the Ashraf led aristocracy swayed over the masses and eliminated all pre-existing local beliefs and customs. Rather, ‘participants in the movements have diverse reasons for their different levels of involvement’ (Uddin 2006:15). In this context it should be remembered once more, as the preceding discussions show, that the people of Bangladesh were attracted to Islam not to make their lives overburdened with the strictures of the Koran. Instead they were more inspired by the accommodative spirits of the Sufi-saints whose central teaching had closely resembled the second verse of Sura Baqarah: ‘There is no compulsion in religion’ (Al-Koran, Sura: Al Baqarah, Chapter: 2 Verse: 256; Ali [trans.] 1983).

66 Thus inadmissibility of compulsion in the process of seeking the spread of Islam in Bengal was always at the centre of the consciousness of Muslim preachers. This consciousness in turn produces the room for practicing a Bengali informed Islam which is malleable in nature. The aristocrat Ashrafs were satisfied with their social supremacy and distance from the masses. Moreover, before the intrusion of the British imperialist power in India the Ashrafs encountered no serious obstacles in terms of their socio-economic position since Bengal was an integral part of the Mughal Empire which collapsed in the eighteenth century due to the presence of the British colonisers. Before this period the sporadic reform movements can be described as the efforts of the Ashrafs to dissociate themselves from their co- religionists that is the Atsrafs and the Arzuls. Thus these movements didn’t gain any significant momentum. The intrusion of the colonial rulers and the various policies taken by them persuaded the Bengali-Muslim elites to think of a separate identity for the Muslims of the Indian subcontinent which would be necessarily different from that of the Hindus. But it would be misleading to treat this Hindu-Muslim communal bitterness as essential and rooted in a historical past from time immemorial. Rather it is very much recent in origin (Kothari 1970:62). Hindus and Muslims lived side by side in Bengal for centuries without any major communal strife. As a matter of fact, there had been little difference in culture between the two communities.

Colonial Construction of Communal Rigidity

Historically, European colonial expansion has been one of the most powerful forces that have shaped the modern world. In a sense, it is colonialism that has created most of the modern nations, which can be thought of as entities that existed prior to colonial conquest, to re-emerge heroically after beating the colonialists back home. The most enduring impact of colonialism has been to force so many people around the world to define their identities in European terms. And the forces of colonialism are far from gone.

The soldier’s insurrection in 1857 shook the very foundations of British colonial rule in India. As a counter to all such revolt, the colonial administration went on intensifying their pre-existing policy of divide and rule and producing a provocative Hindu versus Muslim history of India. They consciously and deliberately adopted measures exclusively designed to provoke animosity and hatred between the

67 communities. The Secretary of the State for India in London advised the Viceroy, Lord Elgin (1862-63), to activate the division of religious feelings,

We have maintained our power in India by playing-off one part against the other, and we must continue to do so. Do all you can, therefore, to prevent all having a common feeling (Faruqi 1998).

By repeatedly propagating their false assertion, the colonial administration made the Hindus belief that no people had ever been more oppressed than the Hindus by the Muslims during the Islamic period.

The colonial rulers gradually replaced the secular spirit of the common people with a contended relation overpowered with religious spirits among the two communities. The communal strife, intolerance among the Hindu and Muslim and the realisation that they are two distinct entities in the Indian sub-continent were mainly a colonial implant. They also sponsored the formation of Muslim political parties during the beginning of the twentieth century in the name of safeguarding Muslim interests and rights, assumed to have been violated by the Hindus, and consequently opposed to the demand for political independence raised by the Congress (Azad 1959).

Purificatory movements: Invented and contested The British policy of divide and rule, as mentioned above, first identified the Hindus in a backward position compared to the political scenario of that time and hence decided to favour the Hindus and to ruin the socio-politico-economic bases of Muslims. In finding their motto accomplished they introduced a series of administrative, revenue and financial measures (Qureshi 1969:132). For example, the Permanent Settlement Act of 1793 evicted the Muslim landlords from their lands. The year 1837 witnessed a major depredation when the British dwindled the opportunity of state employments for the Muslim elites by introducing English as the official language which replaced the earlier Persian language (Qureshi 1969:132). The replacement seemed disastrous for Muslims since they didn’t take up English education. Furthermore, with the replacement of Muslim law by English law the Muslim Qadis (Judges) lost their employment (Khan 1987:2). The whole situation introduced a bleak condition for Muslim elites and they started to slip behind in socio-politico-economic terms. The Hindus, who decided to take up the opportunity

68 of English education, filled up the vacuum. The aristocrat Muslim Ashrafs being formerly the ruling elites started to dissociate themselves and ‘they created a cocoon of exclusiveness around them… One way to maintain this exclusiveness was to cling to the traditional system of education’ (Kopf & Joarder 1977: 48).

In their effort to invent an authentic Islamic past the Ashrafs weighed their first attack on Pirism which they believed as the root of the syncretistic traditional culture of Bengal. Moreover, the reformists also denounced the practices of celebrating muharram, fatihah, milad, and urs26 (Ahmed 1981:60). They also attacked the practice of using tabiz (amulets) which contains some verse from the Koran in it (Ahmed 1981:66). The practice of wearing tabiz or hanging it over doors is so pervasive in the Bengali informed Islam that Katy Gardner’s (1995:106) study pays considerable attention to it. However, at the time of these purificatory movements of the nineteenth century a huge emphasis was given on the proper notions of Halal and Haram. ‘Stress was laid’ as Murshid (1995:397-9) informs us ‘on halal earnings and on halal food. Earning through unfair means was haram. Prayers offered in clothes bought with haram money was considered unacceptable to God…The building of mausoleums over graves, the offering of prayers by the graveside, making manat or vows at shrines were similarly considered haram’. Even the style of trimming a beard didn’t escape their attention. They declared fatwa (formal legal opinion or religious decree proclaimed by any recognised Islamic leader or a group of Islamic leaders) to let Bengali-Muslims know how much trimming of the beard is Halal in Islam. The following image of the front page of a booklet was published to announce the fatwa regarding the trimming of beards. But these reform attempts didn’t go uncontested and surprising enough is the fact that the challenge to these attempts did not always come from the masses but also from the Mullahs for whom these institutions served as their source of income (Ahmed 1981:64-6).

26 Rafiuddin Ahmed (1981) describes these occasions in the following way: ‘Muharram: Ceremony in memory of the martyrdom of the Prophet’s grandsons, Hasan and Husain-primarily a Shia festival; Fathihah: a ceremonial rite, named after the first verse of the Koran, connected with the remembrance of the dead, usually followed by a feat; Urs: an annual gathering at the dargha, or shrine, of a pir, or saint; Millad al-Nabi: Celebration of the Prophet’s birthday, where hymns in Urdu, Persian and Arabic are sung in praise of the Prophet’ (Ahmed 1981:208).

69

Image: Fatwa about Beard Trimming [Subtitle: The Halal nature of beard trimming] (Source: De 1998:252; appendix 10B).

The most profound attack that the reformists made was to denounce the Bengali language as the language of Bengali-Muslims. They considered the Urdu-based culture as the proper code for the Bengali-Muslim to be treated as the follower of correct Islamic life. This dichotomy thus induced a new competing vision among Bengali-Muslims as the Ashrafs started to preach Bengal as the land of the non- Muslims (Dar-al-Harb) and hence tried to introduce an extraterritorial ‘only Muslim’ identity. But this attempt was also proved unsuccessful. A simple example of the Mymensingh Zillah (district) School during 1872-3 can clarify the claim. A Muslim maulvi was appointed here to teach the students Urdu as an Islamic language but the whole venture turned down by the Bengali-Muslim boys which was reflected in their poor attendance in the maulvi’s classes (Bengali Education Proceedings 1873 cited in Ahmed 1981:128).

A simple question can easily be raised here about the support that Bengali-Muslims provided for the Pakistan movement through which they wanted to create a separate state for Muslims. If the reformist movements experienced no success then why were the Bengali-Muslims so enthusiastic for a separate state for Muslims? The answer lies in the very nature of the formation of the middle-class in Bengal, which took up the opportunity to learn English and other modern education and decided to face the

70 ‘economic competition and political rivalry with the Hindu bhadralok27’ (Ahmed 1981:110). Thus political-economic interests, rather than any vow to cling to the orthodox religious dogmas of the Urdu-based Ashraf culture, persuaded the middle- class to stand beside the Ashrafs for a while. They also started to criticise many traditional local practices like pirism, milad, urus, tabiz and the like. It developed a situation where their interests coincided with that of Ashraf reformers. But unlike the Ashrafs they didn’t denounce these practices so as to ensure their supremacy in the religious sphere. Rather, their modern educational background encouraged them to stand against these practices as some of the pirs, mullahs and other traditional religious figures tended to exploit the simple minded population as their source of income (Ahmed 1981:65). Before proceeding further, another question requires some explanation here. If Bengali-Muslims were divided into aristocrats and commoners then how had this middle class developed? There is no simple answer to this question. Without following any structural pattern, an overview of the processes will let us predict that the formation of the middle-class in Bengal had been the effect of various factors. The first one was the flexibility of the caste like social stratification (as mentioned earlier). Along with this there appeared a downward mobility among the Ashrafs due mainly to the discriminatory treatment they received from the colonial rulers, coupled with their ignorance of contemporary education and society. On the other side a group of people having rural and Atraf origin started to thrive to middle- Ashraf status by acquiring education and by accumulating wealth as well. Furthermore, the fall of economic strength also compelled the Ashrafs to go for intermarriage with the non- and middle-Ashraf categories (Murshid 1995:296-7). These middle-class Bengali-Muslims, whom Murshid (1995:26) called ‘heretics’ diluted the local cultural milieu in such a fashion that they involved elements from both the secular and orthodox streams. However, the aforementioned discussion assists us to find that new-middle class Bengali-Muslims started to emerge as the old class division between the Ashrafs and Atrafs began to disappear in the strict sense of it due mainly to the invasion of the British colonisers.

27 The term ‘bhadralok’ was used by J.H. Broomfield (1968:5-14) to identity the Western educated Hindu intelligentsia which emerged in colonial Bengal during the nineteenth century.

71 Creation of Pakistan and Bangladesh The newly formed middle-class (with a secular aspiration to have a modern state for Bengali-Muslim) began to enter into the political sphere and in continuation of their participation they formed the All-Indian Muslim League in 1906, inspired by Sir Syed Ahmad Khan who by this time felt the inadequacy of Indian National Congress as the protector of Muslim interests (Prashad 1999:151). However, in the course of time the Congress and the Muslim league came close to each other, since both declared their stand against British imperialism. But in the mean time the seeds of communal hatred, as mentioned earlier, had started to sprout in such an unprecedented manner that from the early part of the twentieth century up to the partition of India and Pakistan witnessed an innumerable number of communal riots between Hindus and Muslims28. Under these circumstances, when the British colonisers decided to leave India it became evident that Congress’s claim to be the only successor of India’s political power would face serious challenges from various corners. The general election of 1945-46 clearly demonstrates that Congress failed to represent the Muslims of India (Chatterji 2003:262). To clarify the contention let us have a look over the election result of 1945-46 as furnished in Table 4.

Table 4: All Indian votes secured by Congress and the Muslim League in the General Election of 1945-46. Province Congress Muslim Others Total League Seats North-west frontier 30 17 3 50 province Punjab 51 73 51 175 Sindhu 18 27 15 60 Jukto (United) Province 154 54 21 228 Bihar 98 34 20 152 Urishya 47 4 9 60 Bengal 86 113 51 250

28 Since the aim of this research is not to delve into this aspect but rather to catch the dynamics of sifting identity formation of Bengali-Muslims in Sydney, interested readers wishing to know the details of these riots can see Chatterji, Joya 2003. Bangla bhag holo: Hindu shamprodaikota O desh bibhag, 1932-1947, University Press Ltd., Dhaka. The original English version is titled ‘Bengal divided: Hindu communalism and partition, 1932-1947’. Cambridge university Press, Cambridge.

72 Madras 165 29 21 215 Madhya Pradesh 92 13 71 175 Bombay 125 60 20 175 Assam 58 31 19 108

Source: M.N. Mittir (ed.) Indian Annual Register, 1946, Vol. 1, pp. 230-1 (cited in Chatterji 2003:263).

Based on this election picture M.A. Jinnah, ‘who had joined the Muslim League in 1913 and remained its top leader ever since then’ (Prasad 2000:26) boldly declared himself as the sole representative of the Muslims of India. Consequentially the ‘two- nation’ theory received a profound political momentum and provided the platform based on which the Indian subcontinent was divided in 1947, having the present day India as the abode of Hindus and East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and West Pakistan, now Pakistan, as the abode of Muslims. The middle-class secular minded leaders of Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan, supported this movement since they feared Hindu dominance in the post-colonial period and believed that the Pakistan movement would ensure their autonomy, which would eventually enable them to lead their own culture, politics, economics, religion and so on. Moreover, the Pakistan movement was not directed towards establishing a religious state or theocracy, which is very much evident by the social background and character of its leadership29. The Lahore Resolution taken by the Muslim League on March 23, 1940 with a clear demand for a separate state for Indian Muslims did not anywhere mention the word ‘Islam’ (Philips 1962:354-55).

The internal strife between the two ‘wings’– thousands of miles apart with a disdained enemy in between– of Pakistan have facilitated the people of East Pakistan to invent their differences with West Pakistan, particularly with reference to the languages they speak. And it is important to note here that the same allegation was brought against the Bengali language as was by the Ashrafs. Following the age old stereotypes developed against the Atrafs, in 1949 the central minister for education of Pakistan recommended the use of Arabic orthography for Bengali.

29 Among many leaders of this movement I am only describing a little about Muhammad Ali Jinnah since he was the spearhead leader of this movement. Gilquin (2002) informs that ‘Ali Jinnah was a non-practicing “sociological” Muslim. The country he caused to be founded was not to be, in his mind, other than a lay state. Islam only became the state religion of Pakistan in 1973.

73 This historical backdrop along with other concomitant processes at the regional and international level have triggered and sensitised religion and language as influential concerns for the majority of Bengali people and with reference to, or conscious manipulation of, these two factors they derive meaningful sense of social categories as well as activate contesting categories with respect to their relations of competition and symbiosis to those categories in everyday life. Hence, we see that the category denoting by the term ‘omuslim’ or ‘non-Muslim’, if no further specification term is provided, is always contextually interpreted and equated with the category understood as ‘Hindu’ because of the sensitivity developed by historical processes sketched above.

These definitions of national identity continued to receive a plethora of redefinitions soon after Bangladesh emerged as an independent state in 1971, based on a secular Bengali nationalism cutting across religious and communal barriers. The first constitution of Bangladesh outlined in 1972, under the leadership of the father of the nation Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, clearly clarifies this fact as paragraph 2 of its preamble ‘accepts “nationalism”, “socialism”, “democracy” and “secularism” as state principles’ (Mohsin 2004:470). However, based on their landslide victory against the West Pakistani political parties in the general election of Pakistan in 1970 followed by the formation of Bangladesh, the Awami League30 that led the war of independence in 1971 wrongly assumed that the mass reaction against Pakistani and their Bangladeshi collaborators’ aggression, which they did in the name of Islam, signalled the total popular rejection of Islamic values. The mistake the post-liberation Awami League leaders made was to assume the defeat of the Islamists, who being born in Bangladesh cooperated with West Pakistani rulers and participated in all the savage onslaughts, as part of the popular syncretistic Islam which never had any connection with politics. This means they tried to ‘over-Bengalicise’ and hence essentialise the Bengali- Muslims with only one aspect of their total identities. In this sense they made the same mistake as the West Pakistani Muslim League leaders who neglected the

30 Soon after the partition of the Indian subcontinent in 1947 the leaders of the East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, felt frustrated with the policies designed by West Pakistani rulers and this eventually formed a wide gap between the West Pakistani dominated Muslim League and the East Pakistani leadership. As manifestation of their resentment the East Pakistani Muslim League leaders convened by Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, a law student of the University of Dhaka at that time, constituted the East Pakistan Muslims Students’ League on January 4, 1948 which eventually led towards the formation of the East Pakistan Awami League on June 23, 1949 (Maniruzzaman 1980:19).

74 strength and importance of the secular aspects of Bengali identity and hence tried to ‘over-Islamise’ the Bengali-Muslims. However, at the same time national and international processes had also been enormously effective on the ways Islam again started to take its position in the politics of Bangladesh. For example, war damaged Bangladesh was in need of huge foreign aid and recognition as an independent state as well. But many Muslim countries showed their unwillingness to create diplomatic relations with Bangladesh due to propaganda made by Pakistan against the post- liberation government of Bangladesh (Hussain 1984:86-7). Due to these external factors, coupled with other internal failures like the famine of 1974, corruption, and uneven socio-economic development, military resentment31, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman was assassinated on August 15, 1975 by a military coup and secularism was thereafter toned down by the military rulers and Islamic elements surfaced. When the military officer Ziaur Rahman took charge of the government in 1975 he decided to highlight the Islamic elements to differentiate his regime and mode of government with that of the Awami League’s secularism and socialist democracy. He dropped the principle of secularism from the constitution and added ‘Bismillahir Rahmanur Rahim’ (In the name of Allah, The Beneficent, The Merciful) at the beginning of the constitution (Mohsin 2004:473-5). He also introduced the notion of “Bangladeshi Nationalism” with a mixture of secular and Islamic elements and changed the country’s post- liberation national slogan “Joi Bangla” which seemed closer to that of the India’s national slogan “Joi Hind”. He thus replaced it with “Bangladesh Zindabad” which was closer to Pakistan’s national slogan “Pakistan Zindabad” (Mohsin 204:475). Not only had he introduced all these changes to secure his power alone, external factors like petro-dollar aid from Muslim countries, sending a skilled and unskilled labour force to oil booming Gulf-states, which were experiencing labour shortages, and so on, all of which. worked together to find the country’s government leaned towards massive Islamisation. President Ziaur Rahman was assassinated in 1981 by a military coup. Hussain Muhammad Ershad, also a military person, came to power through another coup in March 1982 after deposing the elected BNP (Bangladesh Nationalist Party founded by Ziaur Rahman to accommodate himself in the democratic mode of government) government of Justice Abdus Sattar and ruled Bangladesh with his

31 Soon after the independence Sheikh Mujibur Rahman formed the Jatiyo Rakshi Bahini (National Security Force) which was meant a counter balance the army and hence there prevailed a conflict and jealousy between the military force and the Rakshi Bahini (Jahan 1973:130).

75 autocratic power from 1982-1990. To legitimise his power Ershad declared the country as an Islamic state on June 7, 1988 and tried to invent an Islamic past by introducing the notion of a mosque centred society. His invention went far beyond that of his predecessor. Friday was announced as a holiday since as this day Muslims hold their weekly congregation at midday prayer known as ‘Juma’, the Red Cross was changed to the Red Crescent, Arabic was introduced as a compulsory subject for primary school students and so on (Mohsin 2004:477). In sum while Ziaur Rahman changed the mode of government from socialism to liberal Islamism, Ershad turned it towards a total Islamism (Mohsin 2004:475-6).

But all these changes don’t implicate the wholesale Islamisation of the masses since multiple factors worked behind the whole process which didn’t follow any unilinear direction. Gardner (1995:242) is thus of the opinion that the Islamisation of the state by these military powers has confronted extensive and noticeable resistance and still today the so-called fundamentalists constitute only a minority, although the Western media tend to overemphasise the fundamentalists alone. Also the voting behaviour of the population - as discussed in the introductory section (see tables 1 & 2), I believe - clarifies the claim. Thus it may seem extraordinary (since political processes turned the country into an Islamic state) to a Westerner that even a prostitute in Bangladesh can be blessed by a fakir (holy man). The photograph given below clearly serves as testimony to this:

Photograph 1: A prostitute is being blessed and purified by a fakir (holy man) Source: Photograph by Shehzad Noor & posted on Drik Website: http://www.drik.net/calendar2k/english/index.html. Viewed on January 26, 2007.

76 What are the factors responsible for the growth of this overlapping consensus that give Bangladeshis the strength to practice both secular and religious streams in different contexts and circumstances? Richter (2004) and Rashid (2004) both offer the same reason; that the geographic location of Bangladesh (which is far away from other Islamic countries) represents as a profound factor. Another reason indicated by Rashid (2004:5) is the physical environment of Bangladesh, which forms the material existence of the Bangladeshis. A.K. Fazlul Huq, the populist leader of the Muslim peasantry in Bengal, thus remarks that ‘the politics of Bengal is in reality the economics of Bengal’ (cited in Kabir 1990:40). The hope for economic liberty always drives Bengali-Muslims to co-operate with foreign invaders at one point of time and to resist them at another, to compromise with their religious faith when necessary and to uphold their secular identity, to resist any attempt to over-Bengalicisation of their identity and to prevent any attempt, with equal effort, that tries to impose any notion of over-Islamicisation. The Bengali-Muslim masses, thus, always march forward with a sense of straddling boundary, which would not seem peculiar if we consider Steven J. Heine’s (2001) proposition, mentioned in the introductory analysis, that the relational aspects centred around the East-Asian and South-Asian notion of identity enable them to accept both secularism and religion in their day to day life with equal gravity. Some contemporary anthropologists (Ewing 1988; Prindle 1988) who have had first hand field knowledge of Bangladesh therefore correctly decide not to depict the country with an image of an all encompassing Muslim society. Rather they have analysed their ethnographic findings to point out these dialectics between the religious and social mode which operate in the form of an overlapping consensus.

Islamic State = An all encompassing Muslim society?

We have already seen from various historical and socio-historical materials that Bengali-Muslims are stratified and hierarchically ordered socially. Thus they refer to the Koranic prescriptions and precepts when they ‘say’ about the local social situation but in practice they follow the principle that alters their life-world around them since in ‘doing’ behavior they recognise that men are equal before God but they are not equal among themselves (Prindle 1988:264-5). This inconsistency between ‘what they say’ and ‘what they do’, ‘between ideals and actions’ (Ewing 1988:19), and the flexibility in the application of religious doctrine to personal practice, may be meaningfully explained only if we make distinction between religious and social

77 frames. This line of reasoning may be paraphrased as the discrepancy in what Bengali-Muslim-people ‘say’ or make statements about Islamic egalitarianism that is by religion all people are equal and what in practice they ‘do’ - the Bengali- Community-people are not equal in everyday life.

The above mentioned ambiguity has aptly been conceptualised and contextualised by Prindle (1988) in his study on the Muslims of Chittagong in Bangladesh. According to him:

The historical connections of today’s Bengali-Muslims have resulted in the bifurcation of two quite opposing mode of discourses, which may be seen as dharmic dik (religious mode) and shamajic dik (community or societal mode). The religious (dharmic) context is rooted in Islamic prescriptions, providing a framework to evaluate people and their actions as bhalo (good) or kharap (bad). The central theme of Islamic indoctrination is the discernment of intentions, actions and conducts, and its congruence with sanctions of shariat. The dharmic (religious) context emphasises consistency, equality of people, and the exclusion of alien values and conducts from the way of life. Contrarily, the shamajic (community/societal) context is concerned with social hierarchy, differences in identity as these configure the every day life of Bengali- Muslims. The focus is rather on ascribed status of people by birth but may be negotiated and redefined through achievements in various social fields. Therefore in shamajik (societal or community) context, the frame references for evaluating peoples’ rank positions are uchho (high/upper) and nimno (low/lower), boro (big) and chhoto (small). The high-low distinction is employed to indicate economic class through adjoining an additional term bitto, for instance, uchho bitto (upper class) and nimno bitto (lower class), while, adding the term bongsho implies lineage identity by birth that goes like, uchho bongsho (upper or higher lineage) and nimno bongsho (lower lineage) (Prindle 1988:264; 275 emphasis added).

78

Fig. 2: The oppositions and linguistic category in Bengali-Muslim rank (Based on the study done by Prindle 1988).

In light of this it can be claimed that Islam in its rigid form as practiced by Bengali- Muslims appeared to be the result of the colonial construction of antagonistic Hindu- Muslim identity. But still the national commemoration of the language Movement of 1952 and Independence War of 1971 along with numerous struggles based on Bengalihood remind us of the fact that the process of interaction between secular Bengalihood and Islamic Muslimhood was and is such that one can hardly discern any dichotomy or cultural discontinuity. For Bengali-Muslims Islam doesn’t solely dictate the way one should dress, or the language one should speak or her/his culture should be.

Thus syncretism instead of a rigid urge for the observance of Islamic scripts stands for the cultural contour of the Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh. Most of their pre- Islamic practices have been intermixed so smoothly into and adjusted with the Islamic way of life that at times it becomes difficult to draw a sharp line between the two. For instanc, the wedding ceremony of Bengali-Muslims is a good example of such a complete and complex blending of secular and religious elements. Pre-wedding ceremonies like Gae-Holud32 strongly underline the continuity of secular social practices. In some areas the Gae Holud ceremony is also called Mendhi.

32 Gae Holud is a pre-wedding social ceremony that involves the exchange of gifts including large fish and traditional sweets and the ceremonial colouring of the palm of the bride with henna paste. Turmeric paste is also used on the hand and face. It is usually accompanied by special wedding songs and dance which is particularly forbidden in Islam.

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Photograph 2: Gae-Holud of a Bengali-bride (who got married with one of my respondents). Photograph by: Mr. Khalid Saifullah

Photograph 3: Males and females are dancing together with live music while celebrating the groom’s (one of my respondents) Gae-Holud. Photograph by: Mr. Khalid Saifullah

Photograph 4: Registration of marriage (Switch to the religious mode). Photograph by: Mr. Khalid Saifullah

The wedding ceremony itself is a religious occasion as the religious rites are performed according to Islamic laws and traditions. But again the post-wedding reception of the bride and the bride-groom at the bride’s parents’ home is essentially a

80 secular ceremony and Hinduic in origin. This way of actualising secularism and syncriacism along with a parallel significance of communalism among the mass people of Bengal has been furnished below to make the analysis more understandable that will eventually help us to understand the construction of Halal and Haram among the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney who, I believe, have brought cultural baggage with them full of not only Islamic contents, but also their local cultural aspects.

The secular and the communal: Overlapping consensus It is more or less recognised in contemporary social history that there exists a profound correlation between the emergence of the idea of secularism and that of nation-states. The basic foundational principles of these nation-states are individualism, legal equity, and secularistic principles. Basically, the development of modern nation-states has been underpinned by Western capitalism and social formation through the onset of the Renaissance, enlightenment, French revolution and the Industrial Revolution in England. But this formation of the modern nation-state has taken a different trajectory in oriental societies, especially in the colonised world since the experience of nation-state formation and the resistance towards colonialism have come from the same direction here. Thus the notion of secularism has also taken a different shape in this part of the world. Rather than playing a direct role as a political doctrine, secularism, as an epistemic category, is seen to be more attached to religiosity. In the Indian sub-continent it is seen to be largely connected with communalism. In this context, secularism, at least for the Bengali Muslims, functions as an overlapping consensus and hence used in the construction of communalism at one point of time and that of political identity at another. As a result we find that communalism as a modern phenomenon has emerged in the Indian sub-continent along with capitalism and nationalistic movements. And in the history of this sub- continent the meaning of communalism rests on the basis of the communalistic realisation of Hindus and Muslims. An examination of the social development of the Indian sub-continent reveals that the colonised economy verged on capitalism during the period of colonialism. The adopted organisational framework of capitalism shook the age old foundations of its indigenous societies, their cultures, economies, politics and religions.

81 As suggested earlier, at the end of the nineteenth century the seeds of communalism were sown on the Indian sub-continent as an outcome of a nationalistic resistance movement against British colonial oppression. Therefore both the development of communalism and secularism on the Indian sub-continent, particularly in Bengal, has to be discussed in the context of the history of nationalism. While analysing the history of nationalistic movements of this part of the world the ‘two nation theory’, characterised by the communalistic differences between the Hindus and the Muslims, can be identified as the most influential factor responsible for the emergence of political communalism33. The father of this two nation theory, Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, from 1870 to before the formation of Congress was of the opinion that ‘those living in India or Hindusthan are all Hindus’ (Ahmed 1987:282). It connotes the fact that people may have Hindu, Muslim or any other identity as far as religion is concerned, but when it comes to political identity all should embrace the identity of the Hindu or Hindusthani. This statement should not be treated solely as nationalistic propaganda; but rather for other Indian religions apart from the Hindus, and especially for Islam, it connotes a profound historical significance. Because a comparison between the preconditions of the formation of nationalistic feeling-living in a specific territory, undifferentiated economic system, and a common culture as evolved from the spontaneous processes- and the history of Islam in India reveals the fact that the mass people, who embraced Islam - inspired by the peaceful efforts of the Sufis - have made an influential deconstruction of Islam in accordance with the shape of Indian culture.

This process of assimilation of Islam in the local domain of practices has been largely influenced by ancient Indian secular philosophy, which in turn had been profoundly influenced by Buddhism (Madan 2005:64-5). In the epistemological tradition of the Indian sub-continent, particularly in Bengal, there has been an ancient feeling relating to the conviction that ‘karma (praxis) is not dependent upon dharma (religion) rather the reverse’ (Matubbar 1995:31). This pragmatic notion coupled with age old

33 By using the term ‘political communalism’ I would like to refer to Madan (2005) to draw a distinction between popular communalism and political communalism. The two communalisms- ‘the peoples’ and the political-are different in several crucial respects. For example, and most notably, the former is wholly spontaneous-the lived social reality-but the latter is ideological and in that sense purposively constructed; the former is based on a positive attitude towards religion, but the latter is skeptical’ (Madan 2005:72).

82 syncretism, which in the very beginning of the introduction of Islam has produced a secularist foundation for Indian Islam. Islam (2000) provides us with historical evidence to say that during the fifteenth and sixteenth century Indian Hindu society had been influenced by the philosophy of the Vaishnava movement, which was later revitalised by the philosophy of Sri Chaitanya34 (1486-1535) and these movements cast considerable impact upon the mass people while reinforcing their secular and syncretistic social reality. Along with these the secular tradition of Islam as introduced by the Sufis, who proclaimed religion as a path toward spiritual salvation, also influenced the rural masses of Bengal for whom Islam seemed to be a means for attaining economic and social freedom. Thus as an epistemic category secularism remained here in the form of a spatial element of Bengali Islam. Such an amalgam of religion and secularism is the most profound but unexamined and unexplored feature of the Muslims of the Indian sub-continent.

We can now turn towards the final discussion of this chapter - examining the significance of the above mentioned discussion about Bengali-Muslims’ diversified religious practices in the context of an anthropological understanding of religion. Before getting into the theoretical assumptions that this research is going to underline it is beneficial to briefly evaluate the anthropological traditions that have attempted to study religions. During the 19th century the anthropological study of religion showed a Eurocentric attenuation characterised in its evaluation of religion as opposed to science. Burdened with this attenuation the early anthropological texts were largely focused on the religions of non-Western cultures and appeared to over emphasise their exotic aspects. Thus we find most of the ethnography of this century contains a chapter on magic and witchcraft. This legacy was also carried over by the functionalists who explained religion, like other aspects of anthropology, with the help of descriptive data and a kind of behavioural perspective. In the twentieth century we come across a shift in this interest - particularly when anthropologists have started to study the grand monotheistic religions like Islam, Buddhism,

34 Sri Chaitanya was a Bengali Vaishnava Saint and ecstatic leader of the fifteenth century who revitalised the Bengali Vaishnavism, established a movement and a devotional practice that prevails among the great majority of rural Hindu Bengalis today. He advised the people to opt for a direct approach to a God offering rescue, protection, and release from rebirth through personal ‘loving devotion’ (prema-bhakti) and his movement gained considerable popular support (Nicholas 2003:5, 51). It means Chaitanya encouraged people to love God through personal devotion that eventually discouraged them joining the temple.

83 Christianity, Hinduism and/or Judaism. But this interest, to a certain period, has also paid its attention to the historical aspects prior to conceptualising religion as a monolithic entity. Thus most of these religions have been thought of as solid historical phenomena and thus the study of religion has been more concerned with mana, totemism, taboo, shamanism, magic, myth and the sacred. This confinement therefore is inadequate to understand the multiple and diffused creativity that characterises the religions of many societies like Bangladesh.

What seem to be the fundamental problems of the evolutionary and functionalist study of religion are, firstly these theories consider religion in the light of a fore granted universality, and secondly their discussions over any religion start by attributing stereotypical notions, related to a specific religion, with the highest priority. To overcome this tradition of the study of religion Geertz (1973:89) provides the best theoretical insights that perceive religion as a symbolic communication system. This notion proposed by Geertz (1973) helps us to accept the claim that, like language, religion exists in society as an innate and discursive phenomenon and thus can be studied by following linguistic methodology. Moreover, this contention assists us to understand religion in the light of two contesting and contrasting ideas-religion and religiosity, which can be compared with two famous dichotomies as outlined by Ferdinand de Saussure-signifier and signified, and/or langue and parole.

According to Saussure langue (cited in Crystal 1997:215) is the stereotypical language system shared by a community of speakers and parole is the concrete utterances produced by individual speakers in actual situations that contrast langue. If applied to religion we will find that our conventional ideas conceive religion, for example Islam, as a unified and monolithic belief. Such notions seldom consider the spatial and temporal expression and development of a particular religion. Under such conditions, if we are really interested to overcome these limitations and if we accept religion as a system of communication then, I think, there should be a langue-parole dichotomy in religion too. As part of this presumption, I would like to propose the dichotomy of religion and religiosity which, I believe, would not only be pertinent in the context of the Bengali-Muslims, it may also take us towards some new understandings about religion and religiosity.

84 Contesting notions of ‘the faith’ and ‘the symbol’ in the popular Islam of Bengal Before proceeding further, it would be useful to explore the subtle differences between religion and religiosity. Religion signifies a formal institution and well organised philosophy. But what should be remembered that while signified in the form of religiosity the actual and situational manifestation may not necessarily be well organised; it may not be confined in any institutional bindings. Such an understanding presupposes that religiosity is a particular stratum of consciousness. But that doesn’t decrease the importance of religiosity in studying religion; rather in a pre-capitalist or semi-capitalist society this stratum of consciousness is a guide in the exploration of the logic for understanding the manifested world which in turn sometime helps in understanding people’s multiple roles and duties along with those of the surrounding members of their society. It is this particular context where religiosity seems to be stronger than religion as an organisational formula of society. The flexibility of religiosity thus connotes its strength. The immense possibility of transformation, an open and exposed form of consciousness, uncertainty, unwilling to be confined in any iron structure-all these together equip religiosity with such power that the subaltern population perceive religiosity as a language to express their identity, protest and resistance.

Following such a line of reasoning we can claim that any attempt to understand religion and the religiosity of the mass populace without considering the embedded power relations, exploitation, resistance and the bondage of deference would be a futile effort. The attempt to get a hold of the social power and politico-economic domains is evident in the stratified application of religion. Thus to trivialise this understanding will eventually trivialise the basic structure embedded in the stratified application mentioned above. The human sphere of mind and thought revolves around stratified society and is manifested in their dialectic relations. Thus no analysis about religion and religiosity can proceed further without taking the power relations into consideration. In this context we can find that along with Islam all Semitic religions have been through a historical trajectory of imperial expansion. We can easily calculate that the history of the colonial expansion of Islam can be traced back to one thousand years. Thus Islam, since its inception in the Arab world, has undergone a vast range of diversity while transformed and translated into many languages, cultures, and many distinct histories. And possibly the most interesting deviation has

85 taken place in the Indian subcontinent where Islam has confronted the succeeding cultures of Dravidian and Kolarian on the one hand and the succeeding language and culture of the strong Aryan civilisation on the other. Aside from that Islam has been through much negotiation with local power structures. This is evident in the dichotomy of Ashraf and Atraf among the Muslim converts of this region, following the shape of their earlier practice of the Hindu caste system.

Moreover, the linguistic tone that the English word ‘religion’ conveys should be examined with much care while analysing the religion and religiosity of Bengal. The English word ‘religion’ represents Islam as a religion in terms of its overt and scriptural exercise that demonstrates a gulf of differences with its inner and covert ideas of religiosity. While analysing the word ‘dharma’ T.N. Madan (2004b:3) insists that ‘it is an idea that differs from the dependent bonding of the human being with supernatural powers conveyed by the term religion’. Flood (2004:231) goes a step further and claims that “the term ‘dharma’ is untranslatable, in that it has no direct semantic equivalents in any Western languages which convey the resonance of associations expressed by the term”. Madan (2004a:386) again insists that ‘it is broader and more complex than the Christian notion of religion and less jural than our current conceptions of duty. It emphasises awareness and freedom rather than the notion of religio, or obligation’. Thus it can be said that the English word ‘religion’ and its corresponding Bengali term ‘dharma’ or the corresponding term ‘din’ as used in Islamic discourse, contain considerable difference in terms of semantics. The interactions with Vedic Hindu society, thereafter with the Islam developed in Persian civilisation, and thenceforth with the journey through the imposed and locally invented Western secular and modern civilisation have drawn the semantic separation and distinction between the English cognitive category ‘religion’ and the word ‘dharma’ or ‘din’. Thus we find the words dharma and din signify sundry meanings in Bengali culture and literature. For example, according to the semantics of Bengali language, an atheist may still have religion since ‘dharma’ does not merely connote ‘religion’ or an attachment to the belief of any organisation or community, it can also be easily reflected in the duties as performed by the individual.

Let us proceed further on this aspect. As stated earlier, religion not only signifies having a belief in any community or organisation, it also extends further to mean the

86 belief in any omnipotent supernatural entity along with various psycho-social expressions toward that entity and the accompanied rituals to worship the entity. Apart from that while consulting various sources-from Vedic literature to religious scripts, again from religious scripts to the perceptions of ordinary people-we find four principal meanings emanating from the word dharma: a) Dharma means duties. This meaning was explicit in earlier Indian society, divided along caste and varna line, where the word dharma was used to mean the religiously controlled social division of labour and each caste and varna was characterised by its dharma and concomitant duties ascribed upon them as part of the division of labour. The opposite of it is adharma (unreligious) or onnay kaj (sinful conduct). For instance, in the varna stratified society an attempt of a Sudra child to carry out study was considered as adharma. Even reading Veda by them was treated similarly since in Brahman dominated Hindu society the Brahmans were recognised as the sole guardian of Veda. The meaning of dharma in terms of ‘duties’ can be again divided into two further meanings: 1) the duties or dharma performed or expected to be performed by people in general, and 2) the duties or dharma performed by specific persons in specific situations. In the context of duties this difference in dharma deserves special attention. b) The outcome of karma (conduct) is also considered as dharma. Thus we find in the Indian subcontinent people refer to punya (virtue) as dharma, and pap’(sin) as adharma. c) Dharma also signifies the shabhab (characteristics), gun (qualities) and shokti (strength/power) of an object. Here we find a connection between the first and the third meaning of dharma. While the first one connotes the shabhab (characteristics), gun (qualities) and shokti (strength/power) of an individual, the third one is directed to mean those of other animals and objects. The Gita uses this notion and says that the features as derived from qualified conducts determine the form of dharma (Kane 1968:1-6). d) The forth meaning of dharma stands for niom (order). The signified form of order and discipline pervasive throughout the world is also meant to be dharma.

The connotations of the word ‘din’ also need to be examined. The meaning of din can be seen as extended from the general to the particular. First of all, it denotes the relationship of human beings with Allah and thus we find the usage of the term ‘din- e- Allah’. This is further elaborated as an idea of ‘din-e-Islam’ where the collective religion of the people attached through Islam stands for the fundamental denotation.

87 In this context the semantic meanings of some other related words need to be explored. For example, Islam means ‘submission’. Thus, whoever submits her/himself before Allah is considered as a Muslim. It is the duty of a human being to submit her/himself wholeheartedly before the orders and rules of Allah. The applied meaning associated with the one stated earlier reflects the observance of the path showed by Allah, to perform duties (hidaeti), and to refrain from prohibited affairs (porhejgari). Again, the main pillar of ‘din’ is ‘Iman’ which corresponds in Bengali as bishwash (faith). Proclamation of Iman or bishwash can be affirmed by establishing belief upon the oneness (Tauhid) of Allah and upon the divinity of the Koran. Thus it is not ‘ilm’ or epistemology that affirms one’s Muslimhood, but rather faith in Allah and His holy book the Koran turns an individual into a Muslim. Without this feeling of Iman, the submission or practicing of Islam is not possible. In connection with this we find that in Bengali the word ‘beiman’ (faithless) stands for reproach. The importance of Iman in Islam is so important that in the holy Koran the word Iman has been used 45 times while the word ‘Islam’ has been used only 8 times (Bhadra 1994:315). Compared to the number of times the word ‘Muslim’ is used in the Koran, the word ‘Mumin’ (faithful) appears five times more (Bhadra 1994:318). This quantification clearly reveals the importance of ‘Iman’ as the base of Islam.

Comparing the sundry interpretations (tafsir) of the word ‘Iman’ with its corresponding Bengali dictionary meaning, reveals that 19th century Bengali society underwent a simultaneous continuation and deviation in terms of the semantic practice of Iman. The people of that society showed a clear commitment to the ideal meaning of Iman followed by a continuation of the fundamental categories of Iman. But while diffused in the local setting of Bengali society to demarcate the boundary between ‘bhalo’ (good) or ‘mondo’ (bad) conduct, there occurred much elaboration of the word ‘Iman’ and to many extents that elaboration led to a deviation from its original meanings. As a result we find that the conscience and dharma of an ordinary Muslim is resembled as Iman and again any humanitarian quality or value is also considered as Iman. In the vast and elaborate meanings of Iman the localised ‘KhanarBachan’ (Maxims of Khana35) has been seen to find a place in the realm of

35 ‘Khana was a woman seer, composer of nature saws. Her dates have been variously given, and range from 800 AD to 1200 AD. According to one account, she belonged to the village of Deuli in Barasat in

88 Iman and also as an opposite notion of Iman, and the idea of kufuri, can be explained through the localised versions of the meaning of Iman.

Though the basis of Iman is said to be linked to belief in the holy script of Allah; the medieval period, while Islam was spread in Bengal, witnessed the production of a new from of punthi36, which was heavily influenced by the Sufi saints who came to Bengal to preach Islam. In this new form of localised punthi the biography of Mohammed was depicted in a variety of forms, which are totally absent in the holy Koran and Hadith (Roy 1983:93-5). Here again it is worth remembering the fact that the vast population, who accepted Islam out of their feeling of being victimised by the hegemonic caste stratification system of Hindu society, did not abandon the tradition of writing and reading Punthi as it was one of the most important and pristine mediums of practicing folk knowledge. They rather internalised Islam in the pattern of this popular wisdom. As a result the prime concern for newly converted people was to create a boundary between Islam and Hinduism, and hence to define Islam on the basis of that boundary. The medieval punthi literature of Bengal still vindicates this fact (Roy 1983:90-1)

For the Bengali-Muslim masses Iman didn’t stand for strict observance of Islamic religious doctrine. For them Iman meant to be loyal to desher nyom (local order) followed by their ancestors of which language was one of the most profound identity

24 Parganas, West Bengal. Her father was Anacharya, and she stayed in King Chakraketu's monastery for a considerable period. According to another account, she was the daughter of the king of Sinhala (Sri Lanka). She was named Ksana (moment) or Khana because she was born at an auspicious moment. Meanwhile, at the court of Vikramaditya, the wife of the astrologer Varaha had given birth to a boy named Mihir. When Varaha cast Mihir's horoscope, he found that the boy would die shortly afterwards. Varaha put the child in a pot and floated the pot out to sea. The pot floated to Sinhala where its king brought the boy up and subsequently arranged his marriage with Khana. Both Mihir and Khana studied astrology and became expert astrologers. Mihir then returned to his place of birth with his wife. He became a courtier of Vikramaditya and became famous as an astrologer. One day both father and son faced a problem in astrology. Khana came forward and successfully solved the problem. This drew the attention of King Vikramaditya. Apprehending that he would to lose his position at court, Mihir cut off Khana's tongue so that she would be unable to speak henceforth. Khana died shortly afterwards. Khana is associated with many forecasts, known as Khanar Vachan, about the weather, astrology, crops, productivity etc. Khana's advice used to work as guides for farmers for a long time, telling them when to plant and how to till the soil for different products. She also suggested which way a house should face, where trees should be planted, and where a pond should be dug. Her advice about what and how much one should eat is often cited by mothers to children: 'A little bit of salt, a little bit of bitter, and always stop before you are too full'. Some of her advice is still followed’ (Islam 2001).

36 A type of medieval Bengali literature written in verse.

89 markers. This leads us to the realisation that ‘though a Muslim’s first and primary loyalty is to dharma in the ideal model, that ideology does not preclude action at the local level of activity, since Muslims regard themselves as Bengalis both socially and culturally through their practice of the desher niom or local adat’ (Fruzzetti 1981:93).

From this it can be seen that new forms of signification of the word ‘Iman’ occurred through various folk stories and myths, and due to this flexible nature of Bengali Islam the local populace faced no noticeable problems while adding up new experiences as the signifier of Iman. This is apparent in negotiating various issues of everyday lives – problems of cultivation, problems of determining dress for newly educated Muslim youths who are going to join their jobs, problems of finding a justification for eating beef, dealing with issues like maintaining beard or wearing a cap. In these respects Bengali Muslims have resorted to the notion of ‘Iman’. If expressed in a simple and straightforward way, the idea of Iman has remained ever active in the life practices of Mumin-Musalman (a faithful Muslim).

This brings us to another critical question. Does it mean that Iman and Islam are the same or constitute either side of the coin? There can be difference of opinion on this issue. For example while adjoining the terms din and Islam, the new term din-Islam reveals something more than wholehearted faith. In this context the notion of adab37 (norms) seems pertinent, which closely resembles the religious meaning of duty and conduct. For being a Muslim, everyone is required to follow the adab in accordance with her/his specific social positioning which builds up her/his whole personality and reflects the expression of honest Iman. In this sense adab can be considered the ethical code applicable to real life situations. This code also follows general and specific rules as stated earlier. People from various strata of society follow various forms of adab. For the Muslims of Bengal the articulation of Iman, adab and desher

37 According to Oxford Dictionary of Islam the word Adab stands for the ‘medieval anecdotal form of prose designed to be both edifying and entertaining. Can include Quranic verses, poetry, and the traditions of Muhammad (hadith). Often written in the form of manuals for behavior, protocol, conducting affairs of state, and carrying out the duties of office with advice embedded in tales and anecdotes about rulers, judges, misers, and other characters. The word adab thus also came to mean “proper conduct and etiquette.” Initially a Persian genre, it was synthesised with Arabic literature in the ninth century, reflecting the expansion of the Islamic empire and borrowing from other cultures. The greatest master of Arabic adab was the ninth-century writer al-Jahiz. In contemporary Arabic, adab refers to literature in general’ (Esposito (ed.) 2003).

90 niom signify the whole meaning of Islam. In the last verse of the Koran there is a clear order to accomplish din and to specify Islam as din (Bhadra 1994:4). From the foregone discussion it can be seen that for the Bengali masses the meaning of din- Islam and adab is vast and it should therefore not be understood as the mere reflection of the community or its ideology.

The above mentioned discussion leads us to another important question. How can we explain cultural transformations while encountering the duality between religion and religiosity? How is high culture is transformed by folk culture? How can we understand the difference between the notion of Iman and its nishan (symbolic/emblematic expression)? Following Levi-Strauss’s argument (1972: 16-20) we can say that the intellectuals/narrators/mediators of folk culture transform the elements of high culture through the medium of ‘bricolage’38. The immense possibilities and permutations that the process of ‘bricolage’ holds is evident in the distinction between the ‘bricoleur’ as craftsman and the ‘engineer’ as scientist. While the ‘bricoleur’ works with materials available within reach, the engineer works with materials arranged beforehand in accordance with a pre-planned project. Thus the major distinction between ‘bricoleur’ and ‘scientist’ is that while “the scientist creating events by means of structures, the ‘bricoleur’ creating structures by means of events’ (Levi-Strauss 1972:22). In this vein we can claim that folk culture does not adopt any pre-formulated plan while using the elements of high culture. Nor does there remain any homogeneity in acquiring these elements. Even the reformulation of the folk culture through using these elements depends heavily upon the contemporary social condition, the social positioning of the mediators and the internal pressure emanated from its familiar culture. From the vast pool of possibilities, as embedded in every element of high culture, each mediator then selects a specific possibility of any given element for the purpose of bricolage. A different mediator in a different context may accomplish a different bricolage prior to utilising another possibility of the same element. Thus historical context and experience always determine the deviation of original meaning.

38 The French word ‘bricolage’ is etymologically derived from the French word ‘bricoleur’. The “‘bricoleur’ is someone who...uses devious means” (Strauss 1972:16-7) while creating something. It means for a ‘bricoleur’ the process of creating something is not confined within a predefined realm of calculated choice. Out of this meaning of ‘bricoleur’ Levi-Strauss defines ‘bricolage’ as a ‘dialogue with the materials and means of execution’ (Strauss 1972:29).

91 Within the historical context of the Indian subcontinent, it can be said that historically the popular bricolage of religion has been determined through the struggle for economic, political and social status. The masses have challenged and struggled over the dominant Muslim dichotomy between ashraf and atraf, which appeared as an Islamic transliteration of caste and varna stratification, with the tools offered by the mystic tradition of Sufism. Among the given choices, emerging from the Islamic tradition of Bengal, the aristocrat ashraf people adopt the shariat which is more committed towards the stereotypical ideas of Islam. Alternatively, the subaltern atraf people are seen to select marfat that is the tradition of Sufism, which resembles the Vaishnab Shahajia tradition used by them during their pre-conversion period while resisting the caste and varna stratification of Hindu society. It is evident that though Islam appears in this region as a new form of faith based religion, it nonetheless has utilised the old social formation while categorising the religiosity of the aristocrat and the subaltern people.

Apart from this there are some other significances of bricolage. It may happen that in different contexts different mediators are using the same element. But it still does not mean that the outcome of these bricolages would be the same. Here the relevant question demanding attention is to see which particular meaning has been attached to an element while used by different mediators in different contexts. To grasp the answer we should understand the meanings emanating from the words and ideas of the elements of high culture. I think this realisation is utterly important in understanding the various forms of Islam reflected in the popular culture of Bengal.

Another example can be cited to make the whole discussion more understandable. At the beginning I have tried to explain religion in the light of the innate structure of language. If Iman is an idea then it can be claimed that it has a symbolic representation that is a signifier. In this context we can opt for an Islamic terminology befitting this signifier-nishan (symbol/emblem). Human beings, while using religiosity as a weapon of resistance and struggle, invent some emblems in accordance with the practicalities of their struggle. The symbol/emblem may stem from any of the cultural activities or motivations. For instance, in the history of the sanskritaisation movement of the subaltern-untouchable people of the Indian subcontinent, dietary rules became a dominant emblem. Along with the Orans and

92 Mundas many other cultural groups had been through a number of dietary rules which served as their tools for sanskritaisation movement and also as their tools for struggling for social status and recognition of social identity (Basu 1949:43). In the same vein, the dietary rules stemming from the notion of Halal-Haram may strictly be followed by the aristocrat/ashraf Muslims as part of their inclination to cling to the rigid grammar, but that does not mean that the masses of Bengal, who constitute the major portion of converted Muslims of that region, follow the rules in the same manner. In this respect it is easy to generalise, while observing Bengali Muslim migrants abroad in their pursuit of Halal food, that they are confined within the rigid prose of religion and thus looking for an identity marker to mitigate their identity crisis in a non-Muslim Western country. But such generalisation, as commonly seen, would fail to find the phrases of religiosity, the social context of a particular migrant Muslim population and their capacity to play with the dominant elements.

Bearing this historical background of the Bengali informed Islam in mind, it is time to examine the beginnings of Islam and various Muslim communities in Australia with an embedded aim to decipher dominant reasons responsible for the growing misrepresentation of the Muslims in the West, particularly in Australia, in the light of recent discussions about globalisation, transnationalism and multiculturalism. Though the link between these issues may generate surprise, it can be said that individuals do not construct and/or configure their streams of consciousness about any particular issue without the knowledge they acquire from their experiential realities. And these realities are in turn connected with webs of events that I am endeavoring to explore one after another, to eventually produce the grounds for explaining the everyday practices of the practitioners that are the focus of the research agenda.

93 Chapter V

Migration and its associated terminologies: Looking beyond generalisation

In this chapter I would like to rationalise my focus on the everyday experiential realities of Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney and my avoidance of generalisations prior to evaluating the prevalent discussions about globalisation, migration and multiculturalism. Moreover, I will demonstrate how most of those discussions attempt to generalise migrants’ everyday life experiences in a way that constructs theoretical paradigms applicable to all migrants irrespective of their country of origin, social- history, class, gender, age, time of migration, nature of occupation, marital condition, and many other aspects of individuals’ experiences and knowledge, enabling them to interact with multiplicity, complexity and diversity. More important is the fact that in most of these studies (as will be discussed below) conceptions of multiplicity, temporality and contextuality are seen as emanating only from the migrants’ post- migratory conditions, which I believe disregards any possibility for them to have a pre-migratory sense of multiplicity, temporality and contextuality. In this sense the earlier modernist dichotomies between tradition/modernity, here/there, self/other have still been sustained and in a sense modified with a new dichotomy - that is pre- migratory situationality, stability and singularity/ post-migratory contextuality, temporality and multiplicity. This ignorance has stemmed from the ahistorical nature of most migration studies where the migrants’ history receives little attention. But my understanding of Bengali-Muslims’ history, as discussed in Chapter Four, proves that they have been historically exposed to multiple identities due to the infiltration of diverse cultural traditions brought either by imperialists invaders or by the migrant preachers from various corners of the world. With this understanding in mind I will attempt to go beyond any kind of generalisation so as to produce an actor-centric ethnography.

There is a prevailing tendency in social science literature to find some profound links between globalisation and the geographical relocation of people through migration. Castles and Miller (2003:4) are of the opinion that ‘global cultural interchange, facilitated by improved transport and the proliferation of print and electronic media,

94 also leads to migration. International migration has grown in volume and significance since 1945 and most particularly since the mid-1980s’. These links have invoked a wide range of possible definitions of globalisation of which I will begin concentrating on what Anthony McGrew writes:

Globalization refers to the multiplicity of linkages and interconnections that transcend the nation-states (and by implication the societies) which make up the modern world system. It defines a process through which events, decisions, and activities in one part of the world can come to have significant consequences for individuals and communities in quite distant part of the globe. Nowadays, goods, capital, people, knowledge, images, communications, crime, culture, pollutants, drugs, fashions, and beliefs al readily flow across territorial boundaries. Transnational networks, social movements and relationships are extensive in virtually all areas of human activity from the academic to the sexual (1992:65- 6).

Some other proponents describe the features of globalisation as ‘accelerating interdependence’, ‘action at a distance’ and ‘time-space compression’ (see, respectively, Ohmae 1990; Giddens 1990; Harvey 1989 cited in Held et al. 2003:67). Interesting to note that in all these definitions too much attention has been given to ‘globalisation’ as a controlling agency of public spheres like territory and borders, and hence the individual is doomed to be inactive, running out of agency, for whom, according to these definitions, everything is now getting beyond reach. In a sense, these definitions are not far away from the earlier statist discourses where states were seen to be the controller of peoples’ fate. Moreover, these definitions are produced by social scientists for whom border crossing is endowed with their privileged status of being a citizen of developed countries. Thus most of their definitions fail to see the unequal nature embedded in the notions like ‘accelerating interdependence’, ‘action at a distance’ and ‘time-space compression’. Boaventura de Sousa Santos, therefore, could not help but say that,

…on the one hand, there is the global capitalist class, which in reality controls the time-space compression and is capable of transforming it in its favour. On the other there are the classes and subordinate groups, such as migrant workers and refugees, who in recent decades have represented much

95 cross-border traffic, but who do not, in any way, control the time-space compression’ (2006: 396).

Falk (1993), while encountering homogenising and literalist research on issue like ‘time-space’ compression, has also identified it as ‘globalization-from-above’ (cited in Mitchell 1997:101). In this context it must be remembered that my research is concerned mostly with migrant workers, students and refugees who, in Santos’s (2006) sense, are not in a position to control the time-space compression.

The border crossing of people around the world has introduced a notion of deterritorialisation by some scholars, where people, irrespective of their place of origin, are seen to be citizens of the deterritorialised global world (Kibreab 1999:385). This claim is very much apparent in Featherstone’s (1995:86) claim that ‘we are all in each other's back yards’. Appadurai (1990) also promotes the deterritorialisation claim. For Appadurai (1990:301) ‘it brings labouring populations into the lower class sectors and spaces of relatively wealthy societies’. I agree with such claims in the respect that international migration and various techno-economic advancements have created much deterritorialised existence and social relations possible. But what seems to be problematic is the imposition of these claims on all the population of the world in the form of generalisation. Kibreab (1999:387) takes a position against such claims saying that ‘in most of the third world countries, e.g. in Africa, rights of access to, and use of, sources of livelihood are still apportioned on the basis of territorially anchored identity’. Moreover, is the notion of deterritorialisation equally applicable to forced migration and voluntary migration? How many of the world’s population can enjoy the right to step into another’s back-yard? Are all the populations of the world endowed with passports of equal status? The answer is simple: our passports endowed with the geographical and social positioning in the global map invoke varied degrees of ‘security, rights or mobility’ (Humphrey 1999:1) and ‘permit access to specific territories’ (Torpey 1999:157). If this is so, a question that can be raised about the ‘differential incorporation39’ in relation to the access to capital, goods and technology

39 ‘The “second-class citizenship” of a social category identified by common disabilities and disqualifications, whether racial, religious, economic, or other grounds is merely one common mode of differential incorporation. Communal rolls, restrictive property franchises, and similar arrangements also express and maintain the differential incorporation of specific

96 is ‘whose experience we are describing’ (Tomlinson: 1999:130). Suspicion has been arisen not to define what kind of ideology it is but rather questioning the origin of the ideology, that is whose ideology it bears. And not surprisingly it comes with the same answer: its origin lies in the ruling values (Western, northern, white, male). The falsity of international ‘oneness’, in terms of being in another’s backyard became more visible when the Pacific Ocean turned out to be an important route for Asians to enter America and Canada, and most Americans and Canadians protested against any further intermingling of ‘Oriental and Occidental,…so laws were devised to stop Asian immigration’ (Leonard 1997:119). Furthermore, how much of the world’s population, especially people from the developing nations, can feel themselves as part of the migratory movement? Ahmed (2000:6) clearly mentions with much surprise that ‘only a tiny fragment of South Asia’s population thinks of migrating, and a tinier portion of that tiny fragment, actually migrate!’ (italics in original). Does this mean that those vast majorities who can not even think about migration remain territorialised? In this way the discussions about deterritorialisation has become a passport-centric phenomena which embodies the ‘fetishization of travel and migrancy’ (Chowdhury 2006:134) and hence elitist in nature since ‘among the various kinds of documents issued by governments and supposed to act as guarantee of belongingness, passports are the most elite’ (Das & Poole 2004:15). In my evaluation, the debate about deterritorialisation and territorialisation seems less sensitive to accommodate alternative views and hence more eager to impose a kind of academic imagination (with specific disciplinary trainings) over all the population of the world. Calhoun (2004), therefore, while encountering Beck’s (2002) assertion like: ‘in the second age of modernity the relationship between the state, business, and a society of citizens must be redefined’ (cited in Calhoun 2004:235-6) wants to know which state Beck is talking about. Calhoun (2004:236) criticises this generalising tendency by saying that ‘discussion of whether the state is growing stronger, declining, or remains effective in international relations or for securing domestic welfare is quite frequently carried on without specification as to whether the state in question is, say, the United States of America or Chad’. In the same vein criticism can be directed at those who talk about deterritorialisation, international oneness and so on where no empirical

collectivities within a wider society. Such mechanisms are generally developed to enhance the power of the ruling section’ (Smith 1969 cited in Tambiah 1989:346).

97 specification is found and these terms have simply been imposed over all migrants without considering their minute specificities characterised by diverse experiences. Katy Gardner (1995) in her book ‘Global migrants, local lives: Travel and transformation in rural Bangladesh’ finds no room to accommodate Appadurai’s theory of techno-scapes and media-scapes since these discussions are heavily preoccupied with the notions of the ‘developed’ world. She (1995:275) comments that ‘Appadurai’s techno-scapes and media-scapes while certainly reaching into places such as the Far East or the Gulf, and also perhaps incorporating some elite groups in Dhaka, have little influence on the lives of most rural Bangladeshis’. This means peoples’ spatial positionings attributed by unequal distribution of resources still serve to determine the differential access to territories other than their own. These discussions have influenced me to look for heterogeneity in every sphere of Bengali- Muslim migrants’ lives and a little curiosity in such heterogeneity has exposed me to a wide range of experiences that have enabled individual migrants to produce differentially constructed meaning about the same occasion and thing. For example, while the dominant discourses find the reasons responsible for South-Asian peoples’ migration to developed countries as mainly economic (for validation see Cheesman 2005:545) my investigation has found many other reasons. Two of my respondents, ‘B’ & ‘C’ (husband and wife respectively), expressed their reason for migrating to Australia in the following way:

B: I had a very good job in Bangladesh having sufficient salary to bear my family expenditure. Actually in most of the cases I didn’t have to spend most of my salary money since we lived in a joint family along with my mother, younger brother and sister. My father passed away in 1996 and left a huge property for us from where we earn considerable amount of money. So most of the family expenditures were met from these sources. A number of problems began soon after I got married. Actually I have got married with my matrilateral parallel cousin and there had been an old conflict between my family and that of my wife. And there seemed a lot of possibility to reappear that old conflict on a daily basis in my post-marital family life. I could easily buy or rent a new house and stay apart from my mother, brother and sister but I would have been socially looked down upon by the relatives, friends, neighbours and many other associates. Thus the only solution I could think is to come to Australia and everybody, back in Bangladesh, knows that I have come here for further study.

98 On the other hand ‘E’, a single male migrant living with other single migrants, related another story for his migration.

E: I love a girl back in my country. I know that both of our families would not take it positively and would never allow us to marry as you know that love marriage is still abhorred in our country. Nonetheless still I could marry her. But I am sure that her parents then would have filed an abduction case against my whole family and snatched her away from me. Instead of doing that I have made a very different but effective plan. I came here as a student and now have got the permanent residency. Now I am entitled to work as many hours as I can. I will now bring my fiancée to Australia as a student without letting her family to know my involvement. After her arrival we will get married. And I think both of our families will accept the marriage since we are far away from them and they don’t have any option to take any steps.

None of these stories bear any resemblance to the economic determinism as proposed by Cheesman (2005). Rather they indicate that people may have different aspirations for migration, emanating from their heterogeneous contexts and circumstances. It can therefore be said that conventional studies of the economic consequences of migration have generally been informed by the neoclassical perspective, which eventually ignores multiple contexts and circumstances that individuals face in their day to day lives. What is ignored is the fact that like every aspect of the individual lifeworld, the meaning of migration is also fluid, continually negotiated and redefined. These multi-dimensionalities of peoples’ experiences and negotiated meanings have therefore subjected me to the same dilemma that troubles Gardner (1995). To quote her: ‘Are we to examine its (migration) individual causes and effects or to use broader, structural paradigms, which pay little heed to such details’ (Gardner 1995:3 bracket mine). I think the answer lies in the last part of her question. As I am interested in knowing the details and diversities of the lifeworlds of my respondents, and the multiple ways through which they express themselves, with particular attention to the food rules based on the notion of Halal-Haram, I have decided to concentrate on the individual. This, I believe, will enable me to combat any kind of generalisation and essentialism.

99 Some other notions which are much valorised in migration studies are hibridity, cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. These also require closer scrutiny in this regard. All these notions are inextricably intertwined and emanate from the newness of contemporary migratory movements. Schillar, Basch and Szanton-Blanc have attempted to unfold this newness with their definition of transnationalism and transmigrants:

Our earlier conceptions of immigrants no longer suffice…now a new kind of migrating population is emerging, composed of those whose networks, activities and patterns of life encompass both their host and home societies. Their lives cut across national boundaries and bring two societies into a single social field…a new conceptualization is needed in order to come to terms with the experience and consciousness of this new migrant population. We call this new conceptualization ‘transnationalism’, and describe the new type of migrants as transmigrants (1992:1).

To denote the in-betweenness and local-global continuum, a wide range of terms have come into existence in social science of which hybridity (Nederveen-Pieterse 1995), third-space (Bhabha 1994), and creolisation (Hannerz 1996) have received wider recognition. The main thrust marked by these terms is that the increasing and intensified interaction among cultures stemming from the processes of global interconnections has altered the previous link between culture and territory where both were viewed as separate entities and hence dissolve the link between culture and territory or place. In this sense these terms have been celebrated as emancipatory epithets which signal ‘the struggle and resistance against imperialist power’ (Kraidy 2002 cited in Wang & Yeh 2005:176). I won’t dwell on this issue to know whether these conditions, as reflected by these terms, exist. But the problem that perplexes me is, whose experiences do these terms express? How much are these terms, especially when it is claimed that these conditions have enabled ‘ordinary people to escape control and domination “from above” by capital and the state’ (Guarnizo & Smith 2003:5), applicable to all populations of the world? Actually the trend in social sciences of inventing new terms (like those mentioned above) overlooks the restrictive and conditional immigration and refugee policies adopted by various states

100 to make their states inaccessible for people of other nationalities. This claim is substantiated by a comment produced by one of this study’s respondents ‘A’. He says:

Before coming to Australia I tried twice to go to America. I had admission in an American college and I lodged my application for visa assessment before the American Embassy in Bangladesh. Every time I had to pay a huge amount of money as visa assessment fees. But the result turned out negative all the time. I don’t know why I was refused every time despite having all valid documents and supporting papers. Then I tried for Australia and you see I am here.

Perhaps the post 9/11 situation has influenced American immigration authorities to harden their immigration policies - especially in relation to people whose religion is Islam and who are the citizens of a third world developing country. This may or may not be the case. But the end result demonstrates the fact that the same person considered eligible for entering into Australia was disqualified from having access to America40. Unfortunately very few of the discussions about transnationalism, hybridity through the border-crossing of people take this issue of differential access and discriminatory immigration policies, as adopted by certain countries, into consideration. In light of this, if we ask, whose hybridity is it? Then the answer remains the same: it is of those who have the privileged capacity to access Appadurai’s (1990) mediascapes, technoscapes and fianascapes. But this celebration of new ‘global configuration’ (Appadurai 1990:297) doesn’t consider the fact that ‘many in the South are illiterate and/or do not have the access to a television or hardware capable of receiving CNN and Rupert Murdoch’s Asia bases Star TV’

40 To know more about the issue of differential access visit the immigration authority’s website of Singapore. However, for a cursory understanding I am quoting some notable discriminatory policies outlined by certain immigration authorities to impose restriction of access to the citizens of some countries, mostly belonging to the Third World, or countries dominated by a Muslim population. For example, while people of a good number of countries are exempted from visa requirement to Singapore, people from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bangladesh, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Egypt, India, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, Myanmar, People's Republic of China, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia and Yemen require a visa. For a full account of these requirement details please visit the site: http://app.ica.gov.sg/travellers/entry/visa_requirements.asp.

Singapore has been cited here only as an example. But I believe a visit to most countries’ immigration websites will reveal similar discriminatory policies in terms of access by citizens of the Third world.

101 (Cheah 2006:493). Katy Gardner (1995) also concedes the same view while saying that ‘whilst across the globe people might be producing and consuming the same TV programmes, this does not mean that they share the same cultural interpretations of their activities, or their aspirations are the same (Gardner 1995:15). Such claims indicates that we have tried very little to decipher the diverse experiences and knowledge that people have; instead we have done a lot to invent theories about migrants and their movements backed by our disciplinary orientation, superiority as intellectuals and privileged positioning. In this way we actually ignore the multiplicities of actors’ actions and try to homogenise them with some common generalisations so as to fit them with our preferred theories. My fieldwork among the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney shows that most of the female migrants have come to Australia from Bangladesh because they are expected to accompany their husbands. Therefore, it was not a conscious choice made by them. If their husbands would decide to move to anywhere else, the wives would simply follow them since their Bengali and Islam informed lifeworld has constructed a gender norm different to many other people around the world. This implies that an event can have different interpretations across genders and this has received little attention in the theories outlined by authors who seem to be obsessed with their self-perceived newness of contemporary global interconnectedness. For explaining this tendency in other words I rely on Booth’s (1999) term ‘presentism’ to criticise such claims, which produce terms like ‘hybridity’, ‘creolization’ and ‘third-space’, for being ahistorical, ignorant about the complexity of the social world and for producing unfruitful generalisations (cited in Stivachtis 2006:26). I would rather feel comfortable with Friedman’s argument which claims that these notions have always been operating in peoples’ lives-be they transmigrants or localised people who could never think of migration. To quote him,

In the struggle against the racism of purity, hybridity invokes the dependent, not converse, notion of the mongrel. Instead of combating essentialism, it merely hybridises it (1999:236).

At this juncture I would like to draw attention towards the socio-historical discussion made in Chapter Four of this thesis to recapitulate how Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh have tried to adapt new experiences and knowledge brought about by

102 different people from around the world, how they have challenged any polarised puritanical attempt to impose any dominant version of identity and how they have rather always enjoyed to live with hybridity and to live with a mixture of purity and impurity. If a mixture of different types of experiences and knowledge remains ever present in peoples’ lives then to what extent is it possible to find this mixture in the notion of Halal-Haram? This question drives me to investigate the multiplicities of the reconstruction and reconfiguration of such a notion in peoples’ everyday life practices.

The all encompassing and generalising tendency embedded in a notion like ‘transnationalism’ can be challenged more if we ask whether this notion is equally celebrated by people who have the capacity of frequent travel and people who seldom think of it. Sarah J. Mahler (2003), in her study of Salvadorian migrants in the United States, explains that their unstable legal status in the United States, the untoward situation in El Salvador, and the high cost of travelling home, all produce a condition for her informants that make them unable to think of travelling back and forth between El Salvador and the United States. As a result her informants do not enjoy living in transnational “circuits” (Mahler 2003:79-80). My fieldwork has also revealed similar factors about most of my respondents, for whom frequent travel signifies a waste of valuable money. Another unfortunate case of a refugee migrant, who has been here in Sydney for the last ten years, reveals that he has been ‘trapped’ in his overseas life since his status is yet to be finalised by the courts and hence he will not be allowed to re-enter if he leaves Australia before the final decision has been made by courts. While he hopes for a favourable outcome his stay in Australia will be for an unpredictable duration. Does this refugee feel anything but the change of his location from Bangladesh to Australia? It merely suggests that he has been precariously territorialised - which is a far cry from deterritorialisation.

Similar criticism can also be directed at cosmopolitanism. Research on migration and globalisation, along with the various transgression concepts mentioned above, are also trying to get the social sciences to use the concept of cosmopolitanism which may be rooted in Kant’s (1968) insistence on the significance of ‘knowledge of man as a citizen of the world’ (cited in Cheah 2006:487). Again I find no other alternative but to be suspicious about the elite-centric and Eurocentric construction of

103 cosmopolitanism which is heavily dependent for its connotation upon privileged world travellers who are endowed and empowered with their advantageous passports and citizenships. Werbner (2006:497) challenges the idea of a borderless cosmopolitan community since such a notion appears to be misleading when we encounter millions of refugees and migrants fleeing violence and poverty (Werbner 2006:497). In the same vein Calhoun (2004) clearly states the notion of cosmopolitanism as an illusion cultivated by privileged elites. He concedes that,

“Good” passports and easy access to visa, international credit cards, and membership in airline clubs, invitations from conference organizers and organizational contracts all facilitate a kind of inhabitation (if not necessarily citizenship) of the world as an apparent whole…It (cosmopolitanism) is the culture of those who attend Harvard and the London School of Economics, who read The Economist and Le Monde, who recognize Mozart’s music as universal, and who can discuss the relative merits of Australian, French, and Chilean wines. It is also a culture in which secularism seems natural and religion odd, and in which respect for human rights is assumed but the notion of fundamental economic redistribution is radical and controversial (Calhoun 2004:245-6 second bracket mine).

Calhoun’s (2004) statement signifies that by asserting their self-perceived ‘cosmopolitanism’ over all the population of the world the cosmopolitan elites are exercising their power to essentialise peoples’ diverse experiences and knowledge and hence dismiss any opportunity of self-definition which marginal people feel as the only right they posses. Calhoun (2004) thus poses his suspicion while encountering Ulrich Beck’s (2003) assertion that ‘to belong or not to belong, that is the cosmopolitan question’ (cited in Calhoun 2004: 244). For Calhoun (2004:244) what is most crucial in these sorts of claims about cosmopolitanism is that some people possess the power, endowment and access to ask the question whereas the rest are left alone disempowered, muted and colonised who are only expected to assimilate with the dominant values. Calhoun’s (2004) critical understanding helps us to comprehend the conviction that the end of the age of the ‘politics of difference’ is ensuing and what is replacing it can be termed the ‘politics of sameness’. Partha Chaterjee (1995:20) thus questions the idea of ‘hybridisation’ and says that ‘in spite of making a plea for acknowledging variableness and contingency, it manages to

104 impose, paradoxically, a quality of sameness upon all products of dissemination. How are we to distinguish between hybrid and hybrid? How do we pin down the location of the local’? Chaterjee’s (1995) point reminds us of the fact that there remains much to discuss yet about the inequalities operating behind the difference between Western and Eastern notion of cosmopolitanism, transnationalism, globalisation, democracy, citizenship, secularism, religion and society as a whole. Calhoun’s (2004:237) critical stance toward this situation holds the conviction: ‘The liberal state is not neutral. Cosmopolitan civil society is not neutral. Even the English language is not neutral. This doesn’t mean that any of the three is bad, only that they are not equally accessible to everyone and do not equally express the interests of everyone’. However, I don’t think that I am in a position to issue a death certificate for a forcefully up-coming style of writing about migration; indeed that would be some sort of flagrant arrogance. I have already said earlier that I do agree with the coexistence of purity and impurity in peoples’ lives. What I am disturbed with is the fact that most of the discussions outlined by ‘the celebrators’ don’t ponder the fact that there can be differences between privileged and unprivileged notions of cosmopolitanism. More disturbing yet, is to find the claims about the newness of such notions, which, according to Eurocentric views, is thought to be triggered by Kant as stated earlier. In accordance with these claims every student interested about ideas like cosmopolitanism must have a knowledge of Kant and other Western scholars who talk and write on this issue. But most Western scholars never feel any interest in looking at the wisdom of a Bengali folk song of the 18th century which preaches:

Nanan boron gaabhiray tor ekoi boron doodh, Jagat Bharamiya, dekhlam ekoi maayer poot.

[The cow’s skin may take many hues but its milk is white everywhere, Similarly all men and women are offspring of the same Mother Eve].

(Source: Fakhruddin 2005)

This lyric clearly reflects that there can be a Bengali informed cosmopolitanism that again can be different among the people in terms of status, regionalism, sectarianism, age, gender and so on. Such widespread heterogeneities in constructing meanings, even of the same account, have led me to combat generalisations and to look for the circumstances under which people, equipped with their experiential knowledge,

105 produce multiple meanings and diverse manifestations of the same account and get into actions.

At his juncture it seems necessary to contribute a few words about Australia’s multiculturalism which, I believe, also serves as a source for generalising and essentialising migrants and in particular Islam and Muslim communities.

Multiculturalism and the politics of homogenisation The adoption of multiculturalism as an official policy by the Australian government began in the mid-1970s. It was the Minister for Immigration in the Whitlam Government, A. J. Grassby, who in 1973 produced a paper titled as ‘A multi-cultural society for the future’ with an aim to put an end to the old doctrine of assimilation, based on the notion of the White Australia Policy, and convened a pluralistic view ‘of a truly just society in which all components can enjoy freedom to make their own distinctive contributions to the family of the nation’ (cited in Thomas 2001:17). This means that the multicultural model contrasts the assimilation model and tends to promote a pluralistic approach and to present the feasibility of cultures maintaining distinct identities. In it, it is assumed that, the individual maintains a positive identity as a member of his/her culture of origin while at the same time developing a positive identity by engaging in complex institutional sharing with the larger political entity comprised of other cultural groups (La Framboise et al. 1993:401). However, despite having an optimistic vision the idea and practice of multiculturalism still cannot escape the distinctions of minority and majority and hence is itself a reflection of the subterranean existence of sundry discriminations. Ghassan Hage (1998) exquisitely demonstrates the extent multiculturalism is a managerial concept which eventually consolidates the maintenance of white power in Australian society. Citing quotidian examples, like the comments made by the former Minister for Immigration, Phillip Ruddock, while addressing a meeting of Arab Australians, and the domination of white Australians in the decision making team of Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, Hage (1998) expresses his scepticism about multiculturalism (cited in Thomas 2001:16-7). However, my intention is not to identify the shortcomings of Australia’s multiculturalism in a comprehensive way. Rather I will concentrate on the ways it helps producing a homogenous and essentialised notion about Islam and Muslim communities.

106 Though Muslims in Australia have migrated from various countries with their heterogeneous interpretations about how to actualise Islam in their day to day lives and with their heterogeneous ethnic identities, a profound tendency has been found to provide a homogenous portrayal of a single Muslim community prior to downplaying the heterogeneities they display in real life situations. No matter whether they are from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Pakistan, Egypt or Bangladesh, a conflated identity is always ready for them, that is they are Muslim first41. Humphrey (2001:35) deplores the fact that the notion of ‘Muslimness’ in Western multicultural societies is reduced, simplified, essentialised and homogenised while their vast diversities are ignored. While most of the studies on Muslim migrants tend to show that there exists a universal feeling among Muslims which is reflected in their inclination for building a universalised ‘Ummah’ (world-wide Islamic community), these studies don’t try to ask the question - why do the Muslims of a particular country of origin offer their prayers in separate mosques from those attended by other Muslim nationalities? We don’t find any systematic study that attempts to investigate why mosques are divided along ethnic lines. The politics of othering here is not solely based on the notion of difference; rather a politics of sameness is equally at work where Muslims of heterogeneous backgrounds and country of origin are evaluated as the same and then negotiated as other, based on the perceived differences between Muslims and non-Muslims. Avtar Brah comes up with the opinion that ‘it is essentially a discourse about “Ethnic Other”-one which ethnicises ethnicity’ (1996:230). Norbert Elias (1994) also notices the politics behind the whole process as he says that dominant groups tend to ‘attribute to its outsider group as a whole the “bad” characteristics of that group’s “worst” section-of its anomic minority’ (cited in Roald 2002:103). But it would be misleading to mark the orientalist view as the lone reason for such essentialisation. Rather the whole process is equally complemented by Islamists, as claimed earlier, who also attempt to homogenise Islam by showing that Muslims possess- irrespective of their plurality, heterogeneous social and

41 Rod Chalmers’ (1998) study of Bangladeshi migrants in Camden, UK, unequivocally challenges this essentialised and hegemonic construction. His survey about self-identification reveals that 95 percent of his respondents identified themselves as Bangladeshi first, second choice was Sylheti and most of them opted for Muslim identity as a third choice (Chalmers 1998:124). A similar claim has also come from the linguist Monica Klaiman (1990). In Klaiman’s (1990) view for the majority of Bangladeshis ‘the basis of their Bengali identity is not genetic and not religious, but linguistic and the bulk of the population perceives commonality of language as the principal basis of social unity’ (cited in Chalmers 1998:123).

107 geographical origins, sects, linguistic and national backgrounds (Humphrey 2001:35)- a similar and static interpretation about their religion. This image as set by Islamists is found to be propagandised by the media as shown earlier. Also in Australia ‘government agencies have tended to overlook differences among Muslims and to view Muslim communities as a single unit’ (Saeed & Akbarzadeh 2001:7). The way the Australian Bureau of Statistics collects information about religious affiliation for Census data vindicates my claim clearly. While Christians are shown as divided into more than sixty sects (like Ukrainian Catholic, Assyrian Church of the East, Greek Orthodox, Macedonian Orthodox) Muslims are shown in only one category, that is Islam (ABS 2001 Census). Even the most visible division, in terms of affiliation, between the Sunnis and the Shiates has not been documented let alone the sectarian divisions along different lines of Mazhabs (school of legal thought). What kind of politics is embedded here? The politics lies in the inadequate effort intended to address some homogenised problems of Muslims and to outline some easily applicable solutions. Because ignorance of the diverse social and ethnic backgrounds of various Muslim communities can pave the way for making a readymade image of ‘a single Muslim community with uniform needs and aspirations’ (Saeed & Akbarzadeh 2001:2). This static and stereotyped image of a single Muslim community has also been observed as a prevalent factor in the Australian press and in school text books. Fethi Mansouri’s (2005) study helps us to understand the report of the National Inquiry into racist violence in Australia. The inquiry reports that anti- Muslim views are stemming from some generalised and stereotyped feelings like: Muslims are violent, fundamentalists, conservative about women, moral issues and dietary restrictions42 (Mansouri 2005: 158).

Such a stereotypical, monolithic and essentialised image of identity may eventually lead towards a wide range of consequences for migrant people and for the host country’s population as well. It may invoke a feeling in the host country and its populations to evaluate themselves as being in charge of the populations living in their territory but also of a category of people loyal to the territory of another state.

42 Muslims are conservative about their dietary preferences influenced by the Koranic distinction between Halal and Haram- among the vast list of misconceptions I have picked up this particular misconception to investigate since I believe that the notion of Halal-Haram varies from individual to individual according to their circumstances.

108 Thus there remains every possibility for the migrant people to be treated as ‘proxy citizens’ and often in a politically motivated way that can entail not only a non- accommodative attitude towards them but also a violation of their human rights. To counteract any essentialising trend we should premise upon the wide variety of individual narratives and their changing characteristics over time and space. It means attention should be given to agency. We are required to study migrant people as active social agents. It means migrant peoples’ self-images can play a crucial role and they may be radically different from what they are commonly assumed to be. Thus while researching migration we must welcome the multiplicity of migrant identities that is belonging is always plural in its ties, its imagination, memory, sense of history, and perception of the present.

Combating the misconceptions After reviewing a large number of studies that analyse Islam and Muslim communities I was presented with the problem of how to contribute to the struggle against the prevailing misconceptions. Then I began to fall back on the quotidian, the small questions of everyday life. I was intrigued by the way people craft much of their construction of foodscape43 around the details of everyday existence. That is what drew me to food, with particular emphasis on the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney and their subjective constructions of the notion of Halal and Haram.

Before beginning my fieldwork I was perplexed by the dilemma of starting with a hypothesis, as found in most of the studies, that Muslim migrants are ‘more religious than they were before they left home since religion is one of the important identity markers that helps them preserve individual self-awareness and cohesion in a group’ (see Williams 1988:11 as an evidence). Should I base my investigation on the Bengali-Muslim migrants of Sydney on the equation: Migration = Identity crisis = more religious = mitigation of crisis? Should I agree with Bouma, Daw and Munawar’s proposition that tends to claim that with the growing number of mosques ‘now existing in all Australian capital cities and in many regional centres, Muslims

43 By the term ‘foodscape’ I mean notion of culinary practice evolved over time and space - out of the interactions of a number of factors such as language, region, ethnicity, ecology and environment, social-history, gender, age, class, status and so on.

109 can seek help from them and are thus drawn into mosque life’ (Bouma 1994 cited in Bouma et al. 2001:58)?

My dilemma kept increasing soon after I have started my fieldwork. It may sound a bit strange to claim that all of my respondents interviewed were not found to be at all interested seeking help from mosques or to be associated with any mosque centered activities, except for offering prayers, which was also infrequent. With this finding I started to feel a bit hesitant since it went against the dominant mode of findings hitherto observed. Again the study done by Ahmed (2000) helped to mitigate that hesitation as his study shows that for the Bengali Muslim migrants of Japan religion does not play any significant role and only 8 percent of his respondents visit mosques regularly (Ahmed 2000:9). I also felt relieved to find Cesari’s (2002) study which reveals that the second-generation North-African Muslims in France have not received much religious education at home since most of their parents were not highly committed to observing Islam in every aspect of their life (Cesari 2002:41). Sander’s (1993) study of the immigrants from Iran and Iraq in Sweden also shows that many of them ‘are less religiously inclined’ (cited in Roald 2002:102).

In this context I would like to concentrate on a study conducted by Yunas Samad (1996) of the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in Britain. His study (1996) claims that while the Rushdie affair erroneously helps in formulating a theory which suggests that the ensuing clash of civilisation will be between Islam and the West, it would be more misleading to invent any homogenised version of a single Muslim community based on the notion that all Muslims have stood together to protest against the Satanic Verses. He selects the Sylhetis (inhabitants of Sylhet district of Bangladesh who represent the highest number of Bangladeshi migrants in the UK) of Tower Hamlets and the Mirpuris (inhabitants of Mirpur of Pakistan) of Bradford as his place of investigation and shows that when it came to the issue of protesting against the Satanic Verses:

…there was considerable differentiation between the responses of the largely Sylheti population of Tower Hamlets and the largely Mirpuri population of Bradford. The Mirpuris of Bradford established themselves at the head of the anti-Rushdie campaign, not only nationally, but internationally. In contrast was

110 the muted response of the Sylhetis of Tower Hamlets…In Bradford when the Rushdie agitation exploded the Mirpuri community took it as an insult to injury…In tower Hamlets the picture was quite different. The Rushdie controversy was a low key affair in comparison to Bradford where there was innumerable numbers of demonstrations and even conflicts with the police (Samad 1996:90-1; 96).

This means people’s heterogeneous contexts, that is their socio-historical background, notion of actualising religion, ethnic identity, country of origin and so on. still serve to produce multiplicities and diversities in responding to the same event. A group of Islamists may nourish a utopian hope for a conflated Ummah centric identity for all Muslims of the world, but the realities of life demonstrate something different. At this juncture, I would like to refer to a conversation between a Bangladeshi migrant taxi driver and his female American passenger (O’Malley 2005). I believe this conversation will show how a lay taxi driver evaluates his version of Islam and Muslimness.

The passenger’s narrative gives us some information about the cab driver: He has one day off a week, and goes to the movies, and has a couple of beers at a local pub. He enjoys the pub, and enjoys his friends there.

Then their conversation goes like this:

Cab driver: Bangladesh is a democracy, a new democracy, and on its way to be a functioning one. We are not like Pakistan.

Lady passenger: What would you say is the difference between you guys and Pakistan?

Cab driver: Well, Pakistan is HARD Muslim. We are not HARD Muslim.

Lady passenger: What do you mean by hard?

Cab driver: Well ... they are illiterate. They only are interested in religion. They don't care about anything else. They don't believe women should be educated. The military controls everything.

111 Lady passenger: So ... what is going to happen with Pakistan, do you think? Is this just going to go from bad to worse, you think?

Cab driver: Miss, it is not a good situation. Pakistan is a country full of lunatics.

The research done by Yanus Samad (1996) and the above mentioned conversation indicate that Muslim people of different regions may respond in different ways while confronting the issue of religion. Apart from this the overall discussion in this chapter also signifies the fact that in most of the studies conducted on migration and related phenomena, no attempt has been made to analyse individual migrants in the light of their historical particularity, which is rooted in their regionally informed identity, ethnicity, notion about gender and age, diverse reasons of migration, pre and post migration internal dynamics and so on. What is more problematic in these studies is that they have first discovered some ‘elite-centric’ phenomena and theory, and then have tried to impose those over all individuals prior to having the conviction that individuals posses the same equation as the observers and in this way a vast array of diversities have been ignored, which in turn help to produce a static, changeless, essentialised and generalised version of identities. But I believe our attempt to see the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney with their regionally informed specificities will lead us to defy popular assumptions that Islam and Muslim communities represent a monolithic culture. To validate my claim I will therefore analyse individuals’ circumstances through which they go for actions and interactions ‘with outcomes that are indeterminate for the actors at the time of their action’ (Smart & Smart 2003:108) and this way of approaching reality will enable us to ‘capture the flavour of social life more authentically than ex post facto structural analysis’ (Smart & Smart 2003:108). Following this line of understanding I will try to analyse the food rules and associated prohibitions of the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney with the hypothesis that the negotiations of food rules and associated prescriptions and proscriptions are not going to lead us to explore any generalisable ‘cultural truth’ (Vayda 1994:320), but rather they will expose us to enormous variations as these can be reconstructed, contested and renegotiated according to the situation individuals encounter in their day-to-day lives.

112 Chapter VI

Hybridity in the stomach: Authoritative and every day constructions of Halal-Haram

The strictly and rigidly normative thrust of the Islamicist approach has prevented the appreciation of the bewildering diversity of beliefs, rituals and religious practices that underlies the faith in different parts of the world (Ahmad 1981:1).

In this chapter I would like to examine the multiplicities and variability of human behaviour characterised by the gaps between ideal and reality and/or doctrine and action with an aim to support my theoretical leanings towards anti-essentialism. The context of this research, theoretical underpinnings, socio-historical materials significant for the Bengali-Muslim migrants of Sydney and methodology as discussed in the preceding chapters serve as the prime influential factors to challenge the hitherto taken for granted nature of most of the relevant theories and have therefore encouraged me to look beyond generalisation while investigating human identity and action. Among a vast range of activities I have opted for the notion of Halal-Haram food rules of Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney, which I believe is not solely dependent on scriptural and authoritative constructions but rather it is dependent on multiple factors like country of origins, age, sex and socio-historical background which eventually form the diverse stock of experiences and knowledge of the individuals. And due to these diversities in individuals’ stock of experiences and knowledge, individuals, as this research contends, constantly reconstruct, remodify and renegotiate the basis of their every day actions. This enables them to challenge any polarised and essentialised version of their identities since the actors want the door of identity formation open for them so that they can step into the next version of their identities. Thus the actors always prefer to live with hybridity and impurity which resist any kind of pure, static and monolithic image of selfhood. In claiming so the research is not at all interested in asserting that notions like hybridity and impurity are only the outcome of cross-border migration and hence new. But rather it has been claimed in Chapter Four and Five that peoples are likely to celebrate hybridity and impurity even in their localised positionings since for them these notions secure the freedom of selfhood. Based on that belief in Chapter Two some popular studies pertinent to food rules have been overviewed, which I believe paid no attention to

113 inconsistencies of human behaviour related to food and hence in a way attempt to generalise and essentialise peoples’ identity by the authors’ own version of determinism. In this chapter I have therefore decided to investigate the multidimensionality of peoples’ actions through the notion of Haram-Haram food rules as practised by Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney in their day to day lives, which I believe is far more different and diverse than the authoritative static notion of Halal-Haram. In order to prove my conviction the case of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils has been adopted here as it is regarded as the fundamental authority to define any notion related to the Islamic way of life, of which Halal- Haram constitutes one of the most important and significant factors.

Canonisation of Halal-Haram: The case of the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (AFIC)

The Australian Federation of Islamic Councils is the official representative organisation of all the Muslims in Australia and serves as the central body for different Islamic councils formed in different states of Australia (at present there are nine state based Islamic councils in Australia that are controlled and coordinated by the AFIC). Other than the state based Islamic councils it also serves as the guardian for various Islamic councils constituted along ethno-national lines. The federation possesses the overall charge of defining, dictating, organising and propagating interpretations of activities linked to the practice of Islam. The council wields the authority to promulgate Fatwa, organise the administration of mosques, fix the dates (according to the lunar calendar) of religious festivals, issue certificates guaranteeing the Halal status of food and so on. In doing all these activities the federation and the councils under its umbrella depend on the definitions and interpretations of the Koran, on matters related to Muslim religious life that enables them to justify their decisions. It was established in 1964 with a name Australian Federation of Islamic Societies (AFIS), which has later been renamed as the Australian Federation of Islamic Councils (Humphrey 2001:27). In 1974 Dr. Ali Kettani and Dr. Abdullah al-Zayed from Saudi Arabia visited Australia and empowered AFIC as the lone representative of Muslims in Australia and thus authorised them as the sole organisation to certify the Halal nature of meat. In February 1976 a Saudi Royal Decree proclaimed that for the purpose of importing meat from Australia only the AFIC’s Halal certificate would

114 be officially valued. Later in 1980 The United Arab Emirates and in 1982 Kuwait endorsed the Halal certification by AFIC as officially acceptable. As time passed the AFIC also extended its role by introducing the notion of non-meat Halal certification (Humphrey 2001:27-8). In this study, therefore, we have taken the case of the AFIC since it exercises absolute institutional authority to interpret various theological doctrines related to Muslims and their ways of life. As part of its official authority and dominant position in defining and canonising the issues pertinent to Muslim religious life the AFIC, while defining the Halal and Haram nature of food, has rested upon the prescriptions and proscriptions of the Koran. A simple look over the website maintained by the AFIC will reveal this44. Prior to resorting to various Koranic verses the AFIC tends to informs us that:

‘Forbidden unto you (for food) are: carrion, and blood, and swine flesh, and that which hath been dedicated unto any other than Allah, and the strangled, and the dead through beating, and the dead through falling from a height, and that hath been killed by the gorging of horns, and the devoured of wild beasts saving that which ye make lawful and that which hath been immolated to idols, and that ye swear by the divining arrows.

Forbidden to you is anything that dies by itself, and blood and pork, as well as whatever has been consecrated to something besides Allah, and whatever has been strangled, beaten to death, trapped in a pit, gored, and what some beast of prey has begun to eat, unless you give it the final blow; and what has been slaughtered before some idol, or what you divide up in a raffle; (all) that is immoral!’ (Sura: Al Ma’idah, Verse: 3).

‘O ye who believe! Strong drinks and games of chance, and idols and divining arrows are only an infamy of Satan’s handiwork, leave it aside in order that ye may succeed’ (Sura: Al Ma’idah, Verse: 90).

From the website of the AFIC we can have a list of animals and drinks which are considered Haram for Muslims. These are:

44 In order to collect information on the ways the AFIC defines, controls and disseminates the notion of Halal-Haram food rules I have largely depended on the website of AFIC www.afic.com.au. Quotation marks are used to acknowledge the fact that these statements have been taken from the website of the AFIC. In addition to that an exclusive interview has also been conducted with one of the office bearers of the AFIC and some important statements have been cited from that interview.

115 ‘swine including all by-products, insects considered ugly or filthy such as worms, lice, flies, etc., animals with fangs such as tigers, lions, cats etc, birds that have talons with which they catch their prey such as owls, eagles, etc., animals which Islam encourages to kill such as scorpions, centipedes, rats etc, dogs, animals which Islam forbids to kill such as bees etc., animals which have toxins, poisons or produce ill effects when eaten such as some fish etc., amphibian animals such as crocodiles, turtles, frogs etc., meat (limbs, tails etc.) which have been cut from a live animal, lawful animals not slaughtered according to Islamic rites. (Fish is exempt from slaughtering), carrion or dead animals, poisonous drinks, intoxicating drinks etc’.

According to the AFIC animals for lawful consumption must be slaughtered according to Islamic laws. These stipulate: ‘Slaughtering must be done by a sound- minded Muslim, to sever the blood and respiratory channels of the animal, using a sharp cutting tool such as knife’. Moreover ‘the name of Allah must be pronounced at the time of slaughtering’.

If we go through the definitions of Halal and Haram food rules as posted on the AFIC’s website we will find that the definitions directly resemble the theological and scriptural meanings of food rules and prohibitions. In this sense the AFIC demonstrates its adherence to high Islam, as marked by Gellner (1969) mentioned in Chapter Three of this research, which is scripturalist, rule-oriented, puritanical, anti- ecstatic and literal. In this way the AFIC helps to essentialise Islam since, for it, ‘there is only one Islam’45. The definitions of Halal and Haram food rules and prohibitions therefore leave no room to consider the fact that the lay people may have their own individualised constructions of Halal and Haram as emanating from the practicalities of their life courses. This is the hallmark of folk Islam.

In light of this, this study, instead of attempting to discover any formulaic, abstract and essentialised structure of the variability of human action, has adopted the individual and her/his experiences as the unit of analysis. But before proceeding

45 Islam has not only been treated differently along ethno-national lines, it has also been adopted and practised differently within a given ethnic group. The case of Bangladesh can be taken into consideration here - which has elaborately been described in Chapter Four of this research. Moreover, it is sufficient is to look back over the distinction between Pakistani and Bangladeshi versions of Islam as indicated by the Bangladeshi cab driver mentioned in Chapter Five. Perhaps, keeping these diversities in mind, Edward Said (2001b) titles his article ‘There are many Islams’.

116 further to our empirical findings it would be interesting to mention some important parts of my conversation with one of the office bearers of the AFIC. It seems interesting in the sense that, despite their vow to uphold the image of a single Islam, the reality of multiplicity can hardly be escaped. For example, the former coordinator, according to the office bearer, was extremely rigid about the distinction between Halal and Haram. He used to oppose the use of the same trolley by the airlines for Halal and non-Halal foods. According to him, Halal foods had to be served in a separate trolley. This kind of inflexible attitude caused considerable damage to the business of the AFIC since people started to move to other certification authorities run by some independent individuals who have obtained accreditations from various overseas countries. This means the degree of the Halal and Haram nature of foods has been a disputed issue also among the various office bearers. More interesting issues arise from the following conversation:

I have seen some abattoirs, certified Halal by an independent inspector who has collected the accreditation from Mexico (!), which don’t have any Muslim slaughterer. How can you eat animals slaughtered by a non-Muslim! You know, one day a cow, after being slaughtered, was found to be injured by the skull and the slaughterer was challenged by someone since eating injured animal is Haram in Islam. As consequences of the dispute they called us and after investigating the whole thing we opined that it would be Haram to consume the flesh of that cow. But soon after we left they invited an independent inspector who gave the opposite verdict. And at last the meat of that cow was sold as Halal!

Quite clearly, this means the constructions of Halal-Haram are disputed even among the certification authorities themselves. If they would rely solely upon the Koran then there would be one single definition. But the above mentioned example clearly demonstrates that diverse experiences and knowledge lead towards different meanings of Halal-Haram. This research therefore aims to discover the discrepancies between practice and discourse which, according to Abu-Lughod as discussed in the methodology chapter of this research, should be treated as a resource not a liability for researching human life. In the following discussion, outlined from my conversation with the Bengali-Muslim respondents in Sydney, I will try to exhibit and discuss how individuals in the light of their diverse experiences and knowledge re

117 construct and renegotiate the scriptural/theological and authoritative definitions of Halal and Haram while ‘acting on the world’. The whole discussion at the end, I believe, will enable us to discover how my Bengali-Muslim respondents negotiate their ethnic identity as Bengali and religious identity as Muslim.

Constructions of Halal-Haram in every day life: The case of the Bengali- Muslim migrants in Sydney

This section concentrates on my field observations that have exposed me to a wide variety of perceptions related to Halal-Haram food rules and prohibitions. The preceding discussions of this research have already showed, I believe, which direction I want this research to lead. This is a study about inconsistencies, creativity and variable human behaviour through which I will eventually try to combat the monolithic image that has been constructed about Islam and Muslim communities in general. I have already showed the theoretical and socio-historical reasons that pave the way for differential treatment of Islam among diverse practitioners, since along with Islam various other factors like ethno-historical background, regionally informed gender and age norms, and practicalities of everyday life followed by diverse experiences and knowledge also play a crucial role in forming individuals’ identities, which are in turn flexible in nature. And it is this flexibility that has actually encouraged me to avoid any structuralist and culturalist descriptions in order to expose me to the bewildering diversities of human actions. Among various human activities I have opted for the Halal-Haram food rules and prohibitions of Bengali- Muslims in Sydney who are citizens of an Islamic state as part of their nominal identity but cultivate a syncretistic tradition as part of their virtual identity. The fourth chapter of this research has incorporated a large discussion to demonstrate how a syncretistic tradition had developed in Bangladesh which had never tried to discard Islam but attempted to make a blend of Islamic and local indigenous practices to fit everyday experiential realities. On the other hand we have also seen how the essentialist tendencies adopted by the religious and ethno-nationalist purists have tried to impose their version of identity on the people of Bangladesh. These purists cum elites have received enormous emphasis in scholarly literature due to their organisational visibility and hence most of our discussions on identity have failed to escape the essentialist fervour. I, therefore, in doing this research have decided to

118 highlight ‘free floating’ individual Bengali-Muslim migrants to know their ways of treating the notion of Halal-Haram in their everyday life.

Before approaching the conversation I had with my respondents let me present some other interesting factors about contemporary Bangladesh which will justify my inclination to discover the gaps between ideals and realities or doctrines and actions. I would like to start with an e-mail communication between two Bengali-Muslim friends from Bangladesh. Both of them are members of a yahoo group mail which has been formed by a group of individuals inspired by their school based friendship. All of them started their schooling in the same school, in 1982. The school is a residential school and can accommodate more than one thousand students. All the individuals attached to this group mail lived together for twelve years, in the same hostel based residential school in Dhaka, Bangladesh to undertake their secondary and higher secondary school certificates. The group mail is the outcome of a long standing friendship among these individuals. Two of my Bengali-Muslim migrant respondents belong to this group and one of them has described the school to me, hostel life and their yahoo group mail connection. While planning to write this chapter he gave me a copy of one recent message sent by one of his Bangladeshi mates (hereafter Y) in responding to an invitation to a party which is going to be organised by another of his mates (hereafter Z) to celebrate his appointment to a new job in Bangladesh. The way the group members write their mail is somewhat interesting. They prefer to compose their messages in Bengali words with the English alphabet since there is no popular and user friendly software to write mails in Bengali words with the Bengali alphabet. Thus I am translating the mail sent by Y. While invited by Z to celebrate the occasion of Z’s new job appointment Y congratulated Z and then expressed his desired drinks for the menu in the following way:

Khoooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooob goooooooooooooooooooooooooood News!!...Valo laglo dost…All the breast!!! Party kobe hobe?? immediately party chai…Maal khamu, valo whisky & Vodka rakhbi kintu!!!

Take care

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Y Uttora Model Town Dhaka, Bangladesh

Translated version: Very good news. I am feeling glad. All the breast46!!!

When the party gonna be held?? We want it immediately…We want hard drinks, there must be good whisky and Vodka!!!

Take care

Y Uttora Model Town Dhaka, Bangladesh

(See appendix D to look at the original version)

The correspondence above may seem contrasting for those scholars who seek Islamic organisations for getting help to contact respondents and ultimately receive those individuals as respondents who are attached with these organisations and hence try to uphold an essentialised version of identity. Accordingly, a lay person having no/or scant knowledge about Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh may argue that while in Sydney (and in terms of integration) they would encounter a wide range of coping problems in a non-Muslim situation since their ‘psychic maps’ are stubbornly made with such strict and rigid Islamic sanctions that leave Bengali-Muslims with little room for adjustment to such a non-Muslim cultural space. But the aforementioned correspondence and the historical journey, discussed earlier, travelled by Bengali- Muslims in Sydney show that this kind of perception will stand for a partial truth. It is undeniable that like other religions Islam also wants it followers to go through the scriptural principles set by the Koran and Hadith in a strict legalistic way. But if we

46 According to my respondent Y always prefers to use the word breast instead of the word best. This is the way, I believe, Y as a bricoleur uses a word from English language in a totally different manner and meaning. This example vindicates my earlier claim outlined in chapter four that popular culture runs comfortably with the asymmetry between meaning (signified) and word (signifier) which is eventually reflected in the subsequent asymmetry between ideals and realities or doctrines and actions.

120 believe the faith holders, like blind devotees, follow those commands without any internal modification then we will be locked up in a monolithic view and we will start to surrender ourselves to the ‘thingness’ of Islam. What comes true? Is Islam the cause of its followers’ interaction or the end of their interaction? May be both ways are interwoven in a continuous process of reconstruction and reconfiguration. The malleability of Islamic prescription and proscriptions in the local context has already been discussed earlier. This malleability, I would like to propose, has paved the way for Bengali-Muslims in Sydney to adapt themselves to the diverse socio-cultural space of Sydney, which eventually enables them to construct alternative versions of Halal-Haram food rules.

At this point it should be stated that there is no way to think Z’s inclination to consume hard drinks should be treated as an exception. If we look at various Bengali songs, prior to holding the belief that as a product of social reality language reflects the behaviour of the community that speaks it, we will be able to find the place of alcohol in Bengali secular identity, which is rooted in the syncretism of Bangladesh. Some of the songs are cited below to illustrate this:

1. Taler rosher roshik ami, hoina behush betal Botol botol gile jara tarai holo metal… (I am the admirer of brewed palm juice, but that can’t make me drunk or insane. Those who drink bottles after bottles get drunk)

2. Rosh khaia hoia matal, oi dekho hat foshke jai gorar lagam… (I am not able to hold the reins of the horse since I am too drunk to do that)

Many similar songs are regularly composed and sung in Bangladesh, indicating the place of alcohol in Bengali-informed identity. This realisation has led me to ask the question: do the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney, who don’t consider it problematic to consume alcohol or to allow others to do so, share the same notion of Halal-Haram as do Islamists?

121 We will encounter a similar question if we take a close look at the ways Eid-ul Fitr and Eid-ul Adha47, two of the most important religious festivals of Muslims, are celebrated in Bangladesh. If these festivals are treated only through religious means devoid of any connection to the syncretism of Bengali-informed Islam then it should have been observed by the puritanical and essentialised version of only religious identity. But if we go through a number of magazines and newspapers from Bangladesh it is apparent that all of them publish special Eid copies and in these enormous emphasis is given to Eid fashion, to let the reader know about recent fashion trends and locations of various fashion houses so that they can conveniently buy their favourite dresses to celebrate the occasion of Eid. Numerous photographs have been posted to demonstrate the visual image of such fashion trends. One such photograph is given below:

Photograph 5: Eid fashion 2006 Photograph by: Unanimous; Source: http://www.e-mela.com/fashion/ viewed on: December 29, 2006.

The question that follows is: do the Bengali-Muslim migrants, that don’t bother with religious versions of dress code, hold the same notion of Halal-Haram as do the adherents of high Islam?

47 Eid-ul Fitr marks the end of the Arabic month of Ramadan, the month of fasting. Eid-ul Adha is celebrated on the tenth day of the Arabic month of Dhul Hijja which marks the sacrifice of animals.

122 By the same token, some photographs, showing how Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh celebrate the spring festival on February 13th each year, Valentines Day on February14th, Language Martyrs Day on February 21st and the Bengali New Year on April 14th each year, poses a challenge to the perception that Islamic states equates only with images of burqa (veil) clad women and mullahs. Photographs below illustrate the festivities as observed by Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh on the days mentioned above:

Photograph 6: Celebrating the onset of Spring in the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh Photograph by: Mohammad Alam.

Photograph 7: The youths of Bangladesh Celebrating Valentines Day on February 14, 2007. Photograph by: Unanimous; Source: The Daily New Age. http://www.newagebd.com/2007/feb/15/img7.html Viewed on: February 15, 2007.

123 I believe these photographs demonstrate the syncretistic tradition that most Bangladeshis prefer to uphold. But that doesn’t mean that they feel themselves less Muslim. Rather they perceive Islam the way that Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), the national poet of Bangladesh did. He ‘married a Hindu lady without converting her, gave Hindu names to all his children and worshipped Kali on a regular basis at some stage of his life and yet remained true to his Muslim values’ (Sen:2005). I believe that Bengali-Muslims like Kazi Nazrul Islam tend to celebrate their layers of identities and they actualise these identities according to the circumstances they encounter. That means individuals, whether on global or local stages, have their own constructions of hybridity which they want to uphold to ensure the freedom of selfhood. If this is so, is their any monolithic and essentialised version of Halal-Haram or does the notion vary in accordance with individuals’ layers of identity along with the circumstances individuals face while acting on the world? Bearing these questions in mind, I will now describe some relevant parts of my respondents’ comments and will concentrate on analysing their views on the basis of the preceding discussions-theoretical, methodological and socio-historical.

As my investigation is concerned with food rules and relevant prohibitions based on the notions of Halal-Haram I have referred to pertinent social science literature on food as discussed in Chapter Two of this research. While reviewing the literature I have come across one erudite paper produced by Fischler (1988). Fischler (1988:275) claims that ‘food is central to our identity’. With this theoretical assumption in mind, I asked B, one of my respondents, which butcher’s shop he prefers for buying meat. B replied,

There is a halal meat shop near my apartment. Usually I [do] buy meat from there.

His answer pleased me as such a response would help me to formulate the following theoretical equation:

Migration = identity crisis = more religious = increasing inclination to halal products = mitigation of identity crisis.

124 But the next comment given by B contradicted his earlier statement:

But sometimes I also buy meat from Woolworth’s especially when they offer meat at a discount rate. Moreover, I do work in an Australian restaurant where I work for more than 8 hours a day. So it is natural that I would feel hungry at any point of time. I just organise a steak or chicken nuggets or fish and chips for me as these don’t cost me any money.

B’s wife C also expressed no problem with buying meet from Woolworths. As a result they consume both Halal and non-Halal meat. Both of them offer prayers whenever they have time as they did in Bangladesh. But they don’t like to regard themselves as orthodox Muslims. They don’t even want their child to grow up like an orthodox Muslim. For instance, C often takes her child to McDonalds where she can easily afford a child’s burger. What is more important for her is that the child’s meal comes with a free toy. Moreover, the child can also play in the children’s playground at McDonalds and C believes this will help the child become accustomed to Western values and norms. Based on this one could assume that C doesn’t have any link with the Islamic way of life. But I had a good opportunity to observe the living circumstances of both B and C, as they allowed me to stay with them for the first few months after I arrived in Sydney. In fact, I have found C reciting verses from the Koran, offering prayers and fasting during the month of Ramadan. But neither B nor C are strict about these practices. For example, they don’t pray five times a day, nor do they observe the month long fasting at Ramadan. During that month of Ramadan they fasted some of the days. These observations have made me curious to know their family backgrounds and values regarding secularism and religion.

B and C are both related to each other, apart from their matrimonial bond, by kinship since they are matrilateral parallel cousins to each other. Both of them are influenced by their matrilateral grand father who was a village doctor in Bangladesh. Their grand father was a pious man, but one who abhorred any kind of fanaticism. While alive he never thought of undertaking a pilgrimage to Mecca for Hajj. Their grandfather believed that by serving the poor village patients he could eventually serve Allah and hence there was no necessity to go to Mecca to serve him. Even before his death he requested his offspring to make his burial place beside his pharmacy, instead of in the

125 graveyard attached to the local mosque, so that he could feel the presence of his patients in the afterlife. And this blend of secularism and religion in the life of their grandfather has had a profound influence on with both of B and C’s family history. Being the father of B and C’s mothers, who are siblings to each other, the grandfather decided to marry off his daughters to grooms that would not be religiously orthodox. Thus both B and C’s fathers turned out to be the followers of one of the most important political parties which led the liberation war of Bangladesh in 1971, based on the principles of secularism. Furthermore, C’s father actively participated in the war as a freedom fighter, which makes her proud to think of herself as a Bengali first.

While discussing their notions about Halal-Haram in Sydney, B expressed his disgust with me. He said:

Why are you interested to study the notion of Halal-Haram in Sydney? Why don’t you make the same study in Bangladesh? Do you think everything is Halal there? Look man, I studied and lived in a residential school in Bangladesh for twelve years. Every day more than 250 chickens or 15 goats were slaughtered within the school premise for the students’ dinner. I saw the slaughterers, while being in rush, to separate some of the heads of the chickens from the body which is not Halal according to Islam. But they never cared for that. Moreover, every independent slaughtering must be sacrificed in the name of Allah. But they started the slaughtering process in the name of Allah, but never recited the name again and again while slaughtering each chicken which they were supposed to do according to Islam. But we didn’t mind for that.

This statement by B made me aware of the following paradox: am I taking it for granted that meat sold in Bangladesh is Halal as the country is Islamic by definition? I have browsed some Bangladeshi newspapers and found plenty of reports regarding the sale of non-Halal meat in markets and restaurants. For a brief account of this I am quoting some relevant parts of these reports:

1. Selling of chickens which were dead before slaughtering out of disease has become a profitable business now a day in Bangladesh. Many hotels and restaurants are found as the buyers of these chickens since these chickens can be bought at cheap rate. (Source: Daily Prothom Alo, March 30, 2003).

126

2. Reports from confidential sources confirm that apart from selling diseased and dead chickens, flesh of the dogs were even sold in some restaurants (Source: Daily Prothom Alo, March 31, 2005).

3. Thirty five dead chickens were found in Mymenshing Medical College Hospital where they were prepared for slaughtering and cooking for the patients of the hospital (Source: Daily Prothom Alo, October 18, 2005).

These reports clearly reveal that there is no reason to find any essentialised correspondence between an Islamic state and the behaviour, norms, and values of its inhabitants. Islam can be one of the factors that shape the experiences and knowledge of its practitioners but there are many other factors (stated earlier) that should be taken into consideration. The interplay of various factors coupled with the notion of multilayered identities was so vivid in the life of F and G, husband and wife respectively, that it is worth noting some parts of the conversation I had with them. F and G came to Sydney in the year 1980, and thus represent the first generation of Bengali-Muslim migrants in Australia. They have bought a house in Epping and have been living there for a long time. They have a son (hereafter H), aged 31 who accompanied his parents to Australia at the age of five, and a daughter (hereafter I) who was born here. While talking about their notion of identity both F and G replied that both of them think themselves as Bengali first. While considering the reasons for this G revealed her family history:

My father and mother are very much secular in their thinking. Though they lived in a remote village in Bangladesh they tried to provide all of their children with modern education. Even back in 70’s they sent me to Dhaka University to do honours and master degree in English. We received little formal or institutionalised education about Islam. Rather my father wanted us to read about Bengali culture, folklore, and world literatures. Thus my family is not at all concerned about Halal-Haram distinction. Moreover, we don’t have any Halal butcher shop nearby. We simply buy meats from Woolworth or Coles.

While discussing alcohol consumption both F and G said:

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We keep red wine in our house. But we don’t drink it regularly. Sometimes at the time of dinner we enjoy one or two glasses of it.

I then turned the discussion towards their religious piety. They believe in Allah and Mohammad as His messenger. They like to celebrate Islamic festivals like Eid-ul Fitr and Eid-ul Adha. But they seldom offer prayers on a day to day basis. F attends the Friday prayer, but not every Friday. When asked about their observance of fasting in the last Ramadan they said:

Actually we couldn’t feel the onset of last Ramadan. During the whole month of Ramadan we were busy with organising the marriage ceremony of the son of one of our closest friends. We didn’t fast even for a day. Moreover, we are not that serious about fasting. We want our children to know more about Bangladesh and Bengali ethnic identity than about Islam. You know, at the beginning of our son’s marriage ceremony G recited one poem, both in Bengali and English, from Rabindranath Tagore.

Growing up in a secular environment H and I perceive their religious identity as flexible enough to be negotiated according to the knowledge they acquire from their parents. Both H and I perceive their ethnic identity as overriding their religious identity. H married a girl of Russian origin who is a Christian. They live in Annandale. H never thinks of forcing his wife to convert to Islam. Religion never matters to him. H acknowledges his parents’ contribution in making him a person with a secular outlook. Beside his parents, H also feels close to the thinking of his maternal grandfather. He likes to share views and opinions with his grandfather when he visits Bangladesh. H doesn’t care about being choosy about Halal meat or products. He drinks alcohol but don’t like to be drunk. Moreover for H religion stands in opposition to modernity. Thus by abandoning Halal, he embraces modernity. The case of H suggests that while some of the practical advantages of modern city life seem to have made Halal observance easier, the forces of modernisation are also obviously making it possible to move away from such rituals.

128 Similarly H’s sister also likes to identify her as Bengali first when it comes to the question of primacy between ethnic identity as Bengali and religious identity as Muslim. She never offers prayers or observes fasting. But she loves to listen to and sing the songs of Rabindranath Tagore. And she doesn’t like those Islamists who criticise her for admiring Tagore. She complains:

You know, in some social gatherings I have found some of our first generation migrants criticising us for listening or singing Tagore’s songs. For them listening or singing Tagore’s song is un-Islamic. I don’t understand how a particular poet’s song can be un-Islamic?

The above mentioned cases of B,C, F, G, H and I indicate that their upbringing and socialisation in a secular environment serve as profoundly important in moulding their experiences and knowledge about identity and belongingness. These factors enable them to interpret and negotiate the meanings of Halal-Haram in a way that is different from the authoritative and theological constructions. Based on the strong influence of secular Bengali identity in their stock of experiences and knowledge, their conceptions of Halal-Haram are often fused and hybridised with a mixture of pre-Islamic elements.

Similar comments came from T, who holds a strong belief in the mixture of secularism and religion. He doesn’t like the political party that led the liberation war of Bangladesh, though it bears the essence of secularism in its party manifesto. But that doesn’t mean that T has any inclination toward the Islamic parties. Actually, his family suffered at the hands of some miscreants, according to T, of that secular political party soon after the independence of Bangladesh which was in rule till 1975. When he heard these stories from his parents he started to dislike the party. But for T there is no reason to support orthodox mullahs since, according to T, the mullahs always try to politicise Islam and this will eventually make Bangladesh a backward country. T has received his higher education in Geography at the University of Dhaka where he met a good deal of teachers who uphold a secular-religious version of Bengali identity. The blending of secularism and religion is clear in T’s notion of Halal-Haram, which he explains in the following way:

129 I think myself Bengali first. But my Muslim identity is of no less important to me. I do feel myself rather a normal Muslim, not a rigid Muslim. I am a Muslim by heart more than by practice. I do try to participate in the Friday congregation on a regular basis now. But during the first one and half year in Sydney I couldn’t offer prayer on Friday since I had to study and work simultaneously. Actually I am still concerned about my own convenience. For example, before the beginning of Ramadan this year (2006) I was in Bangladesh and got married. Then accompanied by my wife I went to India at the beginning of Ramadan for celebrating the honeymoon. We were there for eleven or twelve days and couldn’t think of fasting. Similar notion comes to the question of my taste. I like to eat anything that suits my taste. I even tried pork but didn’t feel it tasty. On the other hand, I like the taste of beer but not wine or other strong alcohol.

At this juncture T’s conversation was marked by some evaluative judgements. For instance, he recognises the fact that drinking alcohol is not permitted but his cultural background has enabled him to modify the Koranic prohibition against alcohol. To quote him:

As long as you are not disturbed or disturbing other by consuming alcohol I think it is ok. I perceive alcohol from my cultural outlook and from my way of learning. While in Bangladesh I used to drink alcohol with my friends but not randomly. For example, I have a close friend by whom I feel heavily influenced till to date. One day while celebrating the English New Years Eve I smoked cannabis requested by my friend. We did it at such an age when we had a curious interest for prohibited things. But I didn’t like the taste. Now I only drink beer. But the last time when I drank I felt a little bad since my newly wed wife has come from a religious family and hence doesn’t like drinking alcohol. I am planning to not to drink any more since I love her. But if I would have married a girl who doesn’t have any prejudice about alcohol then I would have been happy to drink sometime together with my wife.

On the other hand Q, a lecturer at Macquarie University in Sydney, doesn’t like to drink alcohol due to his adherence to Islamic values. He tries to offer prayers which he always did back in Bangladesh. But he doesn’t care for buying Halal meat since he is more concerned with convenience.

130 Q: Actually it is difficult to find a Halal butcher shop staying at the Macquarie University. Before coming to Australia I was in Japan for couple of years for accomplishing my higher study. I was never desperate for Halal meat. Only one thing I always try to avoid, pork.

When asked about his political inclination back in Bangladesh, Q informed that he was a dedicated supporter of the pro-independent secular party of Bangladesh and was always a strong voice against the Jamat-e-Islami Bangladesh who worked for the Pakistani rulers during the war of 1971 with a view to retain an undivided Pakistan so as to uphold the notion of Islamic brotherhood. His abhorrence of this Islamic party coupled with the influence of secular Bengali culture has made Q think of himself as Bengali first.

For T and Q the perception of Halal-Haram is individualised and reconfigured mostly according to their pragmatic convenience, which doesn’t conform to the scriptural version of Halal-Haram in the strict sense. Moreover, T’s disliking of orthodox Islamic life has influenced him to such an extent that he has in turn influenced his wife to give up the veil which, his wife used to wear due to her upbringing in an Islamic environment. The case of T also challenges the orientalist perception that migrants become more religious after migration and hence their life course is guided by strict Koranic principles. Interesting to note that T’s feeling of guilt about alcohol consumption has not stemmed from the influence of Islamic teachings but rather his moral commitment to his marital relationship makes him guilty sometimes. In sum it can be said that for T Islam is not a matter of cuisine but of conscience. He therefore doesn’t feel that his status as a Muslim is questioned or his acceptance to other Bengali-Muslims is challenged. His conscience is untroubled and his decisions are fuelled more by pragmatism or even indifference than by ideology.

Another respondent, E, reveals a story similar to that of T. Part of E’s story and his strong commitment to his love relationship has already been described in Chapter Five of this research. His strong feelings toward his fiancée also stretch to his food practices related to the notion of Halal-Haram. E informed me that:

131 Before coming to Australia I was in India for four years where I did my graduation. At that time I used to drink alcohol regularly. But soon after getting back to Bangladesh from India I met my fiancée and fell in love. This time while leaving Bangladesh for Australia my fiancée wanted me to stay far away from any kind of alcoholic beverages and I promised her accordingly. Till today I haven’t violated that promise. In this regard a more interesting story was told by S who works in a bar in Sydney. Before coming to Australia he spent four years in India studying information technology. Though India is a place, according to S, where most of the Bangladeshi students indulge in enjoying drinking alcohol and dance clubs; S tried to maintain his Islamic values in all walks of life. There was a mosque beside the place he stayed in Bangalore, India, and S regularly offered prayers there. He never drank, neither in Bangladesh nor in India. But his life in Sydney has taken a different turn. Though he fasted for the whole month of the last Ramadan he seldom prayers now since he feels it is difficult to work and pray together. A more dramatic change has occurred when he started to drink alcohol. He says:

Soon after coming to Sydney I got the job in a residential hotel where I am still working. The hotel has four conference rooms which they rent out for function. At the beginning I was assigned the job of function setter. It was really difficult since a huge amount of lifting involved there. Then I found that the easiest way to get rid of it was to be transferred to the bar. But things were not as simple as I thought. I didn’t have any idea about the varied tastes of different types of alcoholic beverages. And I got the impression that a bartender must know about the tastes of the beverages so that he/she can meet the clients’ satisfaction. Then I started to drink to get myself familiar with alcoholic beverages, a habit that still continues.

When asked about Halal meat S simply laughed at me and said:

I eat whatever I do get in front of me to eat. How can you be choosy when you are out of your home for most of the time? The first thing that matters to me is to meet my hunger and if possible without cost. I do work in two places; one Australian bar cum restaurant and the other is an Indian restaurant. When it is time for food I simply prepare something for me. Actually I don’t have the

132 leisure to think about the Halal-Haram. But I don’t eat pork as because I have never seen such thing back in my country.

There are also contrary narratives that focus on the efforts of those Bengali-Muslim migrants who continue to maintain Halal. R is one such respondent who is aware of maintaining Halal in every sphere of her life. She has tried to be religious all her life and became more religious when she was admitted to a medical college in Bangladesh. At that time she was not aware of the Haram ingredients contained in various cosmetics which were available in Bangladesh. When she migrated to England as a doctor she was offered accommodation by her cousin. Her cousin was a dedicated Muslim who influenced R to be aware of the distinction between Halal and Haram. Her cousin made a list for her including the names of products that contained Haram substances. Despite her preference for Halal food and products there is no reason to believe that Islamic teachings served as the only factors in this case. Rather, her initial attachment to her cousin made her conscious about the whole issue. If Islam would have served as her only guide then R would follow Islamic principles in every aspect of her life. But she has a totally opposite oppinion about the wearing of a veil or headscarf.

R: I don’t like wearing veil. I am not an orthodox Muslim. I think decency is most important when it comes to the question of dress. Whatever I do wear, be it trousers and t-shirt, I always maintain decency.

A, a nephew of R, lives with her. He came to Australia as a student of the University of Newcastle and stayed at Wagga Wagga. He stayed in a house with some Indian students in a house who were Hindus. They ate together and A never felt it necessary to be strict about Halal-Haram. What this amounted to was that A’s initial attachment to those Hindu students enabled him to develop a flexible notion about Halal-Haram. If he had stayed with a Muslim who maintains a strict and rigid perception about Islamic food rules then there would be every possibility that A would have developed a sharp sense of distinction between Halal-Haram. Flatmates, instead of theological teachings, seem to be an important factor as reflected in the life of A. After coming to Sydney A stayed in R’s house and as a result he consumes now is almost all Halal.

133 A. Actually I respect my aunt. She has allowed me to stay with her and I don’t have to think about the house rent and other household expenditures. It’s a great advantage for me, especially when you are in overseas. I don’t buy meat from such butcher that doesn’t sell Halal meat since my aunt is very strict about that. I work in a petrol station as customer service officer and in a restaurant as well. Sometimes I bring food from there which is not Halal, for instance pie, chicken curry etc. Thank God that, aunt doesn’t mind for that.

On the other hand D mentioned his perception about Halal food by referring to his experiences in relation to other overseas travel he made before coming to Australia. His story not only poses challenge to the general misconceptions about Muslims, but also to those who like to valorise globalisation. He says:

D: I visited Singapore, India and South Korea before Australia. Actually I had a plan to go to South Korea as a visitor and then remain there as illegal migrant. To increase my credibility as visitor I went to India and Singapore. In India I was hosted by one of my Hindu relatives (fictive kin) and I stayed in their house. I ate meat at their home but never felt worried about the Halal status. Actually I still believe that it’s ok for a Muslim as long as he/she is not consuming pork. You know when I tried to enter South Korea I was caught by police and was sent to detention camp. I was there for nine days before I was sent back to Bangladesh. While in the camp I was given two meals a day which was inadequate for a matured person. The camp authority didn’t have any facility to provide the Muslims with Halal food. So what a rigid Muslim can do is to have only fish or vegetables. But it was not possible for me to eat only fish or vegetables for nine days and I was not concerned with the religious status of the meats. Apart from the two meals I used to buy beef or chicken burgers. One thing I never ate, pork.

Such examples have persuaded me to reassess my understanding about food and identity and considering the situation in light of them makes me think that I must go beyond the “food = identity” equation. Time has come to investigate which “identity” we are reproducing through our foodscape since we have multiple and complex forms of identities - national, international, social, religious, ethnic, familiar and so on. What seemed significant for most of my respondents is that food symbolises their

134 identity as ‘Bengali’. The everyday act of nourishing the physical body with food is thus transformed into ethnic identification. And they don’t feel that their practice of eating non-Halal things has made them bad Muslims. For example, B evaluates the whole thing from a different point of view through which he claims to be more Muslim than most of his counterparts living in Bangladesh. He justified his claim in the following way:

B: I believe that life in Australia is more favourable in retaining the fundamental teachings of Islam. I don’t have to give or take bribe here in Australia which is a common phenomenon in Bangladesh. The mullahs of Bangladesh are nothing but ‘dhandabaj’ (opportunistic). Religion is a business for them. They won’t mind to facilitate a millad48 in a rich but corrupted person’s house since they will be given handsome amount for that service. Here in Australia I have every option to live an honest life. And as long as you are not causing any harm to others’ life you are a good person and hence a good Muslim. There is no justification to judge anyone’s Muslimness through the realm of food.

B’s comment shows his inclination to the folk Islam of Bangladesh which stresses humanitarianism more than scriptural Islam. On the other hand B’s explanation also persuades me to look over the prevailing scenario of corruption in Bangladesh. Though according to scriptural Islam, receiving and giving a ‘bribe’ is completely ‘Haram’; a report by Transparency International Bangladesh, titled ‘Corruption in Bangladesh: A Household Survey’, informs us that Bangladeshi Households have to shoulder the annual burden of paying 6796,0000,000 Taka (equivalent to 1359 million Australian dollar) in bribes for receiving services from 9 service providing sectors (2005:1). For B, therefore, migration to Australia has served as a metaphor though which he re-evaluates the non-humanitarian nature of religion propagated by the mullahs of Bangladesh.

The diverse experiences and knowledge of my respondents demonstrate that there are fundamental differences between the authoritative/theological ideal of Halal-Haram and the day-to-day observance reflected in lived experiences. I have shown how the

48 Hymn dedicated to the Prophet Muhammad.

135 notion of Halal is embodied in layers of meaning, which does not always follow the structured roadmap set by religious scripts or by any certification authority. The social context (shamajik dik) through which my Bengali-Muslim migrant respondents evaluated their foodscape enabled them to negotiate the role of religion in the realm of their ethnic identity according to which one could modify some Islamic observances related to food and still remain connected to an Islamic identity. Moreover, the Bengali-Muslim migrants, aware of the possibilities of modern life in Australia, exposed to a variety of lifestyles and aware of their ethnic identity that does not revolve around the notion of Halal-Haram in the strict sense of it, preferred to uphold their dietary activities through the conception of hybridity stemming not solely from their post-migration encounter with diverse lifestyles, rather from their Bengali-informed sense of hybridity, in the sense that ‘almost all cultures are historical hybrids’ (Hedetoft 1999:78). Migration to a Western country has helped them to sharpen their sense of tolerance by being involved in social, economic and cultural practices that had previously been not so open to them. Their post-migration existential realities have exposed them to greater freedom to exercise individual preferences where the authoritative construction of the Halal-Haram model is reconfigured and reconstructed by each individual practitioner to project the multiplicities embedded beneath the model over time and different circumstances that eventually goes with a simultaneous convergence and divergence. And this interplay between convergence and divergence ultimately corresponds to the way in which the actors shape their individual Bengali-Muslim identities where complementary duality is tolerated.

But one thing that I found almost common to all of my Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney is the avoidance of pork. I have used the term ‘almost common’ due to the fact that a few of them tried to eat pork and one of them from the second generation still relishes the taste. She (L) said:

L: I really like the taste of bacon specially the crispy one. But my parents are not aware of it. Though they don’t have any prejudice to hold the distinction between Halal and Haram and to buy meet from any butcher shop, I have never seen them to have pork. They are strict about that.

136 L’s parents J (father) and K (mother), and her sister M buy meat from butcher shops or supermarkets that don’t guarantee the Halal status of meat. For them the distance of Halal meat shops is a major factor. But they are not willing to taste a single bite of pork.

A dilemma associated with pork was illustrated by H who married a Christian girl. She stored ham in the household refrigerator since, being a Christian she likes to eat ham. According to him:

H: I do eat ham but still I feel a bit of uneasiness with the taste. The reason may lie in the fact that my parents never brought pork into our house.

An interesting conversation which took place with N and O, who are consanguine brothers, is worth mentioning here. N and O shared the same apartment with their sister and brother-in-law. The following statement from a conversation with them reveals what they feel common.

N and O: Both of our sister and brother-in-law are not orthodox Muslims. Thus they won’t mind if we bring burgers from MacDonald’s or KFC. They won’t mind if we bring a bottle of alcohol into home. They won’t even mind to have a sip of that. But they would definitely throw us out of the house if we bring pork.

The last case with which I will conclude the discussion is about a Bengali-Muslim girl (hereafter P) who married a Hindu back in Bangladesh. P doesn’t feel guilty for marrying a Hindu. Actually her mother was also a Hindu who married a Muslim (P’s father). Though P’s mother was converted to Islam P doesn’t feel any necessity for her husband to be converted to Islam. Both P and her husband maintain their own religious beliefs and practices. As an expression of their respect to each other they try to take part in each other’s religious practices. P has been a religious minded girl throughout her life and in Australia she still tries to offer prayers and observe fasting as much as she can. Except for maintaining the pork taboo, which is also a practice of her Hindu husband’s family, she holds a flexible attitude towards the notion of Halal- Haram. She says:

137

After I was getting married I used to stay with my husband’s family. I ate everything at their house since the foods were similar to that of my house. I was never brought up like a rigid Muslim by my parents. Rather the social aspects of Bengali identity played a significant role in my life. A person can simultaneously follow her/his Bengali and Islamic identity without major problems.

The avoidance of pork by almost all of my respondents brought me to a new question: is this avoidance ipso facto ‘Islamic’, which emanated from the scriptural prescription of the Koran? If so, then why are the other criteria of Halal-Haram not followed? Why are most of them not aware of most of the five fundamental duties49 of Islam? This reality indicates that the abstinence from pork should not be directed only towards the notion of moral conduct coupled with the perception that Bengali- Muslims may be heavily charged by their religious avowal towards Islam. Based on the historically constructive forces and the indigenous social context where Islam was adapted to the pre-Islamic practices, as elaborately discussed in Chapter Four, I would like to draw a hypothesis that may unfold some new interpretations for Bengali- Muslims’ avoidance of pork. In Chapter Four of this thesis it was mentioned that during the thirteenth and fourteenth century a large number of low castes, untouchable Hindus converted to Islam to get rid of the subjugated status ascribed upon them by the rigid caste structure. After converting they felt it necessary to draw a social boundary between themselves and their low ranked Hindu kin who decided not to convert. And if we look at the composition of the untouchable people of present day Bangladesh we will find that the most untouchable among the untouchables are the Hindu Harijans (sweeper) whose occupation is to deal with human waste and thus thought of as filthy. Still today the way the majority of Bengali-Muslims and other Hindus maintain their boundary between themselves and the Harijans is to think of the Harijans as filthy not only because they deal with human waste but also because they raise and eat pork (Asaduzzaman 2001:55-60). In light of this example of the present day stigmatisation of the Harijans it can be assumed that after conversion to Islam a huge emphasis was attributed to banning pork - not to embrace Islam as a total

49 Kalima (the faith on Allah as the only God and on Muhammad as His messenger) five times praying a day along with the Friday prayer, fasting, pilgrimage to Mecca and alms giving are the five basic principles of Islam.

138 way of life but to draw a boundary between the converted populace and their recently forgone stigmatised background50. The avoidance of pork served to separate the converts from their low caste Hindu counterparts and hence established their social identity. The taboo reflects a pragmatic response to a problem of identity construction and the forming of a higher social status by the Bengali-Muslim masses during the period of their conversion to Islam from Hinduism. Not only did the dharmik (religious) context impel them to avoid pork as a criteria, their shamajik (social) context also served as a major determinant. It was seen as kharap (bad) and nimno/choto (lower/small) and consequently dropping below the Bengali-Muslim rank line (see Figure 1 in Chapter Four). This situation reflects what Bourdieu (1984:6) proposes that ‘taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier’. Bengali- Muslims, immediately after their conversion, desired to be classified as Muslims so as to renounce their lower social status and as a result adopted the pork-taboo not only to confirm their Muslimness but also to confirm their upward social mobility. The pork- taboo of Bengali-Muslims, therefore, had rather stemmed from what Vos (1975:85) terms as ‘status anxiety’, which might of late be reinforced by the notion of pollution. Till to date, Bengali-Muslims’ belief in the lower status of pigs also affects many other aspects of their lifestyle. Not only do they try to avoid pork, a simple uttering of the word ‘pig’ is equally avoided. Uttering the word ‘pig’ happens when someone scolds someone. Moreover, the word ‘shuorer baccha’ (son of a pig) in Bengali, connotes the lower moral (dharmikbhabe/ from religious context) or social (shamajikbhabe/ from social context) status of someone which is commonly used in Bangladesh.

These issues pose a significant challenge to earlier versions of the Muslim pork-taboo which attempt to form an essentialised theoretical reasoning applicable to all Muslims of the world and pay little attention to specific social, historical and regional contexts of Muslims who adopted different mechanisms for actualising their regionally informed Islam. On the other hand, the field level observations show that the concept of Halal-Haram seems much broader for practitioners who are not willing to regard it simply as a criterion to distinguish food items. And due to this wide coverage, the

50 Gauri Viswanathan’s (1996) research also demonstrates that there were many Muslims who had converted to Islam from Hinduism could not adopt the taboo against eating pork for a considerable time span and hence her research confirms the pre-Islamic pork eating practice of the large population of Bengali-Muslims who were converted from Hinduism.

139 meaning has undergone numerous adaptations and negotiations. This is why I have found the Doglasian (1966) framework of studying food rules untenable for the present research since it ignores plots and narratives of life and looks instead to the structural aspect of food rules (as reflected in Leviticus) based on her attempt to discover the scientific ‘rationalisation’ of food rules and regulations. Dissatisfaction with her framework has also resonated in Blumer’s (1967) reaction to Douglas, as Blumer is found to be troubled by the fact that a thing can be anomalous and tabooed in many other different ways (Blumer 1967:22). This means there can not be any essentialised explanation of a given event since the gap between ideal and reality and/or doctrine and action is as true as many other aspects of individual life world. Multiple comments produced by my respondents reveal that food rules are connected with regionally informed histories, socio-cultural milieu followed by different trajectories of individuals’ experiences which eventually help constitute the basis of knowledge for the individual actor that in turn enables her/him to reconstruct, renegotiate and reconfigure food rules and regulations, so as to fit her/his realities.

140 Chapter VII

Conclusion

In European cooking, the order of the dishes is quite precise. It is a diachronic cuisine…A radical difference: in India, the various dishes come together on a single large plate. Neither a succession nor a parade, but a conglomeration and superimposition of things and tastes: a synchronic cuisine. A fusion of flavours, a fusion of times (Paz 1997 cited in Ray 2004:28-9).

This research is the outcome of my interest to explore the differences among Muslim migrants from Bangladesh in Sydney, Australia through observing and analysing their subjective reconstructions and remodifications of food rules and regulations, based on the notion of Halal-Haram. The underlying aim of this research has been to combat the ways academic discussions and media representations have homogenised diverse Muslim communities in an essentialised normative identity, that is, ‘Muslim’. In this context differences among Muslims in terms of ethno-national belongingness, historical particularities and religious practices have largely been overlooked. My study of Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney draws attention, I believe, to the diversities of Muslim practices in turn challenges the ‘manufactured’ misconception about the immutable, static and monolithic nature of Islam and Muslim communities. This underscores a significant point - that Islam in Australia is not a single and homogenised phenomenon to be followed in the same way by its adherents but rather the adherents are constantly engaged in actualising their local version of Islam and this produces multiple forms of involvement and interpretations. These internal dynamics have been ignored while depicting Muslim migrant communities in academic scholarship, as well as in the media. Both accounts are marked by orientalist tropes, as discussed in Chapter One of this research, that only take the institutionally organised activities of a few Islamists into consideration to justify the erroneous and stereotypical images of Islam and Muslim communities. My understanding of the anti-essentialist theoretical paradigm has enabled me to emphasise the contextuality, multiplicity, fluidity and temporality of identity and through this I have attempted to evaluate Bengali-Muslim identities and have found it difficult to map any unified and

141 single meaning of Bengali-Muslimness since the actors themselves prefer to live comfortably with various competing visions of identities emanating from their socio- cultural, political and economic histories. Thus my study suggests that although it provides an important imperative framework by its focus on religious identity of a Muslim community like the Bengali-Muslim, in turn it also eliminates other key questions which can not be reducible to a religious framework. Due to the ignorance of these key questions what we have about Islam and Muslim communities is a large number of studies of religious practices and hence other affiliations that contribute toward the reinscription and contestation of social and cultural identities remain unstudied.

Based on the conceptualities mentioned above I have attempted to show the simultaneity of a complementary and conflicting dialectics between the two fundamental aspects of Bengali-Muslim identity- ethnic identity (being Bengali) and religious identity (being Muslim). And to grasp the overlapping consensus between these identities I have adopted the constructionist approach towards identity since the approach, prior to developing an anti-essentialist perspective, seems to be illuminating in describing the contingency, multiplicity, temporality and contextuality of identity construction by the actors according to the circumstances they encounter in their day to day affairs.

Guided by the aforementioned theoretical underpinnings I have attempted to look at the diverse historical trajectories through which Bengali-Muslims (who were largely converted from the lower strata of Hindu caste system) of Bangladesh adopted Islam in their indigenous pre-Islamic cultural tradition, the creation of the division between an elite-centric high Islam and the popular syncretistic folk Islam, the failure of various purificatory movements as invented by the adherents of high Islam so as to eliminate their self perceived pre-Islamic Hindu influence in Bengali culture, the primacy of religion in the partition between India and Pakistan and the re-emergence of secularism in creating Bangladesh as an independent state. An elaborate discussion of this historical journey seemed essential in order to demonstrate how the Bengali- Muslims of Bangladesh rejected any singularised version of an ‘only religious’ identity as Muslim or an ‘only secular’ identity as ethnic Bengali. This discussion validates my anti-essentialist stance since any question pertaining to identity

142 construction and related practices will be difficult to answer if Bengali-Muslims are thought of only as struggling to adhere to either only a religious identity or only a secular ethnic identity. Instead religion and secularism serve as an overlapping consensus which coexists in their life. Verses from a poem composed by the late Shamsur Rahman (1929-2006), one of most famous poets of Bangladesh, help to illustrate an important point in relation to how Bangladeshi people imagine their nation.

Freedom: You are Tagore’s ageless poetry, His immortal songs … Freedom: You are That meeting at the martyr’s monument On the eternal Twenty-First of February… Freedom: You are my father’s soft jainamaz On which he says his prayers…

(Excerpt from “Freedom” by Shamsur Rahman cited in Uddin 2006:155).

These words reflect the syncretism of Bengali Islam, which constitutes the overlapping consensus between ethnicity and religion for the people of Bangladesh. It also poses a considerable challenge to those Islamists who would not accept such a secular version of syncretistic Islam and hence would like to ‘distance themselves from many of the nonreligious customs to which the poem refers…’ (Uddin 2006:156). Moreover, it indicates that neither Bengaliness nor Islamism stands for the one and only identity of the people of Bangladesh. Rather there exists a dialectic between the two which operates in an overlapping fashion, that is, these two elements can be mutually supportive and/or contradictory based on situational contexts. Willem van Schendel (2000:71) grasps this dialectic relationship and states that ‘few people of Bangladesh have been willing to sacrifice their allegiance to either their ethnic group or their religious community’. It means that instead of holding any strict inclination to either of these identities, Bengali-Muslims of Bangladesh have shifted

143 the emphasis from some elements in their ethnic identity to some elements in their religious identity and vise versa in the course of history. The reason for blending these two dimensions has been the overriding need which Bengali-Muslims have felt to preserve their total identity, their ethno-religious boundary. This juxtaposition of religion and secularism has provided them with enormous space to accommodate complimentary and conflicting dualities, that is, things not adjustable in the religious sphere can be made relevant with the help of the secular sphere and things not accommodative in the secular sphere can be included via the religious sphere. This historicity of the Bengali-Muslim marked by the coexistence of both secularism and religion persuaded me to study Sydney’s Bengali-Muslim migrants’ food rules and regulations from a different methodological angle.

My review of the literature on Bengali-Muslims identified that this overlapping consensus between religion and ethnicity has received scant attention since either the Islamist or the secularist interpretation of Bengali-Muslims’ identity has gained much attention. The reason responsible for this excessive attention gained by the Islamists and the secularists is easy to discern, especially in the context of Bangladesh. In a developing country like Bangladesh, where resources are scarce, ‘the intelligentsia can be said to form a part of the elite as both terms are linked to notions of superiority, prestige and power’ (Murshid 1995:11). Harry J. Benda (1962:237) aptly describes the nature of the intelligentsia in non-Western contexts and defines the intelligentsia as ‘the ruling class par excellence in non-western societies’. Due to their superiority, both as elite and the intelligentsia, they have access to the instruments of authority, coercion and control and hence wield the capacity to essentialise the dominance of a particular world view. Unfortunately very few attempts have been made to portray the fact that these images as laid down by the essentialised version of the Islamists and secularists do not properly fit Bengal. Thus throughout the whole research I had the belief that as anthropologists we must focus not only on the objective attributes but also on the processes51 through which we will be able to observe and analyse even the mundane recurring activities of everyday life. And this realisation attracted me to food with particular emphasis upon the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney and their subjective constructions of the notion of Halal and

51 For more details on this point see Barth, F. 1966. Models of social organization. Royal Anthropological Institute, London.

144 Haram. In doing so, instead of taking the institutionalised claims of religious practices at face value I decided to observe the ordinary Bengali-Muslim migrants whom I came to know mainly though my personal networks. Moreover, as the understanding of Islam and Muslim communities has often been flavoured or essentialised by notions of uniform, static, monolithic cultural values or thought, I have tried to avoid the danger of misleading or sweeping generalisations based on those essentialism. Informed by the anti-essentialist theoretical paradigm I have tried to develop an anti- essentialist methodological framework. This unconventional methodological framework has helped me to find the limitations of the ‘culturalism’, as followed in anthropology, due to its over dependence on institutionalised activities of human beings in search of a taken for granted correspondence between ideal and reality or doctrine and action so as to construct a generalisable statement about a diverse human population and their more diverse actions and practices. In brief, what I wanted to avoid is the tendency to make ‘simplistic sociological or social structural reductions’ (Vos 1975:78). To discover the contingencies and complexities of Bengali-Muslim identities I have adopted a methodological standpoint which can better be termed as ‘ethnography of the particular’ (Abu-Lughod 1996) which has eventually paved the ground for me to take the individual as the unit of my analysis. Instead of evaluating the individual as essentially rational and logical in every aspect of her/his life I have perceived the individual as the combination of both rational and irrational activities since the dialectic between these two kinds eventually leads the society towards accommodating new and changing interpretations of social realities. Thus any discrepancy stemming from the individuals’ activities has been observed with significant value because I believe that the peculiarities and diversities of human actions can not be reducible into a generalised and hence essentialised framework. With this methodological framework in mind I used multiple techniques such as participant observation combined with face to face in-depth interviews and free conversation. This methodological conglomeration helped me to observe the ways the individuals perceive their experiences and identities which are eventually related to their own versions of Halal-Haram. Apart from these methods, the socio-historical method has also been adopted in order to know the historical facts that contribute in the development of the conception of Halal-Haram in the Bengali-informed local cultural milieu and to know, as well, the way this local version facilitates the migrants to translate the authoritative version of the said conception.

145 In the fifth chapter of this research I have again tried to explore the limitations of the generalising and essentialising tendencies found in the contemporary discussions about globalisation and migration along with other related phenomena. Actually, the chapter has shed light on the fact that migrants, even when they are from the same country, are not internally homogenous. Each possesses her/his own experiential knowledge and peculiarities which don’t fit the unnecessarily determinist positions taken by different scholars. Most of the studies done on the stated issues have placed enormous stress on the institutionally organised activities of some migrant centric organizations, which in turn have only described the homogenous and elitist lifestyle of a few migrants connected to those organizations, and, in this way a vast majority of migrants have remained unsearched. My research with the ordinary migrants, whom I called migrants from below, to counteract the elitist inclination, has found that most of the studies conducted on migrants have attempted to overgeneralise their diverse experiences and knowledge so as to outline a structural abstraction about their life. Such overgeneralisations have eventually failed to see the competing discourses characterised by the internal contradictions which the individual subject can exploit in accordance to the situations they face. To overcome this failure I have never perceived the individual’s subjectivity as internally homogenous but as rather fractionated and contradictory. I believe that the different experiences of the individuals play upon their lives and hence enable them to respond in a variety of contradictory ways. This is why different people are unlikely to ascribe identical meanings to a particular action. Rather, meanings vary in different contexts and depend on the individual’s previous and ongoing experiences. An interest to decipher this context dependency of meaning persuaded me to explore the individuals’ experiential knowledge. This way of approaching the individual’s life and living provided me with necessary insights to find out the way a notion like multiculturalism has contributed in homogenising the Muslims in Australia without leaving any room to express the internal differentiations they have within them which stemming from their diverse ethnic, national, social, political and cultural affiliations. I, therefore, have proposed to take these diversities into consideration which, I guess, must have definite reflections in the way individuals negotiate the perception of Halal-Haram. With an aim to counteract generalisation I also examined some influential studies which try to analyse the food rules and regulations of some religious groups. Special emphasis has been given on Mary Douglas’s (1966) study about the Jewish dietary

146 rules and regulations. Though Jewish and Muslim dietary rules and regulations bear similarities in many respects (as discussed earlier) the way she draws her theoretical reasoning doesn’t accommodate the variable individuals’ thoughts and more particularly it doesn’t fit, in particular, the Bengali-Muslims’ perception of Halal- Haram which seems much broader in connotation than the Jewish notion about ‘kosher’. In a sense her study seems an attempt ‘of her own society’s need to control conceptually by classifying the totality of human experience’ which ‘prefers not to deal with more ambiguous areas of the emotions’ (Vos 1975:91). And my discussion in the introductory chapter about the differences between Western and Asian notions of self aptly justifies this criticism. Thus while studying Bengali-Muslims’ constructions of Halal-Haram I have never devalued the contradictions they displayed since that particular discussion about the differences between Western and Asian notions of self has informed me that contradictions are part of the Asian notion of self. The broad difference, in this sense, can be thought of as the difference between structurally precise thinking and the emotionally flexible thinking which is eloquently described in the opening statement of this chapter by the Nobel Laureate, Octavio Paz, who spent a decade as Mexico’s ambassador to India during the 1960’s. It means the people of that part of the world are historically exposed to exercise hybridity, in the sense of mixture and fusion, in their way of life which has these days been over enthusiastically thought as a new phenomenon to mark the contemporary societies. Apart from the study of Douglas (1966) I have also examined the studies of Marvin Harris (1997) and Hunter (1997) that are found to take the Islamic food rules and regulations as objectively given for all Muslims of the world and hence they leave no room to accommodate subjective experiences of the individuals’. In sum, the shortcomings of such approaches lie in the fact that people’s food rules and regulations are analysed in isolation, without taking the historical and socio-cultural configuration of the society into consideration. In my evaluation no single approach can be said to be perfect and the difficulty in constructing a thorough theoretical framework lies in the fact that there is variability in food preferences and food avoidance. Under such circumstances sociological-anthropological approaches to the study of food rules and regulations should take a departure from any kind of over generalised approach to food analysis which seems no more able to catch the dynamic contradiction between the dietary rules and the actual consumption of food by the individual practitioners. In opposition to the deterministic convictions about food

147 rules my own argument concedes that the problem of food preference and avoidance can better be understood in the ways the actual consumers view or explain such problems. My discussion, therefore, puts less emphasis on the structure of thought and more on the role of context, experience and reasoning of the individuals, as I would like to perceive foodscapes as a dynamic process, always changing. Thus I have wanted to see the notion of Halal-Haram in connection with the pre-Islamic caste hierarchy and post-Islamic historical period of Bengali-Muslims through which they had developed their own version of the said notion. Then I have tried to find the contemporary links between the historical legacy of the notion and the present day continuation of that notion. What has become an issue then is: whether the meaning of Halal-Haram and associated food rules as shared by Bengali-Muslims is similar to the scriptural connotation based on which we will be able claim that Muslims are same everywhere in the world and considers their text as the only guiding principle of their life; whether the meanings and expressions of Halal-Haram in their life is determined by the prescriptive and authoritative reference to the institution like AFIC which holds the monopoly to determine the definitions of Halal-Haram or through a subjectively descriptive way in which the said notion is actually exercised by the individual practitioners. It means my study has taken into consideration how the interplay between the authoritative constructions of the rules of Halal-Haram (which urge people to maintain these rules in the strict sense of those) and its implementation and reconstruction that takes place when individuals transgress those rules.

The fieldwork findings have shown that food rules and regulations can not be studied in isolation of their multiple historical contexts and the ways such historical contexts facilitate the negotiation of identity construction. The historical question of national identity construction and its relation to both secular ethnic Bengali identity and to the Muslim identity is a complex one for Bengali-Muslims, as reflected in their highly ambivalent and contradictory preference of choosing a clear side. Rather, Bengali- Muslims prefer to co-opt both of these into their social space in the form of overlapping consensus. And this overlapping consensus allows them to exercise a Bengali informed perception of Halal-Haram which is qualitatively different from the authoritative constructions as exemplified in the case of the AFIC. For Bengali- Muslims the conception of Halal-Haram covers the humanitarian morals of human beings which they have inherited from the early spiritual preachers who carried the

148 message of universal love for mankind and if reduced only to mean the status of food then the original humane qualities embedded in the idea will loose significance. Rather food is an arena they prefer to judge from their ethnic Bengali identity along with their syncretistic Bengali informed Islam. Their Bengali informed syncretistic Islam thus enables themselves to translate various Islamic food rules and prohibitions in conformity with their contemporary Australian life. Moreover, the prime important task of a Bengali-Muslim migrant’s life is to work for living. There is very little time for leisure in her/his day to day life. If she/he has an empty stomach, she/he would not hesitate to take any venture, fair or foul, to manage some kind of food. Moreover, the post-migration individualised and isolated lifestyle and the subsequent lack of social aspects make the consumption of food as only a private matter. Juxtapositions of differential as well as dissimilar thoughts and behaviour with regard to the notion of Halal-Haram have been evident in my respondents’ acts of reconstructing and remodifying the said notion. What has become apparent to me from my fieldwork observation is that the restrictive food rules and regulations are effective in one situation; less effective in other. However, despite this arbitrariness one thing is equally followed by almost all, that is, the avoidance of pork. However, the historical development of the Bengali informed syncretistic Islam has allowed me not to think of this phenomenon as ipso facto Islamic, as other prohibited foods are accommodated in their lifeworld. I believe that the avoidance of pork is rather rooted in their pre-conversion hierarchically structured Hindu caste system where food rules and upward social mobility were closely related. Thus soon after their conversion to Islam from the lower strata of Hinduism, which these converts did to get rid of the rigid caste system and to ensure their higher social status in a newly introduced religion, they had given up pork as pork was and is still regarded as the food of the outcast untouchable populace. It doesn’t mean that Islam was not a significant factor in the whole process. But what is more important to consider is that Islam only served as a means to justify a cause which was more social in nature than religious. The overriding importance of Bengali ethnic identity in dealing with food has enabled the Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney to make a comfortable subscription of the modern notion of individual freedom and self-realisation, which is not only a post- migratory phenomenon for them but rather an extension and reinforcement of their Bengali informed ethno-religious identities which have always been open to accommodate individual freedom and self-realisation; of course with few exceptions

149 emerging from certain movements of puritanical Islamists who have still been struggling to gain popular sympathy. For the majority of Bengali-Muslims Islamic and Bengali identities converge and conflict in the realm of foodscape. And their emotional, instead of structural, bondage to these conforming and conflicting identities has paved the way for maintaining both sides at the same time without eradicating or giving primacy to either of them. This is why the individual perceptions of Halal-Haram in a Bengali-Muslim’s day to day affairs are dependent on his/her contextuality and subjective meanings of Muslimness that is more rooted in their Bengali informed Islam, rather than adherence to any universal notion of Islam. The history of popular Islam in Bangladesh runs parallel to that of the inclusion of mystical elements which has facilitated the Bengali-Muslim migrant to adjust to new situations and circumstances. Remarkable to note that the primacy of Bengali informed Islam which overrides the universal Ummah centric Islam constitutes a different way of ‘being and doing’ Muslim for Bengali-Muslim migrants as reflected in their food rules and prohibitions. Thus a number of food items as identified prohibited by the authoritative definitions are redefined as permitted by the Bengali- Muslim migrants of this research. In this respect I believe I have rightly observed how individuals’ belief systems, conceptual framework and experiences about the world and so on are negotiated in diverse ways. Any expression like ‘Bengali-Muslim food culture’ seems to gloss over meaningful heterogeneity and hence would lead towards an overgeneralised idealisation.

My fieldwork among the ordinary Bengali-Muslim migrants in Sydney reveals that Islam cannot and should not be understood through the works and lifestyles of a few Islamists52 alone, for whom it is a formal, uniform and rigid system of beliefs and practices. Beside that there is popular or folk Islam which is practiced by the majority of Muslims of the world. By recognising the agency of this vast Muslim populace we can appreciate their ability to construct their own self-definitions rather than simply absorbing the Islamists’ definitions of their identities. In the case of the Bengali- Muslim migrants in Sydney we have seen that how the authoritative and standardised

52 At this juncture we can see how one of my respondents B, in Chapter Six, indicates a group of Bangladeshi Islamists as opportunist. There is a popular ridiculing term used in Bangladesh to denote the characteristics of these Islamists- Kath Mullah. The term Kath corresponds to English as ‘wood’ and the word Mullah means ‘a religious person who is strictly involved in the theological practice of Islam’. The word ‘wood’ is used here as a metaphor to indicate their rigid inclination to the scriptural version of Islam.

150 categories used to denote Islamic food rules and regulations on the basis of their self- perceived immutable theological definitions of Halal-Haram have faced varied reconstructions and reinscription which reshuffle notions of religious and national identity, challenging authoritative identifications with dynamic self-identifications. The Bengali-Muslims’ subjective interpretations of the notion of Halal-Haram indicate that instead of promoting any so called unified and singularised vision of a Muslim community, their diverse practices rather illustrate the continuing variety within the Muslim communities.

The nature of arguments and findings as outlined in this research suggests that Islam, particularly folk Islam, as practiced by Muslims has been little studied socio- anthropologically since these practices being textually based have by and large been assumed to be same everywhere, and therefore not of significant academic interest. It is therefore necessary and important to develop an anthropological approach which will allow us to evaluate the interplay of various factors at work in the practices of the adherents of Islam.

In essence what I would like to say, through my investigation of the food rules as practiced by Bengali-Muslim migrants, that no religious doctrine is original, rather it draws on traditional socio-cultural elements. And based on that we must step forward to counteract any essentialising trend through which Muslims of varied ethno-national and historical backgrounds are lumped together as a unified category having unified problems and unified solutions. In short emphasis should be given more and more on appreciating the beauty and bounty of diversity, promoting a rainbow culture rather than a mono-culture.

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174 APPENDIX A: GLOSSARY OF LOCAL WORDS

Adab: Proper conduct

Adat: Practice, habit

Arzul: Converted Bengali-Muslims who were believed to be the counterpart of the untouchable Hindu populace.

Ashraf: Aristocrat Bengali-Muslims who claim their higher social status as the descendents of the original preachers who came to Bengal from out side.

Atraf: Converted Bengali-Muslims who were looked down upon by aristocratic people due to their lower social status.

Beiman: A person who doesn’t have a strong sense of faith about others.

Bhalo: Good

Bitto: Wealth

Bishwash: Belief; faith; trust; reliance; confidence

Bongsho: Lineage

Desh: Country; region; locality

Fatwa: A mandate or decree conforming to Islamic laws.

Halal: Permitted by Islam.

Haram: Prohibited by Islam.

Hidaeti: To do one’s duties following the path as dictated by Allah.

Iman: Reliance, trust, faith, belief in Allah or Islamic creed.

Jolaha: Weaver

Kharap: Bad

Marfat: The Sufi tradition as followed by the mystic religious faith holders of Bengali. The aim of their tradition is to challenge the scriptural version of religious rigidity and to preach religion as a way of enhancing ones devotion to seek and to give away love.

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Maulvi: A Muslim scholar or teacher.

Mendhi: (Corrup. of Mehedi) Henna and/or Henna pest

Mughal: A category of the Ashrafs who believe themselves to be descendents of the Mongols.

Mullah: Muslim theologian or priest or teacher.

Nimno: Lower; usually used to denote the people belonging to lower social status.

Nishan: An emblem; an identity; an aim.

Pathan: A category of the Ashrafs who believe they are the descendents of the Afghans.

Pir: Mystic leaders who are believed to be the possessors of magico- spiritual power.

Porhejgari: To keep oneself away from prohibited affairs

Qadi: Muslim judge. This profession, as judge, is not any more existent in contemporary Bangladesh as they have lost significance in modern judiciary system. Qadis are now seen only to do marriage registration.

Shariat: The Islamic scripture or law (corrup. Of the Arabic word ‘Shariah’).

Sheikh: Bengali-Muslims converted from the upper caste Hindus.

Syed: The highest category of the Ashrafs who claim to be the decadents of the Prophet Mohammad.

Tabiz: Amulets used to protect oneself from the evil spirits and various kinds of every day adversities.

Tauhid: To have belief in the oneness of Allah as the creator of the world

Uchho: Higher; usually used to denote the people belonging to upper social status.

Vachan: Sayings; maxim of wise people.

Varna: A category of the Hindu caste system.

Zillah: District

176 APPENDIX B: CHECK-LIST/GUIDELINE

Religious Practices

How many times to offer prayer each day? How frequent to Friday prayer? Does she/he observe ‘fasting’ during Ramadan? Which mosque is preferred to offer prayer? What is meant by Halal and Haram? How is the distinction maintained? Any experience of difficulties for maintaining Halal? How often zakat/alms is given? Which religious practices are the most important? How does religious background influence her/his life in Australia? Notions about the celebration of the special days religiously attached to Muslim identity. (Eid-ul-Fitr, Eid-ul-Azha, Shab-e-Barat, Shab-e-Meraz, Muharram and so on.) What are the pervasive problems for a Muslim in Sydney while retaining religious practices? How does she/he define her/his Muslim identity? Does she/he have any involvement with any Islamic organisation? If yes, what does she/he know about their activities and services.

Social Practices

Does she/he have any Muslim friend other than of Bangladeshi origin? If yes, how frequent do they get together? Did she/he invite the non-Bengali Muslim friends to her/his home during last Eid or any other occasions? How did she/he celebrate the last Eid? What are the shops being preferred? Does she/he prefer intermarriage between Bengali-Muslim and non-Bengali Muslim? What are the foods she/he prefers to eat at home?

177 While eating outside home what kind of restaurant does she/he prefer? (What are the factors being considered?) What social factors does she/he consider as important in adjusting to life overseas? Does she/he have any involvement with any Bengali organisation? If yes, what does she/he know about their activities and services. What does she/he think about the upbringing of future generation of Bengali-Muslim migrants?

Identifying the self

What does she/he describe as her/his primary identity? Medium of language: Language used at home and while talking with Bangladeshi friends. Language used at work, school/college/university. How often does she/he watch Bangladeshi movie/TV programs, read Bangladeshi newspapers/books/magazines, enjoy Bangladeshi Music? What are the problems that she/he has faced or is still facing while living in Sydney? How does ethnic background influence her/his life in Australia? Notions about the celebration of the special days socio-culturally attached to Bengali identity. [Bengali New Year, Martyr’s and Language Day on 21st February, Independence Day on 26th March, Victory Day on 16th December, Bashanta Utshab (Spring Festival) on 13th Falgun (a month of Bengali calendar) and so on]. What does she/he consider as the main elements of Bengali identity?

Basic Demographic and Personal Information

Name of the respondent: Family/Lineage title: Age: Gender: Occupation: Marital Status: Educational Background: Year of Arrival in Australia:

178 Length of stay in Sydney: Parent’s educational and socio-economic background:

179 APPENDIX C: PHOTOGRAPHS OF THE BENGALI MIGRANTS IN SYDNEY

Photograph 8: Dance performance by two Bengali migrants while celebrating the Bengali New Year in Sydney (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

Photograph 9: Bengali migrants are dancing together while celebrating the Bengali New Year in Sydney (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

180

Photograph 10: Second generation Bengali-Muslims in Sydney (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

Photograph 11: First generation Bengali-Muslim women gathered together at a park in Sydney (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

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Photograph 12: Three second generation Bengali-Muslim girls sharing kitchen work with first generation women (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

Photograph 13: Modern Bengali dance performed by a first generation migrant girl while observing the Victory Day of Bangladesh (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

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Photograph 14: Bengali migrants watching the Victory Day function in Sydney (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

Photograph 15: Bengali women migrants selling dresses at the fair organised to celebrate the Victory Day of Bangladesh (Photograph by: Raasheed Mahmood)

183 APPENDIX D: COPY OF EMAIL CORRESPONDENCE BETWEEN TWO BENGALI-MUSLIM FRIENDS OF BANGLADESH

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To: [email protected]

From: "mahfuz kamal"

Date: Tue, 27 Feb 2007 09:15:02 +0000

Subject: RE: [DRMC92and94] Good News & Maaal khamu!!

Khooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooo ooob goooooooooooooooooo oooooooooooooooo d

NEWS!!....Valo laglo dost...All the breast!!!

Party kobe hobe?? immediately party chai...Maaal khamu, valo whysky & Vodka rakhbii kintu!!!

Take care

Best Regards ,

Md. Mahfuz Kamal Uttara Model Town, Dhaka-1230, Bangladesh.

184