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'Bengali-Muslims' in Sydney: the Construction of Halal and Haram

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'Bengali-Muslims' in Sydney: the Construction of Halal and Haram 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’
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