Being and doing ‘Bengali-Muslims’ in Sydney: the construction of Halal and Haram.

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