Islam offers those faithful to the religion a range of prescriptions relating to the conduct of everyday life. Social scientific literature explores how these practices and norms change according to the social and cultural context in which they are practised (Fischler 1988; Mintz & Du Bois 2002). A growing body of this work focuses on Islamic dietary law and practices of consumption that are defined by the theological boundaries of halal (permissible) and haram (not permissible). In this chapter, I explore ways in which these religious ideas have been both increasingly commodified and politicised and how these dual forces impact practices of consumption for Muslims in Australia. To examine this, in-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a diverse group of middle-class Muslims living in a large Australian city. These interviews explored subjective understandings of halal, locating halal food and drink in shops and restaurants, and acts of negotiation when halal requirements could not be taken for granted. The data reveal how Islamic food taboos result in Muslim identity becoming embedded in a range of ‘intercultural’ settings and offers rich descriptions of the intersubjective meanings generated in these encounters. Here I present the ways that my informants articulate and navigate different ideas surrounding consumption, to accommodate their specific understanding of living as a pious, moral Muslim whilst participating as citizens and consumers in different aspects of Australian life. In this way, I offer an insight into the politicisation and commodification of religious ideas in Australia and the impact this has on modern articulations of faith.
In the context of an increasingly globalised market, current systems of food production and distribution have significantly changed the way food is consumed and understood. In relation to halal, food and drink is now involved in a set of complex global processes far removed from religious authorities and consumers. In this context, halal certification has emerged as a key way for Muslims to ensure Islamic rules surrounding consumption are adhered to in contemporary capitalist societies (Fischer 2011). In Australia, the enhanced visibility of halal in the mainstream marketplace has recently resulted in a backlash from anti-Islam groups who have forged boycott campaigns, with varying success, against companies that have their products halal-certified (Mann 2014). These groups, activated and strengthened through social media (e.g. Boycott halal in Australia www.facebook.com/BH.Australia), have found a voice in the Australian political system through the recent election of several senators from the right-wing, anti-immigration, anti-Islam ‘One Nation’ Party. Paying attention to the consumptive practices of middle-class Muslims allows an empirical exploration of how Islamic practices and identities are interpreted, enacted, and reshaped within this specific context. My reading of data collected also offers an insight into how religious difference is defined and interpreted by non-Muslims in Australia by examining intercultural interactions involving food and drink. I discuss themes of belonging, inclusion and exclusion and how these processes are reflected and produced in these encounters with non-Muslims.
The current place of Muslims in Australia is characterised by their emergent, yet uneven, interest from an economic and political perspective. Literature on political processes of multiculturalism can be seen to overlook the everyday lived reality of cultural difference in diverse cities and spaces (Wise & Velayutham 2009). In Australia, there is a growing literature from this perspective exploring interactions involving food (Wise 2011), however the experiences of Muslims and the negotiation of halal have been neglected until recently (Voloder 2015). Social scientific work on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Wise 2005, 2011) has begun to examine how Muslims navigate and negotiate the boundaries of halal and haram in everyday practices of consumption. Internationally, work among Muslims in the United Kingdom (Fischer 2005, 2010, 2011) and Singapore (Nasir & Pereira 2008; Marranci 2012) has offered an insight into the challenges and complexities of the lived experience of cultural diversity and difference in multicultural societies. Given that a politically hostile environment has seen symbols and practices specific to Islam treated with suspicion and scrutiny, exploring the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion through food-related encounters offers a novel way to articulate how belonging is forged through social interaction.
A qualitative outlook and method allows the exploration of Muslim subjectivities and their experiences surrounding the consumption of food and drink in different aspects of Australian life. Specifically, in-depth interviews are used as they offer an effective way to explore individuals’ interpretations of how specific religious ideas are reflected, translated, and challenged in everyday experiences of consumption. This approach presents an empirical challenge to widely circulating notions that deem Muslims to be bound by a set of religious prescriptions that confine and dominate the autonomy of the individual (Marranci 2004). The chosen methodology can offer specific insight into Göle’s (2002: 174) assertion that contemporary Muslims ‘blend into modern urban spaces, use global communication networks, engage in public debates, follow consumption patterns, learn market rules’ and are active agents in shaping the social landscape in which they operate.
The interview participants, recruited using non-probability sampling methods, were eight individuals living in urban Australia who identified as Muslim. A broad inclusion criterion was used as the sample is designed to reflect the diversity of the Muslim experience in Australia. Like the broader Muslim population in Australia, the sample was heterogeneous with regard to background, ethnicity, and age. Many were born overseas—in localities as diverse as Pakistan, Kenya, Indonesia, and Turkey—before settling in Australia, whilst others had lived in Australia their entire lives. The majority of informants were based in Melbourne and one was based in Brisbane. Two males and six females were interviewed, who ranged in age from 22 to 49. Each informant was of a broadly ‘middle-class’ background, having attained or in the process of attaining tertiary education or professional employment. Throughout the collection, analysis, and presentation of interview data, the confidentiality of informants has been ensured through the use of pseudonyms.
This chapter will discuss the way that these informants negotiate Islamic food taboos in broader multicultural Australian society. Particularly of interest are the social dynamics in everyday interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims involving food. Because food is at once so ‘everyday, deeply embodied, and yet so symbolic of difference’ (Wise 2011: 83), it offers an effective vehicle to how cultural difference is interpreted and negotiated in multicultural settings. Previous literature (Cesaro 2000; Gillette 2005; Nasir & Pereira 2008; Marranci 2012) has discussed how religious difference can become embedded in a range of situations because of Islamic food taboos, and how difference is interpreted and negotiated in the broader context of intergroup social relations. In Australia, despite a broad acceptance and valorisation of multiculturalism and cultural diversity at the societal level, a quarter of Australians hold negative attitudes towards Muslims (Markus 2014). Whilst useful, these statistics tell little about Muslim experiences in everyday intercultural interactions. I offer a qualitative perspective, exploring how middle-class, urban Muslims in Australia experience and interpret different quotidian food-related encounters with the wider non-Muslim population.
Informants’ interactions with non-Muslims were reflected upon with an acute awareness of existing in Australia as a small religious minority. Australian society was variously defined as a ‘secular environment’, a ‘Judeo-Christian society’, and a ‘Christian country’. Therefore, unlike findings from previous literature (Nasir & Pereira 2008; Marranci 2012), informants felt that halal food and other requirements attaining to Islamic practice were not something that could be taken-for-granted—nor expected—in every situation:
It’s always a juggling [process] … you know when you live in a society that isn’t Muslim—and that’s OK—you’re always have to be negotiating and juggling and that’s just the reality of living here. (Rachel)
Despite this, it was rare that informants felt that consuming halal (according to their religious subjectivities) was difficult. In fact, it was common for informants to outline convivial encounters with broader, non-Muslim society where their dietary needs were especially accounted for. This ‘interactive culinary multiculturalism, based on the interaction between different cultural subjects’ (Hage 1997: 114) is strikingly clear in the data. Therefore, I pay specific attention to the power relations and social dynamics present in these encounters and the various ways informants interpret, negotiate, and challenge them. Focusing on a range of quotidian, food-related experiences and their various interpretations offer an insight into the multilayered, multi-directional dynamics of inclusion and exclusion experienced by Muslims in Australia.
The degree to which the provision of halal was interpreted as ‘respect’, ‘acceptance’, or ‘recognition’ was dependent on the social distance between informants and the other in the encounter. Informants spoke of social situations where non-Muslim friends or family went to a particular effort to provide halal food for them. Rachel saw this as reflecting the mutual respect and acceptance of difference in her relations with others:
It’s uncanny how often our non-Muslim friends will have [our family] over and either they’ll make vegetarian or they’ll specifically go to the halal butcher on Sydney Rd or something. We’re like ‘you don’t have to’, [and they say] ‘no, no, we want to’ … It’s so lovely when people make the effort.
Mahnoor, whose friendship circle revolves around people from her ‘really multicultural high school’ where ‘everyone was ridiculously accepting of each other’ relayed similar stories. It was not uncommon for Mahnoor to be hosted by close friends who are ‘like Asian … Vietnamese, Cambodian … and they use pork and that sort of stuff in their food’, to have them cater for her needs. Once again, this was seen as ‘a really amazing gesture of respect’.
These narratives, repeated across the spectrum of the sample, can be interpreted as acts of ‘everyday recognition’ (Wise 2011: 100). Whilst Taylor (1994) and Modood (2007) have promoted recognition of difference at a political level, these everyday encounters show how respect and inclusion are generated in practice through everyday interactions in multicultural settings. The acts of commensality outlined above show the ways in which difference is recognised and respected ‘on the ground’ in everyday situations, fostering positive relationships across religious and cultural boundaries.
However, the ‘everyday’ recognition generated in these convivial, inclusive encounters with non-Muslims was not perceived as one-directional. Rather, these experiences were interpreted as reflecting the ‘mutual respect’ and shared acceptance of different beliefs among those in the encounter. Mehmet saw social inclusion and cohesion as a multi-directional process whereby different beliefs and practices were recognised and respected. He saw this as reflecting a broader culture of respecting difference in Australia:
If I invite you as my neighbour to a barbeque … and I just have meat [that] is sourced from a halal butcher and I don’t have any beer. But I’ve got say, Red Bull or something. Are you going to really care? You’re going to say, ‘Hey! I’m getting great food’. You know, there’s different salads, different varieties of other food on the table. ‘Who [are] [you] to complain? What do [you] care if there’s not a pork sausage, so what if [you] don’t have a beer?’
You invite me over and you say, ‘look, I couldn’t source halal, but there is other stuff I will provide you’, an alternative, at least you’ll have something to eat, so you won’t go hungry. Because that’s what friends [and] neighbours do. You invited me, you hosted me, I invited you, I hosted you … that’s what builds trust, it builds relationships … this is what enhances our society.
Mehmet’s proverbial barbeque and his notion of fostering social cohesion through mutual respect in intercultural interaction contrasts with Marranci’s (2012) and Nasir and Pereira’s (2008) findings, where adherence to Islamic food taboos was actively adopted as a marker of group identity used to reinforce boundaries between Muslims and non-Muslims. In comparison, informants embraced a paradigm of personalised, privatised religious belief that was then negotiated within the broader multicultural milieu. Mahnoor sums this multi-directional process of social inclusion in her assertion that ‘I would never impose my lifestyle on anyone else and I would hope no one would impose theirs on mine’, using examples of ‘homely’ experiences of eating and socialising with friends to support this.
The encounters my informants spoke of reveal the dynamic ways that middle-class, urban Muslims in Australia articulate and negotiate their religious identity and practices in everyday interactions with non-Muslims. Ahmad, who migrated from Indonesia several years ago, maintains a pragmatic approach to halal. This approach allows him to participate in different aspects of social life in Australia, fostering relationships in a range of contexts:
Once I joined friends from China, from Australia, they [drank] beer, I just [had] my coffee and we just [had] a chat … and I [smelt] the alcohol, OK, this is their thing and I did my thing. And we [had] no problem[s]. We just [had] a chat. It’s not really a problem for me. Keeping the relationship, building up the friendship … for me that was more important.
Ahmad’s narrative of balancing piety with conviviality in intercultural encounters suggests an unproblematic lived reality between non-Muslims and Muslims in Australia. However, despite treating adherence to halal requirements with pragmatism and flexibility, it is important to reflect on the tensions and ambiguities present in these encounters. Many informants registered a sense of discomfort surrounding the regular presence of alcohol in Australian social life:
We’ve got a friend in a band and [if] they’re playing in a pub, I feel very uncomfortable going in there, even if I’m not drinking, I feel really uneasy about going into a pub. I have though, in situations to support a friend, but I don’t like it. I judge it on a case-by-case basis … how important to the friend is it that I’m there? If they won’t care then it doesn’t matter. Can I get out of this without causing offence? If it’s really going to upset or offend someone then I try. (Rachel)
Rachel’s rhetorical questions reveal the way that middle-class Muslims negotiate belonging and engagement in Australian life by balancing their beliefs and broader social identities. It does not suffice to simply say that Rachel will avoid particular spaces or situations because of her religious beliefs. Her shifting views on alcohol in different social contexts reveal the contextual and conditional nature of religious practice:
[Alcohol] is a difficult one for me because I’ve got non-Muslim family and there’s this tension between, they can legitimately say ‘look, we’re trying to accommodate you as much as we can, we go and buy halal meat for you. I’m not going to not have a glass of wine at lunch because you don‘t, I’m not asking you to drink it’. So in that situation I will at times, if I feel it is necessary, sit at a table with alcohol even though I would prefer not to. In the interests of trying to accommodate [others], for the greater good I guess.
These narratives show how eating and drinking can see religious difference becoming embedded in a range of social situations, and how intercultural encounters can become sites of risk, ambivalence, and anxiety. As Rachel’s interpretations suggest, the level of discomfort felt in social encounters involving haram substances is dependent on the intersubjective meanings generated within the encounter. The everyday exchanges involving food and drink outlined by informants can be characterised as a ‘moral-economy of place-sharing’ with the ‘people, objects and social relations’ within them ‘made and remade, understood and reunderstood’ through social interaction (Wise 2011: 98).
Although Mehmet’s confident assertion that ‘living in Australia as a Muslim I couldn’t cite one example where I felt excluded’ speaks of an unproblematic lived reality between non-Muslims and Muslims, this is not always the case. Hage (1997) notes that a facile reading of intercultural encounters can overlook their complexity and the ways they reflect and reproduce intergroup power dynamics. In fact, several informants interpreted the growth of halal-certified items in mainstream retailers as a self-interested act to reap greater profits from Muslim consumers. Similarly, in everyday encounters with non-Muslims, recognition was interpreted differently according to the social distance and relations of power between individuals. For example, it was common for informants to outline experiences of having halal food provided for them in different institutional settings, including places of education, hospitals, schools, and workplaces. Hasina works in a professional capacity and recalled a business trip where she was hosted by a large external firm:
I did the presentation and the lunch was served and they actually went and got halal [food] … and that was ‘on them’ [they paid for it]. And I thought, ‘that was not necessary, but thank you’. You know, I’m a ‘big girl’ and I can adapt to situations.
This reveals how intercultural encounters are interpreted differently according to who is doing the consuming, in what kind of social setting, and with whom. In Hasina’s anecdote, her identity as a Muslim was foregrounded as the corporate hosts made a visible effort to provide exclusively halal food. Her comments that she is a ‘big girl’ and ‘can adapt to situations’ captures the way in which the recognition of difference was interpreted with ambivalence, rather than simply a sign of mutual respect and conviviality. Similarly, Ahmad relayed a story of walking into a Chinese restaurant with his wife:
The Chinese [shopkeeper was] surprised, they look[ed] at my wife wearing the hijab [and said] ‘hello, do you know that this food is not halal?’ And we were surprised, we [didn’t] really care, if we could find chicken or beef [on the menu], that’s fine for us!
Here, Ahmed’s wife’s visibility as a Muslim made the shopkeeper assume that they were not permitted to eat at the restaurant because of their religion. These encounters reveal the ways that attempts at showing respect and conviviality can instead be interpreted as exaggerated and abstracted from the daily lives of middle-class Muslims in Australia. Similarly, Aisha recalls being involved as a student representative in her first years in Australia and attending catered institutional board meetings:
I remember that they had made an effort of having one plate that was all halal meat and it was labeled for me specifically [laughs]. But I remember the CEO of [the education institute] at the time was very upset that I had been excluded because of dietary requirements, and he basically asked the catering company that as long as I was on the board … every food that was served in each meeting would be halal. And I think that, for me, was the most significant gesture of welcoming me into that little group.
Although the CEO’s provision of halal was in the best interests of Aisha and interpreted as ‘a significant gesture of welcoming’, it also signalled him as culturally sensitive and accepting of diversity, reasserting his position within the context of managing an international education institute. Aisha’s narrative reflects Hage’s (1997: 116–117) assertion that ‘intercultural culinary interactivity’ can be mutually experienced as ‘homely’ by both sides in the encounter. These experiences and their various interpretations show how multiculturalism can be both inhabited and appropriated as a form of cultural capital in everyday interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims involving food and drink.
Previous literature on Muslim dining practices (Marranci 2012; Nasir & Pereira 2008) overlooks individuals’ agency to actively reflect on and challenge assumptions surrounding Muslims and Islamic religious practices through their everyday actions. My data registered that different ideas and discourses surrounding halal were actively reflected and translated through critical engagement and resistance in the mainstream market. Similarly, interactions with non-Muslims are also sites where informants act with agency to challenge both ignorance and negative assumptions of their religious practices and identities. Several informants saw common misconceptions that circulate about Islam and halal as a way to educate and inform others, actively building and strengthening understandings of both themselves and their religion. Aisha affirms that ‘not a lot of people are very clear on [halal] and not a lot of people really think about it unless they have to’. Despite this, she challenges this perceived ignorance by actively developing the understandings of those around her:
My relationship with my non-Muslim colleagues and friends is that they’ve always been welcome to ask any questions, so over the years they’ve kept asking questions and I’ve been answering them and now some of them that have known me for a bit have a better understanding.
This method of engagement is shared by Hasina, who is always keen to ‘deconstruct the hype’ surrounding Islam and Muslims that she sees stemming from sustained negative media attention and widely circulating stereotypes. Mahnoor regularly experienced non-Muslims exhibiting curiosity towards Muslims and halal rather than unshakeable ignorance:
A lot of people are more so curious. If they don’t know they’ll ask to be informed, and I love that. Because then they know what [halal] is. So I’m always happy to answer questions for people if they’re curious about it.
Informants’ narratives of agency in everyday interactions with non-Muslims support Yasmeen’s (2010) assertion that the processes of inclusion and exclusion are not one-directional and one-layered. Rather, they are marked by a sense of dynamism that plays out differently in different contexts. The diversity of meaning that is generated in intercultural interactions reveals the complexities present as social actors experience and negotiate cultural difference in a multicultural society, summed up by Wise (2011: 85) who notes:
In each setting—the spaces of consumption, the social rituals involved, the actual food consumed and the prevailing political and cultural ‘winds’—all mediate how, and in what way, food matters in intercultural settings, and whether, and to what extent identities are traversed, ascribed, reinscribed or reworked.
Similarly, the data in this chapter suggest that social actors—both Muslim and non-Muslim—reflect on, translate, and challenge widely circulating ideas surrounding Muslims and Islamic religious practice through everyday practices of conviviality and commensality, generating new processes of belonging and social inclusion.
Despite the wide range of experiences given above outlining commensality and conviviality in everyday intercultural interactions, it must be noted that all but one informant noted the current political and media environment as imbued with hostility towards Muslims. Especially noted was the current furore over halal certification, variously described as constituting ‘bigotry’, ‘hysteria’, a ‘moral panic’, and ‘idiotic boycott campaigns’. Despite the intensity with which this was felt, it was rare for informants to experience hostility in everyday encounters with non-Muslims involving food. Yasemin described it as ‘frustrating’ and ‘upsetting’, yet it was ‘probably the least of [her] worries’ living as a Muslim in Australia:
If I were to look at all the issues affecting Muslims, it would certainly not be something that I’m passionate about, or that I would want to lobby for. I mean, I think I feel passionate about the hysteria associated with it today and the fact that you can go to [a major] shopping centre and in the [chain supermarket] they [will] have a huge sign that says ‘kosher items’ … you know if you were to go to a shopping centre that had a huge sign saying ‘halal items’, people would be taking to the streets. That aspect of it frustrates me and upsets me.
The degree in which Muslims were the focus of negative scrutiny in media and political discourse was inconsistent with both the broad societal acceptance of diversity in Australia and informants’ everyday interactions with others. Apart from the occasional ‘funny look’ or experience of anti-Muslim sentiment online, only Aisha outlined an occasion where she had experienced hostility in relation to halal food:
A couple of months ago I came home and in my mailbox I found pamphlets [that] were basically propaganda about halal and halal supporting Muslim terrorism and that kind of stuff. And the way that impacted me was it made me feel very unsafe in my home … because it’s one thing to watch this stuff play out on the television and on the news [but] to find those pamphlets had been distributed in my mailbox and the mailboxes of my neighbours, it was too ‘real’ and it was very traumatic almost.
Despite this hostility, Aisha’s response reveals how Muslims in Australia use methods of civic participation to resist widely circulating ideas and assumptions about Muslims and Islamic religious practices:
I [wrote] to the Minister for Women Affairs [and the Minister for] Multicultural Affairs of my state, to express that, for a group to be openly targeting another group within the community … [it] is not OK.
Additionally, she has seen the incident and the generally hostile political environment as a way to ‘have greater discussions’ with non-Muslim colleagues and friends, educating and informing people about ‘what halal is’ and life as a Muslim more generally. These examples reveal the ways in which Muslims in Australia act with social and political agency to critique and resist negative assumptions towards Muslims, ‘building new and more open social relations’ (Jakubowicz 2007: 279) with wider Australian society in their everyday lives.
Joppke (2002: 252) has noted that despite a ‘retreat of multiculturalism’ from public policy in many culturally heterogeneous societies, ‘implicit multiculturalism’—or the broad acceptance and valorisation of cultural difference at the societal level—is pervasive. The encounters surveyed and analysed in this chapter support this assertion by exploring how cultural difference is experienced and negotiated ‘on the ground’ in everyday encounters. This inclusivity is not one-directional and relies on mutual acceptance and recognition of difference. Additionally, belonging in Australian society is forged by middle-class Muslims through active engagement in acts of resistance and negotiation in everyday interactions with non-Muslims involving food and drink.
Exploring quotidian, intercultural encounters of commensality has allowed me to look beyond simplistic, uni-directional notions of ‘exclusion’ and ‘discrimination’ used to understand the experience of Muslims in Australia in a generally hostile social context (Poynting & Mason 2007). By actively and critically engaging in culinary intercultural encounters, middle-class Muslims reflect, translate, and challenge widely circulating ideas, discourses, and assumptions surrounding Muslims and Islamic religious practices in Australia.
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