I was sitting in an auditorium in a skate park in the centre of Copenhagen, Denmark. By my side was Mohammed Ali, Birmingham born Bangladeshi graffiti artist, known as Aerosol Arabic. It was June 2006.
During the noughties, I was senior diversity policy officer the Arts Council England, a public arts funding body. Mohammed was in the formative period of his artistic career, an experimental street artist developing a Muslim soulful aesthetic and political bent. Three years later he would receive a South Bank Show award for his work, dedicating it to ‘the kids in Gaza… for all those unheard voices, suffering injustice wherever they are in the world regardless of faith, race or colour.’ He is now Mohammed Ali MBE and has his own arts company: Soul City Arts. But back then, he was plain Mohammed Ali/Aerosol Arabic – a bear of a man with a luxurious beard, the end of which he would often stroke into shape.
We had been invited to make a presentation about the relationship between the Islamic faith and artistic expression by Copenhagen fashion festival UNFAIR, that billed itself as an event based on ‘difference and nonconformity, with the spotlight being on creative expression of today that inspire the design of tomorrow’. Hence the lecture in the skatepark. There was a small reception at the festival, organised by the festival team, at which local dignitaries had been invited, including local elected officials. This included a couple of representatives of the Danish People’s Party, a far-right, xenophobic outfit that was on the political ascendency at the time, spouting an early version of the Islamophobic ‘great replacement theory’.
By June 2006, the DPP was riding high on reaction to the Jyllands-Posten Prophet Mohammed cartoons controversy. The Danish newspaper had published twelve cartoons, in late 2005, grossly denigrating the Prophet in a deliberate Muslim-baiting act to demonstrate how Islam was antithetical to free expression and western Enlightenment values. It deliberately took aim at what it characterised as a common belief in Islam that depiction of the human form, especially the Prophet Mohammed, was haram – forbidden! In January 2006, a number of Danish Imams, having risen to the Jyllands-Posten provocation, toured the Middle East, leading to a call for a boycott of Danish goods, in turn leading to attacks on the country’s diplomatic missions and death-threats against the publishers.
Part of the reason we had been invited to Copenhagen was to address this ‘hot button’ issue. It was quite brave of the organisers to be honest. The UNFAIR press release declared:
With the controversy surrounding the cartoon based on the Prophet Muhammad, religion and its relationship with the arts, has become an increasing debate throughout Europe. Denmark, the centre of such controversy, is pleased to invite artist Mohammed Ali, one of the UK’s leading graffiti artists, who will offer an insight into his unique style of urban spiritual artwork. Mohammed takes graffiti from walls to canvas, using the beauty of Islamic script as his art form. He fuses two very different artistic forms by drawing on his faith and the energy of the streets to create a style that is uniquely western and Islamic. He describes this mélange of styles as ‘the sacred script of God’ fused with the ‘selfish script of man’.
Mohammed and I were duly introduced to the gathering at the skate park reception. My eye was drawn to two red-faced men, sat with their arms crossed. We could tell they were bursting to say something. Eventually one of them grunted out something in Danish, and then they both stalked out of the room. ‘What did they say?’ we asked our host. Looking mortified, she took a moment to struggle with a form of words. ‘They don’t like you; they object to you being here. They’re from the Danish People’s Party’. ‘Oh, OK’ was all we could think to say in reply.
Later in the day we gave an illustrated lecture to an audience of predominantly arts folk. The presentation was based on a talk we had given many times in the UK. It was part of a programme I had developed, with my Arts Council colleague, Abid Hussain (also from Birmingham and a friend of Mohammed Ali), in the aftermath of the 2005 7/7 bombings in London. We called it Arts and Islam, a programme of talks and presentations across all the regional offices of the Arts Council England.
It was based on a simple realisation: almost no artists of Muslim heritage in England were getting grants from the Arts Council to make work, regardless of whether they were practicing Muslims or not, or whether they considered themselves just ‘artists’ or were working within Islamic art traditions. There were a few within the field of visual arts, for example Lubaina Himid, although she was long identified with the Black Art Movement than any religious roots. Abid and I investigated why this was the case, a task made more difficult because at the time there was no data that we could draw on.
What we did find was anecdotal evidence that Arts Council grant officers, when assessing the smattering of applications that had a ‘Muslim-looking’ names attached to them, were downgrading them on the casual basis that Islam and art were antithetical, and that anyone articulating their ‘Muslimness’ were proselytising and therefore did not qualify for state funding. In our early conversations we had to rebut this notion as without foundation. We would point out that the National Portrait Gallery, directly subsidised by the British government, was packed to the gills with paintings infused with religiosity and Judaeo-Christian imagery – the crucifixion, the mother and child, the trinity, and that the most celebrated contemporary British artists, such as Francis Bacon, Gilbert and George, and others, constantly explored and leaned into Christian symbolism and iconography.
Talking with our Arts Council colleagues, we also discovered that most of them (almost regardless of whether they lived near or alongside Muslim communities) had virtually no understanding of Muslims in Britain – where they originated, their demographics, their cultural heritages, their employment, and so on. All they had to draw on were the constant flood of negative news stories about Muslims that swamped the media.
At each regional lecture we would seek out and invite a local artist of Muslim heritage to speak directly to the grants officers about their work. (If there was no local artist that fitted the bill, such as our visit to Exeter in the southwest of England, we would import one from another part of the country). We lobbied successfully to change Arts Council policy so that Muslims along with other groups and individuals whose beliefs prohibited receiving money from gambling, could get their grants from the treasury (direct taxation) rather than the National Lottery funds the Arts Council was in receipt of (revenue from scratch cards, basically a tax on the poor and desperate). A regular conversation we had concerned Aniconism – forbidding the artistic representation of the human form, including depictions of prophets, saints, and supernatural beings. The grant officers had heard there was this concept in the Muslim religion called ‘haram’ that all Muslims had to obey, and that it was a set of blanket and universal rules arising out of some dark ancient pre-enlightenment bundle of prejudices, taboos, and restrictions called ‘sharia’.
Back to the Copenhagen skate park.
Mohammed and I present our little talks. I talk about art and Islam, and he talks about his work. Then we open it up to the audience for question and answer. There is a fair-sized audience. A middle-aged white man at the back of the auditorium raises his hand. He introduces himself; he is a director working at the Danish Royal National Theatre (a very plum job in Denmark’s performing arts scene). I perk up because I am also a theatre director – we are in the same game, no?
‘I don’t understand why you are here talking about the arts’, he begins. I paraphrase. ‘We know that Islam is totally against the arts and freedom of expression’ he continues. ‘You don’t like women and their bodies. A man and a woman cannot appear on the stage together. They cannot dance together. They cannot touch each other or speak with one another. All this is haram in your religion. This is against theatre. If we allow Islam into theatre, we will have no theatre at all. How can you have theatre without the human body?’
Mohammed leans over to me. ‘You can have this one bro.’ I take a breath. ‘Well, as a theatre practitioner, I think that is an interesting proposition – a theatre piece without anyone on stage. We should explore that’. The man explodes in anger and loud muttering roils through the audience. Strangely enough, about a decade later, avant-garde theatre-makers would start experimenting along the lines of my, admittedly half in-jest, proposition. They would call it immersive theatre; and stage fashionable shows where the audience would sit in the dark and watch a shadowy figure in a booth recite a monologue that they would receive through individual headphones.
We – Abid, Mohammed, and I – took our Arts and Islam roadshow to various countries between 2006 and 2010, including many in Europe. Inevitably during our visit we would come across struggling Muslim artists who would spill their heart out to us about how hostile an environment their national arts scene was, and how they had even gone as far as to shave their beards or remove their hijab or religious signifiers in an attempt to assimilate and stand a chance of pursuing a career in the arts in their own country.
However, we also became aware that there were other ‘players’ in this debate. There was the state with its obsession with the securitisation of the Muslim population, particularly the younger generation, who were increasingly seen as harbouring an anti-Western – in some case terrorist – subculture. In Britain, this became obvious to us in September 2007.
An email landed in my Arts Council mailbox:
Subject: Counter Terrorism: ‘Hearts and Minds’
Importance: High
The email, forwarded by the Arts Council’s CEO for our department’s attention, had been written by a top civil servant who acted as liaison between the government’s Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Arts Council, which is supposed to be an independent ‘arm’s length’ entity, free from direct state influence. In it, the senior civil servant declared: ‘the subject of “Hearts and Minds”, has come up again, but with a bit of a vengeance. No 10 is very interested, Home Office and CLG (Ministry of Communities and Local Government) doing lots of co-ordinating…We have revived the idea of trying to co-ordinate positive artistic activities for young Muslims, etc with local authorities’. The email then went on list the areas ‘of highest Muslim population’ (a rough and ready proxy for risk of radicalisation). The accompanying briefing paper made clear that the aim was to utilise the arts to influence young Muslims as part of the governments wider PREVENT anti-extremism programme. The paper proposed building on ‘the work already undertaken in this area under the Arts and Islam initiative’, even though we were diametrically opposed to using the arts in this way.
Reluctantly, I and the director of our department, Tony Panayiotou, a committed ally of British Muslims, agreed to meet the DCMS civil servant. We listened to him trot out the now discredited argument that a significant number of young Muslim men were on a ‘conveyor belt’ to Islamic terrorism, and that the arts could be used as a way of deprogramming them and instilling British values in them and promoting ‘community cohesion’. The civil servant let it be known that a million pounds was on the table, ready for us to pick up if we agreed to the terms on offer. We replied that we would happily take his million pounds and invest it in promoting Muslim artists and their right to free expression, including criticising the then Labour government for its foreign policy including the recent invasion and occupation of Iraq. We told him that rather than using the arts in a crude attempt to modify young Muslims’ thought and behaviour, encouraging freedom of expression was by far the best way to tackle their alienation from British society. He retorted that this is not what the money was for. We replied that in that case we didn’t want the money. And we never took it.
There was another set of prohibitions in operation playing into the arts – a state policy of censorship and control, by which it was forbidden to allow Muslims to have the freedom to express themselves that every other section of society took for granted. Today, we have become almost normalised to this state of affairs, but back then it still had the ability to shock.
Wherever we went with the Arts and Islam tour, we encountered and had to relate to at least three audiences: the non-Muslim establishment arts sector (more curious than hostile in the most part), artists of Muslim heritage (who we would do our best to support) and the last being (mostly) young Muslim men who followed Salafism and were intent on laying down the law as to what artists of the Islamic faith could and could not do. The last category were in some respects both the mirror image of, and complement to, the hostile far-right, anti-Muslim interrogators we came across. The one main difference between them was one of power – the establishment Islamophobes had the state to rely on, whilst the Salafi censors were reduced to merely disciplining their own.
For us operating in the British arts scene, everything we did was for a short time measured by the rule-stick of halal or haram, with the emphasis falling on the latter. We moved in a world that the pioneering comedian Shazia Mirza, science teacher turned stand-up comedian, describes in her contribution to this issue of Critical Muslim: ‘growing up everything was considered haram. You got a bank account? Haram. You wear jeans? Haram. You got your ankles out? Haram! As a girl I only had to leave the house and make eye contact with a tree and it was considered haram’. The debates became centred around the popular artistic expressions that young people engaged in, because this arena was also a battle for the soul of the younger generation. We responded by initiating a series of debates around the county entitled Hip-Hop and Islam. At each event we would have a genuine discussion as to the relationship between music and the Islamic tradition, very much along the lines of the powerful and informed essay in this issue by Raza Ali.
Ali’s essay, ‘When Music Becomes Haram’, combines a deep human optimism and a lament, buttressed with a careful marshalling of Islamic jurisprudence. He takes as his starting point the tragic death of Pakistani pop-singer later turned religious preacher Junaid Jamshed. Jamshed was best known for what Ali describes as his 1987 superhit national song, ‘Dil Dil Pakistan’ (My Heart Pakistan). But by the year 2000, Ali tells how Jamshed faced what he perceived to be a fork in the road. ‘Junaid felt that he “wasn’t really able to speak from… the heart”. It wasn’t easy to live two lives. One, where he was becoming more religious with the negative perception of his musical career among the religious community, and second where he loved music, the fans that it brought, and where the fans might not be an equal fan of his religious awakening’. Ali shows how Junaid’s personal struggle was part of a wider phenomenon. In the post-9/11 era, in Pakistan, as in many other Muslim countries and communities, the notion, propagated by hugely influential preachers, that music was not only haram but the work of Shaytan, was on the ascendency. But Ali held fast to his love of music: ‘I couldn’t fathom how music could be prohibited and shunned in Islam’. In his essay Ali takes the preachers on in their own terms, to argue that ‘music is everywhere in Muslim life’, something we should celebrate and treasure as an essential part of our humanity.
Back in 2005, during our Hip Hop and Islam tour, we could really have done with such a carefully articulated and heartfelt set of arguments. What did the Qur’an and the Hadith have to say? How did it connect to, and add or take away from the Islamic concept of Deen? We had to deploy learned and progressive scholars such as Michael Mumisa, who hashed out all the positions. Mumisa would, amongst other things, argue that a direct line could be drawn between the role of the influential poets of the classical Muslim era and the spoken word rappers of today. We also platformed Rakin (Niass) Fetuga, frontman in the original old-school British Muslim hip-hop group Mecca2Medina. Rakin is a Black Muslim whose inspiration is rooted in an appreciation of the radical tradition of the American hip-hop scene and its political connection to the legacy of Black revolutionaries such as Malcolm X. He is also deeply religious. Fetuga argued, ‘it is often asked “Can rap really be put into Islam?” My answer is yes because rap is poetry with rhythm and the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) had his own official poet, Hasan B. Thabit, who used to stand in the mosque and recite poetry’. We would also invite groups like Poetic Pilgrimage (female Black British Muslim rappers) and Lowkey (Kareem Dennis) to perform.
There were other organisations doing similar work in the UK and beyond. North American journalist Abdul-Rehman Malik and fellow activist and publisher Fuad Nahdi launched, with the help of government PREVENT money, the Sufi-orientated Radical Middle Way ‘to promote a mainstream, moderate understanding of Islam to which young people can relate’. RMW set up a ‘Dangerous Ideas’ tour where they mixed Sufi Shaykhs with Muslim hip-hop performers. The American Muslim Hip Hop community had a very large influence on our debates at this time. A very productive conversation was sparked on both sides of the Atlantic upon the release of the 2009 documentary film ‘Deen Tight’ by US Muslim filmmaker Mustafa Davies. In it Davies followed a group of Muslim Hip Hop artists living in the United States and United Kingdom, including Mohammed Ali:
They discuss intimately with us the challenges they face trying to balance their faith, culture, and the pressures of daily Western life. The film provides an intimate look into the lives of a group we know very little about and how they deal with the many issues surrounding their culture and religion. This is the tale of one of the most influential pop culture movements of our time and its relationship to Islam, one of the world’s fastest growing religions.
Mohammed Ali remembers that during this period there was a pioneering feel about being one of a handful of Muslims trying to make their way in the arts and navigating the invisible lines of halal and haram that criss-crossed in front of them. ‘It definitely was exciting because you felt like you were part of something that was really fresh. As an artist, that’s always your dream to be a part of a movement where you go, wow, wow, no one’s really trod this. People were figuring out what is a Muslim artist? At the time it was a very alien concept. Now, of course, we have photographers, filmmakers, visual artists, playwrights. We’ve moved on, leaps and bands beyond the whole art is haram idea’.
How difficult it was, at the time, to thread the needle resonates with Mohammed. ‘Back then we were trying to navigate, music is haram, visual depiction is haram. Even photography was haram! I still remember a time when the Salafis were really banging on saying when you take a photo, it’s like re -creating a human being’. There were myriad of ‘strange and silly debates’ happening about every little detail – ‘that’s haram and this little thing is haram and that’s haram and free mixing is haram’. He used to hang around musicians, hip-hop heads. ‘There was this thing that you had to either be an artist or you had to just drop all your art to be a Muslim’. If you followed the path of Islam you had to leave the music game. Numerous musicians ditched it all. Perhaps most famously Cat Stevens, aka Yusuf Islam. (Only to return later). ‘I was one of the fortunate ones that was able to navigate’, says Muhammad. ‘I told myself, “I can be a full-time artist. It’s not as black and white. I don’t believe that art is haram. Muslims can be creative”’.
For Mohammed, it was a slow evolution. He had to constantly strike the balance between his ambitions as an artist and wanting still to be part of, and speak to, the Muslim community that he had grown up in and drew inspiration from. He was treading a fine line, sometimes justifying to himself the compromises he felt he had to make. ‘In a way, I was playing it safe. I had convinced myself that this was just part of being Muslim and an artist. I believed restrictions on figurative depictions would empower me – that it was forcing me to respond in a more dynamic and imaginative way. That’s an easy way out though, right? To just go, oh, you know, I can’t do that, but there’s loads of other things I can do. Many Muslims would say to me, ‘Why do you need to paint pictures of your people? You can do landscapes. You can do beautiful scenery. You can do calligraphy.’ And after a while, I’m like, ‘I’m sick and tired of only landscapes and nice scenery and calligraphy. It became very, very limiting. I was trying to convince myself that it was liberating, but in reality it was restricting me.
Mohammed explains he has over the years gradually moved towards depictions, but even today he pulls back. ‘I still don’t do what you would call like lifelike portraiture. There’s still a small amount of me that doesn’t want the Muslim community to think ‘this guy’s got no boundaries’. I am conscious that there’s a fine line of respect and understanding and also being humble enough to say, I could be wrong here and Allah forgive me if I am. So what I try to do is operate in a space where I am pushing the boundaries but still being mindful. And that’s the difference between me and a white liberal artist. They wouldn’t think of compromising their art to be respected. In fact, being a compromising, respectful artist is almost an oxymoron in their world. The difference with us as Muslim artists, I think, is that there is a level of thought and mindfulness about communities, because you’re always trying to take the people with you’.
Of course, the concept of halal is not limited to art and music. It is a deeply profound concept designed to promote not only a healthy, ethical and sustainable life but also an ecological sound environment and planet. During the classical period of Islam, it was used to ensure that the carrying capacities of cities is not violated, develop inviolable (hima) zones for the conservation of forests and wildlife, and sacred zones (haram) near water-courses and other areas where development was forbidden. And then halal regulated the economic and commercial activities of society. In this issue of Critical Muslim we explore halal as an all-round ethical concept in relation to different realms of contemporary society, and interrogate the concept from many directions.
In his article, ‘Is Halal Ethical’, Isham Pawan Ahmad’s encounter with a friend and a bottle of water sends him on an intellectual journey to understand how in our times the ethical ‘backbone has been removed’ from our understanding of halal, leaving us with ‘an obsession with technicalities’. The ‘why’ has somewhere been lost. As Ahmed argues ‘Halal has not just lost sight of its rationalist justifications, the concept has been further reduced to an empty formalism – a superficiality. In the name of trying our best to be faithful to the essential teachings of Islam, the halal ‘certification’ becomes a technicality, a ritual exclusively focussed on the who, what, where, and how an animal is slaughtered, for example. The why is conspicuously absent.’ In search of the why, Ahmed returns to the foundations of ethical inquiry, from the Ancient Greek philosophers, the Torah and Qur’an, through to Al-Farabi and the Islamic tradition, and back to his friend and his bottle of ‘halal’ water. Ahmed exhorts us to renew the sundered connections: ‘We must use the reason God bestowed within us and look to how we can practice what we pray’.
Ahmed provides a thoughtful leaping-off points into other contributions. In ‘The Halal Finance Cul de Sac’, Iqbal Asaria leans into his immense experience in the field to explain why the Islamic Finance industry has turned out to be, in his words, almost as socially useless as the dominant paradigm it sought to compete with or usurp. Asaria traces this missed opportunity back to the catastrophic global financial crash of 2007-2008. At that point an alternative system of finance, one that promised to be more equitable and ethical (that word again) could have emerged out of the neo-liberal ruins. A system built on prohibition of usary (riba), that avoided speculation (gharar), shared risk (rather than driving risk down to the very bottom of society), that limited the sale of debt and its use as collateral and prohibited finance for activities deemed incompatible with Shariah Law, could have challenged the dominant paradigm.
As Asaria explains, there was, and continues to be, a largely state sponsored growth of shariah compliant financial instruments in the Gulf states and countries such as Malaysia. However, instead of the equitable and ethical promise originally envisioned, it has instead led to ‘a plethora of approved products which do not fit into a coherent theoretical framework let alone deliver the claimed moral and social benefits of Islamic banking’. A painful cul-de-sac awaits the industry, argues Asaria. The search by economists for an urgent recalibration of the Islamic banking industry is now under way.
But where will these Islamic innovators so desperately needed come from? In ‘Back to School’ Mohamed Aslam Haneef traces the different streams of thought in Islamic economics and their historical sources, such as foundational First International Conference on Islamic Economics, held in Makkah in 1976. Haneef learned about this almost now mythic gathering in his undergraduate days. However, Haneef writes, ‘a spectre lingered over each invocation and memory of 1976, the ultimate question that is not easily answered: what has become of Islamic economics since then?’ Citing the analysis of M. Nejatullah Siddiqi, one of the great pioneers of Islamic economics, Haneef argues, though a satisfying turn of phrase ‘instead of creating an alternative to the economic order that is, frankly, destroying the whole planet, we have instead found a way to recreate neoliberal capitalism in the rose-coloured glasses of an overly fiqh-oriented vessel.’ What then is to be done? Back to school, is Haneef’s reply.
It is blatantly obvious that the Islamic economic thought, as well as Islamic banking and finance industry, cannot anchor themselves on the capitalist perpetual growth model. So does it move from growth to degrowth? Nayab Khalid takes on this question in her essay from an Islamic perspective. Economic growth, catching up with the industrialised west was the orthodoxy in many Muslim countries as they emerged from the yoke of colonialism, following the standard development model of growth. But as Khalid argues, this expansive model is increasingly coming under attack, both from western and Muslim economists and development theorists. ‘Degrowth is an idea’, Khalid writes, ‘that critiques the global capitalist system as the pursuit of growth at all costs, inevitably causing human exploitation and environmental destruction. Its main argument is that an infinite expansion of the economy is fundamentally contradictory to the finiteness of material resources on Earth. Instead, we should build our systems around the health and wellbeing of both humans and the environment’. But Khalid goes much further than describing the Degrowth movement. She argues that ‘the philosophy of degrowth reaches its own limits when it contends with spirituality’. For Khalid, the movement rooted in Eurocentric academic spheres, fails ‘to contend with the spiritual and theological drivers’. In one sense both concepts, growth and degrowth, emanate from the same source – the western materialist tradition. But Islamic thinkers are rooted in different societies, intellectual and moral traditions and schools of thought, and therefore potentially have much to add to this urgent debate.
In ‘Izzat, Halal, and Neoliberalism’, Zahira Latif roots her argument in ‘the challenges faced by the British Pakistani Muslim community living within a neoliberal capitalist society’. Latif describes how izzat, broadly the concept of honour, and halal, converge in ‘a dynamic space where the preservation of cultural honour aligns with the ethical principles derived from Islamic teachings’ at both an individual and a collective level. But for those communities now living in Britain, these interconnected and collective bonds are fundamentally challenged by the hegemonic pull of neo-liberal individualism, identity, and pursuit of personal success. How then can the community at the same time advance and change the society around them? How can our Islamic principles and cultural foundations be brought into play, particularly in today’s society where powerful forces seek to separate us and pull us apart. For all this it seems to me that Latif remains hopeful. She writes ‘Despite these challenges, the pursuit of a fairer, more equitable and inclusive society remains a compelling imperative’. I agree.
Given the current confusion around what is halal in a rapidly changing context, it is not surprising that there is a big gap between the ethical imperatives of halal and its use in industry. Shaheed Tayob, in his essay ‘Between Certificates and Practice’ takes a microscopic look at this gap. We bounce between the halal certification regime in Japan to the soya sauce fatwa in Indonesia, the gelatine debate in South Africa, and the Mutton and Chicken section of the Crawford Market in Mumbai. Tayob’s essay is an eye-opener, touching on all the halal food debates of recent times. His call for ethical reflection and action must surely be right.
The development of halal certification was pioneered by the UK’s Halal Food Authority (HFA). As a young man growing up in the community of the Muslim Institute, Asim Siddiqui had a ring side seat on the emergence of HFA, and provides us with another aspect of the Halal food debate and its connection amongst the Muslim immigrant communities of the west with the wider agitation for civil rights. Siddiqui maps the emergence of the HFA in Britain during the 1990s, initially as a campaigning organisation that exposed the existence of bad-faith halal butchers, whose meat was not only not halal, but sourced cheaply from the daily leftovers from London’s Smithfield meat market. The HFA was founded in 1994, as a project of the Muslim Parliament. It ‘was born by Islamic activists more use to fighting oppression and injustice, than a meat mafia. Now they had to swot up on the finer points of ritual slaughter and how a regulatory system could work in practice’.
A lot changed throughout Siddiqui’s and my own life. Where the emphasis was on getting the notions of halal and haram known in such western contexts as in Britain, it was also about setting a standard on which the regulation can function in our complex and multicultural world. And even in the last couple of decades since my time in the Arts Council, much has changed and there have been no shortage of challenges thanks also to the proliferation of Islamophobia and frank fascism that we witness every day, globally. ‘German Redemption Theology’ by Adnan Delalić is a very powerful dissection of the lunatic and utterly perverse fever presently gripping the German state and political class in its hopeless reactionary attempt to redeem itself from responsibility of its historic genocides (indeed that is plural!) by defending and facilitating a present day one. It is haram to criticise Israel, German law now has it. Read Delalić’s essay, get angry, despair, and recommend it to others.
Indeed, though it has been several years since Mohammed and I found ourselves at a skate park in Copenhagen, the world is disappointingly familiar. While they say slow and steady wins the race, time is not exactly something that we have abundance. A Great deal of work still needs to be done to understand the true ethical depth of halal, as well as between Muslims and the world. A lot of soul searching remains neglected at our own expense. Christopher B. Jones takes a radically different approach to the theme of this issue. In ‘Three Tomorrows of Halal’, Jones deploys Postnormal Times theory to map out possible futures, threats, and possibilities that challenge our present understanding of halal and haram. What do we think about artificially produced meat and seafood. Haram or halal? ‘Will Muslim astronauts and Mars explorers redefine halal practices?’ asks Jones. What happens if global warming leads to societal collapse, and the survivors are forced to forage for insects and other flying and crawling species? An authoritarian future – American Taliban anyone? A grim parlour game for us all to play.
It is time to move on from the superficial status halal and haram have been consigned to. Change is the order of the day. And our understanding of the profound concept of halal must change. We need to dig deeper.