- In “Meat and Religious Difference in Colonial India: the Courage and Contradictions of Sayyid Ahmad Khan” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), SherAli Tareen (Franklin and Marshall College) “conducts a detailed reading of the paradigmatic South Asian Muslim modernist scholar Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s (d.1898) views on Indian Muslims dining with or eating the meat prepared and/or served by the British, as found in his Urdu/Arabic Text Rules on the Food of the People of the Book (Ahkam-i Ta‘am-i Ahl-i Kitab) composed in 1868.” In doing so, Tareen “shows the impact and imprints of modern secular assumptions and desires on the thought of a Muslim scholar on a topic of profound ethical consequence, and…highlights the limits but also the efficacy of the categories of modernist and traditionalist in the study of Islam.” [login required]
- In “Meat Together: South Asian Muslim Visions of Sovereignty in the Age of Minority” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient), Roy Bar Sadeh (University of Manchester) observes that “historians of South Asia have long treated practices related to the consumption of meat—especially cow slaughter—as a flashpoint in late-nineteenth-century Hindu–Muslim conflict. Such clashes carried profound social and political con-sequences and exposed a shifting nexus between sovereignty and everyday life in post-Mughal North India. Against this backdrop, the present article argues that halal meat—and food more broadly—functioned as a medium of inter-communal rapprochement, challenging the colonial state’s claim to arbitrate Hindu–Muslim daily interactions.”
- In his own article of the same name, “Meat Together: South Asian Muslim Visions of Sovereignty in the Age of Minority” (Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient),” John M. Willis (University of Colorado Boulder) argues that “Roy Bar Sadeh’s ‘Meat Together’ [referenced above] offers a compelling vision of intercommunal sociability in nineteenth-century India based on a reading of Sir Sayyid Ahmad Khan’s writing on the legal rules governing the slaughter of animals for meat. Bar Sadeh’s analysis also gives us pause, however, to consider the emergence of life, both human and non-human, as a problem of colonial governance. Taken together, biopolitical government and the question of sociability, the article allows to interrogate the limits of hospitality as it extends to and beyond the human.”