1 - From Caste-Occupational Practice to Market/State/Ulama Capture: Halal Slaughter, Caste Networks, and Islamic Capitalism

The 2015 beef ban in Mumbai fundamentally altered the foodscape of the city. Beef, had until then been a source of cheap protein for low-caste urban labor and of livelihood for Muslim slaughterers, traders, and roadside street-food vendors. But the ban on beef, although often articulated for the protection of Hindu sentiments, needs to be situated as a recalibration of livelihood practice away from Muslim networks of caste-based trade and labor, toward standardized forms of abstraction and export. Indeed the 2024 announcement that all meat exported from India as halal must now comply with ‘India Conformity Assessment Scheme (I-CAS) - Halal’ of the Quality Council of India (QCI) is an indication of the alignment of state interest and bureaucratic practice with the export of halal quality meat to global Muslim markets in the middle East and East-Asia. Yet the matter of halal is not a state led transformation. Over the past decade the Jamiatul Ulama Maharashtra, the largest halal certification organization in India, has been in partnership with a fellow Deobandi aligned ulama organization in South Africa, to enhance their documentary and procedural adherence to internationally agree upon halal standards. This paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Mumbai, considers the exchange of halal knowledge and bureaucratic practice through Africa-Asia networks towards the establishment of halal as a quality that can be abstracted from local networks of labour and trade in favor of ulama-aligned forms of Islamic capitalism.