Bouillon for His Majesty: Healthy halal Modernity in Colonial Java

In the mid-1920s, the vernacular press in colonial Java and Sumatra printed advertisements and articles engaging the idea of halal products, from margarine to mortgages. This article unfolds how these early halal utterances connected with religious demands and motivations while also reflecting the impact of the contingent political and economic colonial context, including public health policies. This is evidenced, for example, by marketers’ choice to add the halal label to claims of cleanliness and nutritiousness as a strategy to expand their consumer base. Similarly, conversations about alcohol consumption and animal slaughter were shaped by reflections over Islamic compliance as well as by the powerful overtones of hygienic modernity amid the Great Depression. Islamic precepts were important for individuals’ life choices and anticolonial politics, but this article shows the complex web of relations that gave rise to Indonesia’s late colonial era claims of halal beyond “Islamization”—a trend usually associated with turn-of-the-century Cairene reformism and Saudi Wahhabism—and in close relation to questions of hygiene and nutrition instead.