Raise Your Voices and Kill Your Animal

This research analyses how groups of people in Tanga discursively construct Islam by animal slaughter. Central to the project are the sometimes conflicting tendencies of grounding ritual practice in authoritative texts and constructing ethnic, social, and religious identity through ritual practices. The discourse on and the practice of daily animal slaughter at the abattoir, sacrifice as part of the annual hajj, the slaughter of sheep after the birth or death of a child, and the Swahili New Year sacrifice all reproduce assumptions of what Islam and Islamic behaviour should be.