When my father arrived in the UK in the late 1950s to work in the east London docks, part of the early wave of Bangladeshi men who came after the Second World War, there was no halal meat available, so he went without for years. Halal meat refers to meat prepared according to Islamic law, which requires a swift cut to the throat while invoking the name of God as part of religious observance.
He first settled in Tower Hamlets – a borough of crumbling terraces and gruelling, low-paid labour – where he and other men from Sylhet would occasionally buy chickens to slaughter themselves, following halal principles. In those small, overcrowded flats, they cooked and ate together – not just for sustenance, but to preserve their dignity, faith, and a fragile sense of home in an unfamiliar land.
