Au-delà des interdits. Religion islamique et pratiques culinaires marocaines en Italie.

In many discourses about the relationship between food and Islamic religion, attention is often devoted to normative aspects: Muslims food practices are ruled by the polarization between what is halal and what is haram to eat. In this discursive context, even if negotiations with certain requirements can be taken into account, believers would primarily incorporate a food style determined by certain feed bans.
My study, without neglecting these aspects, aims at demonstrating how the semantic field of the term halal not only includes all that is not forbidden for consumption by religious norms. This field opens indeed to many instructions, coming from Islamic sources, actively and positively guiding believers in their food choices. My doctoral research, focusing on culinary practices and objects of Moroccan women in migration context, made me reconsider the Islamic religion as having an affirmative role in eating behaviours and even in food preparation. The women protagonists of my ethnography show how the choice to use certain ingredients and to prepare some meals is dictated or supported by divine guidance.
My presentation will focus on the materiality of these dynamics: through images collected during my ethnography, my intention is to recount the complexity and the concreteness of the relationship between eating habits and Islam.