Theoretical Background

Both Islam and Orthodox Christianity in Ethiopia,Footnote ³ in their “local construction” (Tapper and Tapper Reference Tapper and Tapper1986) or indigenized form, have forged and developed some food related cultures (popular proscriptions and taboos) taking presumably some aspects of the dietary rules of one religion as essential “other” with regard to some specific food items. McGee (Reference McGee2002, 15) aptly describes this phenomenon: “Used by outsiders to define a group, food is a key part of a group’s self definition.” This helps us to see interreligious discourse of food, which is used stereotypically as a template for evaluating other people and other cultures (Danesi Reference Danesi2004, 199). In the case of Ethiopia, one group not only names the diet, culinary tool, and so forth, according to the otherness of the group: YeIslam Billa, YeIslam Siga, YeIslam Siga-Bet; YeKristian Billa, YeKirstian Siga, YeKristian Siga-Bet (a Muslim knife, Muslim meat, a Muslim butchery; a Christian knife, Christian Meat; a Christian butchery, respectively) but also goes as far as naming the “other” according to its diet.Footnote ⁴ In addition, the food taboo attached to religion and acknowledged by religious groups helps in the cohesion of that group and in asserting one’s identity in relation to others and in creating a feeling of belongingness (Meyer-Rochow Reference Meyer-Rochow2009, 1). By now there are abundant researches on food and (religious) identity.Footnote ⁵ Whereas this article takes some of them as theoretical backdrop, it is particularly underpinned by notions surrounding speech act theory (Austin Reference Austin1962), specifically religious speech, whose most important aspect is what it accomplishes in contrast to its sheer content (Eller Reference Eller2007, 104). Slaughtering is such an important step in food preparation that marks, according to Claude Levi-Strauss, the beginning of the transformation of the natural into the cultural, that is, the raw into the cooked where the “identity-based food prohibition” is inserted (Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum2010, 77). That is, the religious speech together with other mandatory factors or “necessary conditions” (Austin Reference Austin1962, 14) such as the identity of the slaughterer and the slaughtering tool/utensil is the most important factor that transforms the “natural” animal into a “cultural” meat/food. In other words, in speech act theory, for the speech to be effective, there are relevant cultural and situational conditions: the speech must be performed in the right way and by someone authorized to perform it (Austin Reference Austin1962, 14–16; Eller Reference Eller2007, 106). For example, in Ethiopia, in a very unlikely scenario, if a Muslim slaughters the animal evoking the Holy Trinity BaSeme Ab weWald waMenfes Qedus Ahadu Amlak (“In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, One God”), or a Christian performs the slaughtering uttering Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim (“In the name of Allah, the passionate and the Merciful”), the speech acts are invalid, ineffective, or useless, or according to J. L. Austin’s theory called “infelicity” which includes a misfire, that is, “When the utterance is a misfire, the procedure which we purport to invoke is disallowed or is botched: and our act . . . is void or without effect” (Austin Reference Austin1962, 16). In our case, the meat is conceivably not proper for either group. This simply implies that the right speech should be performed by the right person at the right context with the right conditions.

Food and Religion in Ethiopia

At this point, it is essential to look at the characteristics of Christianity and Islam in Ethiopia in order to better understand the dynamics of their peculiar encounters in wider sociocultural contexts that involve food or eating. The two religions have equally apparently unique features that distinguish them from their counterparts elsewhere. These features are manifest both in their relations and encounters as well as in their respective cultures. For instance, the role of meat in the relationship between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia is unique compared to that of Christians and Muslims elsewhere such as in Lebanon, France, Uganda, Malawi (Ficquet Reference Ficquet and Soares2006), and Tanzania (Terdiman Reference Terdiman2013) where the slaughtering of animals is not a concern for Christians means; it is a business left to the Muslims because food in general and meat in particular is presumably not a dogmatic or doctrinal issue for such Christians. In the case of Ethiopia, however, even public slaughterhouses have distinct sections for slaughtering animals in Muslim and Christian ways. At household level as well, each group slaughters the animal according to their own respective ritual. Hence, the following sections of the article treat how food has become an issue for both religions and thereby for their encounters by juxtaposing it with historical background. However, there is no need, in the scope of this article, to dwell on the details of all the unique characteristics of these religions in Ethiopia except those that throw light on their unique etiquette with regard particularly to culinary tools and food for their difference and commensality.

Food and Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity

Broadly speaking, food is believed by many to be no issue for Christians (Barclay Reference Barclay2010), usually referring to the biblical accounts on food for Christians such as in Matt. 15:11 and Rom. 14:1–22. However, it is an issue for Ethiopian Orthodox Christians for their own relation to God as well as to people of other faiths, mainly Muslims. In relation to this, the EOTC’s history of isolation from other churches illuminates our discussion. As Adrian Hastings observes, the EOTC was isolated for many centuries such that its sociocultural requirements were very different, the most unique feature being its Hebraic substructure (Reference Hastings2008). As a result “the pattern of Orthodox worship and religious life was as much one of the Old Testament as of the New” (35). The Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity is unique among other sister Oriental Orthodox Churches as well for various reasons among which are the veneration of the tabot (replica of arc of the covenant), the observance of the Sabbath, and the observance of Mosaic food laws dividing clean from unclean, to mention just a few (Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968; Pawlikowski Reference Pawlikowski1972; Shenk Reference Shenk1988; Hastings Reference Hastings2008, 35). David Robinson (Reference Robinson2004, 110) states about “the relative isolation of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from the dominant forms of Christianity around the Mediterranean, led by the Roman Catholic Pope and the Patriarch in Constantinople.” More to the point, he writes, “Ethiopian Christianity developed mainly from internal sources, encouraged by the Aksum court, local monks, and missionaries” (110). Concerning food laws, there are several Judaic elements in the church. For example, like Judaism, “Ethiopia’s Orthodox Church forbids eating animals with uncloven hoofs and those that do not chew their own cud” (see Beyene Reference Beyene1994; Lyons Reference Lyons2007, 354). In addition, “The pig is subject to … ‘pan-Ethiopian’ avoidance rule” (Braukamper Reference Braukamper and Rubenson1982, 433). A feature also of Islam, pork abstinence is the most rigorous food prohibition observed throughout Ethiopia (Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968, 103). Therefore, the church, because of its unique history that traces back to Judaism, of its indigenous elements, as well as of its veneration or imitation of the Old Testament has unique food proscriptions (Beyene Reference Beyene1997; Zellelew Reference Zellelew2014). More importantly, the dietary law of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christians that plays a great role in their commensality with Ethiopian Muslims is almost directly linked to the purity concerns observed in early rabbinic food laws concerning questions like who eats with whom, who slaughters the animal, and what and where is eaten, and so forth (see Finger Reference Finger2007; Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum2010).Footnote ⁸ More specifically, as Reta Finger (Reference Finger2007, 177, my emphasis) writes, “In this system like eats with like. . . . Some food is clean if it comes from the right kind of animal and has been prepared with the right utensils and dishes.” These and other elements such as the fasts and feasts make the Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity unique (Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968) among not only the broader Christianity but also its sister Oriental Orthodox Churches including the Coptic Orthodox Church, under whose synod the EOTC stayed for centuries (Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 25; Shenk Reference Shenk1988, 261; Tamene Reference Tamene1998, 96).

Food and Ethiopian Islam

One could give the adjective “Ethiopian”Footnote ⁹ to Islam because of its unique historical and sociocultural features in Ethiopia as much as one uses the same adjective to Orthodox Christianity in the country. Islam, just like that of Christianity, in Ethiopia is also adapted to local cultures and elements of indigenous faiths. To begin with its very introduction, as many commentators note (Abbink Reference Abbink1998; Ahmed Reference Ahmed2001; Robinson Reference Robinson2004), though there were occasional conflicts and frictions between the two religious groups later on the course of history, the Christian-Muslim first encounter was a peaceful one contrary to the introduction of Islam elsewhere, which was through conquest: in Syria (636), in Persia (637), Jerusalem (638) (Apostolov Reference Apostolov2004, 25). That is, while the other two powers, namely, the Byzantine (in losing Syria) and the Persian empires were defeated by the Muslims, the Ethiopian empire accommodated the persecuted Muslims from Arabia; in other words, the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia was at least “initially accommodating” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2001) to the persecuted Muslims from Arabia by the Quraish oligarchy. Moreover, compared to other parts of Africa such as in West African Sahel and the East African coast, the process of Islamization was a peaceful one in Ethiopia (Robinson Reference Robinson2004, 113), nor was it accompanied by Arabization like in North Africa and part of Sudan (Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952). On the other hand, though similar to elsewhere in Africa when it comes to assimilating indigenous pagan rites and beliefs by giving them “orthodox interpretations and explanatory Muslim legends,” it is only in Ethiopia that Islam faced a remarkable challenge from the Orthodox Christian Church (Baum Reference Baum1953, 1; see also Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 139). It is also a facet of Ethiopian Islam that it has been shaped by cultural and ethnic traditions (Abbink Reference Abbink1998).

In general in Islam the law concerning halal (lawful food) originates from four sources: the Qur’an, the hadith (instructions by Mohammed), the sunnah (religious tradition) and fiqh (a summary of Islamic learning) (Lerner and Rabello Reference Lerner and Rabello2007, 11). Although the halal and haram dichotomy of food in Islam as stated, for example, in the Qur’an is universal, there are also differences and controversies in Islam over food, like that of the differences among various denominations of Christianity over scriptural interpretations on food proper for Christians. As Carolyn Rouse and Janet Hoskins (Reference Rouse and Hoskins2004, 245) comment, “Controversies about the ‘right’ form of Islamic diet are not yet resolved.” Broadly speaking, the debate over food in Ethiopian Islam falls in line with the long-standing debate over food in Islam. What Maxime Rodinson (Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1065) wrote about this debate is illuminating:

In view of this, in Ethiopia too there are two opposing views in Islam with regard to food proper for Muslims, especially as to what concerns with meat of animals slaughtered by people of the other faith. The first one is a long enduring tradition maintained by many Muslims who avoid eating meat of animals slaughtered by Christians. According to this group, it is not Islamic to eat meat of an animal slaughtered by Christians or non-Muslims. The second one is that which is maintained in recent times by Muslims who reject the first view. According to this one group, what is most important for a Muslim, as regards food, is to be cautious whether the animal is halal (lawful) first of all and second of all how pertinently the slaughtering is performed (according to the Islamic etiquette, such as blood being completely drained). This group further maintains that there is a Qur’anicFootnote ¹⁰ warrant to eating food/meat if it is lawful (2:168, 5:88, 16:114) and if the meat went through proper ritual slaughter (dhaka’a) (5:4, 6:147) by people of the book (5:5), that is, the Jew and Christians. However, the latter verse of the Qur’an that refers to the Jews and Christians has a different interpretation by the first group. They argue that it does not apply to the Jews and Christians of today but to those of the contemporaries of Mohammed. Moreover, they maintain that the name of Allah should be invoked on the lawful foods, not the name of Trinity, for example (5:4, 6:118–21, 16:115; see Rodinson Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1061).

I need not dwell too much on verifying which view is theologically justified, as it is beyond the scope and concern of this study. However, in general, the avoidance by Jews, Christians, or Muslims (or even different sects within the same religion) of eating meat of an animal killed by a person in the other faith has changed from time to time and place to place in the course of history (Rodinson Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1066). In addition, each Muslim sect, while basically adhering to the Qur’anic food proscription, formulates its own “complete doctrine on all points of dogma and practice” (1070) by making its decisions on problems related to food prohibitions in the Quran, although “some have considered them to have only an allegorical significance or that an era was beginning in which there was no further justification for them” (1070). On top of this, there are “post-Kur’anic religious regulations” which affected questions concerning the food prohibitions in Islam (1068). Therefore, there is no consistency in terms of time as well as place by a given religion or sect concerning its dietary rules. As Montanari (Reference Montanari and Sonnenfeld2006, 137) writes, “Culinary identities were not inscribed in the heavens” which corroborates Jack David Eller’s comment: “Individuals, families, and communities … make their unique interpretations of and responses to the world religion, generating a distinctly local version of it … none can be said sensibly to be the “correct” or “real” one” (Reference Eller2007, 204). Nevertheless, speaking of taboos in general and of the so-called Christian/Muslim meat in particular, such a food taboo is duly working as a separating factor for Christians and Muslims unsurprisingly, on the one hand, because of the nature of food taboos in general as unwritten social rules (Colding and Folke Reference Colding and Folke1997), and of varied interpretations of scriptures by each religion and denomination/sect, on the other.

The Semiotics of Knife and Meat

Bee Wilson (Reference Wilson2012, 85) writes, “Our food is shaped by knives.” There is a great deal of truth in Wilson’s statement than the seemingly simple material relationship between the knife and food. Apart from their materiality, there are other intrinsic relationships between food and culinary tools in general. Broadly, objects, which appear simple and small, possess a “charisma” that affects the physical as well as emotional awareness of individuals (King Reference King2010, xi). Thus, beyond their simple and seemingly banal materiality, objects are charged with other meanings and functions. They become signs signifying meanings and functions related not only to their “inherent” property but also to the meanings assigned to them. For example, apart from its nourishing properties, food is charged with meaning and functions; so are culinary tools. In one of her most commonly cited statements, Mary Douglas (Reference Douglas1972, 61) says, “A code affords a general set of possibilities for sending particular messages. If food is treated as a code, the messages it encodes will be found in the pattern of social relations being expressed. The message is about different degrees of hierarchy, inclusion and exclusion, boundaries and transactions across the boundaries.” Marcel Danesi (Reference Danesi2004, 199–200) also writes: “Food codes, like all other kinds of social codes, are regulatory systems—they regulate what kinds of food are eaten, when they are eaten, who is allowed to eat them, and so on and so forth.” Hence, food and culinary materials, unsurprisingly, serve functions other than just what their simple materiality affords them to. In various parts of Africa, though their importance had been in decline since the late 1800s, the very materiality, that is, the shapes, patterns, or decorations of, for example, throwing knives continued to have such symbolic functions as indicating the tribe, the production place of the knife and the bearer’s rank and ability until the twentieth century (McNaughton Reference McNaughton1970). The semiotic functions of the knife that this article deals with, however, are concerned with narratives beyond the materiality of the knife.

The Knife as a Synecdoche of Slaughtering

The so-called Christian/Muslim knife, as a synecdoche of the slaughtering rituals in each religion, is an important semiotic sign that delineates the frontier between the two religions with regard to food/meat and religious identity in Ethiopia. Interestingly, Detienne and Vernant ([Reference Detienne, Vernant and Wissing1979] 1989, 3) have brought to our attention the following account of Herodotus, which I have evoked in the introduction part, on what the knife, among other utensils, meant “at the heart of the difference [and] the otherness” between Egyptians and the Greeks: “no Egyptian man or woman will kiss a Greek man, or use the knife, or a spit, or a cauldron belonging to a Greek, or taste the flesh of an unblemished ox that has been cut up with a Greek knife” (Herodotus Reference Herodotus, Goold and Godley1925, 2.41). What Detienne and Vernant ([Reference Detienne, Vernant and Wissing1979] 1989, 3) in their Cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec write is worth quoting here in order to illuminate our discussion:

This account runs astonishingly parallel to the place that the knife has at the heart of the discursive of food/meat and religious identity for Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia. In Herodotus’s account, it is the knife (the slaughtering) that turns the “unblemished ox” into a blemished one. In Ethiopia, too, Muslims avoid meat of animals slaughtered by “Christian knife,” and Christians do the same with the meat of animals slaughtered by “Muslim knife.” Among other culinary tools, the knife particularly seems to be charged with affective power so much so that it engenders disgust and repugnance even in the very thought of such meat, much less actually eating it.

It is not my task as well as competence to know when exactly Christians and Muslims started using “different knife,” that is, slaughtering. But one cannot overlook the importance of historical facts in illuminating the theme we are dealing with in such a study, however scarce and patchy the historical evidences are as to know exactly when and how these two religious communities started this custom. For example, John Spencer Trimingham’s Islam in Ethiopia (Reference Trimingham1952) gives us an indispensable account on the aftermath of the sixteenth-century struggle between the highland Christian kingdom and the Muslim Adal sultanate, otherwise known as the Gragn war (referring to Imam Ahmad Ibn Ibrahim Al Ghazi, nicknamed Gragn, “the Left-Handed”). Conceivably, the war between the two sides seriously affected the Muslim-Christian relations in the country (see Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 89–90; Desplat and Østebø Reference Desplat and Østebø2013, 6). Although there had been territorial struggle between the Christian highlanders and the Muslim lowlanders centuries prior to the infamous Gragn invasion (Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 60–91) after the war, the EOTC maintained an isolationist and conservative ideology (90), which probably led to further maintenance of the existing dietary and culinary differences, including separate slaughtering of animals. The composition of a literary work titled Metshafe Keder that the church uses still today “for the reception of apostates” (90, footnote) throws light. As there were forced mass conversion to Islam during the war, the sacrament was crucial for receiving those apostates “who defiled their body” (ዘአርኮሰ ስጋሁ ምስለ ኢምእመናን; Metshafe Keder 1988, 3). This suggests that the EOTC, immediately after the war had to engage in maintaining the existing boundaries (strict dietary rules could also be one) by broadening the breadth of religious and cultural distinctions against Islam through the isolationist stance. This might have helped the church to police the impermeability of its boundary, emphasizing on rules such as separate slaughtering as a “boundary maintenance device,” to borrow Eller’s phrase (Reference Eller2007, 114). However, that the EOTC became isolationist during this period does not mean that such a tradition had not already been practiced in earlier centuries. That is, given the history of the Ethiopian Orthodox Christianity with regard to its pre-Christian and Judaic elements (Rodinson Reference Rodinson1964; Ullendorf Reference Ullendorff1968; Pawlikowski Reference Pawlikowski1972) this dietary law almost certainly is a pre-Gragn one. It seems to have originated from the Jews’ fear of contamination with the Gentiles, which makes meal fellowship for the Jew with non-Jews difficult (Barclay Reference Barclay2010, 585–86; see also Rosenblum Reference Rosenblum2010). Perhaps it could also be part of the process of the national saga of identifying the Abyssinian kingdom and its faith and culture with that of Israel after the year 1270 (Rodinson Reference Rodinson1964) although many surmise that it could be a veneration and/or an imitation of the Old Testament rather than of a Judaic cult (Ullendorf Reference Ullendorff1968, 100–103; Beyene Reference Beyene1994, 212–14). During later centuries after the Gragn period, however, we have better evidences about the dietary differences between Christians and Muslims in the country. Both Charles Jaques Poncet, who came to Abyssinia at the end of the seventeenth century to treat Iyasu I (1682–1706) who had leprosy, and James Bruce, who traveled to the country to study the source of the Nile in the eighteenth century, give account on the avoidance by Christians of meat of animals slaughtered by Muslims (Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 102–3, footnote; also Bruce 1813 in Ullendorff Reference Ullendorff1968, 30; Levine Reference Levine1972, 41).

The more basic question, however, is how or why such food taboo started to be observed by the two religious groups. The justification of this taboo in general appears to go beyond the simple halal/haram or “clean/unclean” dichotomy of animals in the notion of food in the Bible and in the Qur’an alike. Except their difference in camel products (lawful for Muslims only), both religions in Ethiopia have remarkable similarity in what they allow their followers to eat and to avoid, out of which pork, as indicated before, is a common taboo almost throughout the country. The Orthodox Christians, although they know that the meat (except that of camel) slaughtered by Muslims may not fail to fulfill what is prescribed in the Old Testament such as in Leviticus 11, they avoid eating meat slaughtered by Muslims. Similarly, while the basic question of food for Muslims is whether the meat is halal, with the exception of the difference in invocation of the religious formula during slaughtering (an argument by Muslims who observe the taboo) the meat slaughtered by Orthodox Christians may not be short of meeting the dietary rules in Islam because Ethiopian Orthodox Christians also avoid eating the flesh of animals that are haram according to the Qur’an. Thus, the major difference appears to be the slaughtering rituals. But, if looked at closely, even the slaughtering practices of the two religions have a lot of similarities than differences. For example, both groups slit “the animal’s throat by cutting the jugular vein, the carotid and the esophagus without beheading it. The blood must be removed from the animal as it is considered the principle [sic] source of life and is unfit for human consumption” (Ficquet Reference Ficquet and Soares2006, 46). The difference is only in the invocation of the divine in speech acts and in the direction to which the head of the animal should be turned: Muslims toward Mecca (46) and Christians often to the east.

Apart from this difference, the narrative of separate slaughtering maintained by both religious groups can hardly be explained by the broader long-standing debate over food prohibitions in Christianity and in Islam. This taboo therefore seems to have much less a theological justification than an ideological underpinning in that it could have been used to maintain power relations between the two religions in the country. As an official and well-established religion in Abyssinia almost three centuries ahead of Islam, Christianity seems to be the “norm setter” rather than governed by norms of a religion viewed as essential “other” and “newcomer.” Islam, on the other hand, as a “minority” religion, thus, might have emphasized the taboo “to rival the zeal of Christians”Footnote ¹¹ (L. Massignon in Rodinson Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1070) and to mark difference. After a relatively slower pace of expansion during its early years, Islam gradually gathered momentum later on to become a cultural and political force in addition to its religious one. And, contrary to the common assumption of Islam’s political exclusion in Ethiopia, its very expansion, like that of Christianity, can also be seen into two ways: as a political factor, a post-tenth century development (see Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952; Tamrat [1972] in Ahmed Reference Ahmed2001, 32) and “as a religion and a culture” (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2001, 32). Therefore, that Islam did not assume the status of a state religion in Ethiopia does not mean it did not pose political questions and challengesFootnote ¹² in its entire history, nor does it demean its being a cultural force in its own way as well as in its interaction with its main counterpart, that is, (Orthodox) Christianity and other indigenous faiths. Thus, one does not rule out the possibility that Muslims on their part as well might have underlined the difference on the slaughtering practice as a counterpractice of avoiding meat of animal slaughtered by Christians probably as a gesture of resistance and reaffirmation of their religious identity: “If you don’t eat mine, I will not eat yours” or “if my food is unclean and impure for you, so is yours for me” kind of attitude. One might see this as a counter-measure for Muslims against an ideology of “avoidance” by a dominant group, that is, Christians. It is worth noting that by obscuring the power relations, which is at the heart of the dominating and the minority group, the former often uses “symbolic violence” to legitimize its own culture as superior, esthetic and distinguished and to denigrate that of the latter as vulgar and impure (Bourdieu and Passeron [1972] in Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002, 172). Though it may be difficult to hypothesize here that this food taboo is a resultFootnote ¹³ of power relations between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia, it is possible at least to conjecture that the taboo could have been used to maintain and sustain power relations.

The degree of affective experience of people who observe this taboo in both religions as regards eating meat slaughtered by a person in the other faith substantiates the above proposition. That is, most often, it is the Christians who look more sensitive about and show revulsion against the possible consumption of such meat. Ulrich Braukamper, in a study that surveys the food avoidance in Southern Ethiopia, writes: “It is common all over Ethiopia that Orthodox Christians also find it disgusting to eat meat slaughtered by members of another religion. According to my personal observation, they said for instance: ‘Muslim meat is koshasha [‘dirty’] and can not be eaten by us’” (Reference Braukamper and Rubenson1982, 430, bracket in original). Such seemingly aesthetic reaction on food (Rodinson Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1071–72; Telfer Reference Telfer2002, 41–60; Krautkramer Reference Krautkramer, Allhoff and Monroe2007, 255; Monroe Reference Monroe and Allhoff2007) points to the power relations I have discussed above. Particularly, Telfer (Reference Telfer2002, 44) notes that the aesthetic reaction of people as to liking the taste and smell of a food may depend, among other factors, on whether the food is “produced by politically respectable regimes.” This looks evident, as noted earlier, in the travel account on the town of Gondar by Poncet right at the end of the seventeenth century, which recounts that Muslims were “looked down on by the Christians, and meat slaughtered by one group would not be touched by the other,” while the latter also salutes with a left hand as “a mark of contempt” (Poncet 1949 [1699] in Levine 1972, 41–42; see Ford Reference Ford2008, 57). In my own lived experience in different parts of the country as well as the empirical data obtained through observation and interview in Bahir Dar, I have also come to understand that the strict observance of this taboo is more prevalent among the Christians than among the Muslims. In other words, even if Muslims are very cautious about consuming halal meat, they appear to be lenient, for instance, when it comes to the very idea of trespassing and eating “Christian meat” unknowingly. Asked the same question: “what would you do if you unknowingly eat ‘Christian/Muslim meat’?” almost all my Christians informants show utter disgust. Some of them say that they will force themselves to throw up the meat. One informant, for example, said she ate a “meat Samosa” (locally known as Sambusa, a fried pastry filled with lentils, meat, etc.) in a restaurant she did not know is a “Muslim one.” However, no sooner had she savored the food and looked up the wall “something written in Arab script” than she realized she is in a “Muslim restaurant.” Then, she said she rushed out to the bathroom to throw up. This might not be surprising given the fact that vomiting is one of the most common physical reactions upon discovering the breaking of a food taboo while even actual deaths have also been reported from almost all corners of the world after a person discovers that he/she has unknowingly eaten a tabooed food (Farb and Armelagos Reference Farb and Armelagos1980, 124–25). Muslim informants, on the other hand, said it does not matter if they did it unknowingly but they said they are careful not to. Literatures on food disgust affirm that disgust serves as a manifestation of power relations (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004). It is important to note that those who are disgusted are the ones who feel disgust (Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004), which gives them the position of “above-ness” (Miller [1979] in Ahmed Reference Ahmed2004, 89). In other words, the one whose food engenders disgust therefore takes the position of “below-ness” at least in the mind of those who are disgusted, which goes parallel with the historical-political power relations between the two religious communities in Ethiopia. The difference in the affective experience of eating or the very thought of eating the “wrong meat” among Christians and Muslims, therefore is so big that one may be tempted by the above tentative assumption of mine about the historical residue of power relations between the two religious groups as reflected on crossing the religious boundary marked by “meat soaked in faith” (Ficquet Reference Ficquet and Soares2006).

Religious Signs in Ethiopia: Public and Private

In the day-to-day Christian-Muslim relations in Ethiopia, it is the material objects (clothing, food, language, and architecture) that mark their religious identity (Ficquet Reference Ficquet and Soares2006). Based on how and where they serve their purpose, it is possible to classify the nonlinguistic religious signs into two tentative categories: private and public, which is roughly equivalent to Firth’s (Reference Firth1973) classification of symbols into public and private. Along with the cross and the crescent, the two universal signs, there are two other nonlinguistic signs that Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia use as religious identity markers. They are the “invisible” knife and the thread necklaceFootnote ¹⁴ called mateb, “a simple neck cord often holding a wrought silver cross” (Levine Reference Levine1972, 82). The knife is “invisible” because it is not observed until its resultant element, that is, meat plays its role as a dividing line for the two religious groups. It is the cross and the crescent that are being used as more “visible” markersFootnote ¹⁵ of religious identity in the public sphere. Other than on the steeple of churches and on the minaret of mosques, they are also used in places such as abattoirs,Footnote ¹⁶ butcheries and restaurants, signaling whether these places are “Christian” or “Muslim” (Ficquet Reference Ficquet and Soares2006, 44–45). These signs can be seen as the public versions of the knife whose active role seems to terminate at slaughtering but whose effect still continues embodied in other signs.

On the other hand, necklace and the knife can be seen as private signs in contrast to the cross and the crescent because they are confined to the individual’s body and their households, respectively. Most EOTC followers can be identified by the mateb tied around their neck. Among the two, the knife is the most powerful sign. For example, it is because of the knife, though it appears to remain in the kitchen or in slaughtering places, that the use of other signs such as the cross and the crescent in public spaces is eminently manifested. These two signs, especially on butcheries and restaurants, signify no other object than the meat slaughtered with the knife according to the specific religious ritual. As King (Reference King2010, xvii) notes, “we construct our own sense of who we are on the basis of difference. Initially this happens within our habitat but, moving into the public arena, it is shown that our notion of who we are is publicly confirmed through categorization.” Interestingly, the knife seems to possess a transcendent power of crossing the private space to become a sign in public space enacted in other signs (cross or crescent), which make “categorization” of Christian and Muslim public spaces possible. Here the knife is apparently an initial sign for other signs to follow in a seemingly Peircean model of signs as processual: “signs give rise to new signs, in an unending process of signification” (Keane Reference Keane2003, 413). It is also important to note that material culture should not necessarily posses a visual sign to be considered as communicative tool. As Mark Gottdiener argues, we should not “see only a world of signs” and “miss the material culture that acts as sign-vehicles for signification and its relation to everyday life” (Thomas Reference Thomas1998, 100). Therefore, in Ethiopia, even if one does not see the knife, like Cross or Crescent, as a visual sign on restaurants or butcheries, it effectively serves as a sign-vehicle that signifies what is halal meat for Muslims and what is kidus (sacred, clean) meat for Christians. As noted above, the more universal signs, the Cross and the Crescent signs on restaurants and butcheries across the country necessarily conjure up the notion of slaughtering automatically evoking mandatory questions who slaughters what, with what kind of material, how, and so forth.

The Role of Speech Acts: Charging the Knife and Circumscribing Space

A critical look into the role that the knife plays, especially in slaughtering, through speech act theory helps to enunciate two important notions in religion: “the sacred” and “the profane” (Durkheim [Reference Durkheim and Fields1912] Reference Durkheim and Fields1995). Broadly speaking, individuals from either group show tolerance when it comes to food other than meat although there are even quite many from both sides who do not mind eating meat slaughtered by people in the other faith. However, those who do not observe this dietary rule are of no concern for this study. It is important to note that during slaughtering it is not the knife itself per se but rather the speech acts: for Christians the BaSeme Ab waWald waMenfes Qedus Ahadu Amlak (“In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit, One God,” and for Muslims the Bismillah al-rahman al-rahim (“In the name of Allah, the passionate and the Merciful”) that play significant role in charging the neutral animal’s flesh with “Christian” or “Muslim” identity. Even for ancient Egyptians, the repugnance they showed to the Greek knife emanates from the notion of the sacred and the profane. According to Herodotus, the Greek knife and what it slaughters, which may include cows that are holy and venerated much more highly than any other animal, is taboo to Egyptians. That is why no Egyptian used the knife of a Greek or tasted the flesh of an ox slaughtered with a Greek knife (Histories, 2.41). In quite a similar vein, especially for some Ethiopian Orthodox Christians, the knife or any other culinary tool itself can be considered erkus “defiled,” if it has been used by “others.” Here contact and fear of contamination with the object is what has much importance, which agrees with Kristeva’s definition of the “abject”: “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules” (Reference Kristeva and Roudiez1982, 4). Therefore, a culinary tool and a food item, particularly meat, that trespasses, so to speak, the boundary marked by the knife’s power of transubstantiation at slaughtering results in abjection because it “does not respect borders, positions, rules” of the religion in question. This is because food purity is not always determined by its cleanliness in terms of hygienic conditions, rather by factors such as: who prepared it, in whose company it is eaten; whose utensil is used to prepare it (Rodinson, Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1069). Thus, meat that has not gone through the slaughtering practices of one’s own religion is not pure, kidus (“sacred,” “holy,” “clean”) or halal (“lawful”) to eat. Thus, eating such meat equals to defiling one’s body thanks to the slaughtering ritual that includes speech acts and is mainly enacted in the knife, which has the power of changing the neutral meat into a sacred one. Moreover, meat that does not fulfill one’s own religious ritual would give individuals who observe this taboo feelings of repugnance and disgust never mind in eating but even in the very thought of eating it. In other words, food loathing, as an elementary and most archaic form of abjection (Kristeva Reference Kristeva and Roudiez1982, 2) is therefore experienced as a result of the slaughtering ritual the meat has passed through.

It is also important to note that apart from making “categorization” (King Reference King2010, xvii) of Christian and Muslim public spaces possible (e.g., restaurants and butcheries), the knife just like its very nature of splitting things yet again circumscribes quite literally the geographical space between Muslims and Christians on sociocultural settings such as wedding feasts. Guests from each group do not occupy most often the same space. According to the custom, the host caters its “other” guest with the latter’s “own” food (meat slaughtered by members of the “other” religion). There is often a clear territorial demarcation between the two groups. The knife as a synecdoche of the slaughtering practices of the two religions comes here to play its role of territorializing boundaries through its concomitant force now, that is, food. Trespassing the precinct made by the knife gives individuals an uncanny feeling. Thus, the knife seems to be policing the boundary such that it seems to “punish” with disgust those who transgress the “line.” As a result, on sociocultural settings where Christians and Muslims meet involving food or eating (i.e., meat), there is an affective sacrifice that attendants should pay. In other words, in order to fulfill their social obligations, they appear to occupy a space that they might otherwise prefer to avoid, and to smell and see food that they might not prefer to smell and see. This all is because of the seemingly simple process of the slaughtering ritual we have discussed above. That is, if transubstantiation changes the bread and wine into the flesh and blood of Christ in Christian theology, as noted before, the knife is an important culinary tool charged with the immense power of religious performative languages (speech acts) that transform the neutral animal into a sacred or lawful object and that invest it with intense aura of disgust among followers of the other faith who observe this food taboo. In short, in food contexts that involve meat, disgust defends the spatial territory between the two religious groups understandably because what is regarded by one group as sacred is by another a profane and vise versa.

Meat as a Proselytizing Instrument

It is one of the most remarkable beliefs and traditions among Ethiopian Orthodox Christians and Ethiopian Muslims that they believe as if converted to Islam and Christianity respectively if they eat meat of an animal slaughtered by a person from the other faith. Ficquet has discussed the historical use of meat as “a method of forced conversion” (Reference Ficquet and Soares2006, 47–52). But forcing people to eat what they consider as taboo in order to ensure their submission is not unique to the history of conquest between Christians and Muslims in Ethiopia. The Jews were forced to eat pork as a sign of submission to Antiochus IV, according to the apocryphal Old Testament book of Judas Maccabaeus (Farb and Armelagos Reference Farb and Armelagos1980). Similarly, in the very early days of Islam, “Muhammad is said to have obliged two newly converted Dju‘fis to eat heart, taboo in their tribe, without which conversion would have been incomplete” (Ibn Sa‘d, i/2, 62, in Rodinson Reference Rodinson, Lewis, Pellat and Schacht1965, 1061). In Ethiopia, too, conquering rulers of both sides used a similar strategy in “Christian/Muslim meat” as an instrument to force religious conversion on the defeated one (Cecchi 1886, in Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 202). In all these examples, it is possible to see broadly the ideological instrument of food both as a symbol of triumph by the conqueror and of resistance by the conquered. As Telfer (Reference Telfer2002, 37) observes, “People can also be making a broadly political statement in eating or not eating particular foods,” which also calls to mind the modern day boycotting of certain food products as a gesture of politico-economic resistance.

The belief in confessing another religion by breaking a food taboo exists in Ethiopia to the present day among many, given the better degree of evangelization by both religions today than ever before. Asked if eating “Muslim/Christian meat” engenders apostatizing for them, some of my informants said they do not believe that they apostatized, but they consider it as transgression and contamination anyway that requires some kind of remedy. According to Mary Douglas, “There are two distinct ways of cancelling a pollution: one is the ritual which makes no enquiry into the cause of the pollution, and does not seek to place responsibility; the other is the confessional rite” ([1966] Reference Douglas2001, 138). The first way roughly describes what Muslims in Ethiopia do, whereas the latter perfectly fits to the way Orthodox Christians fix dietary trespassing. That is, though they do not have a comparable ritual or sacrament for cleansing dietary trespassing to the Christians, according to my Muslim-scholar informants, Muslims are expected to repent of their action based on their own conscience and should try not to do it again. On the other hand, when the Christians commit dietary trespassing, they see a priest for confession and expiation. The Metshafe Keder (translated from Arabic to Ge’ez, the Ethiopian classical language, in the sixteenth century; Trimingham Reference Trimingham1952, 89) is used until this day for cleansing Christians of various sins. It is also a sacrament used by the church to receive apostates (89). The book explains that church fathers composed the prayers and sacraments for the sake of Christians who trespass and defile their body: “በእንተ ዘክህደ ሃይማኖቶ አው ዘአርኮሰ ስጋሁ ምስለ ዘኢምመናን አው ተባእት አው አንስት አው መነኮስ አው” (Metshafe Keder 1988, 3), which roughly means “ for those: male or female or monk or nun or … who renounced their religion or defiled their body with the infidels.” Dietary trespassingFootnote ¹⁷ is one factor for defilement of the body, while having sexual intercourse with “the infidels” is another, both of which are often viewed as “corporal sins”—lusts of the flesh. Overall, as the common maxim “You are what you eat” goes, in this kind of belief, “you become what you eat.” That is, eating and religious identity are intricately intertwined so much so that you become what you are not supposed to become if/when you eat what you are not supposed to eat. In other words, eating, especially by trespassing the dietary border across religion, is equivalent to becoming “other” as if the intake of food transforms someone into someone else, giving the person an “edible identity,” to borrow Rosenblum’s (Reference Rosenblum2010) phrase, and conjuring up the original sin, which was in the shape of eating (Gen. 2:16–17). Indeed, according to the Bible, Adam and Eve were not the same before and after they ate the forbidden apple since eating has transformed and engendered them to have a new identity that they were not meant to have.