This book is among a handful exploring the contemporary role of halal. The halal frontier: Muslim consumers in a globalized market provides fascinating insights into the consumer choices, adaptation strategies, and pragmatic decisions among members of the Malaysian-Malay diaspora in Britain, living in the interface between revivalist Islam, the sending state's efforts to institutionalise and standardise ‘halal’, the recipient state's difficulties in embracing notions of halal, and global market forces which have discovered Muslims as consumers. Johan Fischer traces the encounters between the very Malaysian conceptions of halal of his informants and their navigation of the sheer endless and often challenging diversity of the British capital. The author followed his informants into ‘halal restaurants, butcher shops, grocery stores, supermarkets and hypermarkets’ (p. 25). Even though private homes, sadly, appear to have been excluded from his list of fieldwork sites, The halal frontier is able to provide important and fresh insights into the dynamic interaction between competing halal discourses, between producers and consumers, and between Malaysian ‘state’ Islam and the diasporic realities of London's Muslim minority. Locating his study in the British capital, a Western metropolis that has become an integral part of the Muslim world and whose economy profits strongly from these connections, enables Fischer to explore life on the ‘halal frontier’, an interesting concept he develops throughout the book.

Fischer's exploration of Malay-Malaysian consumers in London focuses on a field of inquiry that has until now not received much attention from either Southeast Asianists or from students of contemporary Muslim societies. Beyond its relevance in describing at great depth the negotiation of halal among a particular British Muslim community, The halal frontier adds to the overall still equally small body of works exploring contemporary Southeast Asian diasporas, complementing recent works by Tim Bunnell, Michael Laffan and Tony Milner. It is hoped that the work may help stimulate an expansion of serious academic enquiries of diasporic Southeast Asian Muslim communities in places as diverse as Bloomington, Melbourne, Stockholm and Cairo, and of their engagement with what it means to be Malay, Javanese or Patani; Indonesian, Singaporean or Malaysian outside of the region. In that it continues Fischer's path-breaking previous work on ‘halalisation’ in Malaysia and the Malaysian state's role in giving rise to and fostering a group of Malay-Muslim middle-class shoppers and consumers, The halal frontier makes for a fascinating and engaging read.

Most of Fischer's 14 key informants are products of, or are individuals strongly influenced by the Malaysian state's hyper-capitalist modernisation project of the 1980s and 1990s. He is able to explore well their sometimes fraught negotiation of British realities and religious discourses from their youth or from ‘back home’. Two notable drawbacks, however, are that The halal frontier does not seek to locate the Malays of London and their choices, pragmatic or otherwise, in the particular historical trajectory of Islam as it emerged in the Malay world. There is also insufficient exploration of his informants' interaction with the largely non-Malay British Muslim community, even if there are tantalising glimpses into these dynamics in chapter 3. The first is a more serious complaint as Fischer appears to have overemphasised the role played by the modern Malaysian state in shaping conceptions of halal among his informants. He makes only few references to the at least equally important role of Shafi'i jurisprudence in influencing prevailing understandings of halal in the Malay world beyond the borders of the modern Malaysian state.

A major appeal of The halal frontier is its recognition that ‘halal always intertwines the aesthetic and the moral simultaneously’ (p. 52), and that ‘sociological approaches are not always tuned to capturing the everyday complexity involved in modern halal consumption’ (p. 12). And yet the author appears to remain on the whole disinterested in the religious worldviews of his informants and provides little space for their religiously-articulated motivations to keep halal in the sometimes difficult environment of London. Also missing is serious engagement with the resistance to halal consumption on the part of the British state or the non-Muslim public. Even as Britain's Muslim communities are growing, some of their basic religious practices — from slaughter practices to veiling, all of them intricately connected with conceptions of halal or permissible — are under attack from both the conservative elite as well as white nationalists, both of whom have been seeking to label halal as something irredeemably foreign. Even if many of Fischer's Malay-Malaysian informants are evidently more transient and less permanently rooted than many other British Muslim communities, the book would have benefited from an expanded discussion of their everyday experiences of being a good Muslim (the ultimate objective of keeping halal) in the context of an increasingly hostile and sometimes openly Islamophobic Britain.

The halal frontier provides an excellent introduction to the very important but until now largely ignored subject of halal consumption in an era of globalised, mass production. Its use of the ‘halal frontier’ with the attendant ‘bid to cultivate and civilise the ‘wilderness’ of London' is intriguing and developed throughout the book. The most serious complaint against the book is that it is perhaps somewhat shorter than it might have been. More space, for instance, might have been accorded to the intra-Islamic contestations of halal (made all the more acute by the experience of living in London in what is in many ways the Muslim world in microcosm), or to the engagement of the Malay-Malaysian informants with Britain's sometimes hostile non-Muslim public. In particular, chapter 6, which represents the most innovative and exciting core of Fischer's book, is rather short. On the whole, however, The halal frontier makes a valuable contribution to our understanding of how being-Muslim is constructed in the modern world, and how migration and the experience of life in increasingly diverse multicultural societies are shaping, changing and influencing understandings of halal. Fischer's book will be highly useful for anyone interested in modern Malaysian society as well as the struggle of diverse Muslim diaspora communities to keep the faith.