The Meaning of the Word "Halal"

We Muslims use the word halal on a daily basis, using it normally to describe various foods, drinks or behaviors that are acceptable ("legal") in Islam. However, for those of us whose mother tongue isn't Arabic, we may miss out on some of the deeper meanings of even familiar words that have made their way into English language discourse about Islam between Muslims and even non-Muslims.

One such word is halal, which, as we Muslims know, means "that which is allowed, permitted or permissible, legal, licit, legitimate." But did you know that it also means "to loosen a knot?"

Hallun originally meant to untie a knot. In Surah Ta Ha, 20:27, Moses (pbuh) asks Allah (swt) to "loosen the knot from my tongue." Apparently, Moses (pbuh) was a stutterer, and was asking for Allah's (swt) help in order to be able to speak more clearly when facing off against Pharaoh.

Halaltu was used to express the idea of untying knots of the luggage to stop on a journey. Likewise, the second half of verse Ibrahim 14:28 (wa ahallu qawmahum darul bawaar) meant that the kufran caused their people to alight in the house of perdition:

Hast thou not turned thy vision to those who have changed the favor of Allah into blasphemy and caused their people to descend to the House of Perdition?-

Likewise, someone who unties his ahraam after the hajj is said to have become halal: "But when ye are clear of the sacred precincts and of pilgrim garb (wa idha halaltum), ye may hunt..." (fas-Taadoo; see Surah al-Ma'idah 5:2).

Another passage that refers to halal is Surah al-Ahzab 33:50, which reads in part, "We have made lawful to thee thy wives..." (inna ahlalna laka azwajaka). The husband is haleel and the wife haleela. They are haleels to one another.

So how does halal relate to food? While halal-uqdah means untying (i.e., solving) a (problematic) knot, the expression metaphorically refers to the slaughtering of an animal when the "knot" of its neck is "untied," thus becoming permissible to eat.


(Based upon pp. 141-42 of Muhammad Umar Chand's book, Halal and Haram: The Prohibited and the Permitted Foods and Drinks According to Jewish, Christian and Muslim Scriptures.)

The Economist: Food, Fashion and Faith

Note: Please see the update below.

The Economist, in this week's issue (2 August 2007), has a small article about how various companies around the world are beginning to reach out to Muslim consumers, especially in the West.

Marketers and self-proclaimed trendspotters in the Western world love slicing and segmenting consumers into an ever larger number of categories. They created the teenager, the yuppie, the baby boomer, the singleton and the metrosexual. For all of them they invented “needs” that could, inevitably, be met by whatever product they happened to be promoting. Yet to this day they tend to tiptoe around Muslims as a distinct market segment. Although they have settled into a fairly comfortable relationship with Jews and Christians whose cultures they feel they know and understand, the cultural divide with the Muslim world seems to be too daunting.

But a new study by JWT, an advertising agency, points out that the 6m or so Muslims in America are, on average, richer and better educated than the general population. Two-thirds of Muslim households make more than $50,000 a year and a quarter earn over $100,000; the national average is $42,000. Two-thirds of American Muslims have a college degree, compared with less than half of the general population. Muslim families also tend to have more children. So the perception that marketing specifically to Muslims is not worthwhile would appear to be wrong.

According to JWT food, finance and packaged goods are the three consumer markets most affected by Islamic law. The global halal market is worth some $580 billion annually. In America an estimated 16% of sales in the $100 billion kosher industry comes from Muslims who lack adequate halal options. Manischewitz, the leading maker of kosher foods, has already spotted an opportunity. Last year it launched its first campaign under the theme “Simply Manischewitz” designed to reach out beyond Jewish customers.

Muslim-owned consumer-goods companies are also beginning to tap the Muslim market in the West. Since January the Burqini — a full-coverage swimsuit made by Ahiida, whose founder is a Lebanese immigrant in Australia—has been sold internationally, mainly online. As the name implies, the polyester suits are a cross between a burqa and a bikini, and are designed in accordance with Islamic law requiring women to dress modestly.

Similarly NewBoy Toys, a Syrian firm, has created Fulla as an alternative to the blonde, big-breasted Barbie doll made by Mattel, an American toymaker. Fulla has dark hair, brown eyes and a small chest, and wears a white headscarf and a coat. Unlike Barbie, Fulla does not have a boyfriend or a job, say her makers. She spends her time cooking, reading and praying.

Big Western companies have also started to reach out to Muslim consumers, albeit slowly. In April McDonald's, the biggest American chain of fast-food restaurants, began serving halal Chicken McNuggets and other food items permissible under Islamic law for a trial period at a restaurant in Southall, in west London. The firm is treading carefully: the new offerings are not advertised beyond the walls of the restaurant. Yet demand is strong, sales are increasing, and McDonald's is thinking about extending the experiment.

Such companies are also trying to be more sensitive and inclusive in their approach to Muslims. Each year Coca-Cola, the biggest maker of soft drinks, runs a series of marketing initiatives focused on charity and tolerance during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. An ad based on the concept of sharing food during iftar, the fast-breaking meal after sunset, is especially popular. Yet Coke is not adapting its global brands to Muslim consumers. “We don't segment our consumers based on religion,” says a spokesman for the firm.

Update: Amir at Austrolabe has written about this same article and asked the following:

In Australia and, to a lesser extent, the United Kingdom, the Muslim community is not necessarily known for its comparative wealth or relatively better education. So what makes the American Muslim community so different? Is it that American immigration policy has favoured the educated and affluent from the Muslim world or is there something intrinsic to the American system that has led to this?

This is most of my comment answering his questions:

Yes, I believe US immigration policy has primarily created this difference. Professionals, of course, are going to get preferential treatment in being allowed to live in the US (or any other country, for that matter), and with a large immigrant community (about 50% of the US Muslim population), I think that has largely skewed the results.

However, I also think there's one other factor that influences the higher income, and that's a large number of IT pros in the American Muslim community. I think a lot of American Muslims, in trying to avoid haram occupations, have moved into IT, which frequently pays higher wages than other occupations. That, too, has helped skew the results.

Yum! Food!

The following photographs were taken by myself over the past two years or so, using two different cameras.


The above photo was taken at a "halal food exposition" at Singapore Expo some time back. Spicy beef lungs aren't exactly my type of food, but they are popular with Malays here.



As you can see, the "Seaweed Shaker" packet here came from McDonald's. These were for orders of french fries. Customers received their fries with one packet of seaweed and a small paper bag to shake the fries and seaweed in. I collected a bunch of these packets for family back home (who've yet to receive them; bad JD). I have eaten seaweed before, primarily up in Korea. It tastes somewhat like paper.



The final photo is the most recent. The previous two photos were taken with a digital Panasonic point-and-shoot; this last photo was taken with a digital Nikon SLR, which Milady and I bought two-three weeks ago. After buying the camera, Milady, her brother and I walked over to a nearby Burger King while we waited for a computer to be built. This is the second photo I took with the camera, where I just pointed it at the wall in front of me, which had this huge photo wallpaper of a Whopper. I looked at the photo on the back of the camera body and said, "Wow!" I showed the picture to my bro-in-law and he said, "Wow!" :) It's a nice camera.

Forbes: Meeting the Halal Test

The Asian edition of Forbes magazine has a new article on Nestlé and its drive to become a leading marketer of halal foods. Nestlé has annual sales of $3 billion for its halal products out of the worldwide total of $580 billion. Much of the print article focuses on Nestlé Malaysia and the Malaysian government's efforts to make that country a "halal hub" for SE Asia (in competition with Singapore and Thailand).

Note: There are some very significant differences between the online version of this article vs. the print edition. The print version comes to 16 paragraphs, whereas the online edition has only 13 paragraphs. Moreover, one of the 13 paragraphs (#9, comparing the halal market to the American kosher market) is not in the print edition.


You might think of Nestle as the least likely company to venture into such a ticklish market as religious food. The Swiss multinational has, after all, attracted more than its share of protesters with other product lines (namely, infant formula and chocolate). But far from shying away from the halal market--food that passes muster with Islamic authorities--Nestlé has jumped in with both feet.

For centuries the men who decided whether food was halal were bearded and worked in mosques. But Othman Yusoff--not a mullah but a clean-shaven Nestlé executive--has forged a career as a halal expert. He's in charge of Nestlé Malaysia's halal lines, making sure they're free of alcohol, pork or any product from an animal not slaughtered according to Islamic guidelines. This covers everything right down to KitKat bars that are free of flavorings that have traces of alcohol.

Yusoff, 45, was a food engineer in Groupe Nestlé's R&D headquarters in Switzerland more than a decade ago when he was asked to help figure out how to keep some of his employer's supply lines halal. It proved to be a good career break. Nestlé has become the biggest food manufacturer in the halal sector, with more than $3 billion in annual sales in Islamic countries and with 75 of its 481 factories worldwide producing halal food. "Nestlé's set the pace on halal for multinationals," says Abdulhamid Evans of KasehDia, a Kuala Lumpur consulting company.

Nestlé is tapping into a vast market. With 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide and Islam the fastest-growing religion, halal food sales are now worth $580 billion annually, according to Malaysia's Halal Industry Development Corp. "Food companies are not going to be global unless they're halal," says Joe Regenstein, a professor of food science at Cornell University. And an increasingly affluent and savvy base of Muslim consumers means that the halal industry is growing in sophistication as well as size. Well beyond being just about meat, it now embraces products from lipstick to vaccines to savings accounts. In 1990 the Islamic Food & Nutrition Council of America had only 23 clients paying for its halal certification services. Last year it certified products for 2,000 companies worldwide.

Nestlé, which had $81 billion in sales last year and ranks number 51 on Forbes' Global 2000 list, caught the wave when the halal industry was pretty much a matter of uncle-and-auntie butchers and the neighborhood bazaar. In the 1980s Nestlé Malaysia started a halal committee--a group of 11 executives who oversaw halal standards from farm to fork. In the early 1990s this division decided to make all of its imports and exports halal, even though that meant its food scientists would have to occasionally engage in angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debates. "Alcohol is not allowed," observes Nestlé Malaysia's managing director, Sullivan O'Carroll. "But if a product has natural alcohol in it, for example, from fruit, it is allowed. So there can be a debate as to whether the alcohol is there naturally or has been put in." Nestlé Malaysia has pioneered halal standards for Nestlé worldwide, with Yusoff and his staff flying off to consult with executives from India to West Africa.

The lengths that Nestlé must go to meet these standards can be seen at the Maggi noodle factory outside of Kuala Lumpur. It looks ordinary enough, with its bright lights, conveyor belts and white-coated workers bent over noodle vats. But for one thing, if animal bristles are used in the factory's machine brushes, they've been checked to make sure they don't come from pigs or animals not slaughtered in accordance with Islam.

Like the rest of Nestlé's hundred halal lines, the noodles have been subjected to an intensive screening process, starting with the R&D. A halal checklist runs around 30 pages for each product and includes such questions as "Does product contain pork or parts thereof, e.g. enzymes, bacon...?" Then the Muslim scholars at Jakim, Malaysia's Department of Islamic Development, must approve the checklist. And to help avoid hitches with its suppliers, Nestlé Malaysia established a halal training program for small businesses, with employees at 1,200 of them trained.

Scale--and building halal factories from scratch, rather than modifying old ones--have kept costs down, notes O'Carroll. "When we compare our factories in Malaysia with other Nestlé factories around the world, we are at least as cost-effective," he says.

Nestlé's hope is that halal will reach an audience beyond Muslims. Precedent for a religious food's breakout into the broader market comes from the American kosher sector. Because there are only 1,000 halal-certified products on American store shelves, many Muslims cross over to kosher products--there are 90,000--and Muslims now represent 16% of the $100 billion U.S. kosher food industry's consumers.

How do you sell halal to an infidel? Talk about health, purity and ethics. That image would dovetail with Nestlé's new push as a health-and-wellness company. "We see halal as something which can develop along the lines of organic food," says KasehDia's Evans. Opening the first World Halal Forum last year in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi invoked halal as "that which is good, healthy, safe and high quality in all aspects of life. [It] represents values that are held in high regard by all peoples, cultures and religions."

There could be a nice side effect from pushing the halal market beyond its original customer base. Halal's association with purity and animal welfare could help overcome Islamophobia. "Halal could be an extremely good platform for changing perceptions," notes Evans.

Still, selling foods internationally is harder than selling petroleum. Country-to-country differences in halal methods and standards have created headaches for manufacturers for decades. Middle Eastern import companies used to send halal slaughterers to South America to kill the chickens themselves. A couple of years ago, when Muslim scholars in Australia decided that stunning was an Islamically permissible way to kill animals, Australian beef--20% of Malaysia's beef imports--suddenly fell afoul of Malaysia's halal standards. The government banned Australian beef, and Nestlé Malaysia, which was importing all its beef fat from Australia, had to look for alternative sources overnight. The company scrambled to import from South America, but making the change took months. As long as different countries interpret forms of killing in slightly different ways, "it makes trade challenging," O'Carroll says.

Hammering out global standards is a key goal of the second World Halal Forum in Kuala Lumpur, to be held in May. But getting Islamic scholars from Dacca to Detroit to agree will be tricky. Darhim Hashim, a director of the Halal Industry Development Corp., argues that not just Islamic scholars but trade experts and food scientists must be involved in setting the standards. "We need to apply science to the discussion," he says. "There has been a tendency in Islam to make issues out of things that aren't issues." Nestlé's Yusoff says the industry needs to be demystified. "Halal is not that difficult," he says. "A lot of things are halal. Not so many things are not."

Worlds Apart

A TV program Milady and I have started to watch regularly now is Worlds Apart, a National Geographic Channel series that, ironically, doesn't play on Singapore's NG Channel but another called AXN. The series takes American families and places them in various countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America. I find the show interesting for several reasons. One, of course, is because the show gives a brief but interesting look at different cultures around the world. (I grew up reading NG and loved their stories about foreign cultures; it's one of the reasons why I became externally focused on life outside the U.S. instead of being so withdrawn and isolationist, like many Americans.)

Second, I find it very interesting to see how the Americans react, trying to adapt to the various cultures and (frequently) failing miserably. It's amazing to see how quickly these people undergo culture shock; for some, the breaking point is only a few days into the visit (the families stay with a host village for ten days at the most). This post is about some of my observations with regard to these reactions, especially as they relate to gender and family roles (father, mother, child).

Of the five episodes or so that I've seen so far, most of the men seem to enjoy their experiences abroad. I think this is for two reasons. One: The cultures these American men find themselves in are much more patriarchal than American culture. (You can really see how feminism has affected (afflicted?) American culture with some of the families being very egalitarian if not matriarchal. One wife warned her husband not to think that he could continue to enjoy his new-found independence when he returned to the U.S. She planned to rule the roost once more as soon as they got back home.) Two: In many of these societies, the men are required to do a fair amount of physical labor, and I think the American guys are enjoying the work, using their bodies. Many developed economies now rely heavily upon work that is sedentary in nature. I remember the first job I had that required me to sit at a desk for my entire shift: my body hated it. I had worked for a number of years prior doing jobs that required me to stand, walk around, or do heavy physical labor (e.g., delivering furniture). Now, as a lecturer, I have a job that requires both sitting (often preparing for classes on a computer) and standing, walking around a classroom during class. I think these guys are doing heavy work once more and saying, "Wow, this is fun again." (Of course, whether they would say that after years of labor would be another question.) The only guy who didn't seem to enjoy his experience was a black man from St. Louis on last night's episode. I think there were a number of things he didn't appreciate about Mongolian culture at first, although he seemed more comfortable toward the end of his stay.

Many of the women don't do as well away from home as their husbands. That's not to say that all of them have done poorly. So far that I've seen, two women seemed to have positive experiences: the wife of the St. Louis family mentioned above and another woman (from Massachusetts?) who went to Panama and looked like she absolutely loved her experience (her sister, who came to visit for the second half of the stay, was the complete opposite). However, some of the women have broken down and suffered from severe culture shock. This doesn't surprise me as it jives with my own experiences observing American and Canadian expatriate women here in Asia. Many (but certainly not all) of the expatriate women I've known haven't done well overseas, and most have gone back home within a year or so. (Many, but certainly not all, expatriate men seem to last longer overseas, frequently staying for a number of years if not getting married to a local woman, like me, and becoming a PR.) I think many of the wives (and two girlfriends) on the show are shocked not only by the patriarchal society they've found themselves in, with their designated gender roles, but that they have significant work loads of their own to do, whether it's butchering the animals that their husbands have just slaughtered, cooking the food over a fire (no doubt a first for many of these women), or wielding a machete to cut down small trees to build their own huts. For these women, the shock leads to a very sudden nervous breakdown although, to their credit, the women often recover quickly and cope well with the remainder of their stay.

The kids have been a mixed bag. According to the Worlds Apart website, they will accept families that have children between the ages of 6 through 18. Perhaps not surprisingly, the children who have adapted the best are the younger ones, the pre-teens. They're still in child learning mode and take the new cultures in stride. Chop down that tree with this machete? No problem. Climb up this tree to get some betel nuts? The boy struggles for a while, learning how to climb, but perseveres and makes it all the way to the top. The teenagers (mostly girls) think more like adults. They're not terribly interested in learning or adapting, but trying to make the time pass as quickly as possible so they can return home to their friends. I'm more optimistic for the younger kids, that they will have learned deeply-ingrained life lessons from the trip: a respect for other cultures and countries, less arrogance in a belief of American and/or Western superiority, an understanding that people around the world have different values and ways of living. The teenagers I have less hope for.

One of the most interesting aspects of the show is how the Americans react to native food. It's not just that the Americans are exposed to foods that they would almost certainly never eat back home (e.g., armadillo), but that the native peoples slaughter and butcher their own foods, sometimes using body parts in very practical ways (the Mongolians packed a sheep's stomach with a home-made cheese that, as a container, would keep the cheese fresh throughout the upcoming winter). Of course, the slaughtering and butchering has come as a shock to many of the families. (It wouldn't surprise me if many Americans - and kids in particular - have no idea where the meat they eat comes from.) One woman (the woman who came to visit her older sister's family in Panama), who ran a vegetarian restaurant back home, reacted strongly when her brother-in-law speared a wild pig that had been caught for a celebratory feast. Still, there have been some amusing moments. In Mongolia, a young black boy looked askance at the idea of eating a sheep's eyeball, but gladly ate the eyelid. "Tastes like chicken."

I've thought about how Milady and I would fare if we were on a show like Worlds Apart. I think, for the most part, that both of us would do decently in that type of situation. Granted, life in Korea and Singapore is much, much more modern and sophisticated than the places where these families are sent. Most of the living conditions on the show are very primitive. And I think food would be an issue for both of us to a degree. As Muslims, we would find some of the foods offered to be haram, not only due to the issue of pork, but also because, for every animal I've seen slaughtered on this show, the killing has been done in a non-halal manner. On the other hand, Milady is more gastronomically adventurous than I am. :) She likes her "spicy beef lungs," and I say "yuck." ("Tastes like chicken," I'm sure.) I walk by the big container of decapitated fish heads (used for "fish maw soup") at the grocery store, and I say "yuck." I see the back half of a fish (that's been chopped in two) sitting in a small bucket of water at my mother-in-law's place, and I say "yuck." But I wouldn't be surprised if Milady could slaughter (in a halal manner), prepare and eat most halal food that would be offered to her in another country without batting an eye because I think she's more down-to-earth than many of the women I see on Worlds Apart, and I love her for that.

BTW, according to the website, Milady and I wouldn't qualify for the show because we don't have any kids yet (insha'allah). However, that didn't stop me from suggesting to two of my sisters that they try to be on the show. Now that would be a hoot. ;)