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UAE Olympic team exempted from Ramadan fast

salama — Thu, 24 May 2012 10:42:51 +0000

Ramadan coinciding with London Olympics heightens challenge for Muslim sportspersons

By: Allaam Ousman with Agencies

UAE Olympic football team coach Mahdi Ali outlining his preparations for the London Games. (PATRICK CASTILLO)

The UAE Olympic football team has been exempted from fasting during Ramadan as the holy month coincides with the upcoming London Olympic Games.

“There will be no pressure on the players to fast since the Grand Mufti of Dubai Sheikh Ahmed Al Haddad had said players who do not fast can make up by fasting in the period following the games,” UAE’s Olympic football coach Mahdi Ali, told this website.

“The ball is in the players’ court.

“We will not force any player to break his fast, but I think they know what to do, the responsibility is on them and they will take the right decision,” he said.

However, Ali criticised the timing of the games in London as being “unfair” to Muslim athletes across the world, because it coincided with Ramadan.

“It is unfair to all Muslim athletes and they (International Olympic Committee) should have thought about the fact that the Games will be held during the holy month of Ramadan, because around 3,000 athletes at the Games will be Muslim,” said Ali whose team created history by qualifying for the first time for Olympics.

The UAE football team has been drawn in Group A alongside, Great Britain, Senegal and Uruguay.

Ali maintained it was not fair for Muslim athletes by drawing a comparison to one car running on a full tank and the other competing on a half tank.

Fasting is expected to begin on July 21.

The UAE football team will start their campaign against the South Americans on July 26 at Manchester United’s Old Trafford.

UAE will also be represented in athletics, weightlifting and shooting at the London Games.

MUSCLE POWER, SPIRITUAL STRENGTH

Medical experts say that, theoretically at least, a reduction of food intake during Ramadan could deplete an athlete’s liver and muscle glycogen stores.

This is likely to lead to a drop in performance, particularly in sports requiring muscle strength.

Foreseeing potential problems and working far ahead of time, the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) nutrition working group convened a meeting in 2009 to review the evidence.

They came to the conclusion that Ramadan fasting could be problematic for some athletes in some sports, but the likely overall impact of Ramadan on London 2012 is far from clear.

Ronald Maughan, a sports scientist from Britain’s Loughborough University who chaired the IOC working group, agrees some physical changes are likely.

However, he also noted that observing the Muslim holy month involves mental and spiritual discipline, the effects of which should not be underestimated.

“Some individual Muslim athletes say they perform better during Ramadan even if they are fasting because they’re more intensely focused and because it’s a very spiritual time for them,” he told Reuters.

“Their faith gives them strength and Ramadan is an integral part of that faith.”

Maughan led a team of scientists who reviewed more than 400 research articles on Ramadan and selected those relevant to sporting performance.

They found that “actual responses vary quite widely, depending on culture and the individual’s level and type of athletic involvement”.

“There are often small decreases of performance, particularly in activities requiring vigorous and/or repetitive muscular contraction,” the team wrote in the review, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) this month.

But they concluded that in most situations “Ramadan observance has had only limited adverse consequences for either training or competitive performance”.

ENDURANCE

Still, experts say Azizul and Fatehah’s concerns, that fasting could dim their chances of standing on the podium at the end of their competition, are well-founded.

Jim Waterhouse, a sport and exercise science professor at Liverpool John Moores University in Britain, laments that so few studies have been done that give direct insight into how Ramadan-observing athletes may fare during the Olympics.

Het suggests looking at other similar research on fasting, such as in soccer players, or in people who are sporty but non-athletes.

A study in the BJSM in 2007 which looked at two Algerian professional soccer teams found that players’ performance declined significantly for speed, agility, dribbling speed and endurance during the Ramadan fast.

Nearly 70 per cent of the players thought their training and performance were adversely affected.

Another study published in the BJSM in 2010 concluded that “Ramadan fasting had an adverse effect on performance, albeit small in magnitude, during 60 minutes of endurance treadmill running” by moderately trained Muslim men.

“It depends on the sport,” says Azizul. “If you come from skilled sport it doesn’t matter, but we (cyclists) require quite a lot of energy. I did try fasting last year during training.

“For the first one or two days it’s not really a huge decrease of performance, but after that I felt really flat.”

GETTING THE TIMING RIGHT

Some experts have wondered whether changing the timing of some events might be a way forward.

A Muslim 100 metres runner who is observing Ramadan and whose race is in the early part of the morning is unlikely to be particularly badly affected if he or she has been able to eat and drink up until sunrise, for example.

“But suppose you’re a decathlete and your competition starts first thing in the morning and ends at 8pm. With no food or drink in that time, that’s a long hard day, especially if it’s hot,” said Maughan.

Waterhouse notes that with many non-Muslim athlete also taking part in London 2102, and with peak television viewing times a key factor in scheduling events, changing timetables to accommodate Ramadan would be “fraught with difficulty”.

For now, his core advice would be to follow Azizul and Fatehah’s lead and postpone fasting until after the event.

“It’s very difficult to see that a person who is a strong adherent to Ramadan could maintain a proper programme of preparation for something as important as an Olympic event while fasting,” he said. “It just doesn’t fit in with the physiology.”

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Cambodia: ‘Cham’ move for Halal Food

salama — Wed, 23 May 2012 16:42:30 +0000

Cambodian officials and Muslim leaders will meet this month to discuss the establishment of the country’s first halal food institution, which would cater to the Kingdom’s some 400,000 Muslims.

Cambodia would invite experts from Muslim-major-ity countries in the region to teach local Muslims, known as ‘Cham’, how to process food according to Islamic doctrine, Mao Thora, secretary of state at the Ministry of Commerce, said yesterday.

“The institution, or centre, for Islamic food would be a state-run facility with recognised Halal food standards”, he said.

Although many of the nation’s Cham consider themselves Muslim, awareness of the rules governing Halal eating habits was low, some members of the Muslim community said yesterday.

“If we don’t how to do it, then we are not Muslims. So we want to know how to do it,” Othsman Hassan, a local Muslim and president of the Cambodian Muslim Development Foundation, said.

“If we want to know how to make halal food, we have to seek help from Islamic people. And we need this help without spending too much money.”

One of the first steps for establishing a centre would be installing a laboratory for food testing, Othsman Hassan said.

Identifying hygiene techniques customarily used in Muslim cooking would be another part of the process, he said.

Muslims cannot eat food that contains pork or blood.

Cows that had been electrocuted could also not be consumed, Othsman Hassan noted.

Leaders of Cambodia’s Cham population have said their community is poor and often feels marginalised.

Sourced:Phnom Penh Post

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Opinion: If it is not ethical, can it really be Halal?

hamid — Wed, 23 May 2012 10:57:48 +0000

If it's not ethical, how can it be Halal?

As you can probably imagine, at HalalFocus we hear all kinds of stories…good, bad and ugly. In general, our approach has been to stay away from the bad and the ugly; there is plenty of that everywhere else, and we try and stay positive. It is so easy to be critical of everyone who is not doing things the way you think they should be done.

And when we are critical, we also try not to mention names too much; rather just to make a general point….like I am about to do now.

We got some news today from a business colleague of ours, a Halal food manufacturer, the kind of guy who shows up at all the global Halal sector events; very committed, good at his job, really works hard to make sure his Halal products are good quality and also correctly certified. The kind of guy who will bother to find out where all the hoops are, and then work out how to jump through them in the best way.

He was just informed that he had lost an account selling his products to a restaurant chain. The restaurant insisted that the products be certified by one particular agency. That agency, when approached, said they would only issue a Halal certificate if his company obtained all the raw materials from suppliers who were also certified by them.

On further investigation, our guy finds out that those suppliers do not meet his standards of quality, reliability and quantity…so there is no way he can use them as suppliers.

And so he loses the business. He gets punished for maintaining his high manufacturing standards by the certification agency that purports to be upholding Islamic standards.

Is this ethical behaviour by the Halal certification agency? It does not seem like it to me. Is this not ‘selling your religion for a paltry price’…?

Why is it that, time and time again, the Halal market place is full of reports of unethical (tyrannical?) behaviour by the certification bodies? For all their cries of ‘doing it for the community’ and their affiliations to this or that mosque, why are transparent ethical business practices nearly always absent?

So for all the fears surrounding the proposed new labelling laws, creeping shariah and Islamophobia, we would do well to get our own houses in order. Why worry about it being torn down from the outside if we are tearing it down from within?

If you are in the business of certifying what is Halal and what is not, then you had better have plenty of ‘fearful awareness’…that blade is a two-edged sword. It can cut both ways.

by Abdalhamid Evans

Founder, HalalFocus

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Morocco: Halal certification regulation ready

salama — Tue, 22 May 2012 22:24:59 +0000

With growth of over 12 per cent per annum since 2004 and a turnover worth 455 billion euros – which is a 16 per cent slice of the global food market – the Halal product market (the word halal means “allowed” by Islamic law) is an attractive one to Morocco’s businesses.

However, access to exporting into this market lies through obtaining a label issued by an accredited organisation that is recognised by importing markets. Under pressure from the industrial sector, the Moroccan government has already begun to make moves in this direction by introducing at the end of 2010 a first regulation inspired by the Malaysian model. However, according to a report from a sector professional appearing in La Vie Eco, “the fact that Moroccan Ulemas did not take part in drafting the norm means that it never gained credibility. On the other hand, since it came into force, not one single business has attempted to have itself certified according to this norm”.

Over recent months, Morocco has started once again on its quest for credible Halal certification: since December, a technical committee under a Moroccan assaying institute, (IMANOR), which is linked to the Ministry for Industry, has been holding meetings to review the current norm in depth.

This time round, Ulemas were also present at the consultations and broad concordance has been sought with the norm governing Halal products of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which is a synthesis of several national regulations. The new regulations, which will cover every production phase, should come into force over the coming days following approval by the Ministry for Industry and the first certificates should be issued during July.

According to sources interviewed by La Vie Eco, the Moroccan subsidiary of Nestlé has already consulted IMANOR and is working towards having some of its products certified according to the new Moroccan regulation. Other large groups, such as Coca Cola, Kraft Foods and Sapak, are said to be similarly interested and should be applying for certification soon. Sector experts warn that it may take some years for Morocco to be able to compete with competitors like the Turkish companies that currently occupy the international Halal market segment. (ANSAmed).

Expo Halal International – Meknes, Morocco – 13-15 September 2012

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UK: Call for the defence of Halal and religious slaughter

salama — Tue, 22 May 2012 07:49:33 +0000

HMC Press Release

New Halal Legislation is being planned for implementation in the UK by January 2013 and is currently undergoing ‘consultation’. This follows amendments to the European Legislation Law 1099 issued earlier this year. These new laws pose some of the biggest threats to the continuance of Halal in a generation. It is time for the Muslim community to sit up and pay attention.

Week after week, articles are being published calling for the ban of religious slaughter or restricting the production of religious slaughter (both kosher and Halal). These are being voiced by various groups including, Animal Welfare lobbies, Christian far right, veterinarians, secularist groups and the tabloid press.Watch carefully as story after story is released often carrying mis-information aimed at demonising the Halal brand and the religious needs of the 3 million+ Muslims in this country. Biased views and the threat of Islam are being used to justify the indefensible.

HMC says it is time to wake up to this threat and be counted.

The latest attack came from a leading vet Bill Reilly who criticised religious slaughter on Saturday 5th May and the timing seems very deliberate as the Government prepares its consultation papers on the new EU Legislation 1099, due at the end of this month.

HMC, which has been at the forefront of protecting Halal and the prophetic method of religious slaughter calls upon the Muslim community to unite and defend the prophetic method of slaughter and be prepared to respond to the consultation paper due out at the end of the May.

The Legislation draft we expect, will undoubtedly carry unbalanced laws aimed at making religious slaughter more difficult, possibly limiting its production and increasing costs for the Halal industry. They are promoted under the banner of animal welfare, but they are purely there to carry the biased views being promoted by various groups telling Muslims how we should produce and eat Halal!

Stunning is being promoted, yet many methods of stunning which were promoted as best welfare for animals over the past 20 years are now being phased out due to being cruel. In fact some stunning methods that are described as cruel by The European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) and have been recommended to be phased out have been ignored by the European Commission citing economic reasons! “Recommendations to phase out the use of carbon dioxide for pigs and the use of waterbath stunners for poultry are not included in this Regulation because the impact assessment revealed that such recommendations were not economically viable at present in the EU”.

The prophetic method remains the most humane method of slaughter and for the majority of Muslims an absolute requirement for the observance of their faith. Many Western countries including the United States recognise this method as humane in statute. Muslims and Jews believe that their method of slaughter when done properly with good standards is better than any other method available.

Labelling non-stunned meat and poultry

There are also strong calls from many quarters to label un-stunned meat and poultry. Although, HMC is in favour of labelling in principle, we feel the current calls are bias towards demonising un-stunned slaughter, rather than being in the interests of consumers.

Of course, every consumer has a right to know what they are eating, and therefore HMC calls on fair and impartial labelling, through the labelling of all meat and poultry and not only un-stunned. Let us label meat that has been shot with a captive bolt gun, gassed, electrocuted, drowned or mis-stunned, and then we can also label un-stunned, giving real information to consumers.

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Indian brands get ‘halal’ stamp

salama — Mon, 21 May 2012 19:01:03 +0000

BANGALORE: Islamic branding is an idea whose time has come, as brands tracking a broader consumer base get accustomed to Muslim sensibilities. It’s not just about halal food alone, for it’s at the forefront of the branding repertoire that resonates deeply with Muslim consumers around the globe.

Homegrown brands like CavinKare, Daawat, Bikano, Goldwinner oil, Vadilal ice cream,Amrutanjan Health Care and Gujarat Ambuja Exports are embracing halal-certification to get a better foothold in markets like Singapore, Malaysia and Gulf Co-operation Council (GCC) countries.

CavinKare has got a halal certification from Halal India, an apex body for halal certification , for three of its products – Fairever, Nyle herbal shampoo and Ruchi pickle – to expand its footprint in Singapore, Malaysia and GCC. “The certification is a reason-to-belief for customers on quality parameters. The certification will also give an edge over our competitors,” said R S Vijay Kumar, GM of international business at Cavin-Kare , a Chennai-based personal care company.

Nyle shampoo, for instance, cornered a 26.7% share in the Singapore halal-compliant market and 22% in Malaysia for the same segment last fiscal, he added. The Rs 1,100-crore company expects its international business to touch the Rs 100-crore mark in the current fiscal from Rs 70 crore earlier.

Bikano, the sweet and the namkeen brand from Bikanervala Foods, has seen a 30% jump in soan papdi and cookies sales in Malaysian market in the last one year, partly due to the halalcertification that gave a higher visibility on retail shelves there. “Halal signifies highest standards of quality and hygiene in ingredients, processes and products,” said Sachin Anand, head (international business), Bikanervala Foods.

Amrutanjan has obtained a halal certificate for all its pain balm products exported to Singapore , Malaysia, West Indies and a few African markets. “Islam in many ways is a way of life. To that extent, Islamic branding is all about using brands as good deeds. What starts with halal foods, can move on to halal practice in every industry, be it the pharmaceutical or the cosmetic industry . Islamic branding can embrace broader pastures that cover business practices too,” said Harish Bijoor, CEO of Harish Bijoor Consults.

“With many brands embracing halal, Indian brands may look at an export market opportunity of about $200 billion in the next ten years,” said Mohamed Jinna, CEO of Halal India. The halal stamp can be extended to those brands tuned into the principles of Shariah in faith, good practice and spirit . Globally, the halal market is worth a staggering $2.1 trillion a year, says a report by brand consultancy firm Ogilvy Noor.

The market opportunity for halal products is still untapped in India, but brand consultants are not dismissing its potential in a country with 160 million Muslims. Paul Temporal, founder and MD of Temporal Brand Consulting, feels that there is a lot more room for brand managers to adapt these values for different markets and cultures, whether Islamic or not.

“If you look at Islamic values , most of them are emotional and this makes for good branding and marketing. A more careful look reveals that a lot of these values do not just suit Islamic audiences, but are of a universally appealing nature . The issue or challenge is to find where these people are and to reach them with suitable products,” he added.

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EU: Poland – Kosher slaughter alive and well

salama — Mon, 21 May 2012 11:22:01 +0000

Poland’s minister of agriculture said he will not bow to activists and ban ritual slaughter in the country.

Polish Agricultural Minister Marek Sawicki said May 16 that banning ritual slaughter would be contrary to the Polish Constitution, which guarantees freedom of religion.

“Under European Union law, ritual slaughter is acceptable and there is no reason to prohibit it,” Sawicki also said.

The Polish newspaper Rzeczpospolita reported over the weekend that one of the Polish slaughterhouses where ritual slaughter is conducted belongs to a colleague of the minister.

Polish animal rights organizations have been protesting against shechitah, or ritual slaughter, saying that animals slaughtered according to Jewish and Islamic law suffer much more than those killed in the traditional way.

The Polish Ministry of Agriculture authorized the use of ritual slaughter several years ago, but animal rights activists say that a Polish animal protection law does not allow it. Earlier this month activists asked the country’s prosecutor to investigate whether the ministry is violating the law by allowing ritual slaughter.

Under Polish law, animals must be stunned before slaughter; the only exception is ritual slaughter.

Animal rights activists also believe that allowing ritual slaughter in Poland is illegal because it is not regulated by government act but by authorization of the minister of agriculture.

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Malaysia Shows Interest in Developing Tunisia’s Halal Industry

salama — Fri, 18 May 2012 11:47:19 +0000

By Eamon Granahan

On Tuesday, the Malaysian Second Minister of Finance Ahmad Husni Mohamed Hanadzlah met with Riadh Bettaib, Tunisia’s Minister of Investment and International Cooperation, to discuss the prospective collaboration between Malaysia and Tunisia in Halal industries.

“Tunisia can be a platform for the development and export of Halal industries for the Muslim community in Europe and Africa,” said Hanadzlah during a press conference attended by the two ministers in Tunis.

According to TAP, Malaysia’s exports in the Halal industries’ sector are valued at an estimated $11 billon, and the rate of exchange in these industries worldwide generates over $2.3 trillion dollars annually. The Halal industries’ sector refers to the production of food, cosmetics, and pharmaceuticals that abide by Islamic Law.

The Malaysian Minister of Finance stated that his country is willing to host over 30 Tunisian Halal companies in order for them gain experience from the well-established Malaysian Halal industry. He stressed the lucrative potential of developing this sector, given the high demand of Malaysian Halal industry products in countries with large Muslim communities.

Prospects of bilateral cooperation in the Islamic finance sector were also touched upon during the conference, and Hanadzlah stressed that Malaysia’s expertise in this field will be at Tunisia’s disposal.

Islamic Finance was first established in Malaysia in 1983. Since then, Islamic financial transactions total to $31 billion, accounting for 23% of Malaysia’s financial services sector.

Currenty, no Malaysian businesses are based in Tunisia. The only form of trade conducted between the two countries consists of the exportation of Tunisian dates and the importation of Malaysian natural oils.

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EU: Avoid Misuse of Religious Exemptions to Stunning

salama — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:44:30 +0000

EU – At the Agriculture and Fisheries Council this week, the Swedish delegation briefed the Council on the enforcement of the general requirement to stun animals before slaughter.

Some member states supported the Swedish delegation mentioning a possible overuse of the possibility to slaughter animals without preliminary stunning in certain member states. The Commission recalled the existing EU framework and pointed out that its implementation rely on subsidiarity. Recommendations on ritual slaughtering have been published in 2011 and a study is ongoing to evaluate the opportunity for informing the consumer on this type of slaughtering.

According to directive 93/119, animals should be stunned before slaughter. However, in the case of animals subject to particular methods of slaughter requested by certain religious rites this requirement does not apply. Certain member states seem to use largely this possibility of slaughter without stunning although this is not foreseen by the legislator.

Considering that there is an increasing interest among consumers for animal welfare, Sweden therefore incitated other member states to take appropriate action to avoid misuse of religious exemptions to stunning. The Commission could initiate for example targeted controls performed by the Food and Veterinary Office (FVO), prepare an harmonised procedure for approval and control of operators performing unstunned slaughter. Furthermore, Sweden suggests that specific labelling may be a tool.

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UK – Opinion: Halal hysteria

salama — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:39:57 +0000

BY MEHDI HASAN New Statesman

The British “debate” about meat, animal cruelty and ritual slaughter has become a proxy for deep fears about Muslims in our midst.

I am sitting in one of London’s finest Indian restaurants, Benares, in the heart of Mayfair. I’ve just placed an order for the “Tandoori Ratan” mixed-grill appetiser – a trio of fennel lamb chop, chicken cutlet and king prawn.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m pretty excited. Most of the upmarket restaurants in London do not cater for the city’s burgeoning Muslim population. Benares is one of the few exceptions: all of the lamb and chicken dishes on its menu are halal.

The restaurant opened in 2003 and its owner, Atul Kochhar, is a Michelin-starred chef. “Right from day one, we’ve kept our lamb and chicken halal,” Kochhar says. “It was a very conscious decision because I grew up in India, a secular country, where I was taught to have respect for all religions.” Kochhar, who is a Hindu, says Muslims make up “easily between 10 and 20 per cent” of his regular diners. It isn’t just a taste for religious pluralism that has dictated the contents of his menu; serving halal meat makes commercial, as well as cultural, sense.

To other, perhaps less tolerant types, however, the rise and rise of halal meat in the west and here in the UK, in particular, is a source of tension, controversy, fear and loathing. British Muslims are living through a period of halal hysteria, a moral panic over our meat. First there came 9/11, 7/7 and the “Islamic” terror threat; then there was the row over the niqab (face veil) and hijab (headscarf); now, astonishingly, it’s the frenzy over halal meat.

Last month, MPs in the Commons rejected a ten-minute-rule bill that would have made it mandatory for retailers to label all of the halal and kosher meat on sale and make it clear on the packaging that the animals were “killed without stunning”. The bill’s proponent, the Tory backbencher Philip Davies, claimed that the meat was being “forced upon” shoppers “without their knowledge”. It was defeated by the narrowest of margins – 73 votes to 70.

As is so often the case, the right-wing press is behind much of the fear-mongering and misinformation. “Britain goes halal . . . but no one tells the public,” screamed the front-page headline in the Mail on Sunday on 19 September 2010. The paper claimed that supermarkets, restaurants, schools, hospitals, pubs and big sporting venues such as Wembley Stadium were “controversially serving up meat slaughtered in accordance with strict Islamic law to unwitting members of the public”.

The following week, readers were treated to two more stories suggesting a sinister plot to inflict halal meat on innocent, animal-loving, non-Muslim Britons. “How 70 per cent of New Zealand lamb imports to Britain are halal . . . but this is NOT put on the label”, said the Daily Mail on 25 September 2010. “Top supermarkets secretly sell halal: Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Waitrose and M&S don’t tell us meat is ritually slaughtered,” proclaimed the Mail on Sunday the next day.

With the threat from terrorism receding, Britain’s Islam-baiters have jumped on the anti-halal bandwagon, and not just the neo-fascists of the British National Party and the English Defence League, which has a page on its website devoted to its (anti-) “halal campaign”, but mainstream commentators, too. The Spectator’s Rod Liddle – who once wrote a column entitled “Islamophobia? Count me in” – has demanded that halal meat be banned and called for a boycott of Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury and the rest until they agree to stop stocking halal products. “I will buy no meat from supermarkets,” he wrote, rather melodramatically, back in 2010.

In this year’s French presidential election, candidates seemed to spend more time discussing halal meat than rising unemployment or the ballooning budget deficit. Marine Le Pen, leader of the Front National, alleged that “all the abattoirs in the Paris region sell halal meat without exception”, while the outgoing president, Nicolas Sarkozy, claimed that the halal issue was a “central concern” for French voters. (For the record, halal constitutes 2 per cent of all the meat sold in Paris.)

Last year in the Netherlands, the lower house of parliament approved a bill, introduced by the Party for the Animals (PvdD) and backed by the Islamophobe Geert Wilders’s Freedom Party, to have all ritually slaughtered meat, including halal and kosher, banned. The Dutch government refused to sign off on the bill but agreed to appoint a commission to consider tighter procedures for slaughter.

Stun guns

So, what is it about halal that provokes such anger and hysteria? The word literally means “lawful” and refers to any object – not just food – or action or behaviour that is deemed permissible under Islamic law.

For meat to be considered halal, three conditions must be met:

1) The animal must be healthy and uninjured and, crucially, it must be killed with a cut.
2) All the blood must be drained from the animal’s body.
3) The slaughterer must recite the appropriate Islamic prayer at the time of slaughter.

Islam, like Judaism, prescribes a single-cut method of slaughter: the animal is killed with a quick cut to the throat using a sharp knife. This allows the blood to drain out and, it is believed, makes the meat cleaner.

Naturally, the image of blood flowing out from the slit throat of a dead cow or sheep doesn’t help. But Muslims, like Jews, insist that so-called ritual slaughter is humane and pain-free because the animal quickly loses consciousness. “There is no time to start feeling any pain,” in the words of Dr Majid Katme, a former spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain.

In contrast, modern western non-ritual methods of slaughter demand that the animal be rendered unconscious before it is killed – usually by means of stunning, with a bolt gun, or electrocution. The stunning of livestock before slaughter has been compulsory in the EU since 1979 but most member states, including the UK, grant exemptions to Muslims and Jews.

So, for the moment, non-stunned halal meat is available in Britain, but contra the Mail on Sunday, there’s not enough of it to satisfy the growing demand. As a Muslim, I often have great difficulty in deciding where to eat out, given the lack of halal restaurants (hence my excitement at Benares). One recent survey suggested nine out of every ten UK Muslims adhere to the strict rules on halal eating – that is, they reluctantly opt for the salmon, and not the steak, when eating out.

Nonetheless, even though they represent just 3 per cent of the population, Britain’s two million Muslims tend to eat much more meat, on average, than their non-Muslim counterparts. Reports suggest that British Muslims consume a fifth of all red meat sold in the UK.

I have British Muslim friends who book their holiday flights on Emirates, whatever their end destination, specifically in order to be able to stop off in transit in Dubai and buy a Big Mac from the airport’s halal McDonald’s. Some Muslims, it seems, will travel to the corners of the earth in pursuit of halal food.

Is it any wonder that the UK halal meat market is estimated to be worth £3bn? Or that fast-food chains in the UK such as McDonald’s and Domino’s Pizza are working on trials offering halal meat?

Nando’s, the Portuguese mid-market restaurant chain, has perhaps gone furthest and fastest. One in five of its branches in the UK now serves halal-certified chicken, and I never cease to be amazed by the sea of hijabs among the diners at the Nando’s in south Harrow that has been my “local” for the past decade.

Then there’s KFC, which has responded to the raft of halal fried-chicken franchises (see Sophie Elmhirst’s piece on page 28) by running a halal trial in a hundred of its restaurants nationwide. On its UK website, KFC promises its customers that “our food is just as tasty and finger lickin’ good as it has always been”. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it also includes a list of defensive answers to “frequently asked questions” such as “Why have you chosen my store?” and “Does this mean your animal welfare standards have changed?”.

Protecting animals is the cover behind which critics of halal meat often hide. This month, Professor Bill Reilly, a past president of the British Veterinary Association, condemned the rise in the number of animals killed in ritual slaughter as “not acceptable”. “[I]f we cannot eliminate non-stunning, we need to keep it to the minimum,” he wrote in the Veterinary Record. “This means restricting the use of halal and kosher meat to those communities that require it for their religious beliefs and, where possible, convincing them of the acceptability of the stunned alternatives.”

Opponents of ritual slaughter cite a raft of scientific studies that condemn the practice as painful and abusive. In a much-discussed report published in 2003, the Farm Animal Welfare Council (FAWC), an independent body that advised the UK government until its dissolution last year, argued that ritual methods of slaughter resulted in “significant pain and distress” for the animal and recommended that Muslims and Jews be banned from slaughtering livestock without stunning the animals first.

The FAWC’s findings were backed by a major EU-funded study “on issues of religious slaughter”, which concluded in 2010: “. . . it can be stated with the utmost probability that animals feel pain during the throat cut without prior stunning”.

Case closed? Not quite. Ruksana Shain, of the Muslim consumer group Behalal.org, says the scientific evidence against halal slaughter “isn’t conclusive”. But she would say that, wouldn’t she? OK. Well, consider the verdict of Joe Regenstein, professor of food science at Cornell University in the United States, who leads the university’s Kosher and Halal Food Initiative.

“Many of those attacking religious slaughter have no clue as to what is happening,” he tells me. “It is more of an Islamophobic issue, not an animal well-being issue.” Compared to modern, secular methods of slaughter, he says, “the traditional or Prophetic method might actually be equal or possibly superior” because the initial pain of the throat cut results “in the animal releasing large quantities of endorphins, putting it in a state of euphoria and numbness”. The cut thus serves as its own stun. The scientific evidence against halal slaughter, Regenstein says, “is extremely weak and has often been done poorly with an agenda driving a desired outcome”.

Missing defence

To pretend that Muslims do not care about animal welfare is unfair. There are several Quranic verses and sayings of the Prophet warning Muslims not to harm livestock; mistreatment of animals is considered a sin by the vast majority of Islamic scholars. In fact, advocates of halal slaughter can call on their own slew of scientific studies for support.

In 1978, research led by Wilhelm Schulze of the University of Veterinary Medicine Hanover showed that “the slaughter in the form of a ritual cut is, if carried out properly, painless in sheep and calves according to EEG [electroencephalography] recordings and the missing defensive actions [of the animals]”. The German Federal Constitutional Court based its 2002 verdict permitting ritual slaughter on this study.

Then there are the writings and research of Temple Grandin, professor of animal sciences at Colorado State University and one of America’s leading experts on the humane treatment and slaughter of livestock. She sees no difference between stunned and non-stunned slaughter if both are conducted properly and professionally. When a ritual slaughter is “done really right”, Grandin has said, “the animal seemed to act like it didn’t even feel it – if I walked up to that animal and put my hand in its face I would have got a much bigger reaction than I observed from the cut, and that was something which really surprised me”.

Remember, the “secular ways of slaughter”, as Regenstein points out, also have their downsides: “If the public were to discover that animals were subject to a pre-slaughter intervention – like having their skull cracked open, [being] electrocuted, or put in a gas chamber – they might not really like that either.” Shouldn’t consumers have a right to know which of these methods were used? Shouldn’t they be told about the danger of “mis-stunning”, which leaves the animal conscious and in pain, and occurs “relatively frequently”, according to a 2004 report by the European Food Safety Authority? Why not label all meat with detailed explanations of how exactly the animal in question was killed, and let consumers decide? “Why only pick on halal?” Ruksana Shain asks.

In the Commons debate on food labelling on 24 April, the Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, who is Jewish, criticised Philip Davies for singling out Muslims and Jews, saying he had “picked on two small minorities who share the way in which the meat they eat is killed”. However, Kaufman added that he would not have expressed his “total opposition to this bill” if it had cast its net wider to include other animals such as chickens that had been kept in “dreadful conditions”.

Preventing animal cruelty goes far beyond the “debate” about stunning or not stunning. And ironically, not all Muslims are opposed to stunning. There are two main organisations that regulate the halal food industry in the UK – the Halal Monitoring Committee, which has a “blanket ruling disallowing stunning in any form”, and the Halal Food Authority, which allows controlled stunning where the “animal or the birds do not die prior to slaughtering”, and which has certified KFC’s stunned chicken as halal.

Thus, most Muslim, and non-Muslim, participants in the heated debate over halal meat are ignoring a critical point. Data produced by the Meat Hygiene Service in 2004 suggested that roughly 90 per cent of halal slaughter in the UK involved stunning. In September 2011, the Food Standards Agency reported that “the majority of animals destined for the halal trade in both the red and white meat sectors are stunned before slaughter”. So what’s all the fuss about?

Consider the scare stories from the Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday, which automatically assume that all halal meat derives from the traditional, non-stunned method of slaughter. What drove both papers’ coverage of the story? Are we seriously expected to believe that either the Mail or the Mail on Sunday gives a damn about animal rights? I struggle to recall the last occasion on which either tabloid splashed on the abuse or neglect of animals. More often than not, Mail columnists reserve rather harsh words (“deranged fanatics”, to quote Richard Littlejohn) for animal rights activists.

Crucially, if the hysteria over halal meat in Britain isn’t the product of Islamophobia, how do halal-obsessed politicians and journalists explain their silence on the subject of kosher meat? The 2003 Farm Animal Welfare Council report condemned both halal and kosher methods of slaughter. Yet, for instance, the Mail on Sunday, despite referring to “ritually slaughtered meat” in the headline of its “Britain goes halal . . .” report, went on to discuss only halal meat for the first 24 paragraphs of the piece before mentioning kosher meat – in passing – in the 25th paragraph.

The truth is that halal has become a proxy for much deeper fears and concerns about the presence of a growing and vocal Muslim population in our midst. “It’s being used as a political issue, especially by xenophobic and Islamophobic folks, to whip up a backlash against ‘the other’,” Regenstein says.

To pretend otherwise is naive, if not disingenuous. If this was a debate about animal welfare, it would be about all forms of slaughter; if it was a debate about ritual slaughter, it would address kosher, and not just halal, meat.

“Why only pick on halal?” It’s an important question in need of an urgent answer.

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