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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Gourmet butcher shop.

Mohamad Fakih, owner of the Paramount Fine Foods Lebanese restaurant chain, has opened an upscale halal butcher shop in Mississauga. Toronto Star photo

Driven by the urge to unite “halal” and “gourmet,” Mohamad Fakih built himself a beautiful butcher shop in Mississauga.
Actually, the Lebanese-Canadian entrepreneur built Paramount Butcher Shop for his wife Hanan after she complained about the grungy state of halal meat counters and asked him to do something about it.
Hanan yearned for an upscale shop, something like a place called Goodies that her mother-in-law takes her to in Beirut.

Mohamad, who owns the burgeoning Paramount Fine Foods restaurant chain, polled customers and discovered they all want the same three things in a halal butcher shop.

The shop should be clean. The staff should be polite and friendly. And since everyone is time-starved, there should be lots of items “marinated with Middle Eastern flavours” alongside raw product.

Mohamad visited non-halal competitors and researched fine butcher shops in London, Paris and Australia before designing his own 3,400-sq.-ft. shop.

Paramount Butcher Shop opened March 16 in Kee Square on Heritage Hills Blvd. at Eglinton Ave. W.

Help yourself to free Turkish coffee when you arrive. Take a number and a staff member will help you move from the meat counter (beef, veal and lamb) to the chicken counter (kept separate to avoid any cross-contamination) to the deli counter.

“This place is built on full transparency,” says Mohamad. “I want to present Middle Eastern businesses differently, so the front shows what’s in the back.”

There are windows to the meat locker, where meat is dry-aged. The meat counters are left exposed at the bottom so customers can see the floors underneath. Mohamad is as proud of his meat saw as he is of the spray-foam sanitizing system for the back room floors.
It’s not every butcher shop that boasts an indoor charcoal barbecue so customers (especially those living in condos) can get meat grilled to order.

Mohamad happily jumped through hoops to get the grill permit. He has charcoal grills at his four restaurants in Toronto, Thornhill, Mississauga and (any day now) London, Ont.

He bought the struggling Paramount chain in 2007 and transformed it into a vibrant and growing empire that employs 250 people, many of them young and non-Muslim.

The Middle Eastern/Mediterranean restaurants showcase freshly grilled foods and breads.

Animals should be slaughtered manually, not mechanically, by a Muslim who says the name of Allah aloud. But to Mohamad, halal is about more than just slaughter. It’s about being conscientious about how animals are raised, a philosophy that dovetails nicely with the local food movement and the fact that consumers are asking more questions about what they eat.

Mohamad has lived in Canada for 13 years and got his start at Tim Hortons. Sure, his restaurants and butcher shops cater to Muslims looking for halal food, but he courts and welcomes non-Muslims.

He’s already at work on a second butcher shop, set to open in Mississauga’s west end this fall.

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Officials of tourism agencies from Arab countries visit the Black Sea provinces of Kastamou and Sinop, and explain the reason why Arabs choose to come to Turkey.

Officials from tourism agencies from Arab countries, have spoken about why their citizens chose to come to Turkey for holidays. Among the most important factors they detailed were the food, the shared history, the natural beauty, and religious similarities between Turkey and their home countries.

The officials from Oman, Kuwait, Qatar Saudi Arabia, Dubai and Abu Dhabi visited touristic and historical places in the Black Sea provinces of Sinop and Kastamonu over the weekend. The Western Black Sea Promotional Tour was organized with the cooperation of Turkish Airlines (THY), the Kastamonu Confederation (Kas-Kon), and the Turkish-Middle East Tourism Council Agencies.

Nasim Syed from Kuwait said his citizens chose to come to Turkey with their family since it was a Muslim country like Kuwait and so also used halal food. “Turkey is a Muslim country. At the same time, it attracts our citizens because the roots of the Ottoman Empire are on this land, and the Ottoman Empire protected and governed Arab countries in the past. Halal food and tasty dishes are other reasons for them to come to Turkey. Its weather is nice, too.”

Oman’s Samiri al-Ajmi said that there were very beautiful places in Kastamonu. “The city has a natural beauty.” He said the first thing that came to his mind about Turkey was that it was a good country for tourism, adding, “It has been said that the green areas in Turkey do not exist in any other place. I saw it when I came here. The fact that it is between the East and the West, Asia and Europe is very important in terms of tourism.”

Interest increasing every year
Sree Kumar, a travel agency official from Abu Dhabi, said his agency organized tours to Turkey two or three times a year, and that they had been working with Turkey for 15 years. “People’s interest in Turkey is increasing every year.”

Kumar said there were many people in Abu Dhabi who wished to visit Turkey. “Tours are organized particularly to Istanbul, Yalova and Bursa. Trips on the Bosphorus, historical areas and touristic venues draw the attention of our people. Its history is also particularly attractive.” He added that the opening of a new airport would encourage further tourism in Kastamonu.

Saudi Arabian Muhammet Nas?r said Turkey’s natural beauty had also drawn the attention of Arab tourists. “Turkey is a beautiful country, and it does not require a visa. This is what first attracts us. We also have the same religion, and this is why our citizens want to come to Turkey so much,” Nas?r said.

Bhauna Singh from Dubai said the reason why Dubai’s people came to Turkey was the hospitality of Turkish people and their smiling faces. He added that Dubai’s tourists generally liked to visit multi-cultural places, and so Turkey fits the bill.

KASTAMONU – Anatolia News Agency

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An imam officiates at the wedding of Zhe Yagang (groom) and Yang Liu (bride), who were in traditional Islamic costume, at Hongbinlou, a famous halal restaurant in downtown Beijing, in March. Li Yao / China Daily

Zhe Yagang, 25, is a Muslim working at an IT company in Beijing. Yang Liu, his newly-wed wife, also a 25-year-old Muslim, is an auditor at a medical company.

Although the couple were raised in secularized households, they celebrated their wedding in Islamic style, because they consider it is fashionable and a way to please their parents.

Shortly after a friend gave them contact information for a Muslim wedding planning company in Beijing, they quickly called to make arrangements. They paid 8,000 yuan ($1,265) to book the wedding and 700 yuan to rent Muslim wedding dresses.

The wedding took place on a Saturday morning in March in a dining hall at Hongbinlou, a famous restaurant that has served halal food since 1853. Most of the guests sitting around the tables were Muslims.

When the couple entered the room, followed by two ring bearers, a 6-year-old boy and 4-year-old girl, their festive red and full Islamic design attire received warm praise and admiration, especially the elegant bridal gown and hijab.

“I seldom wear a cap. It is for very special occasions only,” Zhe said. Having the ring bearers was the couple’s own initiative, to bring some romance and Westernized modernity.

Following the wedding planner’s advice, the couple invited two imams to officiate the ceremony and write their names as husband and wife on a marriage contract, something required by Islamic teaching for a proper wedding, yet totally unfamiliar to them both.

“We’re instantly interested. Our parents held simple weddings and never told us anything about that,” Zhe said.

They had limited contact with imams earlier in their lives. The couple offered each imam money for the service and waited until they left to bring alcohol to the table.

After the marriage contract was signed, Zhe Jiulan, the groom’s aunt, went on stage as an honored witness to read aloud the civil marriage certificate they registered last June.

It was the first traditional Muslim wedding that Zhe and many of the guests had attended. “Such ceremonies send us strong visual reminders of our faith,” she said.

Her son, Li Xu, 23, was the best man at the wedding, and wore a dark suit. Li said the experience made him want a similar wedding.

His parents were skeptical when Li first brought home his Han Chinese girlfriend, Zhang Jing, a non-Muslim undergraduate classmate.

“My parents took a while to come to terms with my choice. I know they will be pleased if I celebrate my wedding in Muslim tradition,” Li said.

He has other plans in mind, too. Since his girlfriend is from Gaobeidian, Hebei province, Li said they are considering two ceremonies, a Muslim one in Beijing and a fancy church wedding in Hebei.

“We’re open to all interesting options. It is still too early to seriously plan,” Li said.

Ma Nenzhi, 47, a Muslim migrant worker from Dengfeng, Henan province, is a dishwasher at Hongbinlou, where the wedding took place. She said the restaurant is a popular place for Muslim wedding receptions, particularly on weekends.

Mixed marriages, usually involving a Muslim man and Han Chinese woman, are on the rise in Beijing and Ma’s hometown, she said.

Ma’s 19-year-old son is a student at Zhengzhou University in the capital of Henan province. Ma said it will be up to him to decide whom he wants to marry.

“But the girl should accept basic Muslim practices,” Ma said, adding that in her village many Han Chinese women, after marrying their Muslim husbands, must take a ceremonial bath at a mosque and be given a Muslim name by an imam.

Wang Yong, 35, the Muslim wedding planner, said 50 percent of his target clients are Muslims. Their choices and requests for traditional Muslim wedding vary.

Among those considering a Muslim wedding, some favor a simple celebratory party with close friends and relatives, such as Zhe’s wedding. Some celebrate twice, paying equal attention to both, in Muslim style first, followed by Western dresses and procedures. Some show more interest in exotic white wedding gowns and treat the Muslim traditions as a formality, Wang said.

“We want to satisfy all tastes and preferences,” Wang said. In his studio, he proudly presents a wardrobe containing dozens of Muslim wedding gowns in festive colors and elegant designs. The wardrobe can be rented at the ceremony or for shooting wedding photos. Wedding music in Arabic, Muslim marriage contract documents to be officiated by an imam and decorations are also available.

Urban Muslims now have different wedding choices, and not all of them adhere to Islam. Some are reviving past Confucian wedding customs to perform bows first to Heaven and Earth, then to the parents from both sides, and last between the bride and groom, Wang said.

Facing growing competition that advertises the skills and capacity to stage Muslim weddings, Wang is confident that his service stands out because of his inside knowledge of both Islam and the wedding planning business.

“Some take the narrow understanding that the presence of an imam and reading of Quran verses will suffice,” Wang said. “But it happened sometimes when the imam is not yet finished, and a bottle of champagne was already opened, which was disrespectful.”

No alcohol was served during Wang’s wedding, a policy that he promotes but is not always followed at Muslim weddings.

At another Muslim wedding in March that Wang orchestrated, alcohol was served after a brief ceremony presided over by an imam. The groom Ma Yonghui, and the bride Zhao Qian, also changed into a suit and white wedding gown.

The audience laughed when the groom Ma knelt down on one knee and proposed again. He later sang a popular love song in Chinese, with Karaoke effects, dedicated to the bride Zhao.

Ma greeted the bride on the red carpet while the wedding march played. He collected a handful of roses from friends and relatives who stood nearby and showered them with rose petals, declaring his love for his bride and kissing her.

“We want to please family elders by following the Muslim rituals and also have non-Muslim guests in keeping with the process,” Ma said.

Diversity on the rise

Ma Ping, a Muslim scholar from the Academy of Social Sciences in the Ningxia Hui autonomous region, said the practices of different Muslim weddings indicate the growing diversity in China’s Muslim community and a culture not assimilated but influenced by ethnic and religious differences.

“Muslim weddings do not carry a singular form in China. Young people’s novel ideas of hybrid wedding plans that combine tradition and mainstream fashion will receive fewer objections from parents and seniors,” Ma said.

In Ningxia, an area in Northwest China with a strong Muslim culture, Ma sees a clear difference in wedding ceremonies held in the capital city Yinchuan and its suburbs.

In suburban and rural areas, traditions are more strictly followed. Any attempt to change them may be met with stern resistance from the older members of the family, Ma said.

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China’s legendary cuisine has been a secret weapon to winning many an investment. But when a major ingredient of the culinary experience is pork, hospitality can only go so far when it comes to entertaining Muslim businessmen from countries like Indonesia and the Gulf’s emirates.

How the Chinese have been able to adjust can be seen in Hong Kong, the international trade port that many of these business people go through on their way to mainland China.

Take a look at the Islamic Centre Canteen, just a few floors above the Wan Chai mosque. Wrapped up in the savory, little dumplings the canteen serves is the quintessential Hong Kong culinary experience, sans the pork. That kind of accommodation for Islamic dietary rules is growing, along with business prospects from the Muslim world.

In 2010, there were only 14 certified halal restaurants and markets in Hong Kong, advertised by visitor centers. In the past year alone, however, the number has almost tripled. Muslim community leaders have intimated that the Hong Kong government has collaborated with Islamic clergy to lure prospective Muslim guests with dining options. The Hong Kong Tourism Board reports that in recent years, the number of Middle Eastern visitors to the region has grown by as much as 20% annually.

One can often find tourists from the Middle East, Pakistan and Indonesia in the Tsim Sha Tsui district, where 13 of Hong Kong’s official halal restaurants are located. The tourists usually buy wholesale mobile phones — often knockoffs — manufactured at mainland factories for resale at home. “There has been an increase in halal restaurants in the past few years; not only that, but supermarkets are now serving lots of halal products,” says Wael Ibrahim, an Egyptian businessman who has lived in the greater China region for a decade and chairs Serving Islam, Hong Kong’s Muslim community organization. Ibrahim explains that promoting halal-food offerings is an effective way of “tightening the relationship between Hong Kong and other countries.”

Establishing Muslim-friendly services in China’s Hong Kong Special Autonomous Region may well be part of a multipronged attempt to establish a stronger business relationship between the natural-resource-rich Muslim world and the greater China region, which is in dire need of fuels for its burgeoning economy. “Mutually beneficial cooperations between China and the Muslim world are extremely important to China,” says Ma Hongjian, president of the Beijing-based China-Arab Council for Investment Promotion, explaining that since 9/11, trade partnerships between the two have skyrocketed because many Muslim businesspeople were unable to obtain visas to the West and instead started going to China in droves. “There are so many examples of the Chinese government trying to provide facilities for our Muslim guests,” says Ma, himself a Chinese Muslim.

In 2010, the mainland Chinese city of Guangzhou, which has become a hub for international Muslim businesses in recent years, hosted the Asian Games. Over half of the 45 participating nations were majority-Muslim countries and major sources of China’s oil and energy needs. For the occasion, the Guangzhou city government poured some $2.4 million into the construction of a giant mosque, a monument to the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle, Saad Ibn Abi Waqqas, who is traditionally believed to be entombed nearby. The government estimates that 30% of the food served at the games was certified halal.

More recently, Hong Kong has been trying to position itself as a conduit for Muslim business with the mainland. And it is not just by offering the business community more dining options but also by developing a strong platform for Islamic finance — which is compliant with Shari’a and prohibits usury, which many modern-day practitioners interpret to mean any form of interest. Investments in un-Islamic industries dealing, for example, in pornography, gambling and alcohol are also prohibited. “We hope to develop a wholesale Islamic capital market,” says a spokesperson for Hong Kong’s Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau. That would include Islamic bonds, known in Arabic as sukuk, which pay investors in assets to avoid, at least nominally, the exchange of interest.

Local Muslims are still skeptical. “We hear that [Hong Kong banks like HSBC] are studying about implementing Islamic finance in Hong Kong, but so far nothing major has materialized,” says Ibrahim of Serving Islam. Indeed, while the official policy of the Hong Kong government may be to welcome Muslim business to the region, perennial reports of workplace discrimination and harassment of Pakistani and Indonesian Muslims abound.

Hong Kong may work to offer Muslim visitors halal dumplings at the Islamic Centre Canteen in Wan Chai, but the city’s employers often refuse to let Muslim migrant workers practice their religion as desired. Sullying Hong Kong’s name in Indonesia late last year, two live-in Indonesian domestic workers were reportedly forced to eat pork and take off their headscarves by Hong Kong employers, according to the Jakarta Post. They also told the newspaper that they no longer prayed five times a day. “There’s no time, and the employers always complain, so we just gave up. It’s easier that way.”

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On a recent evening, Les Enfants Terribles, a Paris restaurant that serves French cuisine cooked with halal meat, was brimming with customers.

Like many French Muslims, Kamil Saidi, who owns the restaurant, says he was disgusted by the recent political kerfuffle over halal, triggered by far right candidate Marine Le Pen’s charge that non-Muslims in Paris were unwittingly eating animals slaughtered in accordance with Islamic law.

Saidi says the debate wasn’t really about meat, but about the far right trying to attract votes in advance of the election in April and May.

He prefers to instead massage cultural tensions the quiet way: by serving an excellent blend of French and Muslim gastronomic traditions.

Even though France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, Saidi says he and his brother — the other enfant terrible — seem to have been the first ones to make French-Halal fusion cuisine official. “It’s astonishing,” he says.

“Growing up I was always frustrated because I love French cuisine, but like all practicing Muslims I had to eat only fish or vegetarian when I went to a restaurant,” says Saidi. “I always wanted to eat my fill of duck and lamb,” but it wasn’t halal.

Now, Saidi can serve all the duck and lamb he wants because he can guarantee it’s halal. Tonight there is fois gras with confit, onions and red berries; Magret de canard, or duck breast in quince sauce; and roasted leg of lamb — all halal, bien sur.

Saidi’s parents emigrated to France from Algeria, and he was born and raised in the Paris suburbs. He says life is good for Muslims in France. When I ask him if there is discrimination, he says, “yes, a kind of gustatory discrimination.” And that’s what his restaurant is setting out to change.

Saidi says he doesn’t advertise his restaurant as halal. “I don’t want to cater to one type of community because then people will put a label on me,” he says.

Word has spread among the young Muslim crowd of Les Enfants Terribles’ delectable fare. Next to me are Karim Nait and Laila Ayb. Nait, who is a chef at another French restaurant, says he doesn’t keep halal, but Ayb does. They say they come here often because the food is delicious and refined.

Saidi also has a large non-Muslim clientele. Many diners walk in off the street not knowing it’s halal, “or that alcohol isn’t served,” Saidi says. “Some diners say, ‘okay, we won’t drink tonight.’ But others leave when they find out they can’t have wine with dinner.”

Tonight, one table of non-Muslim diners certainly didn’t mind going dry. “It’s fabulous,” they tell me. “The meat is really flavorful and it’s just a good French restaurant.”

Halal meat butchers usually have a reputation for quality in France. And with an estimated 6 million Muslims now living here, halal products are becoming increasingly popular. Grocery stores offer halal meats and prepared dishes in their frozen sections and even a fast food chain, Quick, offers halal hamburgers.

The French have also embraced and adopted many dishes from North Africa.

Couscous, the North African dish with a chick pea and vegetable sauce served over semoul, has practically become a French food. And spicy merguez sausages from the Maghreb are now standard fare at any French barbeque.

I’m even told that the Couscous Royal — a dish that features beef, chicken and merguez — is another form of French-Halal fusion. “In Algeria you only eat couscous with one meat, never all three,” says Nait, the diner. [Copyright 2012 National Public Radio]

Source: KOSU News

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With the fast-food market expected to reach $4.5 billion in the next three years, you’d hardly believe Saudi Arabia is a hot spot for foodies and gourmet chefs alike. However, as CNN reports, the country’s culinary scene is making waves internationally.

The chefs and foodies on the rise: Yasser Jad, the culinary director of Saudi Arabian Airlines who trained at Le Cordon Bleu; Emanuele Esposito, executive chef at Il Villagio Restaurant; and Rashed Islam, food blogger who founded the site JeddahFood.com that has thousands of hits already. The three point out that new restaurants across the country are slowly making a dent in the fast-food franchise nation. Said Esposito to CNN, “There are more restaurants opening all the time. Alongside the Saudi and Middle Eastern restaurants, there are Italian restaurants and Japanese has really taken off in the last few years.”

Plus, the Saudi Arabian Chef Association, born three years ago, aims to create a home for new chefs and become a major player in international food competitions. Said Jad (the founder) to What’s Up in February, the most challenging part of starting the association was to incorporate their dietary restrictions (because Muslims cannot eat pork or drink alcohol) into the World Association of Chefs’ Societies. Despite difficulties, the group has made an impression already; the group has participated in the International Culinary Olympics and a Top Chef-like event for Al Harthi.

What will transform the country into a major international food scene, said Jad, are more culinary schools for developing chefs. Both Jad and Esposito are working on opening hospitality schools in the country.

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By RIYADH: KHALID TAWALBEH ARAB NEWS STAFF

The King Abdul Aziz Center for National Dialogue launched a new project based on the concept of spreading dialogue through coffee shops.

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At the largest food trade fair in the Middle East, Gulfood, it was revealed that McDonald’s is expected to open 100 new outlets this year with a particular focus on the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, reported HotelierMiddleEast.com on February 20.

Currently, the Golden Arches has 833 restaurants in 17 markets in the Middle East and Africa – a growth rate of between 10 to 15 per cent every year.

Meanwhile, US-based burger chain Smashburger also announced plans to add another 50 to 70 outlets in the Middle East this year as part of a larger strategy to become an international presence.

Popular New York burger institution Shake Shack in Madison Square Garden also recently opened its first international outposts, with locations in Dubai and Kuwait City. — AFP-Relaxnews

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Restaurant chains providing hamburgers and popular deserts will see the biggest surge in sales, accounting for nearly 20 percent of food service transactions in the Kingdom by 2015, the market research firm said.

“Fast food outlets have become important social spaces for a growing cohort of Saudi young people,” said Michael Schaefer, head of consumer foodservice research at Euromonitor.

“Future expansion will be driven by those operators which offer a combination of indulgence and inviting, comfortable outlets; with hamburgers, ice cream, and sweet baked goods all in high demand.”

Saudi Arabia along with the rest of the Gulf has seen a surge in fast food chains entering the market in recent years, as international brands seek to bolster their global revenues amid increased competition in their domestic markets.

Franchise consultants say they have been bombarded with enquiries especially from mid-sized firms eyeing opportunities to open tens of stores around the region.

New Zealand fast food chain Burger Fuel said in December it planned to open another 12 stores across the Middle East in the near future, after regional sales grew by 47.29 percent to hit $2m, boosted by outlets in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

Tim Hortons, Canada’s largest restaurant chain, also announced plans to roll out 120 stores in the GCC over the next five years, whilst Smashburger said it had signed agreements for 17 stores in Kuwait, Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

Other brands with regional expansion in the pipeline include US ‘fast casual’ chains, such as Which Wich, Spicy Pickle and Dressed.

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