By Rushdi Siddiqui

The New York Stock Exchange – Muslims working in non-Muslim countries do understand work is for work, even in Islamic finance, and informed non-Muslim colleagues understand basic tenets of Islam.

The New York Times recently interviewed several American Muslims, including me, working in the financial arena for the article, “Muslims on Wall Street, Bridging Two Traditions.” It explored two ‘conflicts’: Muslims working in conventional finance may encounter ‘interest’ against their faith, and challenges of abiding by Islamic ‘traditions’ in a secular workplace.

Today, it seems to an outsider, the burning issues for Muslims on Wall Street include prayer breaks, fasting and productivity, bonding after-office drinks, shaking a woman’s hand wearing a hijab, and structuring instruments dealing with (the prohibited) interest.

This cannot be what Muslims are about. Also, more credit must be given to working non-Muslim colleagues on understanding Muslim sensitivities.

Common Shared Values

Muslims, like other people with strong beliefs, do not see themselves exclusively focused on or defined by such  issues. Islam has spread throughout the world because of its dynamic nature, where it influences local customs and is ‘influenced’ by the older local culture.

Religion is a private matter and it’s looked upon as foundation for building inner discipline and external strength to address challenging situations. People of faith, like their secular colleagues, want to climb the corporate ladder and break the glass ceiling to get to the executive floor, if not the corner office. Muslims have been on Wall Street and High Street for many years, if not decades, and it’s only now they are being noticed. The difference between then and now is there are more Muslims in the financial sector and non-Muslim colleagues know more about Islam because of a combination of internet, 24-7 news, 9/11, documentaries, Dubai’s accomplishments, Islamic finance and personalities like His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.

It should be noted that many Muslims were involved in the Occupy Wall Street movement because of common shared values. In the New York Times article there are two quotes that best summarise how Muslims, residing in
a non-Muslim country such as the US, should think about and approach a place of work and perception of fellow workers. “I think Muslim professionals are too sensitive and underestimate our co-workers,” comments a consultant in the article.

“Seek the opportunities and firms that speak to their set of values, expertise and passion,” said Mohammad Al Arian, CEO of Pimco.

Just as an employer interviews a potential employee, the latter also needs to interview the former.

I have worked at two multinational companies in the US, heading their Islamic finance business, in New York. First at Dow Jones Indexes for 10 years and now at Thomson Reuters.

A common denominator for international companies is their diverse employee base due to extensive international presence, including many Muslim countries. The corporate culture in these companies reflects common shared values formalised in codes of ethics. Thus, these companies understand ‘sensitivities’, and have high expectations of all employees.

As Muslims working in the West we do have a tendency to initially “underestimate our co-workers” in understanding our rituals (prayers, fasting, etc.), and our prohibitions (alcohol). While it could be attributed to many things, such as prejudices, with time there is a mutual understanding and respect.

The New York Times article used examples of Muslims finding places for praying during working hours or Friday prayers, and fasting during Ramadan. The article should have taken this one step further, and asked the Muslim worker about non-Muslim colleagues fasting or visiting a mosque.

Most, if not all, of us have non-Muslim colleagues who have fasted, some partially (till lunch time) and others until sunset. One of the great attributes of Americans is they like challenges, and will push the envelope of endurance. Others have visited mosques, and made observations such as “nothing fancy inside”, “where are the stained glass windows, pews, gold crescent and star?”

Maybe the article should have interviewed non-Muslims working in senior positions in Islamic finance in Saudi Arabia, the UAE or Malaysia on drinking alcohol, shaking hands with conservative women, breaking meetings for prayer time and so on. As senior executives, they are deemed ambassadors of the Islamic financial institution, and it does imply abiding by a certain level of Islamic code of conduct in public places.

Bottomline

The bottomline is that there is understanding and respect for rituals as long as teamwork, quality and deliverables are not compromised.

Muslims working in non-Muslim countries do understand work is for work, even in Islamic finance, and informed non-Muslim colleagues understand basic tenets of Islam. Muslims need to continue taking a pragmatic,
over dogmatic, approach to finding the balance between faith and finance.

This article was originally published in Gulf News. Siddique is the Global Head of Islamic Finance and OIC Countries at Thomson Reuters.

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by Alliance for Natural Health

More and more countries are banning imports of American food products for safety reasons.

Last week, Indonesia became the first country to halt imports of US beef following the discovery of an American dairy cow infected with mad cow disease, or bovine spongiform encephalopathy. The disease is fatal to cows and can cause a deadly brain disease in people who eat tainted beef.

“We will lift the ban as soon as the US can assure us its dairy cows are free of mad cow disease,” said Rusman Heriawan, Indonesia’s vice agriculture minister. “It could be one month or one year. It depends on how long it takes to resolve this case.”

One would think the US government would immediately test beef to make sure it’s safe. But the USDA, which regulates the test, administers it to less than 1% of slaughtered cows. Worse, until 2007 it was illegal for private beef producers to test their own cows for the disease! Larger meat companies feared that if smaller producers tested their meat and advertised it as safe from mad cow disease, they too might be forced to test all their cows—so they persuaded USDA to block individual producers from doing the test. In 2007 a federal judge said this practice could no longer stand.

The highest risk occurs if animals or humans eat infected brain or nerve tissue. Meat unconnected to bone, milk, and hooves are supposed to be safe, but who knows for sure? The ultimate source of mad cow, of course, is the filthy and disease-ridden (not to mention inhumane) conditions in CAFOs, or concentrated animal feedlot operations.

In February, Taiwan began refusing meat products from the US because they contain ractopamine, a leanness- and growth-promoting drug used widely in pork and beef production in the United States. Taiwan has a zero-tolerance policy for the drug.

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Saudi Arabia halted imports of U.S. beef, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food Safety and Inspection Service.

Beef from the U.S. shipped on or after April 19 is not eligible for export to the country, the agency said today in a report on its website, without providing a reason for the ban.

The U.S. shipped 15.469 million pounds (7,017 metric tons) of beef to Saudi Arabia in 2011, government data show. That’s less than 1 percent of total U.S. beef exports last year.

To contact the reporter on this story: Elizabeth Campbell in Chicago atecampbell14@bloomberg.net

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Dairy scientists are the Gregor Mendels of the genomics age, developing new methods for understanding the link between genes and living things, all while quadrupling the average cow’s milk production since your parents were born.

Reuters.

While there are more than 8 million Holstein dairy cows in the United States, there is exactly one bull that has been scientifically calculated to be the very best in the land. He goes by the name of Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie.

Already, Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie has 346 daughters who are on the books and thousands more that will be added to his progeny count when they start producing milk. This is quite a career for a young animal: He was only born in 2004.

There is a reason, of course, that the semen that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie produces has become such a hot commodity in what one artificial-insemination company calls “today’s fast paced cattle semen market.” In January of 2009, before he had a single daughter producing milk, the United States Department of Agriculture took a look at his lineage and more than 50,000 markers on his genome and declared him the best bull in the land. And, three years and 346 milk- and data-providing daughters later, it turns out that they were right.

“When Freddie [as he is known] had no daughter records our equations predicted from his DNA that he would be the best bull,” USDA research geneticist Paul VanRaden emailed me with a detectable hint of pride. “Now he is the best progeny tested bull (as predicted).”

Data-driven predictions are responsible for a massive transformation of America’s dairy cows. While other industries are just catching on to this whole “big data” thing, the animal sciences — and dairy breeding in particular — have been using large amounts of data since long before VanRaden was calculating the outsized genetic impact of the most sought-after bulls with a pencil and paper in the 1980s.

Dairy breeding is perfect for quantitative analysis. Pedigree records have been assiduously kept; relatively easy artificial insemination has helped centralized genetic information in a small number of key bulls since the 1960s; there are a relatively small and easily measurable number of traits — milk production, fat in the milk, protein in the milk, longevity, udder quality — that breeders want to optimize; each cow works for three or four years, which means that farmers invest thousands of dollars into each animal, so it’s worth it to get the best semen money can buy. The economics push breeders to use the genetics.

The bull market (heh) can be reduced to one key statistic, lifetime net merit, though there are many nuances that the single number cannot capture. Net merit denotes the likely additive value of a bull’s genetics. The number is actually denominated in dollars because it is an estimate of how much a bull’s genetic material will likely improve the revenue from a given cow. A very complicated equation weights all of the factors that go into dairy breeding and — voila — you come out with this single number. For example, a bull that could help a cow make an extra 1000 pounds of milk over her lifetime only gets an increase of $1 in net merit while a bull who will help that same cow produce a pound more protein will get $3.41 more in net merit. An increase of a single month of predicted productive life yields $35 more.

When you add it all up, Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie has a net merit of $792. No other proven sire ranks above $750 and only seven bulls in the country rank above $700. One might assume that this is largely because the bull can help the cows make more milk, but it’s not! While breeders used to select for greater milk production, that’s no longer considered the most important trait. For example, the number three bull in America is named Ensenada Taboo Planet-Et. His predicted transmitting ability for milk production is +2323, more than 1100 pounds greater than Freddie. His offspring’s milk will likely containmore protein and fat as well. But his daughters’ productive life would be shorter and their pregnancy rate is lower. And these factors, as well as some traits related to the hypothetical daughters’ size and udder quality, trump Planet’s impressive production stats.

One reason for the change in breeding emphasis is that our cows already produce tremendous amounts of milk relative to their forbears. In 1942, when my father was born, the average dairy cow produced less than 5,000 pounds of milk in its lifetime. Now, the average cow produces over 21,000 pounds of milk. At the same time, the number of dairy cows has decreased from a high of 25 million around the end of World War II to fewer than nine million today. This is an indisputable environmental win as fewer cows create less methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and require less land.

At the same time, it turns out that cow genomes are more complex than we thought: as milk production amps up, fertility drops. There’s an art to balancing all the traits that go into optimizing a herd.

While we may worry about the use of antibiotics to stimulate animal growth or the use of hormones to increase milk production by up to 25 percent, most of the increase in the pounds of milk an animal puts out over the pastoral days of yore come from the genetic changes that we’ve wrought within these animals. It doesn’t matter how the cow is raised — in an idyllic pasture or a feedlot — either way, the animal of 2012 is not the animal of 1940 or 1980 or even 2000. A group of USDA and University of Minnesota scientists calculated that 22 percent of the genome of Holstein cattle has been altered by human selection over the last 40 years.

In a sense that’s very real, information itself has transformed these animals. The information did not accomplish this feat on its own, of course. All of this technological and scientific change is occurring within the social context of American capitalism. Over the last few decades, the number of dairies has collapsed and the size of herds has increased. These larger operations are factory farms that are built to squeeze inefficiencies out of the system to generate profits. They benefit from economies of scale that allow them to bring in genomic specialists and use more expensive bull semen.

No matter how you apportion the praise or blame, the net effect is the same. Thousands of years of qualitative breeding on family-run farms begat cows producing a few thousand pounds of milk in their lifetimes; a mere 70 years of quantitative breeding optimized to suit corporate imperatives quadrupled what all previous civilization had accomplished. And the crazy thing is, we’re at the cusp of a new era in which genomic data starts to compress the cycle of trait improvement, accelerating our path towards the perfect milk-production machine, also known as the Holstein dairy cow.

There are no more famous experiments in genetics than the ones undertaken by the Austrian monk Gregor Mendel on five acres in what is now the Czech Republic from 1856 to 1863. Mendel bred 29,000 pea plants and discovered the most basic rules of genetics without any knowledge of the underlying biochemical mechanics.

Smack dab in the middle of Mendel’s experiments, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species was published, but we don’t have any record of intellectual mingling between the two men. Even the idea of a gene as an irreducible unit of inheritance wasn’t presented until 30 years after Mendel began his experiments. The term and field of genetics would not be fleshed out until William Bateson and company came along in the early 1900s. And its form, DNA, would not be proposed by James Watson and Francis Crick with indispensable help from Rosalind Franklin until 90 years after his last pea plant died. All this to say: Mendel was ahead of his time.

What he had going for him was a dedication to data, to quantification. His fundamental insight was statistical.

Here’s the simple version of what he did. Mendel took pea plants that reliably produced purple or white flowers when they self-pollinated. Then he crossbred them, carefully controlling how the plants reproduced. Now, one might expect that if you breed a pea plant with a purple flower and a pea plant with a white flower, you’d get progeny that were sort of mauve, a mix of the two colors. But what Mendel found instead is that you either got purple flowers or white flowers. Even more amazingly, sometimes breeding two purple flowers would yield a white flower. Among the first generation of crossbreeds, the mix of flower colors occurred at a roughly constant ratio of about 3:1, purple to white. If the traits of two plants were being mixed to generate the next generation, how could two purple flowers yield a white flower? And why would this ratio arise?

Mendel took a conceptual leap and hypothesized that the plants had two possible copies of its plans (i.e. genes) to make flower color (or any of six other traits he analyzed). If the plant received two of the dominant plan (purple), the flowers would, of course, be purple. If it received one of each, the dominant plan would still reign. But if the plant received two recessive plans, then the flowers of that pea would be white.

The monk turned out to be right. For traits controlled by a single gene, things really do work as he predicted. Mendel’s insights became part of the central dogma of genetics. You can use the statistical method he used to calculate how likely someone is to get sickle cell anemia from her parents. In most genetics classes, Mendel is where it all starts and for good reason.

But it turns out that Mendel’s version of things doesn’t actually give a very clear picture of the kinds of things we care about most. “Mendel studied a few traits that happened to be controlled by a single gene, making the probabilities easier to figure out,” the USDA’s VanRaden said. “Animal breeders for many decades have used models that assume most traits are influenced by thousands of genes with very small effects. Some [individual] genes do have detectable effects, but many studies of plant and animal traits conclude that most of the genetic variation is from many little effects.”

For dairy cows — or humans, for that matter — it’s just not as simple as the dominant-recessive single-gene paradigm that Mendel created. In fact, Mendel picked his model organism well. Its simplicity allowed him to focus in on the simplest possible genetic model and figure it out. He could easily manipulate the plant breeding; he could observe key traits of the plant; and these traits happened to be controlled by a single gene, so the math lay within human computational range. Pea plants were perfect for studying the basics of genetics.

With that in mind, allow me to suggest, then, that the dairy farmers of America, and the geneticists who work with them, are the Mendels of the genomic age. That makes the dairy cow the pea plant of this exciting new time in biology. Last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, two of the most successful bulls of all time had their genomes published.

This is a landmark in dairy herd genomics, but it’s most significant as a sign that while genomics remains mostly a curiosity for humans, it’s already coming of age when it comes to cattle. It’s telling that the cutting-edge genomics company Illumina has precisely one applied market: animal science. They make a chip that measures 50,000 markers on the cow genome for attributes that control the economically important functions of those animals.

A snippet from Illumina’s animal science fact sheet.

***

Mendel may have worked with plants, the rules he revealed turned out to be universal for all living things. The same could be true of the statistical rules that dairy scientists are learning about how to match up genomic data with the physical attributes they generate. The statistical rules that reflect the way dozens or hundreds of genes come together to make a cow likely to develop mastitis, say, may be formally similar to the rules that govern what makes people susceptible to schizophrenia or prone to living for a long time. Researchers like the University of Queensland’s Peter Visscher are bringing the lessons of animal science to bear on our favorite animal, ourselves.

Want to live for a very long time? Well, we hope to discover the group of genes that are responsible for longevity. The problem is that you have genomic data over here and you have phenotypic data, i.e. how things actually are, over there. What you need, then, is some way of translating between these two realms. And it’s that matrix, that series of transformations, that animal scientists have been working on for the past decade.

It turned out they were in the perfect spot to look for statistical rules. They had databases of old and new bull semen. They had old and new production data. In essence, it wasn’t that difficult to generate rules for transforming genomic data into real-world predictions. Despite — or because of — the effectiveness of traditional breeding techniques, molecular biology has been applied in the field for years in different ways. Given that breeders were trying to discover bulls’ hidden genetic profiles by evaluating the traits in their offspring that could be measured, it just made sense to start generating direct data about the animals’ genomes.

“Each of the bulls on the sire list, we have 50,000 genetic markers. Most of those, we have 700,000,” the USDA’s VanRaden said. “Every month we get another 12,000 new calves, the DNA readings come in and we send the predictions out. We have a total of 200,000 animals with DNA analysis. That’s why it’s been so easy. We had such a good phenotype file and we had DNA stored on all these bulls.”

They had all that information because for decades, scientists have been taking data from cows to figure out which bulls produced the best offspring. Typically, a bull with a promising pedigree would reach sexual maturity and his semen would be used to impregnate a selection of about 50 test cows. Those daughters would grow up and start producing milk a few years later. The data from those cows would be used to calculate the value of that now “proven” bull. People called the process “progeny testing” and it did not require that breeders knew the exact genetic makeup of a bull. Instead, scientists and breeders could simply say: We do not know the underlying constellations of genes that make this bull so valuable, but we do know how much milk his kids will produce. They learned to use that data to predict who the best bulls were.

That meant that some bulls became incredibly sought after. The number two bull of the last century, Pawnee Farm Arlinda Chief, had more than 16,000 daughters, 500,000 granddaughers, and 2 million great granddaughters. He’s responsible for about 14 percent of all the genetic material in all Holsteins, USDA scientists estimate.

“[In the past], we combined performance data — milk yield, protein yield, confirmation data — with pedigree information, and ran it through a fairly sophisticated computing gobbledygook,” another USDA scientist Curt Van Tassel told a group of dairy farmers. “It spit out at the other end predicted transmitting ability, predicted genetic values of whatever sort. Now what we’re trying to do is tweak that black box by introducing genomic data.”

There are many different ways you could model the mapping of 50,000 genetic markers onto a dozen performance traits, especially when you have to consider all kinds of environmental factors. So the dairy breeders have been developing and testing statistical models to take all this stuff into account and spit out good predictions of which bulls herd managers should ultimately select.The real promise is not that genomic data will actually be better than the ground-truth information generated from real offspring (though it might be), but rather that the estimates will be close enough to real but save 3 to 4 years per generation. If you don’t have to wait for daughters to start cranking out milk, then you can shave those years off the improvement cycle, speeding it up several times.

Nowadays breeders can choose between “genomic bulls,” which have been evaluated based purely on their genes and “proven bulls,” for which real world data is available. Discussions among dairy breeders show that many are beginning to mix in younger bulls with good-looking genomic data into the breeding regimens. How well has it gone? The first of the bulls who were bred from their genetic profiles alone, are receiving their initial production data. So far, it seems as if the genomic estimates were a little high, but more accurate than traditional methods alone.

The unique dataset and success of dairy breeders now has other scientists sniffing around their findings. Leonid Kruglyak, a genomics professor at Princeton, told me that “a lot of the statistical techniques and methodology” that connect phenotype and genotype were developed by animal breeders. In a sense, they are like codebreakers. If you know the rules of encoding. it’s not difficult to put information in one end and have it pop out the other as a code. But if you’re starting with the code, that’s a brutally difficult problem. And it’s the one that diary geneticists have been working on.

Their work could reach outside the medical realm to help us understand human’s evolution as well. For example, Kruglyak said, human population geneticists want to figure out how to explain the remarkable lack of genetic variance between human beings. “The typical [genetic] variation among humans is one change in a thousand,” he said. “Chimps, though they obviously have a much smaller population now, have several fold higher genetic diversity.” How could this be? Researchers hypothesize that human beings once went through a bottleneck where there were very few humans relative both to the current human population and the chimp population. Few humans meant that the gene pool was limited at some point in the pre-historical but fairly recent past. We’ve never recovered the diversity we might have had.

***

The number-one ranked bull in the world. Kathy DeBruin.

It might seem that Badger-Bluff Fanny Freddie is the pinnacle of the Holstein bull. He’s been the top bull since the day his genetic markers showed up in the USDA database and his real-world performance has backed up his genome’s claims. But he’s far from the best bull that science can imagine.

John Cole, yet another USDA animal improvement scientist, generated an estimate of the perfect bull by choosing the optimal observed genetic sequences and hypothetically combining them. He found that the optimal bull would have a net merit value of $7,515, which absolutely blows any current bull out of the water. In other words, we’re nowhere near creating the perfect milk machine.

The problem, of course, is that genomes cannot really be cut and pasted together from the best bits. “When you go extremely far for one trait, you’re going to upset some of the other traits,” Vanraden said. Breeding is a messy (i.e. biological) process, no matter how technologically sophisticated the front end. After decades of breeding cows for milk production, people realized (to their dismay) that the ability to generate milk and the ability to have babies were negatively correlated. The more milk you tried to order up, the less babies your herd was likely to have. While we’re nowhere near the hypothetical limit for Holstein bull value, we do now know that nature is not so easily transformed without some deleterious effects. We may have factory farms, but these machines are still flesh and blood.

Except for Badger-Fluff Fanny Freddie and his fellow bulls, that is. Freddie is a disembodied creature, an animal that is more important as data than as meat or muscle. Though he’s been mentioned in thousands of web pages and dozens of trade industry articles, no one mentions where he was born or where the animal currently lives. He is, for all intents and purposes except for his own, genetic material that comes in the handy form of semen. His thousands of daughters will never smell him and his physical location doesn’t matter to anyone. He will be replaced very soon by the next top bull, as subject to the pressures of our economic system as the last version of the iPhone.

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Muslims and Jews are advancing, at different rates, toward new breakthroughs in frozen pepperoni pizza.

Daniel Gryfe, the 24-year-old operations chief of Gryfe’s Kosher Bakery near Toronto, launched a frozen kosher pizza in the U.S. last year. Now he is at work on the next model: pizza with soy-milk cheese and veggie pepperoni. Neither milk nor meat, it would satisfy not only Jews who keep kosher, but also vegans and the lactose intolerant. “We’re the first kosher pizza to go after the mass market,” says Mr. Gryfe. “We’ve got stone-ground, whole-grain crust.”

William Aossey, 65, founder of Midamar Corp., of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, is a Muslim. He sells a frozen pizza, too. His has real cheese and pepperoni made from halal beef-raised and slaughtered according to Muslim dietary laws.

As Mr. Aossey strives to bring his pizza — and his people — into the American culinary mainstream, his model is the Jewish struggle for freedom from the delicatessen. Gryfe’s hopes non-Jews will want to go kosher-vegan. Midamar is betting that Muslim Americans are ready to go Italian-Islamic. “We’ve had immigrants accuse us of ‘distorting the culture’ by feeding kids halal pepperoni,” says Mr. Aossey, whose father immigrated to Iowa from Lebanon. “But your children are going to grow up in this country. You cannot deny them American food.”

Mapping kosher’s progress, halal producers are coming to see that eating may be the fastest way to this country’s heart. Muslims can be as American as pepperoni pizza and still keep their faith. And halal-pizza makers can make a lot of money. “It’s the approach the Jewish community took 60 years ago,” says Mohammad Munir Chaudry, 62, who grew up in Pakistan and now heads the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America. “We are 60 years behind, but it’s not going to take us 60 years to catch up.”

Mr. Chaudry’s council, based in Chicago, certifies halal products with a “crescent M,” much like the circled “O” of the Orthodox Union, the largest kosher certifier. Asked if he has borrowed a page from the kosher book, Mr. Chaudry replies, “We borrowed the whole book.”

The book began with the leap of beef franks from the corner deli to a corner of the chain supermarket. Kosher stamps spread, letting observant Jews in on salsa, sushi and samosas. There are 86,000 products marked as kosher now, and by that measure sales are approaching $200 billion a year. Still, with fewer than six million Jews in the U.S., purchases by the faithful have their limits. To keep growing, kosher is going “natural.”

The tactic got an airing at Natural Products Expo West, a show that drew 2,700 organic, herbal and Earth-friendly exhibitors to the Anaheim Convention Center not long ago. Its organizer, New Hope Natural Media, of Boulder, Colo., set up a companion kosher show with 40 booths one floor below. Alongside them, in an ecumenical first for America, it also set up booths for a dozen purveyors of halal food. “It’s all about better-for-you foods,” says Fred Linder, New Hope’s president.

Neither kosher nor halal, of course, translates as “healthy.” Both forbid pork, and both require rituals for butchering meat that are comparable, although not interchangeable. Religious Muslims don’t drink alcohol. Religious Jews don’t mix milk and meat, nor do they eat shellfish. Neither group eats birds of prey or blood. The rules are complex, but one thing isn’t disputed: Calories and cholesterol don’t matter.

The perception of purity is close enough for Mr. Linder. “The growth possibilities,” he says, “particularly on the halal front, are enormous.”

That may be news to U.S. mass marketers. Estimates of the U.S. Muslim population range from one million to seven million. In the rest of the world, with 1.4 billion Muslims, it’s a given.

Halal-product marketers see the possibilities as the global trade in processed foods and ingredients makes it harder for Muslims almost anywhere to know precisely what they are eating. Gelatin in yogurt can come from forbidden pigs, rennet in cheese from improperly slaughtered calves, and enzymes and artificial sweeteners from contaminated factories.

Malaysia would like to create a world body to validate what is or isn’t halal. The issue is bound to come up at the first World Halal Forum in Kuala Lumpur May 8. Like kosher certifiers, halal certifiers differ over rules and compete for fees. That may be one reason mainstream U.S. marketers haven’t pursued Muslim shoppers.

Politics is another. “They don’t know if there’d be a backlash from Islamophobes,” Mr. Chaudry says. His council certifies products of 2,000 U.S. companies, largely for shipments to Islamic countries.

In Europe, such fears may be fading. Antoine Bonnel, a French trade-show operator, noticed when Carrefour Group, the hypermarket chain, began wooing French Muslims. This year, it sold whole sheep in its parking lots for the feast of Eid al-Fitr, at the end of Ramadan.

In 2004, Mr. Bonnel put on the first-ever kosher-halal show in Paris and “made politics completely unimportant.” He mustered an all-American halal contingent in Anaheim: from steaks and chicken tortillas to lactose-free bouillon cubes. Retail buyers passed through the show: Wild Oats, Whole Foods, Albertson’s. Jalel Aossey, the Midamar founder’s 31-year-old son, told them all, “Halal is not a fad.”

But to some, the products are still a mirage. Jim Small, a buyer for Ralphs, Kroger Co.’s California chain, would like halal sections in his stores. But “there are no major distributors,” he says. “You don’t know even know where to look.”

And the halal-as-healthy idea may be lost in the wilderness. Ziyad Brothers, a Chicago halal-food importer, didn’t have their new Wild Garden Hummus Dip displayed at the halal show. It was upstairs, with the natural foods. “The consumer base on this is the American mass market,” says the company’s general manager, Nassem Ziyad. “It’s all natural and also shelf stable. It’s a pioneering product.” The label said “Product of Jordan,” with a small stamp: a circled “K,” for kosher.

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HijabMan » The Labels Halal & Zabihah And Why I Choose Local And Organic Instead

The above article explains the author’s decision to prefer locally-produced, organic meat over halaal meat which has been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic guidelines. He argues that the term “halaal” only applies to the method of slaughter and says nothing about the manner in which the animal was reared, including whether it was treated humanely or indeed fed on animal-based feed including pork. He refers to this article from the website SoundVision, which brings in the issue of “mad cow” disease, a disease which can be transmitted to humans when they eat ‘infected’ meat (I use the quote marks because the disease-causing agent is a protein, not a living organism of any sort). His decision is not Islamically valid, for a number of reasons.

He mentions (or rather, quotes the SoundVision article) as saying this:

Muslims are directed in the Quran to eat food that is Halal and Tayyib. Halal is defined as food that is permissible according to Islamic law. Tayyib means wholesome, pure, nutritious and safe. Traditionally, Muslims in North America have emphasized the Halal over the Tayyib when it comes to meat consumption, Hussaini [Mazhar Hussaini, president of the North American Halal Foundation] says.

I remember listening to a lecture by Shaikh Hamza Yusuf in which he explains that there is no redundancy in the Qur’an, so if “halaal” and “tayyib” are both used, they cannot mean the same thing. The basic rules for meat to be permitted (halaal) are that they are of a species we are permitted to eat in the first place (principally herbivorous stock animals, but some schools of thought allow other animals including some carnivores), that the animal was not sick or injured and that they are slaughtered correctly and that the blessing and the name of Allah ta’ala be recited at the time (meat slaughtered according to the rituals of the Jews and Christians are permitted provided that it was not slaughtered in the name of other than Allah ta’ala; the safest position is that kosher meat is permitted but the commercial meat in the West is not, because it was not ritually slaughtered at all). Tayyib means wholesome, as the SoundVision article notes, but although this clearly excludes animals that have been fed on meat-based feeds that they are not biologically supposed to eat, it does not make them forbidden to eat, because haraam is the opposite of halaal, not of tayyib. Scholars have in fact said that animals or plants raised on haraam food are in fact permissible to eat, although it is better not to (there was an article on SunniPath or Seekers’ Guidance to this effect, but I could not find it when researching this).

The fact that meat is raised on purer food and not exposed to pesticides does not mean it is permissible to eat if it does not meet the criteria to be halaal. The majority of meat that the early Muslims were exposed to would have been just as wholesome as the organic beef and lamb of today, but the Muslims only ate it if it had been slaughtered correctly, and they were much less sure of where their next meal was coming from than any of us are. Many of the scare stories about chickens fed hormones or cows fed offal from other cows are out of date; many of these practices were banned precisely because they caused disease in livestock and humans, or because they caused public outrage. Cases of spongiform encephalopathy in humans (variant Creutzfeld-Jakob Disease) peaked in the mid-1990s, and were probably in people who had eaten contaminated beef products in the early 1980s. The meat that was being produced then was already safe, and most pathogens are killed by cooking.

There are, of course, suspicions about how halaal the meat presented as halaal really is; and stories circulate from time to time that the blessing is played over a loudspeaker, and one of the major certifying organisations in the UK will only certified meat from non-stunned animals. They also say that stunning involves shooting the animal with a bolt through the head before slaughter, which could kill it but certainly means it would be classified as an injured animal. Many of us, even if we accepted the electric shock method, would not accept that an animal be shot before slaughter. However, we hear rumours about food a lot on Islamic forums, and we do not know whether the stories that we hear are true, or if they are based on something that happened years ago but is not happening now, or are distorted “Chinese whispers”, or are simply malicious rumours. To complicate things for Muslims, the organic certifying body, the Soil Association, will not certify meat that came from an unstunned animal regardless of how it was reared, although they do not have a monopoly on the term “organic” and many supermarket branded organic products do not have their logo (much as they often do not use the Vegetarian Society’s logo either), so theoretically, organic halaal meat suppliers should not need the Soil Association’s blessing.

It is fine to be concerned about animal welfare and the wholesomeness of food, but it does not change the fact that the basic criteria for halaal do not include being organically reared and that farming methods and humane treatment do not make the meat halaal if the animal was not slaughtered correctly; in fact, the meat is considered impure and one may not pray if it is on one’s person. In this day and age, fish is readily available, even far from the sea, and there are non-meat-based alternatives such as tofu; protein can be obtained through milk and other dairy products, nuts and eggs, so no Muslim has any excuse in this day and age to eat non-halaal meat. If you are concerned about animal welfare or food quality and the halaal meat available to you is not to your satisfaction, you should not eat meat.

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Yes, you read that right – the term “halal meat” is a scam, which is why I’m a semi-vegetarian. By semi-vegetarian, I mean that I only eat meat on certain occasions, under specific circumstances, and following very strict guidelines. I would say in a given month, I eat meat twice, maybe three times (if that). “But whyyy?” you might ask? Simple. I’m following the commands of Allah in the Qur’an, and the sunnah of our Prophet Muhammad .

What’s the Problem?

Let me just say, this post has been in my drafts for over a week. Then yesterday, I saw this post from Hijabman, in which he quoted the following, which was my sign to finish and publish this piece already:

“75 percent of Halal meat in America produced in the year 2000 came from pork fed cows, according to Dr. Stephen Emanuel, from Agway Feed Company.” – SoundVision

In the Muslim world (and the Arab world, in general), meat has become a staple at the dinner table…and the lunch table…and the breakfast table. From kebabs (meat cubes) and koftas (ground beef kabob), to shawarma (minced meat) sandwiches and sujouk (beef sausage), our community has built an unhealthy obsession around meat. It’s everywhere; weddings, funerals, birthday parties, aqeeqas, Eid feasts…if there is a gathering of Muslims for any reason, you better believe, there will be meat!

Because Allah made meat lawful for us in the Qur’an, and because Prophet Muhammad ate meat, we’ve convinced ourselves that it’s our God-given right to consume as much meat as we possibly can on any given day. Ahh, the Qur’an and the Sunnah – the pinnacles of all Islamic law and jurisprudence…let’s take a look at what these two sources have to say about the consumption of meat, and compare that to what’s taking place in Muslim homes across the globe.

Halal in the Qur’an

The Qur’an contains verse after verse telling us to eat only that which is lawful and good. Here are just a few of those verses:

O ye people! Eat of what is on earth, lawful and good; and do not follow the footsteps of the Evil One, for he is to you an avowed enemy. (Al-Baqarah:168)

O you who believe (in the Oneness of Allah)! Eat of the good things that We have provided you, and be grateful to Allah if it is (indeed) He Whom you worship. (Al-Baqarah:172)

Eat of that which Allah hath provided for you lawful and good; but fear Allah, in Whom ye believe. (Al Maidah:88)

As we see from these verses, Allah tells us to eat that which is lawful AND good – not lawful OR good. In Arabic, these terms are halal and tayyib. But what does that really mean?

Islamic law states that in order for meat to be considered halal, very specific conditions must be met:

1. An animal must not be beaten, mutilated, or branded.
2. An animal must be killed in accordance to very specific guidelines, which ensure the quickest slaughter, and the least amount of pain.
3. Muslims are strictly forbidden from eating the flesh of carnivorous animals.
4. The name of Allah must be invoked over each animal before it is killed.

What is Tayyib?

Most Muslims are familiar with the term halal (lawful, permissable), but sadly, our community is much less familiar (if at all) with the term tayyib (pure, wholesome, nutritious, good). How can this be, when the two terms are mentioned together in the Qur’an numerous times? How can we ignore such an important aspect of what Allah has allowed us to eat?

The term tayyib is just as important as halal and should be treated as such! To me, tayyib is today’s equivalent of ‘organic’, meaning locally grown food, free from hormones, pesticides, antibiotics, artificial anything, and in the case of livestock, free-range, grass-fed (beef), and well-treated. Yes, well-treated! Lest we forget what Allah tells us in the Qur’an about the treatment of animals:

“There is not an animal (that lives) on the earth nor a being that flies on its wings, but they are communities like you. Nothing have We omitted from the Book, and they all shall be gathered to their Rabb (Lord) in the end.” (Al-An’am:38)

“Halal” Factory Farms are NOT Halal

Isn’t that beautiful? Allah likens the animals on this earth to us humans, with communities and an ultimate return to their Lord! If Allah has elevated these creatures to such a high status, why then, are Muslims not outraged by the inhumane and downright evil treatment to which animals are subjected on today’s factory farms? I won’t go into every detail (you can read more at this article), but here are just a few of those heinous treatments:

• Factory farms are over-crowded, putting the animals under a great deal of stress, leading to behaviors like cannibalism and fighting. These behaviors are prevented by debeaking chickens, and dehorning and castrating cows, without the use of anesthetics. [Mutilation]
• Cows are killed using electric shock so that their throats are easier to cut. There have been reports that some animals are still alive by the time they make it down the line to be dismembered. [Slow and Painful Death]
• Natural herbivores are fed slaughterhouse waste, including fat, blood, meat, and bone meal. Dairy cows are given feed with ground pork bones in it. “Animal cannibalism” is also common, with cows being fed the blood and meat of other cattle as protein supplements. [Carnivorous]

Even Muslim farms have been known to undermine the law that Allah’s name be invoked over each animal before it is killed. Some of them just recite it once at the beginning of the day, others have it playing on a tape recorder over and over, as they slaughter each animal. Others, more, practice the use of “blessed blades“, wherein they either inscribe Bismillah Allahu Akbar on the blades or someone says the phrase and blows on the blades, thereby “blessing” the blades for the slaughter…nevermind the fact that machine-slaughter is against Islamic law in the first place! They’ve turned into a simple, ritualistic behavior…as if this is all that’s necessary in order for it to be considered halal.

What is the real Halal?

Saying Bismillah Allahu Akbar before slaughtering an animal is not simply a ritual, as these farms have reduced it; when we invoke Allah’s name on an animal that will be slaughtered, we are speaking directly to Him, thanking Him for His bounty and asking Him to accept the animal’s sacrifice. We are acknowledging that the animal is His divine creation, that we have done our best to provide it with a healthy, happy life, and that we will sacrifice it in order to feed and nourish our family.

How many of us remember all of these things before we dig into the lamb kebab or that chicken biryani? My guess is very few. But that’s only because we have been conditioned and desensitized to the sacred meaning of eating meat. With the growth of factory farming in the past few decades, meat has become an expendable resource, like sugar or flour. It’s just always there, it’s not going anywhere, so we don’t really think too much of it.

This is where we’ve failed – failed the animals, failed ourselves, failed our communities. We are supposed to be ‘ahlus sunnah wal jama’ah’, but when we look at the sunnah of our Prophet Muhammad , we immediately see that factory farming is not something he would have approved of:

It behooves you to treat the animals gently. (Muslim 4:2593)

Allah has ordained kindness (and excellence) in everything. If the killing (of animals) is to be done, do it in the best manner, and when you slaughter, do it in the best manner by first sharpening the knife, and putting the animal at ease.” (Muslim 2:156)

There is a reward for acts of charity to every beast alive.” (Bukhari 3:322; Muslim 4:2244)

Animals raised tortured on factory farms are NOT treated gently, are NOT put at ease, and are NOT provided with acts of charity from their handlers. Instead, they are subjected to awful, cruel conditions just for the mere fact that they are animals, and somehow subhuman and unworthy of love, affection, and respect.

So, now what?

I’ve decided I’ve had enough. I cannot continue to support this atrocity any longer. Basem and I have been living a simpler, more eco-friendly lifestyle for the past couple years, and along with eating more organic, whole foods, we’ve also cut our meat consumption by a lot! Like I said, we only eat meat a couple times a month now. And with all the highly accessible halal options here in Toronto, there’s no lack of choice when deciding what we’re having on those two nights of the month.

But we’ve got to be real here, the “Halal Meat” label doesn’t mean anything anymore. I don’t care if it was certified by ISNA or whoever; it seems that all they are concerned with is how the animals are slaughtered, without any concern for how the animals were treated during their short life. If an animal lived its entire life in misery, stress, and depression, I don’t care if it was slaughtered properly or not. How can these farmers/butchers say Bismillah before slaughtering an animal which was subjected to such unethical treatment under their watch? Oh yeah, they don’t…they just use a tape recorder or “bless the blade”.

Do you see how feeble our understanding and implementation of halal has become? Just because something is halal, that doesn’t give us the right to do it all the time, by any means necessary. Moderation is key. Conscience is integral. Education is necessary.

Is there a solution?

We need more halal meat companies that use organic farming practices. That means no antibiotics, hormones, or pesticides. That means allowing cattle to graze in open fields of grass (instead of grains, which are difficult to digest). That means letting chickens bask in the sun, while munching on weeds and insects.

Here in Toronto, we are blessed, alhamdulillah, to have the wonderful company, Blossom Pure - a truly halal, organic foods company. They work with the Amish and Mennonite farmers just outside the city, who raise all the meat on their organic farms. The slaughterer goes out to the farms and slaughters the animals on-site before loading them onto the truck and driving them back to the store to be sold. From the very beginning, these animals are treated with respect; by slaughtering them onsite (as opposed to driving them back to the store), the burden and stress of travel is completely removed from the animal, and placed on the slaughterer.

The Prophet was a semi-vegetarian

Yes, organic meat is much more expensive, but it doesn’t have to be! Here’s a simple tip: don’t eat so much of it! Of course it will be expensive if you eat meat 4, 5, 6 nights aweek. But here’s a radical idea: cut it down to just once a week! Then just once a month. Then to just on special occasions. The Prophet Muhammad didn’t eat meat everyday, or every week, or barely every month! It was saved for special occasions; something to celebrate and enjoy.

If your meat is not organic, it’s NOT HALAL – simple as that! If I cannot find organic halal meat in my area, guess what? I just don’t eat meat! You know what we can eat freely, and is in utter abundance? All the creatures of the sea! Fish, shrimp, crab, lobster, etc. All of these are healthy alternatives (if caught using sustainable fishing methods). Again, moderation is key, so let’s not aim to replace all the beef in our diet with salmon, for example.

And if we are going to strive to follow the sunnah of our Prophet , we MUST include his sunnah for eating (in general), and consuming meat (in particular). Even Umar ibn al Khattab [ra], during his khilafa, prohibited eating meat everyday. He said:

Beware of meat, because it has an addiction like the addiction of wine. (Malik)

Let’s Make A Change!

Let us take the lessons from the Qur’an and the Sunnah and really, truly apply them to our lives. Let us stand up for what is right and just, and denounce that which is wrong and unjust. Let us enjoin the good and forbid the evil, as Allah states in surat Ali ‘Imran (3:110).

We all know the current practices of the “halal meat” industry are wrong, and we all can do something about it. Take that first step, however small it may be. Just renew your intentions, take that first step, and Allah will take care of the rest. I’m not here to tell you what to do; only you know what you need to do. But I can say that making a change is possible, however difficult or inconvenient it may be. Say a little prayer, ask Allah for guidance and strength, and just do it!

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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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According to the available information meningitis vaccine earlier produced, contained materials of bovine or porcine origin. Due to this reason Muslims had been complaining against those vaccines and urging for producing completely halal vaccine from halal ingredients. Due to this demand from the Muslim world an ‘apparently halal’ vaccine was produced named Mencevax. It is alleged that Mencevex even used porcine ingredients at manufacturing stage but the finished product could be made porcine free with the blessings of latest scientific technologies. Nevertheless, to say that Bangladesh is still using this ‘apparently halal’ vaccine though completely halal vaccine is available in the market. However, the government is under pressure to use halal vaccine especially for the hajj pilgrims.

The Hajj Agencies Association of Bangladesh (HAAB) has recently forwarded a letter to the ministry of Health and Family Welfare on March 19 and urged the government to take necessary measures to collect halal meningitis vaccines for the hajj pilgrims.

It should be mentioned here that the Saudi government has already approved Menveo as a halal vaccine for its people. The Jakarta Globe reported that Indonesia’s health ministry has halted distribution of Mencevax for those planning the pilgrimage to Makkha, after the Indonesian Council of Ulema passed an edict banning the vaccine, citing the use of porcine enzymes. The health minister said that the country will not use the vaccines already purchased worth US$3.0 million.

Meanwhile, the government of Singapore has seriously been considering the issue as the Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS) has also expressed concern over possible problems with the vaccine after clerics in Indonesia declared it haram or forbidden under Islamic law, as pork and pig-derived by-products are prohibited for Muslims.

The Islamic Services of America (ISA) has approved Menveo as a halal vaccine manufactured by Novartis. After visiting Novartis plant based in Italy ISA has issued a certificate mentioning that “there are no additives or processing involving forbidden or suspicious ingredients” in Menveo. The Indonesian Council of Ulamas has also issued halal certificate in favour of Novartis’s Menveo, in July 2010, which is the first conjugate vaccine commercially available in Europe as well, that helps protect meningitis against four major serogroups of Neisseria meningitides A, C, W135 and Y.

European Commission (EC) has also granted a marketing authorisation for Menveo products in all 27 European member states. Menveo was also approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on February 21, 2010.

Menveo vaccine is a conjugate vaccine but the previous one was polysaccharide vaccine that has lots of limitations. It is not effective for infants, it cannot immune memory and cannot ensure prolonged duration of protection. But Menveo vaccine is very much effective for the aforementioned conditions. It not only protects but also prevents the carrier of the germs to spread, among others. The halal vaccine has a boosting effect, and in repeated use it doesn’t lose power rather intensifies it.

According to the Ministry of Hajj of Saudi Arabia 2,927,717 persons performed the holy Hajj in 2011. While Bangladeshi Hajj pilgrims were 1,05,608 in number. This year around 1,20,000 Bangladeshis will perform the Hajj.

Every year millions of people from around 160 countries worldwide gather in Mecca for Umra and hajj. The Hajj has become the epicenter of mass migration of millions of Muslims of enormous ethnic diversity.

No other mass gathering can compare, either in scale or in regularity. communicable disease outbreaks of various infectious diseases have been reported repeatedly during and following the hajj. Therefore, to protect the pilgrims from communicable diseases the Saudi government has made it mandatory for the pilgrims to take meningitis vaccine before arriving at the holy place. During Hajj, carrier rates for meningococcal disease rise to a level as high as 80% due to intense overcrowding, high humidity and dense air pollution (according to www.eurosurveillance.org). It should also be mentioned here that the meningitis belt of Sub-saharan Africa, stretching from Senegal in the west to Ethiopia in the east has the highest rates of the disease.

Therefore, saving life is of foremost important for the host country. Besides, the hajis might not be infected and become a carrier of such communicable diseases is also a great concern. And when there is an issue for haram and halal, the muslims will accept the halal one- no doubt. So, it is expected that the government will also take necessary steps to provide halal conjugate vaccine for this year’s hajj pilgrims.

Md Sazzad Hossain

Dhaka

md.sazzad.hossain@gmail.com

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The interfaith meeting held at the Islamic House of Wisdom was headed by Imam Mohamed Ali Elahi.

DEARBORN HEIGHTS— On Tuesday an interfaith meeting was held at the Islamic House of Wisdom in Dearborn Heights that included Imams of both Shi’a and Sunni congregations along with representatives from churches around the southeast Michigan area. The meeting was called for to discuss and address concerns of prisoners in the Michigan Department of Corrections.

“I am absolutely committed to ensure that prisoners and volunteers, whatever their religion is, have the same opportunities as other volunteers and prisoners from other faiths,” Martin stated at the end of the meeting.

Article 2 on Halal Food in Prisons

Chad Groening – OneNewsNow

Judge: Equal Muslim law = no religious establishment

A federal judge recently threw out prisoner James Rivers’ lawsuit against Ohio Prison director Gary Mohr’s decision to ban pork from kitchens in all prisons under control of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. That was Mohr’s solution when Muslims threatened a lawsuit, demanding that they be served strict “halal” meals.

Former Navy Chaplain Dr. Gordon Klingenschmitt, who runs The Pray In Jesus Name Project, reports that Judge James S. Guin ruled the prison’s no-pork diet does not violate the Constitution. But he points out that Christian inmates have no dietary rights.

“This is another example of the Islamicization [sic] of America. It’s establishing Islam as the state religion of the prison system,” Klingenschmitt contends. “The judge’s reasoning is this: He said as long as all of the prisoners are forced to eat the same food, then there’s no discrimination taking place. In other words, if he enforces Muslim law equally, then there’s no establishment of religion. I think that’s wrong, and I pray this is overturned on the appeal.”

This is another reason Klingenschmitt is encouraging believers to sign his online petition urging Congress to pass HR 973 in order to stop activist judges from enforcing sharia law in American courts.

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