Muslims Seek Goods That Conform to Dietary Laws

Reacting to steady growth in the nation’s Muslim population, suppliers of consumer goods from meat to cosmetics are moving to meet a growing demand for products that comply with Islamic dietary laws.

In Los Angeles and Orange counties, where an estimated 400,000 Muslims live, the number of grocery stores specializing in Islamic food, known as halal--an Arabic word meaning “permitted”--have doubled over the last three years.

Syed Abbasi, for example, has seen his wholesale halal poultry business grow from supplying five butcher shops last June, when he started, to 27 today in Los Angeles and San Bernardino counties.

Abbasi’s Zabiha Meat & Poultry of Rancho Cucamonga contracts with Cal Fresh poultry in Azusa to kill 3,000 chickens a week. In a typical example of Southern California’s religious diversity, Cal Fresh, operated by a Chinese American, originally was set up to provide chickens that met Buddhist standards. But it arranged with Abbasi to hire a Muslim to separately slaughter chickens in the Islamic style.

With the growing demand for products that are halal, however, have come increasing reports of deception and fraud among sellers of meat and poultry.

The issue takes on special significance this time of year when Muslims the world over observe the Feast of the Sacrifice, Eid al-Adha, which takes place on Tuesday and marks the end of the Hajj--the season of pilgrimage to Mecca. Sales of halal meat increase substantially for the observance of the feast.

Unlike Jewish communities, which have well-established programs for certifying that products labeled kosher comply with religious law, Muslims in the United States have just begun building an inspection system.

Some stores have been known to buy meat from a mainstream supermarket and resell it as halal meat, which sells at a higher price.

As much as 65% of Islamic stores in Los Angeles are selling non-halal products as halal, either through ignorance or outright fraud, said Aslam Abdullah, editor of Minaret magazine, a Los Angeles-based national Islamic publication.

“What angers me is that it is a kind of deception,” Abdullah said. “They are saying one thing and doing something else.”

Recently, for example, Abdullah published a letter from a contrite Los Angeles storekeeper who said he worked with a man who bought non-halal chickens and resold them as halal.

“May God forgive me for that,” he wrote. “I am confessing that now to repent. However, I would urge you to withhold my name as I don’t want the community to ridicule my children as the offspring of a cheat.”

The U.S. Department of Agriculture last year levied a $15,000 fine against Washington Lamb, a Springfield, Va., meat processor, for fraudulently mislabeling ordinary meat as halal and selling it in the Washington area for a premium price.

In other cases, Muzammil Siddiqi, director of the Islamic Center of Garden Grove, said restaurants or butcher shops will go so far as to buy a minimal amount of halal meat so that they can produce a receipt if devout customers inquire.

*

For meat or poultry to be considered halal, it must comply with exacting Islamic standards. The live animals must have been fed natural feed such as grasses, cereals or corn free of hormones, blood, meat or enzymes obtained from any animal, according to Ahmad Sakr, the author of numerous books on halal and director of the Islamic Education Center in Walnut.

Next, the animal or fowl must be slaughtered by hand--not on a mechanized assembly line--by a trained Muslim schooled in Islamic practice. Unlike commercial slaughterhouses, stunning an animal before the kill is not permitted. Instead, a prayer is pronounced over each individual animal--”Bismillah. Allah Akbar” (“In the name of Allah. God is great”)--before its jugular veins are quickly severed. This ritualistic slaughter is known as zabiha and is required in order for the meat to be considered halal.

Finding halal food is no small matter for the strictly observant Muslim. To knowingly eat non-halal food, and especially specifically prohibited food like pork, is to risk divine displeasure.

Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the new Southern California office of the Council on American Islamic Relations, recalled the time he bought some muffins only to put off eating them after reading the ingredients listed on the label. He said he worried that some of the preservatives might have been derived from pigs. Pork is forbidden to Muslims, as it is to observant Jews.

“Here we had 12 good-looking muffins and we couldn’t touch them. So we called the company based in Seattle. They said the muffins were baked here locally,” Ayloush said. “We got an answer two days after that. It turned out all the ingredients were [permitted] vegetable ingredients, but by then the muffins were stale. It happens all the time.”

Some observant Muslims will not permit their school-age children to buy lunch in school cafeterias for the same reason. Others take a broader view on the grounds that Islam allows its adherents to eat the food of “people of the book,” Jews and Christians.

The assumption is that Jews and Christians, like Muslims, believing in one true God, would not kill or sacrifice an animal to an idol or false god. In addition, halal rules for slaughter are quite similar to the rules for kosher meat. Even so, Muslims are expected to mention God’s name before eating such food.

*

Whatever the interpretation, few dispute that the demand for halal food is growing. In the years ahead, Muslim leaders say, they believe that the word halal will be as familiar to Americans as kosher.

Muslim leaders are urging cosmetics makers and pharmaceutical firms to consider a new and potentially lucrative niche market for halal products as varied as lipstick and cold capsules made without animal byproducts prohibited by Islam.

Mohammed Farooqui, 38, who runs a small Islamic grocery and meat market on Vermont Avenue across the street from the Islamic Center of Southern California, says he gets customers from as far as San Diego and Las Vegas. Farooqui said he drives to Fresno to personally slaughter animals in accordance with Islamic law for his customers.

On a normal week he may sell 1,500 pounds of halal beef. This week he expects to sell 5,000 pounds. Except for Ramadan, halal meat is never in more demand.

According to tradition, to properly observe the holiday, Muslims must sacrifice--or arrange for someone else to sacrifice on their behalf--a lamb, goat or other permitted animal. A third of the meat is given to the poor, a third to friends and neighbors and a third is kept by the family. The Feast of the Sacrifice commemorates the willingness of Ibrahim (Abraham) to sacrifice his son, Ismael, to prove his love of God.

“People are becoming more religious. They now know what is halal,” Farooqui said. “You do whatever you like here, but we have to answer to God there.”

The growth in demand for halal foods can be seen both locally and nationally.

A Cedar Rapids, Iowa, halal meatpacker, Midamar Corp., reports its sales have jumped 70% in five years. And in one Anaheim neighborhood, the number of Islamic stores has more than doubled in the last five years, Ayloush said.

Competition is keen and getting keener, Abbasi said--and sometimes dishonest. Halal meat and poultry brings a higher price. For example, California-grown halal chickens cost 10 cents to 15 cents a pound more than non-halal California-grown name brands, Abbasi said.

But even with presumably reputable businesspeople, observant Muslims have no ironclad guarantee of what they are buying.

Attempts to fix the problem have so far been troubled. Last year, Muslim groups set up the short-lived Institute of Halal Food Control in Indianapolis, but it went out of business in December. One director said it was poor management. But another director was arrested that same month and pleaded guilty in Illinois to a federal firearms violation.

The Chicago-based Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America has been in business 15 years, but most of its work is directed toward certifying halal products for shipment to Islamic countries overseas, including the Persian Gulf and Malaysia. The USA Halal Chamber of Commerce, which bills itself as a full-service commercial and professional halal certification body, opened last October in Washington.

So far, there has been no organized group in Southern California that compares to the Rabbinical Council of California, whose kosher certification program inspects restaurants, bakeries, butcher shops, hotel functions and industrial manufacturers of kosher food.

In Los Angeles alone, there are 20 to 25 observant Jews called mashgiach who are trained to inspect kosher establishments and make frequent and regular visits to companies whose products carry a kosher seal, said Rabbi Nissim Davidi, kosher administrator for the rabbinical council. One mashgiach does nothing but “float,” dropping in unexpectedly to any place of his choosing just to make sure everything is kosher.

Muslims have nothing that approaches that--and may not for some time to come.

“We are still passive on the West Coast,” Sakr said.

But Abdullah, who says he has slaughtered his own animals to be sure the meat is up to religious standards, has made a halal certification program and honest consumer labeling a crusade--one that other Islamic leaders share. “It’s not just a religious issue,” he said. “It’s a consumer protection issue.”