The Last Word: On the Halal Food Authority

The BBC soon heard of the parliament’s concerns and ran an undercover investigation, on the ‘scandal of the UK halal meat industry’. It was produced by Aaqil Ahmed, who a decade and half later would become BBC’s Head of Religion and Ethics. The situation was so dire that some Muslims were becoming vegetarian rather than risk eating haram meat labelled as halal.

The halal meat industry in the early 1990s was dominated by halal meat shops. In fact the foundation of the early Muslim economy in the UK was based on these separate shops providing halal meat and then selling other produce to a captured Muslim consumer base. However, the halal meat trade was entirely unregulated and based solely on the honesty of your local butcher and his suppliers. It was found that many were buying the cheapest quality meat from places like Smithfield meat market in Farringdon. They would turn up late, after all the fine meats were sold, pick up the cheap stuff which, if unsold, would go into making dog and cat food, and sell it off as halal.

Many in the community could not believe or accept the deception. And often quoted the lofty saying that a Muslim should rely on the word of another Muslim and not doubt him, and that the sin would be on the latter if he had lied. But with the Muslim Parliament research showing 80% of meat being sold as halal being in fact haram, that saintly reliance was not credible. And something had to be done.

The Halal Food Authority (HFA) was established in 1994, just a year after the concerns were first raised on the floor of the parliament. The name of the Halal Food Authority was coined by Muslim Parliament leader Kalim Siddiqui. The former Guardian sub-editor knew the power of words. He had earlier coined the term ‘parliament’ and was a master in projecting influence and how to punch well above your weight. The new body would not be a ‘committee’ or an ‘association’, but an ‘authority’. He knew rival Muslim groups would soon compete with their own bodies, so he gave the name an edge. What could be higher than an ‘authority’, and one established by a parliament!

Ghayasuddin Siddiqui (no relation to Kalim) was appointed the first Chair, and Haroon Kalla, an MMP originally from South Africa, would become deputy chair. Matin Khan, a London MMP, who would later become the current chair, joined the original team. None of them quite knew what they were signing up to and how their lives would never be the same again.

So the HFA was conceived by Islamic activists more use to fighting oppression and injustice, than a meat mafia. Now needing to swot up on the finer points of ritual slaughter and how a regulatory system could work in practice.

The HFA went to see the Jewish community. The London Board of Shechita, formed in 1804, had been regulating the kosher meat market for almost two centuries. The Shechita Board was aligned to the Board of Deputies of British Jews - a body the Muslim Parliament would often cite as a model for Muslims. However, the Board of Deputies and the Muslim Parliament had no relations and were certainly not on speaking terms, given their opposing views on Israel/Palestine. Each would consider the other extremists.

Whilst a meeting between the Board of Deputies and the Muslim Parliament was deemed undesirable by either side, a meeting between the Shechita Board and the HFA was not. So the HFA arranged to meet the Shechita Board and on this they were very helpful. They considered this as one area where both communities had a mutual interest in working together to see the credibility and reputation of ritual slaughter protected. After one of their meetings, a member of the Shechita Board told the HFA that they were well aware of the Muslim Institute and Parliament and read its publications (Crescent International at the time) and its anti-Israel sympathies, but that here was an area where they could work together.

So by 1994 the HFA had started rolling out its own tagging scheme, where the meat and poultry would be tagged with a HFA tag from the point of slaughter right up to the point of sale in butchers shops. Customers could see the tags and know the meat was HFA verified.

The tagging system was of course expensive. To run the scheme, the HFA would charge the butchers 8p per tag, which they would then pass on to their customers. HFA approved halal meat was more expensive, but halal assured. HFA approved shops began springing up and down the high streets of Britain.

The early HFA team would soon be saying goodnight to a good night’s sleep. Often having to visit abattoirs in the early hours to inspect the start of the process. Other times getting calls from a butcher before opening hours to say the delivery of their HFA tagged meat had not arrived and demanding to know where it was. No meat meant no sales. No sales meant unhappy butchers. Frantic calls had to be made to the abattoirs. Ghayas, Haroon and Matin would run around (like headless chicken?) and fix gaps in the process. Stopping short of slaughtering the animals themselves! Creating a community-run regulatory framework on a shoe- string budget had never been tried (and never would again). Predictable supply chains were crucial or the butchers would pull out of the scheme.

The early success of the scheme brought some unity in the Muslim community and admiration from opponents that the parliament and HFA had actually brought forward a solution to fixing a real problem effecting all Muslims. The formation of the Muslim Council of Britain was still a few years into the future. The late Hashir Farooqi of Impact International offered advertising space for HFA approved meat shops. The late Fuad Nahdi ran multiple stories in Q News in support of the HFA (a number of which were penned by Kalim Siddiqui himself under a pseudonym). Ahmed Versi of the Muslim News also provided positive media coverage. Adverts for HFA audit inspectors would appear in these papers. The job description came with an £18k salary and a car. Such a high calibre job and salary (at that time for a community institution) attracted hundreds of applications highlighting both the quality of talent in the Muslim community, but also the levels of poverty and unemployment.

However, it was far from plain sailing. The HFA was taking on the established meat mafia with its vested interest in the status quo. They were not happy for two reasons: firstly, the HFA was a threat to their profit margins of selling cheap meat off as halal; and secondly, handing over control to an outside regulator would be to admit that there was a problem of unscrupulous trading which they could not concede. Those butchers who joined the HFA scheme would either mix HFA meat with the cheaper haram meats to boost profits, or they would be under huge pressure from their industry to pull out and not lend credibility to the scheme. Others would complain (or claim) that their customers were not prepared to pay for the more expensive HFA meat. Meanwhile others - outside the scheme – claimed this was all just a money-making scheme for the Muslim Parliament. And that the meat wasn’t all that haram to begin with.

So having run adverts publicising HFA approved butchers, the HFA would then have to pay for adverts advising of those butchers who had been expelled from the scheme! This was all very expensive, time consuming and exhausting given the level of opposition from the halal meat industry. There were also noble exceptions of halal suppliers and caterers that held their ground with the HFA. These included meat shop owner Ehsan Choudhry, who many years later would be awarded an OBE for running a halal homeless kitchen in West London.

In order to drum up support for the HFA scheme and combat the propaganda from the butchers, the Muslim Parliament had to mobilise the halal consumer. If the consumer insisted on certified halal, then the industry would have to accept greater regulation. So the Muslim Parliament formed the Halal Food Consumers’ Association. Its chair was Jahangir Mohammed, an MMP from Manchester. The HFCA campaigned to raise consumer awareness of the importance of a halal accreditation system to independently verify the halal-ness of meat sold.

Creating both a regulatory body and a consumer body was a pincer movement to pressure the industry to mend it ways. In the absence of law, this was the best the community could hope for at the time.

Masood Khawaja came to learn about the Muslim Parliament’s interest in fixing the halal meat industry. He hailed from a food and meat background. He first came to see Ghayasuddin at the Muslim Parliament’s World Conference on Bosnia in November 1993 at the Institute of Education. The genocide in Bosnia was raging and the parliament was balancing both its domestic and international agendas. Ghayasuddin was a little busy that day, but Masood kept in touch and would later play a pivotal role once the HFA was established, as its first CEO.

The HFA would try to persuade the industry that if it does not change, the next generation would stop shopping at their corner shops and instead buy much higher quality halal meat from mainstream stores which would soon move into this market space. 30 years later this indeed would come to pass as most supermarkets now have separate halal counters with meat of a higher quality and today’s Muslim consumers vote with their feet with halal food available almost everywhere.

By the noughties, the HFA model of working with the butchers had run its course. Playing cat and mouse just would not work, with the butchers being one step ahead. Many were simply using the HFA tags for haram meat as soon as the monitoring teams had left their shops.

So the HFA team put their heads together and changed their strategy. The HFA would now certify corporate and non-corporate organisations that were involved in halal food production to ensure that they complied with halal requirements and guidelines. Halal certification was more than just a meat certification and soon the HFA diversified into certifying non- meat Halal products and services.

In 2001, the HFA broke into the mainstream. Breakfast tables up and down the country would be pouring their cereals from Kellogg’s boxes with the mehrab HFA logo. Kellogg’s was the first major multinational non-meat organisation to have their products certified halal by the HFA. In 2009, the HFA decided to launch the Halal Certification Program for the UK retail industry.

Soon other major brands began joining the HFA certification scheme. The KFC pilot project was launched with 10 KFC stores initially approved for Halal certification in the London area only. The project was unique in that it was the first time a Halal certification body in the world was certifying a multi-national chain store in a non-Muslim country. As a result of agreement with KFC, all the products entering the KFC Halal stores were monitored by the HFA. The whole supply chain of meat and the non-meat processing sites supplying the products to the KFC Halal stores were to be audited and scrutinized by independent and qualified HFA auditors with the support of food technologists. Unsurprisingly for a fast- food giant, the Halal KFC stores would become very popular. By March 2024, the HFA was certifying over 250 KFC stores around the UK, with more in the pipeline. Many more household names would become HFA certified. UK halal exports to the Muslim world would now often require the HFA seal of approval.

The HFA would become a recognized Halal authority in the Halal food industry globally by securing recognition and accreditation from the major players in the Muslim world. The Emirates International Accreditation Centre, a UAE standards body, accredited HFA for the GCC market. HFA recently received accreditation from Turkey’s Halal Accreditation Agency, HAK, to certifying products for the Turkish market. HFA has also been accredited by the Department of Islamic Development (JAKIM) of Malaysia, that administers Islamic affairs in the country. Similarly recognised by the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), Islamic Religious Council of Singapore (MUIS), the Ministry of Industry and Advanced Technology of the UAE (MOIAT), Ministry of Public Health of Qatar (MOPH), Saudi standards bodies SASO and SFDA, and the rest of the world by securing membership of the World Halal Food Council.

The HFA has its own UK Shariah Board that reviews and approves products being certified.

The HFA were innovators. But one innovation was deemed problematic at the time. The issue of stunning. Given the volume of animals slaughtered on a modern industrial conveyor belt, stunning is used to either kill or immobilise the animal. Stunning to kill is haram as the Qur’an is clear that the meat of a dead animal is not permissible. However, science and technology were developing such that the intensity of the stunning could be reduced so that it was non-lethal, reversible and used only to immobilise the animal to allow for a smoother, quicker and less painful kill. The HFA would work with the University of Bristol to test and develop non-lethal stunning that would comply with Qur’anic principles. Stunning to immobilise (as opposed to kill) is now used across the Muslim world, from Malaysia to Turkey. The debate, which raged in the UK in the noughties, has mainly died down as Muslims become more familiar with advances in science and technology. Today most halal meat sold and eaten by Muslims is stunned.

However, the stunning debate did highlight a rather more underlying issue. The reason that stunning is necessary is to meet the high demand for halal slaughter. It’s a solution to a problem. But rather than debate the solution, debate the reason for it. In other words, Muslims are eating too much meat. According to the Food Standards Authority, 71% of all sheep and 22% of all chicken slaughtered in the UK are slaughtered using a halal method with British Muslims consuming more meat per capita than the general population. Such is the demand for halal meat that many non- Muslim suppliers simply slaughter all their meat as halal without always labelling it as such. The ‘scandal’ in the 2010s was how halal meat was being sold in mainstream outlets, restaurants and schools without being labelled as halal. Anti-Muslim bias was quite easy to whip up in the press such that some non-Muslims demanded to know whether they were unknowingly being fed halal meat.

Demand for halal is expected to continue to grow globally. There are around two billion Muslims globally, representing nearly a quarter of humanity. Frost and Sullivan, an American marketing research company, found that the global halal economy reached $2.3 trillion in 2020 and is forecast to double to $4.96 trillion by 2030 as the demand for such products increases from both Muslims and non-Muslims.

The battle of supplying halal meat seems to have been won. The challenge in the next phase will not only be around basic permissibility (the legal definition of halal) but tayyib (pure and wholesome). Awareness of the general husbandry of the animals being reared and to gently nudge consumers to eat less meat and when they do, eat that which is both halal and tayyib will likely be the next battle. This, alongside, addressing the broader issues that impact our society and the planet around food consumption and supply chains.

Self-regulation is often described as no regulation and that was probably the case with the HFA’s early endeavours. But it was those early struggles that raised awareness in the community of what was possible and raised the demand and expectation for halal verification and better-quality meat. The government has also now raised what minimum standards are expected from halal slaughter.

The Muslim Parliament and its other bodies were not to survive from the chaos and turmoil that followed the death of their charismatic founder Kalim Siddiqui in 1996. However, from the institutional debris, the Muslim Institute and the Halal Food Authority were to emerge and endure. The HFA is now a highly established regulatory body with a multi- million-pound turnover. The Muslim Institute is a Fellowship society that supports the growth of knowledge, research and critical thinking. Together the two institutions have launched a joint Community Empowerment Fund to support and empower grassroot Muslims. A nod to their shared history and the scars from previous battles.