Couldn’t he just hand the goats over to a halal butcher for them to slaughter?
Wait, what??
I mean getting Halal certification through fraud is not a joke. Bob could be in a world of hurt legally. There are multiple organizations granting Halal butcher certification, but as far as I know none of them are so easily corruptible or duped as Bob seems to believe.
I’ve worked for a bunch of supermarket chains who have some locations where our meat departments are halal (areas with a high concentration of Muslim customers, obviously) and other where they are Kosher.
There are inspections and paperwork that we submitted about the butchering process either in the store or at a contract abattoir and the religion of the slaughtermen (sorry for the gendered term, but that’s what they are called). It would at least be civil fraud. And I can imagine the damage awards could be pretty awful if the fraud could be proven.
In Aus, it’s a food labeling requirement, and heavily regulated like all other food labeling requirements. Except for export, in which case it’s a heavily regulated export labeling requirement affecting a billion-dollar export industry.
To the people not directly involved, it would seem logical to merge the two systems, but the people directly involved don’t see it that way, and AFIK it hasn’t happened yet.
On the other hand, there are (used to be?) muslims in Aus who take an originalist (rather than Halakha/Sharia) view of halal slaughter, and just believed that beef should be properly slaughtered and that carrion is unclean. Halal food labeling has been a thing in Aus for 40 years, and doesn’t add anything important to cost now, but it wouldn’t surprise me if 30 years ago muslim butchers were willing to accept uncertified halal meat if certified halal meat wasn’t available.
I think the slaughterer needs to be Muslim. I have a friend who used to be a kosher slaughterer. And one of the services offered by the place he worked was to let a Muslim use their equipment to slaughter an animal so it would be halal. (They should the animals, too, iirc.) That was perhaps 30 years ago, when it was very hard to find commercially available halal food, and they got a lot of business from Muslims. He told funny stories about helping customers who had never killed an animal before.
I also think that it’s acceptable for a Muslim to eat kosher meat if they can’t get halal meat. But there’s still a distinction.
It is.
Actually, you’re also allowed to eat pork, IF AND ONLY IF you’re in a life-or-death situation and you absolutely cannot find anything else to eat.
This depends. I think the original text is pretty clear that slaughter by Jews or Christians is acceptable, and I don’t read that the prayer has to be said by the slaughterman at the time of slaughter. But some groups are more particular, and in order to avoid problems the EU and Aus certification requirements are strict. (I don’t know anything about USA regulations).
In the case I’m talking about, there was no concern with legal certification. The guy who paid for the use of the equipment to kill a chicken got to take home a halal chicken for his own use, and all that mattered was that he thought it was halal.
Similar to the kosher rules where you are allowed to eat pork, IF AND ONLY IF it’s in Chinese food.
A joke of course, but true with some of my less observant friends.
It’s very rare that a religious rule is so strict that you’re expected to starve to death rather than violating a dietary rule. In fact, Jewish law (and probably also Islamic, though I’m not as familiar with that) explicitly says that almost any other law can and should be set aside if necessary to save a life/soul.
Are you possibly thinking of the Grand Mosque seizure in 1979? An anti-monarchist Islamic group seized control of the Grand Mosque and the Saudis were unable to handle it, so they asked for help from the French. Three French anti-terrorism experts traveled to Mecca and assisted in the operations to take back the mosque.
You can find several people online saying that the three French consultants “briefly converted to Islam” to be able to enter Mecca, and I know that I had heard this as well in the past. But right now I’m unable to confirm this in a more “formal” source (BBC, Wikipedia, etc.) so it’s possible that this is an urban legend. Maybe they were already Muslims; maybe they didn’t actually enter Mecca; maybe some kind of exception was made; maybe something else.
I disagree. The situation in Saudi Arabia is essentially a balancing act between two factions; the Saudi government which controls politics and the Wahhabi movement which controls religion. The two factions circle around each other, generally working together, but there are sharp disagreements between them.
If the Saudi government allowed fake conversions in order to allow non-Muslims to enter Mecca, that’s exactly the kind of thing which would outrage the Wahhabi religious conservatives. And the Saudis don’t want a repeat of 1979, when religious conservatives tried to overthrow the secular government and establish a theocracy.
The Wikipedia article on the Grand Mosque seizure doesn’t say that the French consultants visited Mecca. They might have provided advice from outside the city.
Seeking assistance for their counteroffensive against the Ikhwan, the Saudis requested urgent aid from France, which responded by dispatching advisory units from the GIGN. After French operatives provided them with a special type of tear gas that dulls aggression and obstructs breathing, Saudi troops gassed the interior of the Grand Mosque and forced entry. They successfully secured the site after two weeks of fighting.
I’m not saying the Saudi government would allow fake conversions. I’m saying the Saudi government would allow a non-Muslim into Mecca on a temporary basis as an ad hoc exception for a good reason.
It’s not the Saudi goverbment’s rule, it’s Islam’s; the Saudis are just enforcing it. The Wahhabists they don’t want to offend wouldn’t agree that the Saudis have the authority to make an ad hoc exception.
I’m pretty sure this wouldn’t fly at all. I also doubt there were any Muslim GIGN operatives in 1979.
I find it more believable that the consultants converted fully as far as the Saudis were concerned but then reverted back to being non-Muslims once the job was done. A sort of tacit, hypocritical agreement from both sides.
But that would fly even less than making an exception to allow non-Muslims into Mecca.
In 1979, the Saudi government brought in French special police forces to forcibly end the occupation of the Grand Mosque by militants. Since the members of that SWAT team were not all Muslim, this was either done on the basis of an exception or a pro forma conversion. I find the former more likely.
If you carefully read the thread, you will find that this point was already raised.
From your source:
So the French sent advisory troops, who have the Saudis equipment, but (presumably Muslim) Saudi troops did the actual entering of the mosque.
Do you have any evidence that the French operatives entered Mecca?
The Wiki article cites a book as saying:
A team of three French commandos from the Groupe d’Intervention de la Gendarmerie Nationale (GIGN) arrived in Mecca .
(Emphasis mine.)
From your source:
HOWEVER - the article notes that violence is forbidden in the mosque, but the Saudi government got a cleric to issue a fatwa allowing them to use violence to retake the mosque:
So maybe that is a solution, if they really needed a non Muslim to enter Mecca - get an appropriately ranked cleric to make a ruling saying it is OK.