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New Challenges for Islamic Ritual Slaughter: A European Perspective Online Publication Date: 01 August 2007 To cite this Article: Bergeaud-Blackler, Florence (2007) 'New Challenges for Islamic Ritual Slaughter: A European Perspective', Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 33:6, 965 - 980 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/13691830701432871 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13691830701432871
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Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies Vol. 33, No. 6, August 2007, pp. 965 980
New Challenges for Islamic Ritual Slaughter: A European Perspective Florence Bergeaud-Blackler
The production and consumption of halal meat products, i.e. deriving from Islamic ritual slaughter, have grown steadily over the last 15 years. Today the global halal market is estimated at US $150 billion per year. In this paper I describe the main steps in the integration of ‘Muslim ritual slaughter’ into the national legislation of Western European countries, and present an analysis of the economic and political issues involved. Once the subject of dispute between animal welfare organisations and religious groups, the arguments surrounding slaughter ritual have, more recently, particularly in the aftermath of the BSE crisis, evolved to become an issue of consumer rights. To illustrate this evolution, I examine two specific cases: Switzerland, as a European country, and the UK as a member-state of the European Union. Keywords: Islamic Ritual Slaughter; Religious Freedoms; Animal Rights; Consumer Rights; European Union; Switzerland; United Kingdom Slaughter is probably the most delicate operation in the transformation of an animal into a piece of meat fit for human consumption. This moment of killing is governed by strict regulations related to food hygiene and safety, working conditions and animal welfare. In the case of ritual slaughter (RS), however, many European countries have included an exemption clause in their laws and regulations for the otherwise obligatory pre-stunning. Apart from pre-stunning, RS has to comply with all precautions that apply to any other mode of industrial slaughter (Burgat 1995). RS thus benefits from a statute of ‘exception’ but not from a statute of right. In other words RS is defined not in its own right, but with reference to ordinary slaughter. Worldwide, RS is codified in the relevant international reference texts and regulations. In its ‘European Convention for the Protection of Animals for Slaughter’, the Council of Europe authorises dispensation from the provision for prior stunning Florence Bergeaud-Blackler is Researcher in Sociology at the Universite´ de la Me´diterrane´e. Correspondance to: Dr F. Bergeaud-Blackler, Unite´ d’Anthropologie, UMR 6578 CNRS-Universite´ de la Me´diterrane´e, Faculte´ de Me´decine, 27, bd Jean Moulin, 13385 Marseille cedex 05, France. E-mail: florence.bergeaud-blackler@univmed.fr ISSN 1369-183X print/ISSN 1469-9451 online/07/0600965-16 # 2007 Taylor & Francis DOI: 10.1080/13691830701432871
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in the case of religious ritual slaughter. At the EU level, Council Directive 93/119/EC of 22 December 1993 on the protection of animals at the time of slaughter or killing allows that, in the case of animals subject to methods of slaughter specifically required by religious rites, the requirements of stunning ‘may’ not apply a permissive rather than prescriptive stance. At all these levels, ritual slaughter emerges as an exception to the rule. This uni-dimensional definition of RS, coupled with the permissiveness of the EU Directive, means that the way is left open for the expression of a wide variety of different attitudes towards it across Europe. Sweden, Norway, Iceland and Switzerland, as well as six Austrian regions, allow no exemption from pre-stunning. By contrast, dispensatory status is allowed in France, the United Kingdom, Belgium, Denmark, Italy, Ireland, the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain. Implementation of the dispensation is, however, differently interpreted. In Spain for example, it does not apply to cattle. Questions have been raised in Germany, the UK, the Netherlands and Denmark about these exemptions for religious purposes for several years now. In these countries, pre-stunning is a matter of lively public debate in animal welfare and veterinary circles. Where RS is not authorised and is a public issue, as in Switzerland, pre-stunning dispensation was not introduced. In countries such as Spain, Ireland and Italy, stunning is not a live issue. In France and Belgium, it resurfaces as a public issue annually in the weeks preceding and following the Eid el Kabir under pressure from animal welfare organisations, only to be forgotten again until the following year. As I will show, the differences of implementation of the dispensation arise, in part, from the way the implementation of RS is regulated at a national level. How ‘Ritual Slaughter’ Entered in European Nations’ Legislation Since the end of the nineteenth century, Jewish communities in Europe have asserted a right to slaughter according to the shehita, that is, without use of assommage or prestunning. The operation of pre-stunning had been introduced primarily in the interests of safety, i.e. to protect the slaughterer from injury by any unpredictable spasms of the dying animal, and only secondarily to reduce its suffering. Shehita was widely accepted but also immediately criticised by veterinarians and humanitarians. Motivated by animal welfare considerations, such criticisms also sometimes served as vehicles for anti-Semitism (Burgat 1995; Langenfeld 2003; Shadid and van Koningsveld 1992). The ritually observant Jew was described as fanatic and childish.1 Although a comparative history of the normalisation and legalisation of ritual slaughter in Europe has not been undertaken, a few documents testify to similarities in the historical process of integration of RS into the national legislation of European states. In one of the rare articles devoted to ritual slaughter in the Netherlands, Shadid and van Koningsveld (1992) describe some strategies employed by veterinarians and animal welfare organisations to stigmatise the practices of shehita, such as organising boycotts of kosher butchers. The authors show that, from the very start of the
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century, ‘the cruelty’ of the shehita is the subject of dispute. In 1910, the Dutch ‘Society of the Protection of Animals’ published a list of butchers selling meat resulting from RS in order to dissuade their customers. This first anti-RS consumer campaign was criticised by the Reverend Wagenaar who, based on reports by German, French, Russian, Swedish and Dutch experts, claimed that, on the contrary, shehita is preferable by far to the technique employed in Dutch slaughter-houses at the time. Quoting a decision made in 1896 by the Dutch Minister of War to prescribe Jewish methods of killing in Dutch military slaughter-houses, Wagenaar hoped to convince his detractors of the advantages of this method in terms of both animal welfare and meat quality. Not only does the sharpened blade of the knife used in the Jewish method make the animal lose consciousness more quickly, but shehita also avoids the side effects of assommage, which slows the rate at which the blood drains and reduces the intrinsic quality of the meat (Shadid and van Koningsveld 1992: 5). From the beginning of the twentieth century, many European experts have examined this question but have failed to reach agreement on animal suffering. These disputes continue today in spite of progress in improved slaughter technologies and techniques. Four European countries prohibit RS. Switzerland banned the practice after a referendum in 1893. It was followed by Norway, which introduced a ban in 1930, then Sweden in 1938, and Luxembourg more recently. The government of the Netherlands finally chose to satisfy the requests of the Jewish community in 1920 by a royal decree exempting the Jewish rite from pre-stunning. In the UK, pre-stunning was made compulsory in 1933, except in the case of religious ritual (Ansari 2003). In other countries shehita could be tolerated since pre-stunning had not been made a legal requirement. The Nazi period in Germany, however, led to the total prohibition of shehita across Western Europe, except in the United Kingdom. Thus shehita was made illegal in Germany (1936), Poland (1938), Italy (1938) and, after 1940, in countries occupied by the Nazis (Nizard-Benchimol 1997). After the war, the interdiction was lifted, but authorisation was strictly circumscribed (Shadid and van Koningsveld 1992: 9). In Germany, RS was reintroduced gradually, but would not be legally recognised until 1986 (Langenfeld 2003). In the second half of the twentieth century, Western European countries*with the exception of Sweden, Norway and Switzerland*allowed slaughter according to religious recommendations for the Jewish population. Two events were to shake this fragile consensus: one was the general adoption across Europe of the legal requirement for pre-stunning; the other was the arrival of significant numbers of Muslim immigrants. The Progressive Integration of Islamic Ritual Slaughter into the National Legislation of European States In the 1960s stunning animals before slaughter became compulsory in the majority of European countries: France in 1964 (Burgat 1995), Italy in 1978 (Aluffi 2003), Belgium in 1986 (Dassetto and Hennart 1998) and Spain (where exemption was
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granted only for sheep and goats).2 All signatories to the Council of the Europe Convention on the Protection of Animals at Slaughter joined the countries of the North which, under pressure from animal welfare organisations, had imposed the use of pre-stunning. It is in this context that Muslim immigration in Europe began. A large proportion of the 15 million non-Community foreigners who have arrived in Europe since the 1970s were Muslim: Maghrebians (Moroccans, Algerians, Tunisians), Turks (and Kurds), ex-Yugoslavians, Pakistanis, Indonesians and sub-Saharan Africans, unequally divided across the countries of Western Europe (Wihtol de Wenden 2002). Muslim populations are the most important in France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and to a lesser extent in Italy. The demographic consequences of significant numbers of Muslim migrants (and in France a notable Jewish migration from Algeria), appreciably modified traditional issues surrounding ritual slaughter. From then it was no longer a matter of accepting an exception to the rules of slaughter, but rather of accepting the coexistence of several modes of slaughter. The colonial history of the countries concerned, their demographic ratios, the quality of ‘migrant/host’ relations, and the degree of sensitivity of nationals to the question of animal welfare, partially explain the variation in the ways in which European countries integrated Muslim ritual slaughter into their regulations. Countries such as the Netherlands and Germany, which contain relatively significant immigrant Muslim populations, hesitated for a long time before only recently accepting the permission of the Council of Europe to grant Muslims exemption for the shehita. These countries initially sought to obtain assurances from Muslims that their religion prohibited pre-stunning. Unable to obtain this with any certainty*since opinions of religious specialists diverge on this point*they instead based their decisions on the opinions of those Muslim specialists who were more moderate in challenging existing legislation on slaughtering. For example, the Dutch authorities originally relied on the opinion of an imam from The Hague to justify their refusal to grant the same exemption to the Muslim community that was granted to the Jewish community (Shadid and van Koningsveld 1992: 14). It was under pressure from Muslims wishing to practice the sacrificial rite of Eid el Kebir that, in 1975, the Netherlands accepted that Muslim immigration was permanent and lifted the interdiction against Muslim animal slaughter without pre-stunning. In West Germany, in 1982, the government obtained from Sheik Muhammad Al-Najjar, from the University Al-Azhar in Cairo, a fatwa according to which stunning in itself was not illicit. Rather it is the death of an animal directly caused by stunning which made the meat illicit. Without regard to the subtlety of such an answer, the Bundestag deduced that stunning was not illegal in Islam and that it was not necessary to apply the exemption granted to Jewish slaughter. After some hesitation, the German administrative federal court repealed the exemption from stunning for Muslims, asserting that this exemption was not a formal requirement of Islamic religion. The court rebutted the objection to the basic right of religious freedom, by declaring that Muslims were not prevented from practising their religion
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since ‘the Muslims concerned were not forced to consume meat from animals not slaughtered according to their religious prescriptions but could switch to fish, vegetarian food, or imported halal meat’ (Langenfeld 2003: 142 3). Finally, in 2002, the German constitutional court reconsidered this decision and granted authorisation to slaughter according to Islamic rites to a Muslim butcher. In the United Kingdom and France, two former colonisers of vast Muslim territories, there has never been such hesitation at public regulatory levels. In the UK, in spite of the polemic by powerful animal welfare associations against RS as practised by Jews, Muslims and Sikhs, exemptions granted to the three religious communities have been upheld. France even anticipated religious demands and granted Muslims the same exemption to stunning as that obtained by the Jewish community. In France, RS was considered as a cultural food habit and therefore relatively well tolerated by the state. Indeed, it had formerly organised the ritual slaughter of animals on behalf of its colonial soldiers for Eid el Kebir (Bergeaud 2000). French animal protection organisations such as the Fondation Brigitte Bardot have not achieved the same popularity that animal welfare organisations on the other side of the channel enjoy. In France, the debate on stunning exemption is of little concern to those outside animal welfare circles, remaining confined to the ‘demonising’ discourses of extreme-right-wing groups. Thus, in France, despite the rather mild position of the main Islamic organisations*leaders of the Mosques of Paris and of Lyon, or of the Union of Islamic Organisations of France accept stunning in principle*exemption for RS remains authorised. As in Belgium (Dassetto and Hennart 1998), the countries most recently receiving Muslim immigrants*Italy and Spain*adopted the European Convention on the Protection of Animals at Slaughter and incorporated Directive 93/119/CE of the European Community into their regulations. Greece,3 Luxembourg, Switzerland and Norway continue to require pre-stunning. Sweden prohibits exemption but subsidises halal meat imports from Denmark.4 Finland and some Austrian regions are the only countries in Europe that use post-stunning as an alternative to pre-stunning.5 In the context of the intensification of global food exchange, legislation on ritual slaughter in the 1990s has favoured an unprecedented development of the market for food intended for religious consumption in all Muslim immigration countries in Western Europe as well as North America (Bergeaud-Blackler 2004a; Bureau des Marche´s Internationaux 2001). As a result, controversies around ritual slaughter took on another dimension and gained new significance, as will be demonstrated, using the examples of Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The Cases of Switzerland and the United Kingdom Most Western European countries have had their polemics about ritual slaughter. In countries operating a dispensation (‘de´rogataires’), exemption from stunning for ritual slaughter is regularly disputed by a multitude of actors and militants. The countries
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without (‘non-de´rogataires’) are put under pressure from harmonisation of food and slaughter legislation within both the EU single market and the global market. A second dividing line has appeared recently: between countries where the controversies became public6 and those where the debate remained a matter for experts. In the first group of countries, the debates are characterised by the entry of new ‘actors’ no longer motivated by opposition to the principle of exemption, but which claim the ‘right’ for consumers to choose their meat products according to mode of slaughter. Extreme-right-wing groups’ adoption of the issue as a way of expressing their anti-Semitism still exists,7 but this constant of European history is not currently at the centre of the debate, which is rather more dominated by the secular confrontation between defenders of animals and religious organisations. As in Denmark, it is often at the time of debate on the revision of slaughter regulation that ritual slaughter is challenged. The cases of Switzerland and the United Kingdom, where there were recent public consultations and debates on ritual slaughter and the exemption from stunning, illustrate the new issues framing ritual slaughter. We now turn downstream and consider the status and identity of ‘food primarily intended for a religious consumption’. The comparison of these two countries is enlightening because of their different situations regarding international economic conventions, which have led them to different answers. First let us examine the example of Switzerland, a non-member-state of the EU. On 21 September 2001, the Federal Department of Economy (DFE), supported by the Federal Commission Against Racism (CFR), published a preliminary draft of a modification to Swiss law on the protection of animals (LPA)*repealing the prohibition of RS introduced in 1893, by referring to the freedom of conscience and belief of religious minorities. For the second time in its history, Switzerland organised a referendum on RS. The popular referendum of 1891 had a turnout of 49 per cent of which more than 60 per cent had voted against ritual slaughter.8 The results at that time were largely influenced by anti-Semitism. More than a century later, the Swiss Protection of Animals (PSA) collected thousands of signatures against the approval of ritual slaughter. Acknowledging the failure to change public opinion, the Federal Council withdrew the draft amendment in favour of ritual slaughter before the popular consultation took place. This victory did not satisfy the PSA. Supported by the majority of the cantons, by the Swiss Union of Peasants (USP), the Company of Swiss Veterinary Surgeons, the Swiss Union of Master-Butchers, the Chambres Cantonales d’Agriculture and by consumer groups, the PSA proposed a counterproject which not only confirms the prohibition of ritual slaughter without stunning in Switzerland, but also prohibited any meat importation resulting from animals not pre-stunned. The Federal Council refused to examine this counter-proposal, considering that this prohibition would act against the principle of non-discrimination in several articles of the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs. It conceded, however, a limitation on the importation of ritual slaughtered meat only to the Jewish and Muslim communities and their affiliated companies. Moreover, it provided that
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people who have the right to import will have to market this meat only through approved points of sale, i.e. those that sell only meats and other products of animals resulting from RS.9 This concession is clearly aimed at agricultural domestic protection and the protection of the Swiss consumer. In this way, consumers will not be eating products deriving from RS without consent; moreover Swiss producers will not face ‘unfair’ competition from foreign producers. Not being a member of the European Union, Switzerland is free to use this type of decision to protect its producers and consumers. This same ‘protectionist consumerism’ appears in the debates in the United Kingdom. But in this case, as a member of the EU, the UK’s room for manoeuvre is limited, since any change which can affect the Community market has to be negotiated. In the EU, slaughter regulation is harmonised across the Community. It guarantees consumers the assurance that meat products on sale, no matter what the origin of the meat, conform to the Community’s own standards of slaughter and butchery. It also aims to ensure that food safety and animal standards are identical throughout the EU, thereby providing a pretext for a member country to prohibit imports and thus to protect its domestic market. Community harmonisation prevents the use of national protectionist measures. In the UK, country of origin of BSE, the most serious food safety crisis that the European Union has known,10 consumers’ right to choose what to eat and how to produce it has became of great social and political concern. In less than a decade, this country has undertaken major reforms of its institutions and food policy (Millstone and van Zwanenberg 2002; Shears et al. 2001). In 2004, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) launched a consultation around its response to the FAWC report (Farm Animal Welfare Council 2003) on welfare and slaughter. In this report, FAWC concluded that the situation regarding ritual slaughter was unsatisfactory and in particular that slaughter without stunning, such as that practised for ritual slaughter, was unacceptable. The report proposed the abolition of any exemption to stunning (Farm Animal Welfare Council 2003: 36). Its conclusions on this point were not different from those of another report specially devoted to RS, published nearly twenty years before (Farm Animal Welfare Council 1985), but in which the FAWC did not go so far as to formally recommend withdrawal of the dispensation. Many years later, the legislative, institutional and political contexts have changed, and on a question related to food and animal welfare the government felt it would not have any other choice than to organise a vast consultation. In 2004, stakeholders of the food sector, consumer and religious organisations and NGOs were invited to state their positions*despite the risk of the debate turning into demonstrations of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Following the BSE crisis, transparency regarding food safety and consumer protection seems to have such political and public legitimacy that the British government took the risk of this consultation. Indeed, behind questioning the exemption from stunning, more general ethical questions
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related to consumption arose. Taking into account the considerable growth and increased visibility of the markets for foodstuffs intended for religious consumption, the question which was hitherto: ‘Can the Jewish and Muslim communities legally slaughter according to their rites?’ became: ‘Do consumers have the right, if they wish, not to buy and consume meat of animals resulting from non-stunned ritual slaughter?’ In the absence of either national or Europe-wide systematic studies on the demand and supply of religious foods, it is still difficult to have a precise grasp of these products’ market share as a proportion of the total food market. Similarly, the logics of purchase and consumption of this type of product are no better known. But NGOs, some of which opportunistically adopted the rhetoric of consumerism in the immediate aftermath of BSE, affirm that a growing number of consumers are concerned by the lack of clear traceability that would ensure a strict separation of the meats resulting from ritual and non-ritual production chains.11 It seems now that anti- and pro-ritual slaughter lobbies are joining forces to ask for traceability of food intended for religious consumption. The backs of carcasses which become unsuitable for Jewish consumption,12 as well as the carcasses that fail the bedika examination,13 go into non-kosher distribution channels. In some British and French schools, all children are served ritually slaughtered meat to avoid the possibility of including ingredients that are unacceptable to Jewish and Muslim families. This situation has led the ‘anti’ lobby to ask for clear labelling to ensure that traceability is ensured from ‘farm to fork’. Obviously supporters of ritually slaughtered meat also request that traceability be established. Some develop a mirror type of argument claiming that stunning adds supplementary suffering for the animal.14 A consultation by the Food Standards Agency on foodstuffs information and labelling, launched in 2000, confirmed growing consumer interest in methods of production such as the use of hormones, the use of genetically modified products and producers’ adoption of animal welfare standards. Consumers who call for the method of RS to be declared on the label are expressing growing concerns. Towards Systematic Labelling of Halal Food? The creation of a labelling scheme for halal food presupposes an agreement between the various European partners and food stakeholders. The White Paper on Food Safety (European Commission 1999), as well as many other studies, illustrate how much consumer choice has become a leitmotiv of food policies in Europe (Burgess 2001). The ‘right [of the consumer] to choose’, a liberal argument justifying free competition of products and services (cf. Gabriel and Lang 1995: 27), became a favourite expression for all those market actors, consumer associations or environmental and animal welfare organisations that want to influence food policy decisionmaking in Brussels (Bergeaud-Blackler 2004b). The need to inform the consumer is regarded as ‘essential’ by all, despite the fact they do not share the same interests. ‘Labelling’ became the focus of consensus since it allows organisations representing
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consumers, environmental protection, animal protection or the promotion of fair trade to express their disapproval by actions, whether boycott or destruction. The right of consumers to information and systematic labelling became tools of transparency accepted and endorsed by governments which fear new pan-European food scandals such as BSE, dioxin or foot-and-mouth disease. The Europeanisation of agro-food policies has been accompanied by new protectionist strategies by member-states. One of them is to appeal to consumer vigilance via labelling. Organising consumer distrust is not without risk, because it can be turned against its initiator. Indeed, it is necessary that all actors in production and trade, as well as authorities and organisations they consulted, agree on the selection, production and communication of this information. Recent debates on GMO (Genetically Modified Organism) labelling have shown the difficulty in reaching consensual agreement. This can sometimes result in unintelligible and incomprehensible information for the consumer. For instance, a recent European regulation provides that GMOs and products derived from GMOs should be labelled, whether or not they contain traces of modified DNA. At the same time, this regulation tolerates the presence of a certain quantity of unauthorised GMOs (up to 0.9 per cent) in non-labelled food.15 So systematic labelling of ritual products requires a minimum of agreement on the conditions of food production and traceability by stakeholders and consumers. For now, this agreement is made difficult by the existence of two major uncertainties, which continue to fuel controversies. The first relates to the link between the degree of animal suffering and use of stunning. The second is the question of the Islamic legitimacy of stunning. Continuing Debate on the Role of Stunning as a Means of Decreasing Animal Pain at the Time of Slaughter What do we know about the welfare and pain of animals? If this question has become an issue of concern for citizens (Veissier et al. 1999), it has been a vast topic of study in veterinary literature for decades. How is animal pain to be to conceptualised, quantified and studied objectively? Fraser (1995) determined a certain number of principles: the first, about which there is some unanimity, is the absence of suffering (pain, fear, hunger, thirst . . .); then comes normal physical conditions (absence of disease, wounds or malnutrition etc.); and finally the existence of positive aspects (comfort, expression of behaviours specific to the species). From these principles, it is possible to divide the various approaches to characterising the state of animal welfare into three groups: ergonomics, the measurement of preferences, and the measurement of discomfort and suffering. The consequences of different modes of slaughter, stunning methods and preconditions have been studied for at least as long as the problem of animal suffering has been recognised as a rational, quantifiable, economic and scientific problem. Nevertheless, a global solution for animal welfare that takes these three dimensions into account has received little consideration.
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In consequence, in the controversies around animal suffering and ritual slaughter, opponents mount their arguments regarding animal discomfort and suffering. Some of them blame inadequate conditions for slaughter, others the imperfection of stunning methods that can add to an animal’s suffering. The validity of the arguments depends on the way in which the problem is circumscribed and defined (in experimental situations, integrated, or not, in the life of the animal). How is it measured? Interpreted? At which stage? Using which means of measurement? Generally it is accepted that in experimental situations pre-stunning, calibrated to suit each species, decreases an animal’s suffering. It is on this evidence that the Federation of Veterinarians of Europe (FVE) bases its arguments against any dispensation to stunning (Federation of Veterinarians of Europe 2002). Sometimes slaughter without stunning increases the time before loss of consciousness by several minutes, during which time the animal can be subjected to needless suffering caused by a possible inhalation of blood, or the risk of asphyxiation. Research undertaken by FAWC leads to the same conclusion (Farm Animal Welfare Council 2003). A report of the British Compassion in World Farming (CIWF) points out that the unpublished position of the Scientific Veterinary Committee of the European Commission favours stunning.16 It supports its arguments by many studies carried out on various species including work by Blackmore (1984); Daly et al. (1988) and Gregory and Wotton (1984). Defenders of ritual slaughter claim they are dealing with real, not experimental situations. For them, preliminary stunning can inflict additional suffering on the animal. They stress significant limitations to each mode of stunning recommended by the regulation. Inept use of the perforating gun induces paralysis, which mimics unconsciousness and can thus be misleading. Electro-anaesthesia or electro-narcosis caused by an electrical current on the animal’s face can cause suffering if it is incompetently carried out. This line of argument revolves around the probable duration of consciousness after stunning which is measurable rather than with the ‘animal’s suffering’ which is more a matter of interpretation. Science provides the theories and instruments. By contrast, interpretations of animal suffering are made in terms of levels of human tolerance. In effect, a plurality of opinions on the matter is inevitable. Variation and Divergence in Islamic Views of Prescriptions for Slaughter In Islam, food prescriptions are codified in two principal sources, the Koran and the Sunna (see Benkheira 2000 for a synthesis). There are essentially two main interpretations dealing with industrial halal slaughter,17 with two groups of opinions about the licitness, or acceptability, of meat in relation to the mode of slaughter. The first is based on a verse of the Koran (5:5) that considers Christian and Jewish traditions of industrialised countries are adequate to render their slaughter methods acceptable to Muslims. The principal authority defending this point of view is Sheik Yuˆsuf al-Qaradaˆwıˆ,18 whose explanations can be summarised as follows: wherever
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God explicitly did not prohibit them then Muslims are allowed the food of ‘people of the Book’, i.e. Jews and Christians. Consequently, Muslims can share their food with Jews and Christians, and eat the meat which they herded or slaughtered. In the same way, Muslims are allowed imported meats coming from ‘people of the Book’, including that originating from animals killed by electric shock. As long as, so opinion goes, ‘people of the Book’ find these methods licit for themselves, then they are licit for Muslims (al-Qaradaˆwıˆ 1960: 59). In opposition to al-Qaradaˆwıˆ, the second interpretation considers that meat has a status peculiar to Islam. Meat and meat products are recognised as licit for Muslims only under certain conditions specified by Islamic sources. This interpretation is based on a verse in the Koran that explicitly forbids the consumption of meat deriving from an animal slaughtered in the name of any other being than God. In addition, adherents of this interpretation claim that European and American industrialised countries do not deserve to be designated ‘people of the Book’ and therefore their meat cannot be licit. Turning to the positions regarding stunning, all specialists in Islam agree that to be licit the meat must originate from an animal which has been killed by the act of slaughter itself (as distinct from death by natural causes or accident). Some consider that stunning is acceptable since it conforms to a hadith: ‘God prescribed kindness in any thing. If you kill, do it with kindness, and if you bleed an animal, do it with kindness’ (Abu-Sahlieh 2002), and that consequently it is allowed as long as the animal remains alive before the actual killing. Opponents consider that this runs too great a risk of the animal being killed by the act of stunning itself, and therefore declare that stunning should be banned. A third argument considers that pre-stunning reduces bloodshed and thus fails to conform to the prescription that the animal must be bled completely, and consequently should be prohibited. So to summarise, on the one hand the link between stunning and the level of suffering is not well established; and on the other, the religious legitimacy of stunning is disputed. In spite of these uncertainties, European Muslim ritual slaughter inherited a particular statute from the conditions granted to the Jews. Without a religious consensus on the process, but with the blessing of the law, ‘ritual’ slaughter produces ‘religious’ food. . . . Traceability and Food Intended for Religious Consumption Since the differentiation between halal and non-halal takes place at the stage of slaughtering, it means that all operations carried out downstream must guarantee that this separation is maintained throughout the chain right up to the point of sale. Numerous technical solutions are available.19 But the introduction of any traceability system depends on a considerable degree of cooperation. The procedures involved run across boundaries between private enterprise and public intervention. Overseeing the relevant classifications along these borders is a matter of both politics and the law. Among the principal problems is the very status of foods. Are ‘diet’ foods or those
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with special nutritional or health properties a medicine or a food? In the same way, are foods intended for religious purposes simply religious products? Can the issue of foods intended for religious consumption be left to the private sphere, when practising one’s religion is an established human right? For ‘quality’ products (i.e. those of a particular ‘terroir’, ‘appellation controlle´e’, or specialist production method), public regulations protect the private sector in order to prevent market forces undermining their ‘authenticity’. The EU established standards of protection such as Protected Designation of Origin (PDO), Protected Geographical Indication (PGI) and organic standards. These regulations are designed to ensure fair competition, to encourage rural development and enhance the environment. To become the subject of any particular EU protection, halal or kosher needs to be recognised as conferring some public benefit. In the US, the absence of regulations covering kosher and halal foods has led to a multiplicity of uncontrolled production methods. For halal foods in particular, traceability and labelling controls are non-existent and religious authorities are left out of a poorly- or under-regulated market. In the US, strategies of halal trade are well advanced and opportunities for creating new commercial initiatives and outlets based on the halal niche are numerous. The strategies of differentiation between halal and non-halal are not limited to butcher’s meat or meat products, but include all types of food. The ‘dhabiha’ is not regarded as the only basis for distinguishing between halal and non-halal. Owing to the fact that Muslims should neither eat pork nor consume alcohol, halal food producers have established their own guidelines to classify the hundreds of synthetic agents, dyes, thickeners and other additives, into licit and illicit. These lists are sometimes authenticated by religious authorities, whose legitimacy is not always attested. The potential of this market would appear infinite if the search for innovative products and new outlets, to be different and to create and impose their own standards, were not limited by the minimum of standardisation necessary for the smooth running of the transactions. In the ‘Cornell’s Multi-Farming Kosher Meal Program’ at Cornell University, Regenstein has developed a compendious handbook of permitted and prohibited foods that are guaranteed for Muslims, Jews, vegans, people suffering from allergies, Hindus, Seventh Day Adventists, those who need to avoid alcohol and, finally, what he calls the ‘discerning consumer’ (Regenstein et al. 2003). Since the privatisation of the halal market excludes any religious control, the legitimate certification organisations where they exist can thus be swamped by aggressive marketing. These are the circumstances that lay behind the resignation, in 2000, of Mr. Mazhar Hussaini, the former executive director and cofounder of the ‘Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America’ (IFANCA),20 the organisation where certifications’ economic imperative had led them astray in selling the rights to market halal products to a non-Muslim company. Where do the boundaries of halal lie? It is unlikely that markets without adequate regulation can determine them. Can religious authorities exert any influence without the support of public policy intervention? In Europe, this intervention would be
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justified in terms of both consumer protection and of human rights. The single market imposes on states a minimum of harmonisation in order to facilitate the circulation of products. Consumer protection, registered under the Treaty of Maastricht, in Article 9 of the Convention of Safeguard of Human Rights and of Fundamental Freedoms21 and in the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union, guarantees to any individual the freedom of religious expression or conviction, individually or collectively, in public or in private, by worship, teaching, practices and the performance of rites. In this light, the question is whether ordinary and daily food for religious consumption can be regarded as a ‘religious practice’. If the answer is yes, will European countries and the European Union have any other choice but to play a central role in approving religious organisational control of slaughter (BergeaudBlackler 2004c)? This would, however, require a certain degree of institutional integration of Islamic institutions in each European country (which are far from identical in all countries) and also on a European scale. If the answer is no, the legitimacy of ritual slaughter will perennially be called into question by non-religious actors. As history has often shown, it risks being a hostage to fortune as the pretext for disputes whose stakes will overwhelm it, leading to negative consequences for the religious groups in question. Conclusion In all industrialised countries, the internationalisation of the market in food intended for religious consumption has been going on for at least two decades, in particular because of the development of the halal market. In this context, the terms of debate around ritual slaughter have demonstrably to move beyond an older, simpler opposition between animal welfare organisations and religious groups. Following the 1990s’ food crises, the defence of consumer rights in respect of both safety and also the adequate provision of information has assumed an importance in all European countries: witness numerous campaigns centred on production methods. Animal feed, novel foods and organic production became more and more widely discussed. The recent growth of debates about ritual slaughter in northern Europe has much in common with these campaigns. They no longer relate just to consumer health but more broadly to the citizen’s right to know and consequently to exert control on the processes used to manufacture the foods which he or she buys and eats. While European regulation grants ritual slaughter a statute of exception in the name of respect for religious values, the European single market has no legitimate mutual control which can guarantee all consumers the origin and traceability of food intended for religious purposes. European Union institutions would appear to have two possible options. They could prohibit ritual slaughter, which would make the production of food for religious consumption impossible for some and thus conflict with the Convention of the Human Rights, to which it is signatory. Alternatively, they could impose on food for religious purposes the same ‘farm-to-fork’ traceability that
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applies to food whose production poses ethical problems. Ritual slaughter cannot be treated in isolation from considerations of its social effects. The risk of privatising religious products may prove to be socially, as well as economically, costly. Acknowledgements A version of this paper was first published in French in 2004 under the title ‘Nouveaux enjeux autour de l’abattage rituel musulman: une perspective europe´enne’ in Cahiers d’e´conomie et sociologie rurales, 73: 5 33. I am very grateful to Anne Murcott for her support in the translation of this text. Notes [1] [2] [3]
[4] [5] [6]
[7] [8] [9]
[10] [11] [12]
[13] [14] [15]
[16]
Translated from the French: ‘fanatisme religieux avec son corte`ge de momeries hypocrites et ineptes’, quoted in Burgat (1995: 79). The Times, 15 June 2003. Final Report of Mission Greece, 01/03, DG SANCO, European Commission. Online at www.europa.eu.int/comm/food/fs/inspections/vi/reports/ greece/vi_rep_gree_9002-2003_en. pdf Where Muslims accept the stunning process for the slaughter of cows. Source: the website of the British organisation ‘Vegetarians International Voice for Animals (VIVA) at www.viva.org.uk Such as Switzerland, the United Kingdom and to a lesser extent Denmark (Delavigne 2000), Germany (Langenfeld 2003), Austria (European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia 2001) and the Netherlands. See http://www.coe.int/T/F/Droits_de_l’Homme/Ecri/1-ECRI/2-Pays-par-pays/Suisse/Suis se_CBC_3.asp Site of Swiss federal authorities http://www.admin.ch/ch/f/pore/vi/vi1t.html Federal legislation of the Swiss Confederation, Section V: Modification of the law on the protection of animals (LPA), No 29, 23 July 2002, http://www.admin.ch/ch/f/ff/2002/ 4651.pdf The BSE crisis caused contamination by bovine spongiform encephalopathy of hundreds of thousands of cattle. ‘Farming Today’, BBC Radio 4, 10 April 2004. According to Jewish law, the backs of carcasses are not fit for consumption unless the sciatic nerve has been withdrawn. This time-consuming operation is no longer carried out in modern slaughter-houses and the backs of carcasses are systematically withdrawn from kosher circuits (Nizard Benchimol 1998: 51). After slaughter, the slaughterer performs the ‘bedika’, primarily an examination of the animal’s internal organs. BBC Radio 4, ‘Farming Today This Week’, 3 April 2004. Regulation (EC) No 1830/2003 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 September 2003 concerning the traceability and labelling of genetically modified organisms and of food and feed products produced from GOMs. ‘The European Commission’s Scientific Veterinary Committee (SVC) were sufficiently concerned about the pain involved in religious slaughter to recommend (in an unpublished 1992 Statement) that ‘‘stunning before, or within 5 seconds after, the cut should be made a general requirement’’ for cattle, sheep and chickens undergoing religious slaughter’ (Stevenson 2001: 21).
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[19]
[20] [21]
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I am not referring here to ritual slaughter during Eid el Kabir; for this see Brisebarre (1998). Al-Qaradaˆwıˆ is a Muslim scholar and preacher best known for his popular al Jazeera programme, ash-Shariah wal-Hayat (‘Shariah and Life’), and his website IslamOnline, launched in 1997. Al-Qaradaˆwıˆ is controversial: among Muslims he is widely considered a moderate conservative, while many Western critics regard him as dangerously radical or as a supporter of violence. Some Muslim opponents see him as lax and influenced by Western ideas (Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yusuf_al-Qaradawi). See the literature on the various systems, a sense of which is provided by a special issue of the journal of the OIE (Organisation Mondiale de la Sante´ Animale) guest-edited by MacDaniel and Sheridan (2001). IFANCA presents itself as the leading halal-food certification organisation in North America. Based in Chicago, it has offices in Toronto and Brussels: www.ifanca.org. Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms, as amended by Protocol No. 11, http://conventions.coe.int/Treaty/EN/Treaties/Html/005.htm.
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