Following up on my plan on not really having a plan, and just blogging about what I'm thinking about the moment, I thought I'd follow up on yesterday's discussion of the pros and cons of the Muslim Pro app. One of the features of the app was Halal Restaurants, which the students thought was interesting because some of the selections - most notably Five Guys and Unos - didn't seem legitimate. Essentially, how did a restaurant get on the Halal Restaurants list for the app? I don't really pay that much attention to Halal restrictions, but for devout Muslims being directed to a restaurant which was not Halal would be, at the very least, a major inconvenience. Truthfully, however, most of the devout Muslims I know have something akin to a spider sense in regards to restaurants that would be Halal or Haram and wouldn't go to someplace simply because it popped up on an app.
I don't want to get into a big discussion about what qualifies as Halal, but suffice it to say that it means that the animal was killed in a ritualistic fashion that involves prayer and making sure that the animal suffers as little as possible. Overall the rules for food preparation/consumption are much less onerous in Islam than they are in Judaism. I'll include a link to a BBC story that briefly discusses Halal and it's implications, although, obviously, in the UK. Like most folks living in the 21st century I typed "halal restaurants in Burlington Vermont" into Google to see what came up (hoping that this might explain how Five Guys and Unos (I have nothing against either restaurant, I just seriously doubt that they devote much time to Halal issues on a daily basis, and it makes one wonder how they ended up on the list) ended up on the list of Halal restaurants. Not surprisingly a Yelp review, promising the top 10 halal restaurants in Burlington popped up, although it actually only listed one place. There was also a link to a Zabinah site, which advertises itself as "the original & world's largest guide to Halal restaurants and markets," which ended up listing three places in all of northern Vermont (none of them Five Guys or Unos). I also found a very interesting article in Seven Days which deals specifically with the challenges of buying Halal meat in Vermont, featuring an interview with the current Imam of the Islamic Society of Vermont, which probably deserves a separate post all to itself because that's an issue that transcends the more narrow issue of Halal restaurants.
So, I don't have an answer for the question of how restaurants are designated Halal for the Muslim Pro app, so I suspect I'll revisit this down the road.
I don't want to get into a big discussion about what qualifies as Halal, but suffice it to say that it means that the animal was killed in a ritualistic fashion that involves prayer and making sure that the animal suffers as little as possible. Overall the rules for food preparation/consumption are much less onerous in Islam than they are in Judaism. I'll include a link to a BBC story that briefly discusses Halal and it's implications, although, obviously, in the UK. Like most folks living in the 21st century I typed "halal restaurants in Burlington Vermont" into Google to see what came up (hoping that this might explain how Five Guys and Unos (I have nothing against either restaurant, I just seriously doubt that they devote much time to Halal issues on a daily basis, and it makes one wonder how they ended up on the list) ended up on the list of Halal restaurants. Not surprisingly a Yelp review, promising the top 10 halal restaurants in Burlington popped up, although it actually only listed one place. There was also a link to a Zabinah site, which advertises itself as "the original & world's largest guide to Halal restaurants and markets," which ended up listing three places in all of northern Vermont (none of them Five Guys or Unos). I also found a very interesting article in Seven Days which deals specifically with the challenges of buying Halal meat in Vermont, featuring an interview with the current Imam of the Islamic Society of Vermont, which probably deserves a separate post all to itself because that's an issue that transcends the more narrow issue of Halal restaurants.
So, I don't have an answer for the question of how restaurants are designated Halal for the Muslim Pro app, so I suspect I'll revisit this down the road.
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