Late one night about a year ago coming back from a friend’s house I popped into a local restaurant that serves Oriental food. I ordered a seafood dish but the guy behind the till asked me to consider one of the meat dishes. I said, no, it’s not halal. The guy understood what halal meant but said that they cook with halal meat from Brazil sometimes. “Halal meat from Brazil?! lol” I thought to myself, but I smiled at him and waited for my food.
I mentioned this some time later to a friend living in Saudi who then proceeded to tell me that Brazil is well-known for it’s production of halal poultry and that the Kingdom imports lots of poultry from there. He also dug out an article from an Arabic newspaper discussing halal-meat production in Brazil complete with photos from one of these slaughterhouses. Unfortunately, I’ve since lost that email.
Then this past weekend I saw a selection of meat products in the freezer at our local halal butcher’s with a halal stamp on it and signage saying it originated from Brazil. So after googling about this I came across the following very interesting, and very official looking document describing Brazil’s halal-poultry production. It talks about the history (decades long), the certification process, the Muslim organisations involved and other stuff. All in all it looks pretty convincing. Click here to view it.
But then further googling showed discussion on some Muslim boards casting doubt on the halal-ness of Brazilian poultry but providing nothing concrete to backup these doubts, just a lot of hearsay.
Probably the most serious allegations against Brazilian halal poultry are those made in this document from the HMC which in summary says that after carrying out inspections of about 2/3rds of Brazil’s main slaughterhouses they concluded that the meat could not be trusted to be halal. My problem with this HMC investigation is that after describing this epic journey consisting of flying “12,500 miles by air and covering 1,800 miles by land, working through the night across the vast terrains of Brazil” (that’s a direct quote from the newsletter), all they have to show is a single page article which is one-third background, one-third self-promotion and five bullet points pertaining to the actual investigation itself. Is that it?! Surely they must have more to show! The irony is that the HMC surveyed 2/3rds of Brazil’s main slaughter houses, while, the document states that Brazil’s halal output makes up 1/3rd of it’s gross poultry output. Coincidence?
On the other hand, in addition to the official looking document, I also found this quite compelling video on YouTube showing exactly what the document describes: Muslim staff on the production line with a closeup of them saying bismillah during the slaughtering of chickens, prayer rooms for Muslim staff, inspections by some cleric, all of it. Take a look for yourself:
The last thing I wanted to check was the perception of Muslims in Brazil. The reason is that some Muslims ascribe to Sh. Ibn al-Uthaimeen (rahmatullahi alaih) a ruling making permissible food in places like McDonalds in Western countries because according to the ruling the meat slaughtered in places like the UK and the US is meat of the people of the book. Muslims native to the US and UK would obviously disagree which is why we have organisations like the HMC to certify halal meat. The Q&A with Ibn al-Uthaimeen is reproduced here but also check out the interesting comments later in that thread, in particular the quote attributed to YQ.
Anyway, back to perception and I asked myself what do Muslims in Brazil say about this halal-meat produced in Brazil? Because after all, if they perceive it to be halal that would be a big green light for the rest of us, whereas, if it was the opposite, it would give serious backing to those who claim it is not halal.
So I contacted the Sociedade Beneficente Muçulmana do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil who put me in touch with one of the people in charge at Masjid an-Nur in Rio. Straight off he started naming names of companies from the document which I had downloaded earlier saying that they are well known for producing halal meat. I then asked whether the halal-certifying authority in Brazil, CDIAL (and which certifies these companies that are exporting under the halal badge), was an authority that could be trusted and he confirmed that yes this was the case.
So on balance I’ve concluded for myself that poultry that is marked as halal from Brazil and issued from a company that is certified by CDIAL or CIBAL is safe to eat for Muslims.
If anyone has additional information related to this topic please add to the comments section. (NB. hearsay will be removed).
UPDATE 1: Please click here to view an article about the SADIA chicken company in Brazil and their halal production. Again very convincing!
UPDATE 2: Please click here for a 2-page article with the results of an investigation into halal meat from Australia & New Zealand.
Pod used to use Halal chicken from Brazil I believe, and over here in Cairo we buy frozen Brazillian Beef Mince and Brazillian Steak all the time.
A lot of the frozen chicken here are either local, or from Brazil or Oman.
Again there were rumours here that the Brazillian meat was not halal, pretty standard everywhere to be honest, though watching the butcher in the local market here remove his cigarette from his mouth momentarily as he slaughtered your ‘balady’ chicken did not give much more confidence in his meat.
In fact they refer to all imported frozen meat as ‘Brazili’ – though the halal mutton seems to originate from Australia, it is unfortunately not particularly good (extremely fatty, Egyptian seem of only make kebabs with mutton) so we have to wait till we return to London periodically for a decent Karahi Gosht.
Actually, that was another point in favour Brazilian meat: the large number of Muslim countries that import it stretching from the Gulf all the way to Malaysia.
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I thought HMC was the new Halal :)
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