In 1995, Benjamin Barber published an influential essay entitled Jihad vs. McWorld. Thirty years later, that armed bipolarism between the culture of fast food and that of Islamic fundamentalism appears completely outdated. The news came in recent weeks that Five Guys, an American hamburger restaurant with 1,700 locations worldwide, will serve halal meat in six French restaurants (specifically in Lyon Part-Dieu, Paris Place de Clichy, Rosny 2, Créteil Soleil, Marseille Vieux-Port and Lille rue de Béthune). The bacon, they assure from Five Guys, will be cooked separately to avoid contamination and furthermore none of these places will serve alcoholic drinks.
In France this is not surprising news. With the increase in Muslim inhabitants (estimated at 10 percent of the population), the market adapts. According to the data available, in 2025 the (difficultly) calculated turnover is at least 7 billion euros (with a maximum valuation of 12), compared to 5.5 billion in 2010. It is double that of the organic sector, which however reflects a more talked about change in consumption.
So here Carrefour, for example, has just acquired 10 percent of the capital of the Hmarket brand, specialized in halal food with an operation worth 10 million. The E.Leclerc chain is more cautious, but admitted that it is only a matter of time. Changing society, changing culinary customs? It’s not that simple.
But what does halal mean, to begin with? In Arabic, halal means “lawful”, “permitted”. In the Quran, the term is used 12 times to designate foods that are not prohibited and another 7 times with a negative, to indicate what is not permitted. It’s not very much, actually. The subsequent jurisprudential tradition has undertaken to better define dietary prescriptions in line with Islamic doctrine. Today, halal slaughter means meat from permitted animals (not pork, therefore) processed by a Muslim, who invokes the name of God and then cuts, strictly by hand, the throat, esophagus and main arteries of the beast to allow the blood to flow.
In Europe, Regulation (EC) No. 1099/2009 which regulates, in particular, the protection of animals during killing, provides for the killing of the animal only after stunning. However, there is an exemption with which the EU allows ritual slaughter, such as halal slaughter, according to which “animals can be killed without being previously stunned, provided that the killing takes place in a slaughterhouse”. The global turnover is quoted at 1.27 trillion dollars. One would be mistaken, however, in thinking of a harmless modern resistance to centuries-old traditional rites.
In his essay just published in France, Le djihad par le marché. Commenting on radical Islam s’empare du marché halal (ed. Odile Jacob), the anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler explains that the halal market is «an invention of the end of the 20th century, born from the meeting between neoliberalism and neo-fundamentalism, product of a capitalism without borders and the desire of a part of the world to conform to the sharia order».
The immigrants of Arab origin in the Seventies, explains the author, did not have too many problems. The fact that they were in a non-Muslim country gave them an excuse, when necessary they served themselves in kosher (i.e. Jewish) butchers who apply similar rites and in any case, in the worst case scenario, they could get away with blessing the “impure” meat on the plate.
Eating halal was not a compulsory religious practice and in any case only concerned meat. «Twenty years later, their children are fed halal baby food and sweets, vegetable soup packages display halal stickers, toothpaste and vaccines can be halal, and mosques and iPhone apps teach that adhering to halal allows you to accumulate precious good deeds (hasanat) in your “religious account”, which, in the end, will guarantee access to paradise», writes the scholar.
Things changed with the end of the seventies. First of all, the unfortunate laws on family reunification bring the wives of foreign workers to France. They are the custodians of culinary customs. The first Salafist organizations also appeared at that time. But a geopolitical event was also decisive: in 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini came to power in Iran. Until that moment, Arab countries were satisfied with some general assurances on slaughter abroad and relied heavily on trust. It is Tehran that changes the cards on the table. In a speech in March 1979, Khomeyni announced that he wanted to ban all non-halal food from the country. The ayatollah launches a sort of autarky: from now on, Iran will produce the meat it needs on its own, following all religious prescriptions. The drastic decision brings the country to the brink of famine, so the Islamic Republic reopens to the foreign market, but on one condition: the regime will send religious delegations to the slaughterhouses to control the slaughter. The decision has a huge impact on New Zealand and Australia, major meat suppliers to Iran. Furthermore, the Sunni world, which until then had been disinterested in the issue, immediately felt the competition: if it was Shiite Iran that issued the stamp of what is and what is not permissible with respect to the precepts of Islam, the cultural victory of the ayatollahs is sanctioned.
A mechanism was therefore set in motion that takes us to today and which reverberates on the improvised butcher shops of the suburbs, but also on consumer products and even luxury products, to attract the high-spending tourism of the Emirates. And here the rise of Islamic fundamentalism intersects with the turbo-capitalist globalization in gestation. It is not, therefore, a market created around traditional norms. Bergeaud-Blackler explains it well: «It is often believed that halal products have been commodified, that they are “religious things” transformed into “market products”. (…) We must consider things differently: halal products are the product of the halal market, which arises from an “agreement” between different interested parties – religious figures, market players and regulatory authorities – in other words, stakeholders: production companies, halal certification bodies, Muslim consumers, specialized distributors, health authorities, consumer associations, NGOs that denounce animal suffering and so on».
That the halal market is growing in parallel with the affirmation of globalization and the sedimentation of the first migratory flows is not surprising. The myth of the immigrant who integrates and westernizes with the passing of time and generations is, in fact, a myth. The reality is that exactly the opposite happens.
According to a recent Ifop survey, today in France, 80 percent of Muslims interviewed identify themselves as “religious” or practicing. One in four French Muslims even define themselves as “extremely” or “very” religious, compared to an average of 12 percent among all other believers. The trend is even more pronounced among young Muslims: 87 percent of 15- to 24-year-olds surveyed identify as religious, as do 82 percent of 25- to 34-year-olds. Furthermore, 42 percent of young Muslims interviewed fully or partially approve the positions of the Islamists, 13 points more than in 1998. It is not surprising that rigorism tends to worsen regarding halal food, as well as about the veil. Thanks also to a commercial offer that considers Islamism as any market niche.
It is clear that the problems linked to the explosion of halal are multiple, from those linked to greater animal suffering to the danger that the lobbying of very specific powers is hidden behind this market. Not to mention a symbolic aspect that would be absurd not to evoke: it is in fact no coincidence that many of the Islamic attacks in Europe in recent years have involved the slaughtering of the victims. In 2016, ISIS made this reference explicit, releasing a video on the first day of the Feast of Sacrifice in which some prisoners were introduced into a slaughterhouse like a flock, were slaughtered and then hung by their feet to bleed to death, like so many lambs. Obviously, let’s be clear, this does not make every halal slaughterhouse a terrorist center or every immigrant a cutthroat. But it is always better not to underestimate the power of symbols.
