Halal meat business leverages new
market opportunities: Businesses in Gardiner and Hallowell see new
opportunities in the immigrant Muslim population for growing the halal meat
business.
Iraqi immigrant Khalid Zamat, who owns two Mainly
Groceries stores, one in Augusta and another that opened recently in Hallowell,
sells halal meat, which he gets from out of state.
Joel Davis and his business partner
Bill Lovely operate a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse at Central Maine Meats in
Gardiner. Now Central Maine Meats has received USDA authorization to bring in a
halal butcher to ramp up that segment, the Kennebec Journal reported.
Davis said Central Maine Meats is
talking to food distribution companies it has contracts with to supply halal
meat to their clients. "We are in the infancy with this," Davis told
the paper. "We think there are bigger opportunities in state and out of
state as well." Zamat said he was on the verge of striking a deal with
other halal markets in the state to provide meat.
Two Maine businesses work together to supply halal meat
(Hallowell) For Joel Davis and Khalid
Zamat, a chance encounter several months ago has launched new opportunities for
both their businesses. And that business relationship opened the door for
Central Maine Meats to reach out to a new group of potential employees.
Davis is managing director of Central
Maine Meats in Gardiner, and Zamat owns two Mainly Groceries stores, including
one that opened just last week on Water Street in Hallowell. Through those
stores, Zamat sells halal meat, which he gets from out of state.
At Central Maine Meats, Davis and his
business partner, Bill Lovely, are operating a USDA-inspected slaughterhouse
that’s helping to build the local food economy in central Maine. They work with
Maine producers to process meat that otherwise would be sent out of state and
to sell it to a wide range of customers. Because of its USDA designation, it
can sell across state lines.
The meeting with Zamat showed him a new opportunity among Maine’s
growing population of Muslims. A Somali community has settled in Lewiston, and
several hundred Muslim families from a number of countries have settled in the
Portland area. Augusta has an established Iraqi community, and families from
Afghanistan and Syria have recently moved to the area.
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| Davis met Zemat and an American-Iraqi Halal butchery was born. |
“One of the things we recognized with
the new immigrants is that they have special dietary habits, and we were
approached by several places that wanted to provide for halal processed food,”
Davis said.
“Halal” is the Arabic word for
permissible, and it refers to anything that is permitted under Islamic law.
When it comes to meat, it describes the process used to slaughter animals.
First, the animals are blessed and then are killed by hand by a Muslim butcher.
(Muslims cut the animal’s throat without out stunning first, but do not
cut the spinal cord or stun the animal unconscious, which means the animal dies
in agonizing pain which can take a few minutes depending on the size of the
animal. Muslims believe that the longer the animal suffers before he dies
releases hormones which they believe makes the meat taste better.)
Davis said he asked Zamat to find him a
halal butcher, which Zamat did, but that was only the start of the process. “As
a USDA facility, we had to be authorized to bring in a non-employee to do the
processing,” Davis said. The company applied for a special certification
license, and received authorization last month.
Now Central Maine Meats is producing halal meat and it’s being
distributed in Maine. It’s a new opportunity for Zamat, who owns and operates
Mainly Groceries in Augusta and Hallowell. Zamat had been getting his halal
meat from distributors in Boston and Minnesota because he could find none
locally. In addition to providing halal meat, Central Maine Meats has hired
four Somalis to work in the company’s flash-freeze facility, packaging meat for
freezing.
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| Somali-Muslim butchers are brought in to torture the animals according to the Koran. |
CAIR Forcing Sheriff To Investigate So-called Islamophobic Attack
TROY — A national Muslim advocacy group
is calling on Maine law enforcement officials to investigate whether
Islamophobia played a role in an alleged shooting of a newly built sign that
took place Sunday at a Muslim family’s halal butchery business.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, sent a report
Wednesday to the Waldo County Sheriff’s Office after being contacted by the
owners of Five Pillars Butchery, Hussam Alrawi and Kathryn Piper, asking that
during their probe they try to determine whether the person acted with bias
when shooting at the sign.
After shots were fired at the sign advertising the butchery that Hussam
Alrawi and his wife, Kathryn Piper, operate in Troy, they are worried about the
safety of their family, which includes their son, Mohammad-Noor, 3, and
daughter, AlThurayya, 15 months.
After shots were fired at the sign
advertising the butchery that Hussam Alrawi and his wife, Kathryn Piper,
operate in Troy, they are worried about the safety of their family, which
includes their son, Mohammad-Noor, 3, and daughter, AlThurayya, 15 months.
Contributed photo
(A sign outside the Five Pillars
Butchery farm on the Detroit Road in Troy, seen Wednesday, has been repaired.
Someone shot and damaged the sign Sunday, but Hussam Alrawi fixed it after
police investigated, saying he wants to send a message that he and his family
are in Troy to stay.)
“My family is terrified,” Alrawi said
in an interview over the phone Wednesday afternoon. “My kids and my wife, we
don’t know what’s going on.” Alrawi, who is originally from Baghdad, Iraq, and
is now a permanent resident of the United States, said that he built the sign
himself, using lumber he had on hand and cutting letters out of insulation
material.
He had been waiting for several weeks
for the snow to melt to put up the sign and decided Sunday was the right time.
He worked on the project for most of the day. About an hour after Alrawi went
into his home, where his business is located, and as he was sitting with his
wife, Piper, and their two children, they heard a loud, strange noise outside.
At the time they thought someone was setting off fireworks.
It wasn’t until Monday morning that
Alrawi saw the eight holes in the sign from apparent gunshots. “We’re not
certain it was motivated by bias, but the timing is strange,” Ibrahim Hooper,
CAIR’s national communications director, said over the phone Wednesday.
“The wife wears an Islamic head scarf.
I’m not aware of any other Muslim families in the area. It happened just an
hour after he finished putting up the sign. All these things lead to the need
to at least investigate the possibility that there was a bias motive.”
Hooper added that he thinks this could be representative of what CAIR
sees as an overall rise in Islamophobia nationwide since President Donald Trump
began his 2016 campaign for the presidency.
A representative from the Waldo County
Sheriff’s Office was not available Wednesday evening to answer questions about the
incident. Alrawi said he called the police Monday when he discovered the bullet
holes in the sign and that officers spent two hours at his home, taking
pictures and talking with the family.
Hooper said he had not yet received a
response from the sheriff’s office Wednesday evening. Alrawi said he is not
sure whether he was targeted because of his faith, but if that is the case,
this incident is the first time he has experienced Islamophobia directed at him
and his family since he moved to the United States nearly two years ago.
The couple met and were married about five years ago while Piper was
teaching English abroad. Piper, who converted to Islam eight years ago, said
her father’s family is from Maine and she spent summers here, swimming and
rafting in the Kennebec River. For their first year in Maine, the couple and
their children lived with her parents in Searsport before moving to Troy.
Prior to that, the couple visited the
U.S. frequently but found it difficult to find halal — permissible — meat of
quality in the area. According to BuzzFeed News, in order for meat to be
permissible in Islamic tradition, before an animal is slaughtered, God’s name
should be pronounced over it as a show of appreciation. Then the animal is
killed with a swift cut to its throat to ensure its blood is drained from its
body.
(Muslims cut the animal’s throat without out stunning first, but do not
cut the spinal cord or stun the animal unconscious which means the animal dies
in agonizing pain which can take a few minutes depending on the size of the
animal. Muslims believe that the longer the animal suffers before he dies
releases hormones which they believe makes the meat taste better.)
About one year ago, Alrawi opened Five
Pillars Butchery — a name that refers to the five pillars of Islam: faith,
prayer, charity, fasting and pilgrimage to Mecca, the basic mandatory acts for
those who practice the religion. Alrawi wanted to offer a quality product for
the Muslim community and that any Mainer would be happy to put on the dinner
table.
But now Alrawi said he is worried about
his family’s safety in their community. “It’s not like a hate message that they
sent; it was an actual shooting,” he said. “What would the next thing be? Maybe
if I was out by the side of the road I would have been shot.”
Piper said in an email that the
incident “breaks her heart” because it is not the Maine she knows, and she
doesn’t want that image she holds of the state “to be tarnished by someone who
has more hate and fear in their heart than they do love for their neighbors.”
“I want to stress that it wasn’t just
an attack on our business sign. It was an attack on our home, a home with 2
children 3 years old and under. Almost every day my 3-year-old son says to me
‘nice house mama.’ I want him to always feel that way about our house, our
community and our country,” she said.
Alwari said that the family hopes to
speak with others in the community so that they can get to know them better and
understand their culture. And despite the fear and anxiety that the incident
has caused, the family of four will be sticking around.
“After
a couple hours (after the police left Sunday), I called the police and asked if
I could fix (the sign) so I could send a message to the shooter that we are
here and we’re staying.”
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| Muslims are going nowhere but staying put in Maine till every one is eating Halal meat. |