Hey everyone,

If you’ve been anywhere near South African social media lately, you’ve probably seen the bizarre meltdown over halal certification.

When I first came across the viral clips, I, like analyst Ebrahim Fakir, honestly thought they were parody.

They weren’t. People were filming supermarket aisles, expressing shock that everything from milk and mealies to a box of Choice Assorted biscuits could carry a halaal stamp.

It came on the back of social media claims that South Africa was somehow being “captured by Muslims” and that Islamic practices were being imposed on a predominantly Christian country.

It all got very weird, very quickly. So at The Debrief, Producer Grace Moya and I decided to figure out what was actually going on.

Because there are really two questions here: Why do so many products carry halaal certification? And why has that suddenly become something to be angry about?

We spoke to political analyst Ebrahim Fakir to make sense of everything.

First, the boring bit.

Halaal simply means permissible under Islamic law. Certification on manufactured food gives Muslim consumers assurance about ingredients, manufacturing processes and possible cross-contamination with prohibited substances.

It doesn’t mean someone prayed over your biscuit. And a halaal stamp certainly doesn’t make the person eating it Muslim.

There is also no general government requirement forcing manufacturers to halaal-certify everything on supermarket shelves.

Businesses do it for an obvious reason: they want more people to buy their products.

As Ebrahim explained:

“Surely the question should be asked of the manufacturers, the suppliers, and the stockists of that product for why they stock those products, why the manufacturers make it, and why the suppliers insist that they should have this certification. It must make some economic sense to do so surely.”

So why the sudden panic?

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Muslims are a small minority of South Africa’s population and have been part of this country’s social fabric for centuries. Halaal certification isn’t new.

What is interesting is how suddenly it has become a subject of political outrage.

Ebrahim believes this is part of a broader trend: “It actually comes on the back of a whole range of Islamophobic, bigoted, racist messaging which has been doing the rounds over the past three or four years actually. And it’s part of a broader right-wing agenda to find and demonise a community so that there is effective separation of the races, of the religions, of the people...”

And that is the part that should concern us.

The question isn’t really whether you care about halaal certification. The question is what happens when ordinary markers of someone else’s identity are suddenly presented as evidence that they are threatening yours.

I make this point: today it’s a halal stamp. Tomorrow it could be a ZCC member wearing a star badge or a Rastafarian wearing dreadlocks.

Social media makes manufacturing this kind of outrage incredibly easy. Someone films something, adds an inflammatory caption and suddenly thousands of people are furiously debating something they hadn’t thought about the day before.

South Africa has far too many real problems for us to manufacture new ones. We can ask legitimate questions about certification, costs and procurement. But that’s very different from turning a label on a packet of biscuits into evidence of a grand religious takeover.

Sometimes a biscuit really is just a biscuit. And I am going to be enjoying Choice Assorted this December!

Watch our full Let’s Debrief discussion and subscribe to our YouTube channel. We’re trying to reach 20,000 subscribers before the end of the year!

Warmly,
Qaanitah

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Why the halal panic isn’t actually about food