Halal Economy: Elephant in the Room

If the halal economy is an ice-cream stall, how do you think its marketing is going to be. I can tell you one way of selling it. The seller can say something like this

There are trillions of dollars to be made, hurry, hurry!

Everybody is welcome!

Do you support new Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories?

No problem!

Did you put Muslims in detention camps by the millions?

No problem!

Your intelligence service engineered regime change to topple Muslim leaders?

 No problem!

Hurry first come first serve, there is huge money to be made!

 Everybody is welcome.

Get a piece of the Muslims hard-earned cash now!

Like it or not that is how we have been selling the halal economy in the past and this has to . change. This is the result

Prior to that, we were shocked by a Muslim Pro scandal, which potentially put Muslim’s lives in danger of drone strikes. Although Muslim pro denies selling data directly to US military they do admit sharing user data with third party vendor.

Now how do we stop this? It is fairly simple but it is going to take courage and an Iman of steel. We need to talk about the Elephant in the room several of them

Servitude or Profit

We must understand that the Islamic Economy is not about opportunities or profit. It is about worshipping the creator and this

It is about worshipping the creator.discussion revolves around opportunities and returns. The halal economy is about serving the Ummah This concept is alien to the conventional Economist. Whether we like it or not, we have to talk about the elephant in the room, which is the security and integrity of the halal products and services.  We need to talk about the white elephant openly as well privately among us. We need to discuss issues such as:

Can it be spearheaded by Foreign Actors?

Muslim has to own their own halal economy it is not about exclusion it is about empowering Muslims. Muslims need to be owners that drive the halal economy. What if they are reputable MNC  with the rigorous system in place like let’s say a company like Volkswagen. Just google, Volkswagen emission scandal, you’ll know that that is not enough

Proxy Muslim

There is a lot of partnership between non-Muslim and Muslims in serving the Muslim community is welcome. How many of this partnership is genuine, there is a lot of partnership out there which is camouflage with a Muslim face. When the Muslim partner, don’t really have a real say to chart the direction, it is questionable whether this partnership is truly for the benefit of the Ummah

Muslim Minority country

There are a lot of passionate Muslims who develop technology that serves the Muslim Ummah, but they are located in Muslim minority country. To what extent do, they have the freedom to serve the Muslim Ummah. For example, like when September 11 occur a lot of Muslim NGO’s in the United State have their funds freeze. The Muslim pro app scandal was located in Singapore and although they do not sell the data to US Military.

Tribal mentality

In the Muslim world, there is a tribal mentality sort of like the caste system, if you come from a Middle east, you are viewed as better Muslim than if you are Turkish, and Turkish is better than Asian and the list goes on and on. This has cropped in into the halal economy where you see we are all competing with each other to be the champion of the halal economy. While competition is healthy sometimes it confuses the Ummah.  UAE, for example, resumed normalization with Israel while still not on speaking terms with Qatar.

The halal economy is a complete eco-system from farm to fork, from customer acquisition to data security. The Muslim pro and the Fake halal frozen meat scandal should be a wake-up call for Muslims.