Why do so many of us worry about trivialities?
The other day I received an email with the morbid title of “FW: BAD NEWS”. The “BAD NEWS” was that a range of chocolate bars were no longer considered Halal owing to the use of pig rennet, a natural enzyme which breaks down fat used in the production of cheese and other processed foods. It turns out that e-mail was a false alarm: the company in question eventually decided to stop using pig rennet owing to protests from a vegetarian advocacy group. So we dodged that bullet. Phew!
This is not the first time I’ve received messages from the Muslim community telling me what I can or cannot eat. My childhood is littered with instances when an uncle or aunty would hand us a letter listing decliciously forbidden products. One even warned me not to drink Pepsi because pig’s blood was used in its production.
When I was younger, I was pained by our family’s decision not to continue eating at McDonald’s after we learnt all of its fried foods were cooked in lard. Curiously, the fact that McDonald’s sells unhealthy food, pays restaurant employees poorly and promotes unsustainable farming practices never entered our collective conscience at that time. As I grew older, however, such concerns seemed somewhat trifling - I was more concerned about eating healthy, nutritious food. The haraam discussion became a dangerous form of distraction.
The concept of haraam is most often used to described prohibitions against food and alcohol, sex outside marriage, and gods other than Allah. One oft cited verus in Sura Baqarah reads : “He hath forbidden you only carrion, and blood, and swineflesh, and that which hath been immolated to (the name of) any other than Allah”(2:173). But at its apex the halal/haraam dichotimy is about righteous conduct. It is about establishing a way to act which minimizes harm and misconduct and maximizes virtuous behavior.
This is not an easy thing to distil. Each individual and community has their own standard. We don’t have to explore that standard when it comes to pig products since eating chocolate bars with pig rennet will not make me a better or worse person. Believe me, it won’t. But these standards must be explored on more pressing questions of how people treat each other.
For example, it is universally accepted that gratuitously killing people is wrongful. But as one Taliban commander told me in Pakistan last month, “we don’t kill Muslims, we only kill hypocrites.” If we ignore, for a moment, the problems with the Taliban’s definition of hyprocite, this reasoning implies that gratuitiously killing hypocrites is permissible. This kind of duplicity is not exclusive to the Taliban. Even something as seemingly nonaggressive as international law can justify murder. Under the the Geneva Conventions, it may be lawful for a state’s armed forces to kill civilians so long as the deaths are not intentional or foreseeable and are part of an armed attack against a military objective. Likewise, the death of enemy combatants may be considered lawful if the deaths occasion an attack on a military target whose eradication is considered necessary for defeating the enemy.
Such explanations need not give us satisfaction nor should they solve all or any of our moral concerns. Or should they? What is startling is how rarely such questions are posed by Muslims. Modern Islam seems to represents a bundle of practices which you follow because they are mentioned in the Quran or Hadith and less a set of principles to guide spiritual and intellectual reasoning. Following rules you don’t have to think about is easy, but that’s not what Islam is about.Thanks for the heads up about the Skittles, but let’s start talking about something that really matters.