Today I learned a little bit about halal.

Specifically I learned about something which I hadn’t even considered before. Even those of us who don’t know a lot about halal know that it involves animals being slaughtered for food in a particular way. But with muslim countries now being in some cases as removed from rural, agricultural roots as we are, and with a move towards large city populations, there is a need for a lot of mechanisation and automation to be able to prepare food in sufficient quantities.

It had never occurred to me to wonder how that can be done. It turns out to be quite interesting.

According to the Halal Food Authority animals must be healthy and clean before slaughter, and the act itself must be done by a licensed individual who will pronounce shahada or tasmiya at the crucial time – by reciting Bismillah Allahu Akbar. If the slaughter is mechanised then you still need a licensed person to do the shahada, and to do it once for each animal…

They reckon a healthy young male can recite shahada approximately 1500 times per hour. So someone must have to work out how many animals a plant would process in an hour and employ enough people to cover that rate.

That must be a tough job – reciting the same phrase over and over again, all day and every day, without pause. It makes a call centre job seem varied and exciting. The things people will go through for religion never cease to amaze me. The reasons for halal food rules are eminently sensible, but when applied to modern production-line methods they result in something very strange indeed, although I wonder if its really any more dull than other production-line jobs just that the repetition is verbal instead of manual.