Muslims are a small minority in Trinidad and Tobago – around five percent. The majority are of Indian descent, although there is a growing number of Muslims hailing from the African population.
Issues
At midday, after a two-hour wait for crates of bottled water and vats of petrol to load, the horn blows and the ferry slowly chugs away from the port at Kingstown, the capital of St Vincent and the Grenadines.
One of the greatest ironies that has come out of our contemporary existence is how we have managed to make an infinitely interconnected, globalised world filled with unimaginably closeminded individuals and communities.
In the Muslim imaginary, both in the popular version and the learned genre, the Prophet Muhammad is remembered as the paragon of virtue.
Positive communication is a virtue by itself, aiming as it does to overcome barriers between people and thereby to increase understanding. Such communication has been the life work (so far!) of Scottish-Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela, whose first novel was called The Translator.
The issues of halal economics were first raised at the First International Conference on Islamic Economics, which took place in Makkah al-Mukarramah nearly a half century ago in 1976.
Jerusalem, 18 March 2008. A first: German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivers a speech to the Knesset. Thus far, only heads of state, not heads of government, were permitted to address the Israeli parliament.
Allow me to take you on a journey to possible futures and possible alternative futures or transformations of halal and haram.
I was recently in conversation with a colleague in Japan who works on the conflicts and contestations around halal practice and halal certification in East Asia.
Halal is expanding. Not only the ubiquity of the halal label found on products, but the wide variety of applications of the concept.