Three Tomorrows of Halal

Allow me to take you on a journey to possible futures and possible alternative futures or transformations of halal and haram. I tackle the concepts from an outside perspective, having only travelled to Turkey, Bosnia, and Malaysia and not having visited any of the Arab nations, unless you count one layover in Doha, Qatar. I am a relatively new student and explorer of Muslim societies and cultures and have novice eyes yet am eager to understand what is and is not halal and haram. The scholarship is not always clear, as debate is very much focussed on the logistics, but certain concepts are well understood. The thirteenth century jurist and hadith scholar, Imam Al-Nawawi said ‘according to the scholars, the vermin of the earth such as snakes, scorpions, dung beetles, cockroaches, rats etc., are haram’. Crows, vicious dogs, and swine are also bad news, to be neither handled nor eaten. Food that is not haram becomes halal by its offering to Allah and being blessed. The profane and mundane become sacred. It is also clear after some reading that the meaning of halal is being transformed. The world itself is changing and quite rapidly. And through a collection of changes that are the result of our climate crisis along with the numerous other permacrises we find ourselves enveloped in, our diets and the ethics that regulate them are long overdue for a review. I can relate as I am in a personal diet transformation away from the classic meat and potatoes, North American diet, which formed and nourished me when I was growing up. Vegetarians of the world unite!

Planetary change and globalisation concerns could impact halal both in terms of dietary restrictions and in other aspects of individual behaviour and daily life. The focus here is less on specific restrictions than on the broad cultural contexts where such restrictions emerge. Predicting where halal will stand in the future is an exercise in the impossible given the multitude of converging and conflicting trends. Add to this the numerous specificities from one Muslim community to the next, virtually all countries across the globe – a global diaspora – and the generations coming up that have been influenced by western industrial culture. There are growing differences and practices within Islam. There is a range of adherence to, avoidance of, or acceptance of dietary restrictions among practicing Muslims today, variations between Shia and Sunni, liberal and conservative, and what might be considered secular or nominally religious Muslims. The origins in religious law have evolved along with social norms and cultural practice that have changed over time. It is safe to assume, in general, that norms are very likely to continue to change and law may change to affirm new values – that could include both secular and religious law and social norms. After all, as the old dictum goes, the least likely future is the one in which nothing changes.

There are nuances, subtleties, and conditions expressed by scholars, and in interpretations of the Quran and hadith, about what is, and is not permissible, but conditions do change over time. So, one wonders what the future may hold for the practice of dietary restrictions, and how might that change in the future? Given that the future cannot be predicted – one of the key assumptions of futures studies – what can we say about possible futures of diet and compliance given technological, environmental, and climate change – particularly global warming? It is also important to note that there is no one single future of halal and haram, but an array of alternative possibilities. We are also living in postnormal times (PNT) that are having transformative effects on Muslim societies. It is even more challenging to imagine halal in a distant future, given the postnormal chaos, complexity, contradictions, uncertainty, and ignorance swirling around us. 

To explore alternative futures of halal further, I will apply the Three Tomorrows approach (the 3Ts) from the postnormal times theory. This approach takes into consideration the chaos and uncertainty of our current postnormal times when thinking about organisations or topics in the near, medium and far distant futures, that is twenty years or more. To help us understand the possible futures of halal, it is necessary to explore how this concept will progress through the three tomorrows: the extended present, the familiar futures, and in the least predictable time frame, the unthought futures. 

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