Over the past few years, the Halal market has been growing in China in the form of Halal restaurants in every major city and Halal products in supermarkets. (Photo: foodaholix.in)
Authorities in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region have launched a campaign against the growing proliferation of Halal products in the Muslim dominated region. Officials have claimed that the proliferation and demand for goods produced in conformity of Islamic laws was an intrusion of religious rituals in secular life and encouraged extremism.
At a meeting on Monday in Urumqi, Communist Party leaders and cadres took an oath to “fight a decisive battle against ‘pan-halalisation’. Halal means food or goods that is produced in conformity with Islamic law.
China currently has some 23 million Muslims, who make up 1.6 per cent of its population and 10 Muslim ethnic groups, the largest of which are Hui, largely based in Western China’s Ningxia Autonomous Region and Gansu, Qinghai and Yunnan province. The second largest Muslim group is the Uighur, Turkic people who live primarily in Northwest China in the Xinjiang province.
Over the past few years, the Halal market has been growing in China in the form of Halal restaurants in every major city and Halal products in supermarkets.
There has, however, been a backlash against the proliferation of Halal products in the country. The term “pan halal tendency” was first coined by the state-run newspaper Global Times, which claimed that “Muslims were demanding things to be halal which cannot really be halal, such as water, roads and toilets.”
“Officers of the People’s Procuratorate in Urumqi were asked to be more conscious of the ideological battle, take the lead to free minds and shake off conventional thinking,” Liu Ming, secretary of the leading Party members’ group of the People’s Procuratorate of Urumqi said during a meeting on fighting pan-halal tendency, according to State media.
During the meeting, party officials were encouraged to write articles to clearly express their stand against the pan-halal tendency, according to a statement on the procuratorate’s WeChat account.
Party officials, however, claimed that the fight against pan-Halal was not aimed at targeting religious people by restricting their daily habits.
“The fight against the pan-halal tendency is not against halal,” Zhu Weiqun, former head of Ethnic and Religious Affairs Committee of the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference said in the state media. He further said that officials should recognize the difference between pan-halal and halal.
The campaign comes in the backdrop of mounting criticism of China over its counter-terrorism strategy in the restive Xinjiang region. The communist country has been accused of trying to wipe of Uyghur culture and forcibly assimilate the Muslim minority into the dominant Han culture.
The meeting, meanwhile, also called on all government officers and party members to speak Mandarin at work and in public.