Habib Ghanim Went From Asking About Pork to Certifying Halal Meat

The hamburger counter never gave him a straight answer, so Habib Ghanim ordered fish. He was a student from The Gambia, newly arrived in the United States in the early 1970s, and whether the meat contained pork was the one thing he needed to know before he could eat.

Halal shops were scarce in the United States then. Many young Muslims bought kosher meat instead. It excludes pork, which settles half the question, but it carries no Islamic blessing. Ghanim and his friends closed the gap themselves: they pooled their money to buy a whole cow, stored it in a freezer, split the meat and cooked from the shared stock once a month. Nobody was selling halal meat, as he tells it, so the students made their own arrangement.

Ghanim was born and raised in The Gambia in a trading family of Lebanese descent, a household that set store by independence. He came to the United States to study, and the plan was orderly: graduate, go home, start a business of his own. He met his wife at school in 1975. He spent a few years running a well-digging business in The Gambia before resettling the family in the United States.

Certification arrived sideways, as a favour rather than a career. A delegation of Muslim buyers from Singapore needed poultry, and Singapore required documented proof of halal status for imports. Ghanim introduced the buyers to a large poultry plant in Maryland. The owner had a condition of his own: a Muslim had to perform the slaughter. Ghanim did it himself in the early period. On weekends he drove two to three hours to reach the plant ahead of its 6 a.m. shift, supervised the killing, then went back to his regular job.

Then came the suggestion that changed the scale of the thing. Ghanim proposed that the plant certify the whole bird instead of a single cut, so breasts, legs and wings could all be sold as halal. Recognition from Singapore followed.

He says he never set out to become a certifier. He took on the responsibility because somebody had to verify that the process met halal requirements, and nobody else was doing it. For years the work stayed part-time. He often paid his helpers out of the fees and kept little for himself. Companies, meanwhile, knew almost nothing about halal and had to be educated before they could be certified at all.

A halal label is a claim about something the buyer cannot see. The person at the counter cannot watch the slaughter, inspect the paperwork or follow a bird back through the plant, and a written policy means little without an auditor who turns up on the floor. That is the gap Ghanim's business occupies, and it is why the mark is worth exactly as much as the body that issues it.

In 1999 he joined fellow certifiers in Jakarta to form the World Halal Council. Membership grew from about 40 to roughly 150, and the council continued after a split over who should lead it. Ghanim sits on its executive committee and chairs its membership committee. He also founded the USA Halal Chamber of Commerce, a certification body based in the United States.

He is semi-retired now, though not retired from the work. He still takes part in certification decisions and still travels to international halal meetings.

Three principles, as he describes them, sit behind everything the business signs off on: credibility, verification and traceability. Every certificate goes through a five-member decision committee that must agree unanimously, which hands any single member a veto. Each one can be traced back to who audited what, so an error carries a name and a date rather than disappearing into a file.

The traceability rule bites hardest on his own habits. A recent audit finding concerned internal checks that had been made but never written down. Ghanim pushed back at first; his son talked him round. His conclusion was blunt. If something is not written down, it cannot be proven to have happened.

His children now handle much of the management side. Aly, his son, is quality manager and, by his father's account, more technical than Ghanim is. His daughter was among the first women to work in the halal industry and graduated from the Halal Academy in the United Arab Emirates.

The plants have changed as well. A once-small operation he worked with is now one of the largest halal businesses in the field, with a mosque of its own on site.

What he wants handed on is the same three-part standard. A halal label means something, he argues, only while the checking behind it holds, and the generation now running the office is the one that has to keep it there.