Allāhu akbar, I really hate the dog food and the khamr aisles in the local supermarket. Your standard Wal-Mart/Asda has been designed in a specific way so that you zig-zag around the store taking in the whole range of products before you reach the checkouts. The vegetables are the first things you come across, presumably because psychologically you’re more likely to put them in your trolley if it’s empty. Say your trolley is full and the last thing you come across was the potatoes, you’re going to worry about squashing your eggs and so not buy them.

But my gripe is that the dog food and khamr aisles in a shop throw a Muslim shopper out of sync. When you reach the dog food or the khamr ailse you end up zigging where you should be zagging and before you know you’re halfway home and have forgotten to buy bin bags.

They’re obviously not going to take my advice to stop selling this sort of stuff in the first place but I propose that the khamr aisle should be directly opposite the dog food aisle, that way it won’t throw me too much out of the mix when I’m whizzing around with my trolley.

And why do Pizza/Chicken shops etc. put big flashy “Halāl” signs in their windows and then you go inside and they’ve got “Hawaiian pizza (Ham and Pineapple)” on the menu? Even in secular law isn’t this against the trade description act? “So this one-arm bandit over here for me to entertain myself with while you prepare my kebab, does it also fall under your neon “Halāl” motif that brought me in here in the first place?”

I’m actually in favour of restaurants putting up “Harām” signs in their shop windows. So that we know exactly where we stand before we go in. “Come inside, We sell Halāl and Harām meat.” I mean, it shouldn’t affect sales to the non-Muslims, when halāl signs first started appearing in windows it didn’t put your average Joe non-Muslim off buying his Saturday night Vindaloo. I’m just after a bit of honesty here, so that when I see a sign saying “We sell harām” outside my local restaurant I know what’s on sale. Rather than being wooed inside by a sign saying “halāl” only to discover that the owner seem unaware of what the word entails.

Linguistically speaking the word ‘ham’ is actually closer to the word ‘harām’ than it is to word ‘halāl’. I’m sure a couple of extra letters wouldn’t break the bank, couldn’t they just change the menu to say “harām and pineapple pizza”?

I once walked into a ‘halāl’ restaurant to ask a question. “I was reading your menu and I wondered about this sentence that I saw at the bottom ‘Bring your own wine‘?” “Oh, but that’s not for us, that’s for them.” He really didn’t seem open to the suggestion that in addition to Muslims not drinking wine in his restaurant, non-Muslims shouldn’t be either. What’s next, set aside an area of the masjid for Christians to come an pray too but with the disclaimer “Bring your own crosses”?

It’s a sad fact but where I work if I want to buy something harām on my meal break the Muslim owned shops are the most conveniently located for this. If I fancy a piping hot bacon sandwich there’s an obliging Muslim owned shop next door; if it’s alcohol or pornography that I’m after then I’ve got a choice of two Muslim owned stores. In fact if I want to buy something harām from a non-Muslim I’ve actually got to make more of an effort and walk further to get it.

It really is disturbing to reflect upon but if all the Muslims in the West were to give up selling harām products over night it would actually have a huge impact. Sure give it a week or so and some “brave” enterprising soul would step up to fill the niche in the market that we’ve left. But just imagine being confident that when you walked into a Muslim owned shop that everything that you saw before you was actually halāl. That a Muslim shop actually meant that you were in a branch of “Halāl ‘R’ Us”; rather than the current situation where you believe you’re in a non-Muslim shop and then are shocked to spot a shiny, green, half-peeled sticker with the basmallāh above the cigarette shelf as you pay for your shopping.

So I feel that it’s about time that our local Muslim owned shops take off their Budweiser baseball hats for a moment and start to express more open animosity to all that is prohibited in Islām.