LANCASHIRE – The Lancashire County Council has put Muslim students’ meal back on agenda, reviving an old row on adding halal meat to the menu.

“We thought this issue has been resolved in 2012 and it is unfortunate it has been raised again,” LCM chairman and Burnley resident Abdul Hamid Qureshi told Lancashire Telegraph on Sunday, September 17.

“This is a personal crusade by Cllr Driver. For him, it is a matter of feelings but for Muslims, this is a matter of faith.

“The LCM position is and always has been that stunning before slaughter means the meat is not halal and there is an argument about whether pre-stunning causes more or less distress to animals that slaughter without it.”

Qureshi’s comments followed a decision by the Lancashire County Council Cabinet on Thursday to re-open the question of whether it should use meat from animals which had not been stunned before slaughter.

Abdul Hamid Qureshi

“In my view, it is abhorrent to kill an animal without stunning it because of the distress it causes. We will bring it to a full council meeting where members can vote with their conscience,” county council Tory leader Geoff Driver said.

Accordingly, the issue of the stunning or otherwise of animals before slaughter for halal purposes will be debated at the next full council meeting on October 26 ‘with a decision going to a free vote, to enable members to vote according to their conscience’.

The vote revives a row from 2012 when the authority banned all animal flesh from its 600 schools where pre-stunning has not been used.

Then the Lancashire Council of Mosques told Muslim families to boycott all such ‘halal’ meat as it did not meet their interpretation of Islamic law.

Thousands of Muslim children at 45 county council schools in Burnley, Pendle, Hyndburn, and Rossendale, as well as five in Blackburn with Darwen borough supplied through the authority’s central catering unit, refused to eat meals containing the meat.

The decision was disappointing to many Muslims.

“This is very unfortunate,” Salim Mulla, a Blackburn with Darwen councilor and chairman of the LCM’s Halal sub-committee, said.

“My advice to Muslims is always ‘if you have any doubt, leave it out’.”

The concept of halal, — meaning permissible in Arabic — has traditionally been applied to food.

Muslims should only eat meat from livestock slaughtered by a sharp knife from their necks, and the name of Allah, the Arabic word for God, must be mentioned.