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Anti-halal graphic from the Barnabas Fund Operation Nehemiah website.

Dr Patrick Sookhdeo is director of the Barnabas Fund, an international organisation that has begun a campaign, Operation Nehemiah, against the halal food industry in three continents including Australia. Viewing the settlement of Islam in the West, and the growth of Western Muslim communities as a threat to the dominance of Christianity, the aim of Operation Nehemiah, according to the Barnabas Fund website, is ‘to rebuild the Christian foundations of our country‘.

Although the Barnabas Fund halal petition authors make a nod to affirming the religious freedom of minorities, the petition includes Islamophobic ‘scare’ phrases such as (with my emphasis):

• Petition against the imposition of halal
• Defending our right to non-sharia meat.
• Muslims are working actively to integrate halal meat into the mainstream market and to extend it to non-Muslims.
• The spread of halal is part of a Muslim commitment to Islamic mission (dawa) and the Islamisation of non-Muslim societies.
• The imposition of sharia practices on non-Muslims may be interpreted as an assertion of Islamic supremacy.

In response to the impending Australian lecture-tour of Dr Sookhdeo and his New Zealand-born wife, I had an op-ed published in the Age: Anti-Muslim tub-thumping helps extremists. Here is a brief letter from Dr Sookhdeo in response, and Dr Mark Durie was given an opportunity to respond with his claim that: Muslim violence is a fact, not prejudice. This is my response to that article.

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There exists within the Muslim world today, a number of different conceptual approaches to interpreting Islam. These roughly boil down into four overarching categories: (neo-)traditionalists; secularists; fundamentalists; contextualists.^[1] Each group (and even within each group) takes different approaches in how they understand what is Islam. As I’ve written elsewhere^[2]: (more…)