University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses

Beyond halal

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Beyond halal

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“BEYOND HALAL”

by

Najeeb Hasan

_______________________________________________________________

A Thesis Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE USC GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
MASTER OF ARTS
(SPECIALIZED JOURNALISM)

August 2013

Copyright 2013 Najeeb Hasan

ii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Acknowledgements iii
Abstract iv
“Beyond Halal” 1
References 15

iii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks, to Diane Winston for the clarity of her vision, to Sandy Tolan for his
patience and careful editing, to Michael Parks for his wisdom and support, to Sherman
Jackson for empowering his students, and to Shannon for her sacrifice—and more than
that. The title “Beyond Halal” is a reference to a concept articulated by Nuri and Krystina
Friedlander.

iv
ABSTRACT
Ahmad Karaouni operates Nature’s Bounty, a USDA-certified halal
slaughterhouse in Vacaville, California, where he offers grass-fed and grass-finished
animals that remain free of hormones and antibiotics. Karaouni’s commitment to
sustainable slaughter places him in conversation with two trends: a local food movement
in the United States that seeks solutions to circumvent the maze of industrial food
systems that blocks access to the sources of (and knowledge about) the food Americans
eat; and, an emerging consciousness in the American Muslim community that, in the age
of industrial slaughter, “halal,” the standard of ritual slaughter in Islam, may not be
enough to ensure that Muslims eat animals that are raised and slaughtered ethically. This
thesis explores these themes through immersion-style journalism focusing on Karaouni’s
slaughterhouse. It includes direct observation and first-hand accounts gleaned from
several hours of reporting at Nature’s Bounty with Karaouni during a number of
individual visits that stretched from December 2012 to March 2013. The reporting for
this thesis is rounded out with first-hand interviews of additional individuals with
knowledge of either slaughter or halal practices and an investigation of secondary source
material. A version of this thesis will be published as a magazine piece in the food issue
of San Francisco Magazine in August 2013.

1
“BEYOND HALAL”
Ahmad Karaouni kills sentient creatures, mammals mostly, but also birds of
various sorts, almost every day. He doesn’t shoot from distance, but makes it more
personal, with just a knife sharp enough to slice cleanly through a single sheet of
everyday printer paper (Grandin 2012), which is harder than it sounds. This proximity
makes him know things about dead animals that others usually don’t. Like the fact that it
adds at least half an hour to his schedule if customers—Nepalese, Filipinos, really any
culture that promotes eating goat—request, in lieu of skinning, that their purchase be
torched.
The request is literal, something I discover one of the first times I visit Ahmad
when a customer, a Nigerian this time, asks for a torched goat. Torching, Ahmad explains
later, imparts a smoky flavor. I had come to Nature’s Bounty, a small-scale
slaughterhouse in Solano County, just outside California’s Central Valley, to learn more
about why a tiny halal operation, frequented more by first-generation immigrants than
foodies, could be on the cutting edge of sustainable meat production. On the afternoon of
my visit, I find Ahmad inside the kill room, conversing with his skinners, Eddie and
Armando, about the Nigerian’s goat, already with a large gash under its neck.
There’s still a six hundred pound calf left to kill—“The guy’s coming in half an
hour for the veal,” (Karaouni 2012b) Ahmad loudly reminds everybody—and they all
agree about the need to move past the goat. At least the calf waiting in line isn’t an
Angus. “You cannot calm down an Angus,” Ahmad warns me after the conference. “It’s
impossible” (Karaouni 2012b). He adds, scornfully, that it’s also not USDA-defined veal:

2
“For the USDA, veal doesn’t drink its mother’s milk; it doesn’t see the sun; and it’s jailed
in a four-by-four foot cell. For us, veal is a young animal” (Karaouni 2012b).
Eddie, a new hire who is stout and good-natured, springs into action, helpfully
dragging the carcass onto a waiting trolley and rolling the load, much like an overloaded
cart in a grocery store but with hooves splaying at awkward angles and a breadcrumb trail
of fresh blood in its wake, to a sort of outdoor patio in the back of his shop that overlooks
a fenced-off square of his grazing pasture. There, Ahmad ignites a propane blowtorch—
no goggles or other noticeable safety measures—takes aim, and blasts the goat, making
its coat first glow a bright orange then charring it black before scraping it clean with a
steel-wire brush.
About twenty minutes later, the goat looks like a newly fleeced sheep, except it’s
colored a dark caramel instead of a pinkish white. The Nigerian leaves pleased with his
purchase. Still, there are petitions from customers Ahmad turns down. Earlier, he
disappointed an Arab woman—headscarf, loose black outer-garment, white sneakers—by
replying “No” (Karaouni 2012b) to her bashful request for the “male parts” (Karaouni
2012b) of her lamb. Armando, who’s just twenty-one and has worked with Ahmad for
three years, first appeared puzzled by the euphemism, before brightening with
recognition: “Ah, the balls. We call them balls” (Karaouni 2012b).
Ahmad’s slaughterhouse, a USDA-licensed plant that offers grass-fed, hormone-
and antibiotic-free meats (Karaouni 2012b) is on the forefront of an emerging
consciousness for sustainably produced food among Muslim communities in the United
States. Muslims, like Jews, have traditionally relied on the requirements for ritualized
slaughter attached to their faith to rubberstamp halal meat as good meat (Nana 2012). But

3
“halal” is a term in Islamic law that merely means “permissible”—or, in reference to
meat, what’s legally permitted for Muslims to eat (Nana 2012). The standard governs the
kind of animal that Muslims can eat—pigs are out but also, for example, carnivores with
fangs (Halal Advocates of America n.d.). It also regulates the slaughter itself, such as
through the requirement, for most schools of law, that it be done manually by a Muslim
who invokes the name of God before the kill (Nana 2012).
Ahmad extends his ambit beyond Islamic legal concern with what happens
between the holding pen and the knife, to everything that comes before. He grew up
watching his father, a farmer, slaughter animals that roamed free in South Lebanon
(Karaouni 2013a). Also, he’s slaughtered practically every animal he’s eaten for the past
two decades in the United States. Sorting through the stomach contents of the American
animals he didn’t raise, he saw, in partially digested detail, the effects of feedlot finishing
(Karaouni 2012c). “I only found out what kind of animal I had after I killed it and looked
inside,” he says. “But it’s too late after you kill it” (Karaouni 2012c). The animals he
wouldn’t feed his children, he fed to his dogs. He became convinced he needed know
more than about his animals than what they cost.
With his slaughterhouse, where he processes about 2,500 animals each year
(Karaouni 2013e), he joins Muslims who suggest halal may be too tolerant a benchmark
in the age of industrial food systems. “Islamic law is concerned with how the animal is
killed,” says Nuri Friedlander, who with his wife Krystina has founded a website called
Beyond Halal (Friedlander 2013). The two argue that Muslims err by screeching to a halt
at a legal baseline—one that generally permits industrially sourced food—without

4
considering the ethical value: eating animals raised and slaughtered sustainably
(Friedlander 2013).
Nuri, also a doctoral candidate at Harvard studying the role of ritual in animal
slaughter, adds that the Muslim legal tradition focuses narrowly on “whether the
appropriate ritual was carried out correctly. And if it was, the meat is permitted”
(Friedlander 2013). For example, one prominent Pakistani jurist, who has authored a
standard text about halal slaughter, recommends replacing the automated blade at an
industrial chicken abattoir with four humans to ensure God’s name is uttered for each
fowl without slowing down the assembly line (Usmani 2005). “At the same time,” Nuri
continues, “there are many teachings in Islam that talk about how animals should be
treated, how animals should live, that go beyond how the animals spend the last three
seconds of their life” (Friedlander 2013).
The Friedlanders have visited Nature’s Bounty and recommend the
slaughterhouse as one of a handful of sources of ethically produced halal meat they have
found. “I didn’t see how his animals were raised,” Nuri, who is also the son of a Jewish
convert to Islam, tells me, “but [Ahmad] puts a lot personal care into making sure that the
slaughter process didn’t just follow the letter of Islamic law but also some of the spirit of
caring about what the animals experience” (Friedlander 2013).
Ahmad, who is in his early 60s, is sturdy and built low to the ground, like a bull
rider. It’s not hard to imagine him running somebody off his property, something he’s
been known to do as the occasion presents. One day, I just missed it, arriving a shortly
after he spotted a visitor tucking a live pheasant under his jacket (Karaouni 2012a). His
most distinctive feature, more than the American Spirits he jams between his lips

5
between kills, is his right hand, which lacks a thumb and has only a nub for a forefinger.
People think he mangled it butchering meat, but it’s actually an older injury from
Lebanon, an overturned car that pinned his hand, which prompted his emigration to
United States. After recovering, rather than stay a year behind in high school, he applied
to American colleges. Still, he never mastered making his left hand dominant; he writes
right-handed and, more impressively, grips his slaughtering knife with his right hand,
using his three remaining fingers to pinch the handle tightly against his palm.
Before Ahmad decided he would slaughter goats and sheep for a living, he ran a
profitable floral farm for twenty years on the same ten acres where Nature’s Bounty now
stands (Karaouni 2012c). Serendipitously, the market for dried floral arrangements
boomed in the mid-1990s (Ross 1992), and he was doing just fine, selling two to three
hundred thousand dollars worth of flowers each year, taking family vacations—“If I
walked outside without five hundred dollars cash in my pocket, it wouldn’t feel right,” he
says (Karaouni 2012c). But, he saw a way to make more and went all in, planting more
flowers and hiring more employees. Business skyrocketed: millions of dollars a year,
twenty to twenty-five employees, an overflowing bank account—but he was losing
control (Karaouni 2012c). Often, his money was already spent. “A lot of times,” he
continues, “I would put my hand in my pocket, and I didn’t have twenty dollars”
(Karaouni 2012c).
He was big enough to fail, a farmer traveling to trade shows stuffed into a suit and
fenced by the walls of hotel rooms, until a favor for his brother, who had slaughtered
animals in Lebanon, turned into Nature’s Bounty. Transplanted in America, his brother
needed an income. Ahmad had the land—and the cash, about $174,000, after he sold

6
property in Lebanon and Honduras, where his wife is from—and told his brother to
supply the animals (Karaouni 2012c). He was licensed to sell whole carcasses out of his
shop, what’s known as custom slaughter, in August 2008; by November, his brother was
gone. He had been buying bargain-basement lambs and goats at livestock auctions, where
the sick ones were pumped with antibiotics to perk them up for the sale. “The animals
weren’t making it past the third day,” Ahmad complains, justifying his takeover.
“Everyday, we’d have two or three animals dead. I wasn’t trying to open a cemetery”
(Karaouni 2012c).
The kill floor at Nature’s Bounty is in a simple, rectangular building that sits near
the back of his ten acres, about fifty yards behind his house. A wood-railed, outdoor
chute connects this building to a roughly constructed corral a few yards to the east, where
his goats and sheep spend their final days. Typically, Ahmad cycles about one hundred
animals every few weeks. The worst ones are picked up, at a loss for Ahmad, by men
trolling farms and ranches for animals to turn into cheap halal meat. The ones that remain
spend most of their time grazing on a series of fields that horseshoe the perimeter of his
property until they are herded into the holding pens inside the corral, where they stay
until they’re sold (Karaouni 2012a).
It’s also into the corral where customers are herded first, to select their animals.
It’s up to Ahmad or one of his skinners enter the pen to tackle the chosen one—“These
are wild animals, not feedlot animals!” Ahmad often crows while his customers make up
their minds—and drag it, using a maneuver that looks like a headlock, toward the chute.
The animal’s pen mates, presumably sweating bullets, unify into a giant, surging wave,
some on the shoulders of others, against the side of the pen opposite to the wrestling

7
match. “They’re scared,” admits Armando, his skinner. “We’re pushing them, asking
them to come to a place they’re not familiar with. The inspectors say the best thing to do
is spend time with them in the pen and make them think you are their friend.” Armando
grins, amused by the thought. He shrugs. “But there’s not time to do that; this is the only
thing we can do” (Karaouni 2012b).
Once in the chute, however, the animals ordinarily progress unaided toward the
kill floor; if he must, Ahmad will swat larger animals, usually calves, with a plastic oar,
but never deploys electric prods. The chute ends at a door, preventing each animal from
witnessing the previous kill, a recommended act in halal slaughter. On the other side,
each animal is guided into a hard right turn that ends at a hinged, steel contraption
painted grass green and similar in appearance to a giant waffle maker. It’s called a
squeeze box and is positioned upright, on its hinges, as the animal enters. Ten years ago,
Ahmad spotted ranchers using a similar restraint while trimming the hair of show goats.
After the head pokes through the other side, the device is squeezed shut and flipped
ninety degrees so the animal is suspended on its side about three feet above ground and
facing the qiblah, the direction of the Muslim prayer. Unlike conventional operations,
which rarely allow outsiders, including journalists, to view the actual slaughter, Ahmad—
who performs each kill stroke himself—hides nothing, and it’s not unusual to see
children ogling as the animals are bled, skinned, and eviscerated before they’re broken
down for customers.
Ahmad is a midget in a world populated by giants. Take the sheep industry, a
good example because most of the animals slaughtered at Nature’s Bounty are lambs and
goats. American sheep, hovering at about five million in all (National Agricultural

8
Statistics Service 2012a), are scattered across more than 80,000 farms or ranches
(National Agricultural Statistics Service 2011). But in the familiar pattern replicated up
and down the list of animals we eat, almost 60 percent of the 2.2 million lambs and sheep
slaughtered in 2011 were funneled from those 80,000 ranches into the three plants that
dominate sheep processing in the United States (National Agricultural Statistics Service
2012b).
Small slaughterhouses, then, are dwindling rapidly. The American Association of
Meat Processors reports 1,500 local processors have shut down within the last decade
(Estabrook 2010). A Food & Water Watch study, released in 2009, confirms this trend,
charting a 20 percent decrease of small-scale slaughter facilities between 1998 and 2007
(Food & Water Watch 2009). For small operators like Ahmad, who build ethics into their
business model, it’s even more challenging. Each kill helps pay the bills, but the problem
with high-volume slaughter is sourcing animals more like the ones he remembers in
Lebanon, freed from feedlots, irrigated fields contaminated with pesticides, and
antibiotics or hormones. “It’s got to be a small operation,” says Ahmad. “If you do 100
heads a day at one slaughterhouse, that’s 700 heads a week, 2,800 heads a month.
Multiply that by 12 for the year. You’re not going to find those animals. There’s no way”
(Karaouni 2012c).
Ahmad makes forty dollars for each lamb or goat he slaughters (Karaouni 2013c).
With a margin that low, especially when every animal means twenty or thirty minutes of
work, it’s tempting to ramp up production. But he resists this urge, often declining
requests, mostly from owners of halal markets, to expand. Once, he worked once with a
halal market supplier who paid him a few hundred dollars a day to rent his kill floor. It

9
was easy money, and Ahmad tolerated it as long as he could, even as federal inspectors,
who consistently give his facility high marks, raised their eyebrows at the carcasses. They
teased him that Nature’s Bounty should now be called Ahmad’s Fantastic Animals, a
reference to the artificially grown animals they were seeing at his facility for the first
time. One day, he saw his new business partner kill fifteen lambs; of those, two were
condemned by the USDA and another seven had pneumonia. “That was the last day he
killed here,” Ahmad says. “I told him it’s over, finished” (Karaouni 2012b).
When he took over from his brother, Ahmad experimented with livestock auctions
to supply his immigrant customer base but couldn’t verify the provenance of the animals.
His solution: to circumvent auctions by agreeing to purchase all his lambs from a single
rancher two weeks after their birth. It’s a novel arrangement in a line of work where most
ranchers are beholden, with little leverage, to the behemoths of the slaughter industry.
Ahmad reserves his animals with a deposit and promises to complete the purchase at
market price once the lambs mature. The rancher avoids terms dictated by a large
processor or the headache of trucking his lambs to auction, and Ahmad knows what his
lambs have ingested. When he first proposed the deal, he guaranteed buying five hundred
newborn lambs with a twenty-five dollar deposit for each if the rancher vowed to finish
his lambs on grass and not pump them with antibiotics or hormones. “He said I was
crazy,” says Ahmad, “but the first year, he saw that I came up with it.” Now, he’s up to
four thousand lambs with the same rancher (Karaouni 2012b).
Ahmad is protective about this relationship, knowing the market directs ranchers
to produce increasingly larger animals. Even his supplier finishes his lambs for another
processor on grains. “The ranchers, their main aim is profit,” Ahmad shrugs. “They don’t

10
care. The more they feed the animals things like corn, they more the animals are going to
grow. If he can sell his lamb for one hundred fifty dollars or two hundred dollars, which
way is going to go? That’s why I pay a deposit: to let them know that those are my
animals—not your animals” (Karaouni 2012b).
The contradictions, however, aren’t all the fault of the breeders, who follow the
cues of a handful of processors that determine everything from weight to price. The
processors, meanwhile, say they respond to consumer demand, in the form of large
grocery retailers, which pass those standards downstream. For example, Superior Farms,
an industry leading processor with a plant in Dixon, just a ten-minute drive from Nature’s
Bounty, slaughters ten month old lambs, mostly finished on feedlots, weighing between
140 and 170 pounds for this reason (Ahart 2013).
Ahmad isn’t buying it. No rancher, he believes, at least a self-respecting one, will
raise a 170 pound lamb in 10 months. Ahmad sells six to ten month old lambs that range
from 60 to 115 pounds. “130 pounds for me is a disaster,” he says, “at 110 pounds I start
shaking my head.” He does a back-of-the-napkin calculation for a hypothetical 160 lamb
and arrives at 88 pounds of meat. He jerks his head up. “Who wants 88 pounds of meat?”
he demands. “I will not touch it. I will not eat it. If you tell me the lamb was two years
old, that’s something. But ten months at 160 pounds?” (Karaouni 2013b).
When I visited Ahmad again one Saturday afternoon this past spring, I caught him
inside the kill room during a lull after the morning rush, slumped in a plastic black chair,
his head tilted back against the wall. On a grazing field outside, about twenty lambs, born
just weeks ago, huddled near their mothers, animals Ahmad elected to not to slaughter in
the winter because they were “second-class” (Karaouni 2013d). He also didn’t unload

11
them in castaway market for cheap halal meat because they were pregnant—a surprise
that meant one of his males had escaped castration—and he knew the Islamic
discouragement of slaughtering pregnant animals would be ignored. So now he had
babies.
Good news aside, he’d just informed one of his customers that five goats preceded
his lamb in line. The customer took it badly, arguing to be moved up —“I said, Good-
bye; I salute you. So he took off.” Ahmad shrugs. “That’s why [Muslims] are behind the
whole world. They think they are the only ones who exist.” He recalls his father sending
him to government offices in Lebanon with a folded piece of paper and instructions not to
look inside. “So we’re accustomed to it,” Ahmad sneers. “We’re special. We don’t have
to wait” (Karaouni 2013d).
He thinks, sometimes, he’s become too Americanized, having little patience for
habits—haggling, indirectness, unreliability, disregard for time—that he identifies,
almost like an nineteenth century Orientalist, as peculiar to his customers from Muslim-
majority countries (Karaouni 2013d). Some of the more religious bother him in more
inventive ways, rejecting, for instance, his halal authenticity because he follows the Shia
tradition (Karaouni 2012a). One man, who purchases chickens on Tuesdays, insists on
slaughtering his own birds.
Shortly after he bemoans his community, a blue station wagon skids to a stop in
the gravel driveway, carrying five passengers, four men and one woman. Ahmad sighs,
readying himself to argue about something. They exchange pleasantries in Arabic, and
Ahmad leads all five into the corral. Trouble starts when they angle for a male lamb
that’s not castrated. Impossible, replies Ahmad, whose lambs are castrated at two weeks.

12
He tells them he doesn’t have any. The visitors push back, believing he must have at least
one.
“If they had balls, you walk in this place, and everybody would have to cover
their nose,” points out Ahmad defensively, his voice rising. “They smell” (Karaouni
2013d).
A family conference ensues in Arabic. Ahmad tries again, in English: “I killed
five hundred males for qurbani [the Eid al-Adha sacrifice]. They were all castrated”
(Karaouni 2013d).
They retreat, finally believing him, but now demand Ahmad let one of the
younger males—a tall, burly twenty-something wearing knee-length shorts—enter the
pens and select the lamb himself. Nobody does this. “They’re wild animals, not feedlot
animals,” Ahmad warns, warily opening the pen. The youth scuffles with a lamb:
“You’re not supposed to touch them like that!”
The family, it turns out, are Mandaeans (a gnostic, pre-Arab religion) who fled
from Iraq, the woman, the mother of the lamb catcher, explains in halting English.
They’ve lived in the United States for three years, Syria for an additional three. She once
had another son, a goldsmith in Baghdad who’s now dead, shot and killed by bandits
emboldened by the chaos in Iraq. As she speaks, one of her companions, a balding, older
male, disrobes behind the open door of the station wagon, exchanging his trousers and
plaid button-up for a cotton robe, unadorned and dull gray. He strides purposefully into
the kill room, barefoot and a white handkerchief draped like a hood over his head. Inside,
he ceremoniously unsheathes, from a wrapped towel, an ordinary kitchen knife, making it
apparent he’ll slaughter the lamb himself.

13
Ahmad glances up, his eyes widening when he spots the foreign knife in his shop.
Wordlessly, he takes the knife and stalks to the paper towel dispenser, stretching a single
sheet military-bed tight and slicing it across. The knife fails the test. Twice. “Is there any
reason you need this knife?” he asks, a little too loudly. He drops the knife on the
stainless steel counter, the clang calling out his disapproval. The Iraqi agrees to a new
knife, which he sanitizes with hot water before attacking the sheep with a sawing motion.
“That’s enough!” (Karaouni 2013d). Ahmad turns away, spreading his hands in disgust.
I often ask Ahmad the obvious, about why he’s so committed to something—
knowing where his animals come from—most of his customers, more interested in
custom-processed meats at low prices, really aren’t. It’s a softball question, and one that
he’s answered in more than one way, depending on his mood, usually. He won’t sell
anything he wouldn’t also feed his children. He’s inspired by his religion. He detests
Walmart. He has a reputation to uphold. One evening, just before sunset, after the kill
floor’s been hosed down, and Eddie and Armando, his skinners, have left for the day, I
ask him again. This time, Ahmad talks, as he sometimes does, about South Lebanon. His
father, he tells me, employed a herder, an elderly man who was improbably spry, to graze
his goats—he owned about two thousand—in the mountains near his farm. Often his
father would ask Ahmad, then twelve or thirteen, to run lunch up to the herder. “One day
I asked him,” Ahmad says, “Don’t you ever get sick? I don’t understand how you can
take care of these goats at your age.” The herder laughed at him: “He said to me, Sit
down. I’m up in the mountains, where there is fresh air and spring water. If I get thirsty, I
catch a goat and drink”—Ahmad pantomimes pulling a teat towards him and craning his
neck for a gulp—“Why would I get sick?” He looks up, to confirm I see the connection.

14
“When you see where my animals are”—they graze on natural grasses on the Montezuma
Hills, about an hour east of Nature’s Bounty—“you’ll ask the same thing” (Karaouni
2013a).
His animals, he means, have the hills, which is all they really need.

15
REFERENCES

Ahart, Greg (Vice President, Superior Farms). Interview by author, Dixon, California,
January 13, 2013.

Estabrook, Barry. “The Need for Custom Slaughter.” The Atlantic, January 21, 2010.
http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2010/01/the-need-for-custom-
slaughter/33904/.

Food & Water Watch. Where’s the Local Beef?: Rebuilding Small-Scale Meat Processing
Infrastructure. San Francisco, CA: Food & Water Watch, 2009.

Friedlander, Nuri (co-founder, BeyondHalal.com). Telephone interview by author, April
21, 2013.

Grandin, Temple. “Welfare During Slaughter without stunning (Kosher or Halal)
differences between Sheep and Cattle.” Dr. Temple Grandin’s website. September
2012. http://www.grandin.com/ritual/welfare.diffs.sheep.cattle.html.

Halal Advocates of America. “What is Halal? An Overview.” Accessed June 12, 2013.
http://halaladvocates.net/site/our-resources/what-is-halal/.

Karaouni, Ahmad (owner, Nature’s Bounty). Interview by author, Vacaville, California,
December 23, 2012a.

———. Interview by author, Vacaville, California, December 27, 2012b.

———. Interview by author, Vacaville, California, December 29, 2012c.

———. Interview by author, Vacaville, California, January 3, 2013a.

———. Interview by author, Vacaville, California, January 10, 2013b.

———. Interview by author, Vacaville, California, January 12, 2013c.

———. Interview by author, Vacaville, California, March 16, 2013d.

———. Telephone interview by author, June 10, 2013e.

Nana, Abdullah (co-founder, Halal Advocates of America). Interview by author,
Berkeley, California, December 27, 2012.

National Agricultural Statistics Service. Livestock Slaughter 2011 Summary. United
States Department of Agriculture, 2012.

16
———. Overview of the U.S. Sheep and Goat Industry. United States Department of
Agriculture, 2011.

———. Sheep and Goats. National Agricultural Statistics Service, USDA, 2013.

Ross, Elizabeth. “Dried-Flower Market Flourishes in US.” Christian Science Monitor.
December 15, 1992. http://www.csmonitor.com/1992/1215/15072.html.

Usmani, Muhammad Taqi. Legal Rulings on Slaughtered Animals. Translated by
Abdullah Nana. Karachi: Maktaba-e-Darul-Uloom, 2005.

Abstract (if available)

Abstract Ahmad Karaouni operates Nature’s Bounty, a USDA-certified halal slaughterhouse in Vacaville, California, where he offers grass-fed and grass-finished animals that remain free of hormones and antibiotics. Karaouni’s commitment to sustainable slaughter places him in conversation with two trends: a local food movement in the United States that seeks solutions to circumvent the maze of industrial food systems that blocks access to the sources of (and knowledge about) the food Americans eat

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Money moves (to the) mountains: how Zoom towns are changing the housing market forever

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Creator Hasan, Najeeb (author)

Core Title Beyond halal

School Annenberg School for Communication

Degree Master of Arts

Degree Program Specialized Journalism

Publication Date 07/22/2013

Defense Date 07/21/2013

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag halal,Islam,Lamb,Meat,Muslim,OAI-PMH Harvest,slaughter,slaughterhouse,sustainable

Format application/pdf (imt)

Language English

Contributor Electronically uploaded by the author (provenance)

Advisor Tolan, Sandy (committee chair), Jackson, Sherman (committee member), Parks, Michael L. (committee member)

Creator Email najeeb.hasan@gmail.com,najeebha@usc.edu

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c3-294084

Unique identifier UC11294675

Identifier etd-HasanNajee-1806.pdf (filename),usctheses-c3-294084 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier etd-HasanNajee-1806-1.pdf

Dmrecord 294084

Document Type Thesis

Format application/pdf (imt)

Rights Hasan, Najeeb

Type texts

Source University of Southern California (contributing entity), University of Southern California Dissertations and Theses (collection)

Access Conditions The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...

Repository Name University of Southern California Digital Library

Repository Location USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA