What have the Muslim to offer?

FOR most of the time when we read reports and analyses about the halal industry, our confidence is usually buoyed by the statistics quoted to describe its rise. The halal industry — from food to cosmetics to hotelier — is now worth an estimated US$1 trillion ($1.46 trillion) a year, and the figure is climbing steadily.

Food makes up about 16 per cent of the whole market, whereas the Islamic finance industry's value, though it currently accounts for just 1 per cent of the global market, is growing at around 15 per cent a year, and could reach US$4 trillion in five years, up from US$500 billion today, according to a 2008 report from Moody's Investors Service.

It should therefore be a wakeup call for the Muslims to read one of the latest reports on the subject, this time by TIME, which says that at least 90 per cent of the halal industry is actually controlled by non-Muslim global corporations! From Tesco to McDonald's to Nestlé to Carrefour, those giants are racing to get the biggest bite from the market powered by the world's 1.6 billion Muslims who are not only younger but also, in some places at least, richer.

So Domino's now sources halal pepperoni from a Malaysian company for the pizzas it sells from Kuala Lumpur to Birmingham; KFC is testing halal-only stores in Muslim areas of the UK, and the Subway sandwich chain has halal franchises across Britain and Ireland. South Korea's LG and Finnish cell-phone giant Nokia are targeting Muslims as well with LG offering an application to help users find the direction of Mekah and Nokia offering free downloadable recitations from the Quran and maps showing the locations of major masjids in the Middle East. In short, the report is saying that even as the market is getting bigger and bigger, the Muslims themselves remain consumers.

How many wakeup calls do Muslims need before they are really aware that the world is passing many of them by? Haven't there been too many of such calls? The movements of international economic players to wrest or retain powers on their own hands are reported daily and in most cases the Muslims are standing on the sideline watching.

Close at the heels of the May "secret" Bilderberg conference in Greece, where some 130 individuals described as "the world's most powerful" planned to continue playing gods with the global economy, four countries with the world's fastest economic growth met earlier this month to discuss their own schemes.

Brazil, Russia, India and China — or Bric, whose internal economic cooperation has been growing by leaps and bounds over the past few years — met at Yekaterinburg in Ural, Russia. Their stated agenda was to seek replacement to the American dollar as the global means of transaction. Supporters of the agenda believe that beyond weakening the greenback is the weakening of the US global military domination. Critics of Bric say that while the US dollar's viability is indeed diminishing, there is no existing viable alternative to it today.

So, is there or isn't there? Whatever is the world's answer to the question, it is in for a dragging debate over the subject. "Do not expect any short-term initiatives with respect to the dollar," said Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil's minister for strategic affairs. However, following the Bric summit, gold futures climbed as the US dollar fell amid speculation that major emerging countries could diversify their reserves away from the greenback, boosting bullion as a hedge against the dollar.

Shouldn't this report serve as yet another wakeup call for the Muslims to take a good look internally? Apart from being consumers and suffering their leaders' political bickering, what has the world's Muslim community done to appease the uncertainty? The cues are already written all over the media reports daily — the weakening of the riba-based and fiat money system, the strengthening of gold and the Muslim history of inflation-free gold as a means of transaction dating back to the time of the Prophet, peace be upon him.