DIVERSITY | Offering a place for everyone
03 September 2008
Young Muslim Sees Running Family Business as His “Life’s Journey”
Imran Uddin provides service to Muslim community with halal meat business
Washington — The biggest challenge Imran Uddin faced when taking over his father’s traditional halal slaughterhouse in New York City was earning the trust of the Muslim community.
“To cater to their needs, provide them with halal, it took a lot of time and patience for them to be able to trust me. That was the biggest obstacle that I had to encounter and overcome,” said Uddin in an America.gov webchat August 26.
“I’ve made this my life’s journey,” said Uddin, 31, who left a career in advertising five years ago to take over Madani Halal Lamb, Goat & Poultry, the business founded by his father, Riaz.
“Once I started, I saw how important it was for the Muslim community — how much it was necessary for them to be able to have halal products,” Uddin said.
The Arabic word “halal” means “permissible” and is used for food prepared in conformity with Islamic rules. Since 1996, Madani Halal has produced halal meat for Muslims in Ozone Park, a neighborhood in Queens, although many non-Muslims also purchase Madani products. (Queens is one of the five boroughs that make up New York City.)
“Serving halal to the community is a very big responsibility one has to carry,” Uddin said. “It's not just giving someone a piece of meat; you're blessing their meat for them, for them to consume as part of their religious obligations.”
Some businesses that claim to sell halal products are run by non-Muslims, Uddin said. “I feel as a Muslim, it’s our obligation, it’s our birthright, it’s our responsibility as Muslims to provide these types of businesses and services to the Muslim community.”
Muslims are very supportive of the business and “love the fact that they can have fresh lamb just like many of them get back home,” he said.
Uddin also urged Muslims to support other Muslim-run businesses and to invest in “educational systems, schools, mosques, things like that, whether that is here in America or overseas. It doesn’t matter as long as the Muslim people are investing in themselves.”
While his father is a Bangladeshi immigrant, Uddin’s mother is Puerto Rican, and because of that mixed lineage some Muslims initially were skeptical about his devotion to Islam and thus his commitment to maintaining a strict halal approach.
“They wondered, am I more like my father or am I more like my Puerto Rican mother?” he said.
Uddin — who was in his 20s when he took over the business after having been at school and then working in advertising for several years — also had to win over the company’s employees.
“They were adjusted to one way of doing things and here I came in with all these changes, so they were a little apprehensive initially,” he recalled. Among the changes were a computerized inventory and billing system and a Web site.
Uddin made the choice to go into the business because he was “feeling unhappy and incomplete in the corporate world. There’s a lot of activity that goes on that I don’t feel is proper conduct.” In addition, “I felt that it was time for me to go back to my community, the Muslim community, and be a part of that.”
Life for Muslims in the United States has “definitely changed since I was a child,” he said. There is a large Muslim population in his neighborhood, “and Muslims can walk around feeling proud in their communities because they have their own schools, they have their own stores.”
“Children are being brought up to be American but they will also maintain their culture and tradition as well as their religious obligations, so it’s becoming easier,” Uddin said.
Asked how Muslims are viewed by the public at large, Uddin said he could not generalize because “the United States is a big place” and each community and individual is different. People in New York City, for example, are accepting of virtually every race, ethnicity and religion, he said. Throughout the country “you are going to find those handful of people who aren’t accepting, but then there’s going to be even more people who are going to embrace you.”
The public’s reaction to the halal slaughterhouse provides an example of changing perceptions. When the business opened in 1996, “Americans were initially very skeptical. … Some of them perceive it as being barbaric and not very sanitary and gruesome,” Uddin said.
However, Gourmet magazine recently visited Madani Halal and published an article on the quality of halal meats, “and suddenly it’s becoming like this new trend that getting fresh is better than buying at a supermarket,” he said. “There’s a transition going on within the American community.”
The story of how Imran Uddin struggled to take over the family business and forge his own identity as an American Muslim was captured in a documentary film titled A Son's Sacrifice. See a transcript of a podcast with the film’s director, Yoni Brook, and the film's Web site.
See also a transcript of Uddin's webchat and “A Halal Meat Business Thrives in New York.”
More information about Madani Halal is on its Web site.
Podcast with director of documentary film "A Son's Sacrifice" (MP 3)