Some months after the food court in Jurong East Entertainment Centre opened about 2 years ago, I noticed that it didn't have the usual Nasi Padang stall selling Malay-Muslim food. I vaguely remember that it did at the beginning, but I hadn't paid much attention.

The absence (or closure) of the Nasi Padang stall only struck me when a new addition to the food court, serving another minority, arrived: a stall selling Indian food -- not Indian Muslim food, but dhals, curries and meats served on a thali with rice or bread. This stall has done well since, especially as the International Business Park nearby employs quite a number of expatriate Indian software engineers. Each time I'm there, I see a queue at the stall, which must now count as one of the best performers among the food court's subtenants.

Left: the Jurong East stall. Above: a meal served on a thali (not from the stall).

On the one hand, you can decry the increasing marginalisation of the Malay-Muslim community; it gets harder to mainstream a community when we can't even eat together. On the other hand, you cannot expect a business to keep providing for a market segment that continues to spurn it. The fact is, there would be a Malay-Muslim stall if demand justified it.

The trend of Singapore Malays preferring all-halal dining establishments has been noted for a long time. Single Muslim stalls in non-Muslim dining halls are rarely favoured.

One key reason, I suspect, has to do with plates and eating utensils. Strict adherence requires that these too should never come into contact with pork; washing alone is not good enough. However, the logistics of managing a food court are such that for efficiency, these should be pooled.

Individually, most Muslims in Singapore don't actually care that much, but in any group of them, e.g. a family, one or more may be particular about this, and so the whole group is then directed away from mixed dining establishments in order to accede to the strictest member's wishes. This bleeds support for stalls in mixed food courts.

Two restaurants in this row are Indian Muslim. The third appears to be Chinese-owned.

The patronage is directed towards all-Muslim restaurants. For instance, while the 24-hour food court at the junction of Bencoolen Street and Bras Basah Road may not have enough demand to justify a Muslim food stall despite easily over a thousand customers daily, 400 metres away, at the junction of Bencoolen Street and Middle Road, the 3 Muslim restaurants in the photo at right are doing well.

This gives rise to a phenomenon which non-Muslim Singaporeans may not be aware of. We're so used to being able to find food at every corner in Singapore, we can rely on what I call grazing, to keep ourselves fed. For Muslims, however, I suspect they have to carry a map in their heads with halal food places marked out in each district that they frequent. They do this so effortlessly, we don't notice that for them finding food is not a matter of just looking left and right wherever they are.

A tourist however, does not have the benefit of such a mental map. Thus Zainol Abidin in his Mahaguru blog on 18 November 2007 remarked that during his recent visit to Singapore, he had to forego dining at Ikea's restaurant in Tampines because it wasn't a halal-certified restaurant, even though he had looked forward to it. Being Malaysian, he was used to having most restaurants other than clearly Chinese ones certified halal.

More generally, Zainol advised that Singapore "set up the 'Halal' requirements in all your food courts and restaurants." Just like in his home country.

This is not a suggestion that would fly. In fact, to pursue such an objective would be socially divisive. Unlike Malaysia, where 60% of the population is Muslim including the ruling class, in Singapore just 15% are, and they tend to have lower purchasing power per capita than the non-Muslims.

I can anticipate this argument: non-Muslims can very well eat at halal places but not vice versa, so why not accommodate the Muslims even if they are a minority? Such an argument completely ignores the reality that there are plenty of dishes non-Muslims like which include pork, ham and bacon [1]. How can you deny people these? What about dishes that require brandy or wine as an ingredient? Moreover, it is doubtful whether certain items or cuts of meat required for haute-cuisine, e.g. foie gras, are available in halal-certified form. How will top-end restaurants maintain standards without them?

While I'm not sure about this, I doubt if one can even serve beer or wine in a halal-certified restaurant. So my point is: it's far too glib to say non-Muslims can and should be happy enough eating at halal-certified places.

Then there are issues I have with the whole notion that halal-certification is a monopoly business, available only through a single body, the Majlis Ugama Islam Singapura (MUIS). In contrast, ISO certification for businesses can be obtained via a number of competing certification bodies.

Once we exert public pressure for place to go halal, we give more power to a monopolistic religious body.

Since only MUIS can issue a certificate, it has a free hand in determining the conditions and the fees. Fortunately, the fees are not unreasonable, being S$320 per food stall per year and S$480 to $640 per restaurant per year.

It is the condition (see box on the right), requiring the stall or restaurant to hire at least 2 fulltime Muslim employees, smacking as it does of religiously-based quotas, that personally, I consider the most unacceptable. A food stall, for example, may have in total no more than 2, 3 or 4 employees. What are the consequences of requiring all stalls in all food courts to be halal-certified?

For this reason alone, I find myself avoiding halal-certified places if I have a choice. I don't want to support such mandatory quota schemes.

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When a community gets used to eating exclusively in its own dining places, its members would feel awkward to share a table with non-Muslims on other occasions.

Yet eating together is an important social lubricant.

A few years ago, government leaders here noted the trend towards the segregation of the Muslims from non-Muslims at community functions. something which they felt was unhealthy. They said it was not desirable that Muslims should be sitting at separate tables from non-Muslims; they should be sitting at mixed tables, albeit that the food brought to them come from a Muslim kitchen. I don't know if the trend has been reversed, but even if it has, it would only be at those events that state-affiliated bodies organise. I don't see any ground-up desire to do things differently in privately-organised events.

Some food court chains are now developing a separate brand for halal-certified food courts

In fact, looking at how food courts increasingly do without a halal-certified Malay-Muslim stall, I'd say the trend towards separation continues unabated. Will this lead to further invisibility of Malay-Muslims in Singapore? Will Singaporeans, Muslim and non-Muslim, never acquire the habit for sensitivity simply because the trend is towards segregation rather than interaction?

Then again, perhaps we're fretting about nothing, for people seem happy enough to eat at separate places. Why are we trying to socially-engineer people to fit some textbook conception of "social harmony"?

© Yawning Bread