Cape Town - The Muslim Judicial Council has come under fire. The Muslim community was outraged after Radio 786 posted a picture of the Melrose cheese spread with the MJC’s halaal symbol on their page over the weekend.
The Muslim radio station, who says they were alerted by a member of the public, published an accompanying statement from the MJC Halaal Trust.for certifying bacon-flavoured cheese as halaal.
In the statement, the MJCHT says technically the spread is halaal as the bacon flavour is “synthetic”.
However, the MJCHT claims they had an agreement with Melrose not to use their logo on the bacon product.
But social media users accused the MJCHT of being greedy, with Mogammat saying the MJC was being “irresponsible yet again”.
“I don’t buy Melrose at all because they sell bacon products and cannot be trusted. The MJC must pull that MJC halaal certification unless profits are more important than morals,” he said
Naeem added: “The Muslim Judas Council. It’s all about the money.”
Picture: Daily Voice
On Saturday, the MJC Halaal Trust director, Sheikh Achmat Sedick, tried to allay concerns, saying: “In essence, the product does not contain bacon, because the flavouring is synthetic. Thus, the product is halaal.
“The MJCHT has an agreement with the company not to print the MJC Halaal Trust halaal logo on the Melrose Spread product, depicting the word “bacon”, due to the fact that the word “bacon” cannot be reconciled with the term halaal.”
He said the matter was being dealt with.
The Daily Voice visited three retail stores on Sunday and found that the halaal symbo was only on the larger 400g Melrose bacon flavoured jars and not on the 250g container.
Melrose could not be reached on Sunday.
In 2012, protests were held outside the MJC offices in Cashel Avenue, Athlone, after a damning TV exposé involving the Orion Cold Storage company.
An undercover team from e.tv’s 3rd Degree programme discovered the Cape Town-based meat company had tampered with halaal products after they had been certified by MJC officials at the docks.
They showed that pallets of imported products, which were sealed and shrink-wrapped, were opened by staff and repacked into smaller badges.
“From what we saw, there was definite contamination,” one producer said.
The MJC later pulled Orion’s certification.