Inside a halal slaughterhouse, where the knives are sharp and tradition endures

Adam Musa found what he was looking for here in Livingston, California, a small rural city about two hours from San Francisco.

“Myself and my wife we were really hungry. We wanted some meat,” he says. But it was a particular kind of meat. See, Musa is from the Bronx, grew up with Catholic Latino parents, but later turned to Islam. “I’m a convert or, I like to say, revert,” he says. “I studied Islam, I went to Pakistan. I went to India.”

He follows the faith and eats halal, Arabic for lawful or permissible. When it comes to meat, “we have to treat the animal with utmost kindness and mercy because this animal was put here by God,” says Musa.

But when Musa moved to rural California, finding halal meat wasn’t easy, until he heard about Schawali Mayar. He has run the small halal slaughterhouse since 2000.

Musa placed his first order of steaks on the spot.

For Mayar, his bustling business — keeping up with demand as California’s Muslim community grows — reflects a big shift from how he started life in the United States. He arrived when he was 16, after fleeing Afghanistan’s Wardak Province, where his family, mujahideen fighters, battled the Soviet-backed government at the time. As fighting increased, Mayar eventually had to escape. So he left — walked — out of Afghanistan — through Iran and up to Europe, and then he was allowed to come to the United States.

In California, he worked a corner grocery store in a rough neighborhood in Oakland. “I got minimum wage of $2.75 an hour,” he says. “There were drug deals happening outside, it was not good.” He kept at it, beat the store’s high turnover, and eventually took it over and started to save. 

In 1998, the Mayar family bought this land in Livingston. It’s dry, flat, slightly hilly, and reminds Mayar of Afghanistan. And it’s where he explains the halal process.

Today, it’s all about lambs. About 20 of them are corralled in a small area before they enter, one by one, the aluminum-side slaughterhouse. Inside, each lamb enters a narrow pen and faces northeast toward Mecca. The lamb is then hoisted up by one leg and a butcher from Pakistan takes it from there. 

It's a messy process. This is a slaughterhouse after all. But there’s a prayer: Allahu Akbar. God is great in Arabic.

Then things move very quickly and precisely. Mayar says the idea is for the animal to suffer as little as possible. “It takes seconds to kill these animals in a really humane way,” he says.

The blood also drains quickly and fully. You’re not going to see a rare, bloody halal piece of meat — ever. And soon the animal is off to the meat locker. 

The process repeats with the knife sharpened every time. Only knives used here, too. Some halal slaughterhouses — bigger ones, usually — stun animals before they’re cut. Some Muslims accept that, but not Mayar. He says he can’t electrocute anything.

“I’ve been shocked by Russians before. Electricity,” he says. It was in Afghanistan, when Mayar was a teenager and tortured for information during the war in the ‘80s. “When I see an animal getting shocked, I feel those shocks. I feel that pain.”

So Mayar keeps it simple. His slaughterhouse is only about the size of a large classroom. It’s also a process that’s pretty similar to prepping kosher meat. There are differences of course. With kosher, for example, only a Rabbi can bless the animal. And, usually, only the first and last animal get blessed. With halal, any Muslim can do the job and every animal gets blessed.

And some Jews will eat halal, and some Muslims will eat kosher. It’s a personal choice, says Musa, who also served as an imam for a time in the area. “We’re all following the same tree, and the same tradition of all the religious prophets, and the Abrahamic faith,” he says.

As his workday wraps up, Mayar shows me the meat locker. It’s packed with over 400 lambs. “By Friday, they give another order and this is gone, consumed, completely."

Mayar has non-Muslim customers, too. He provides lambs for Easter.

And his biggest customer? “I’ll tell you right now, it’s a Mexican restaurant,” says Mayar. He says the owner just likes the flavor of the meat.

Halal tacos, two cultures in one. And why not?