This page explains how the guides on MuslimRestaurant.com are researched, sourced, dated, and corrected.
We publish for a reader with a specific problem: you are standing outside a restaurant, you are hungry, and you need to decide whether you can eat there. That reader cannot use hedging, padding, or a confident answer that turns out to be wrong. Everything below follows from that.
1. We tell you when a claim was last checked
Every guide carries two dates: when it was originally published, and when it was last verified. They are different dates and we keep them separate on purpose.
Halal information goes stale in a way that most content does not. A restaurant changes suppliers. A certifier updates its standard. A chain quietly drops a halal line in one region and keeps it in another. An article that was accurate in May can be wrong by September without a single word of it changing.
The "last verified" date tells you how much weight to put on what you are reading. If it is old, treat the guide as a starting point and confirm directly. We would rather show you an uncomfortable date than let you assume freshness we have not earned.
2. We name our sources, and we pick checkable ones
Claims about Islamic dietary law and about certification are attributed to a named source you can go and read yourself — for example the Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA), Islamic Services of America (ISA), the American Halal Foundation (AHF), or a reference work such as Encyclopædia Britannica.
We prefer sources that are:
- Primary over secondhand — the Quran and authenticated hadith for the underlying rulings; a certifier's own published standard for what that certifier actually requires.
- Named over anonymous — "IFANCA defines halal as…" rather than "experts say."
- Checkable over impressive — a source you can verify beats a source that merely sounds authoritative.
If we cannot source a claim, we do not make it.
3. We do not resolve disagreements that scholars have not resolved
This is the commitment that matters most in this niche, and the easiest one to quietly break.
Real, live disagreement exists among qualified scholars and among certifying bodies. Some certifiers accept mechanical poultry slaughter under conditions; others require hand-slaughter. Standards differ between organizations. Schools of thought differ on questions that have been debated for centuries.
Where that disagreement exists, our job is to show you the disagreement and tell you who holds which position — not to pick a winner and present it as the settled answer. You may follow a particular scholar or madhhab. That is your decision and your relationship with your faith, and a website is not entitled to make it for you. See our Disclaimer for the full statement of what this site is and is not.
4. We are specific about what a claim actually covers
Precision is a safety feature here. "This restaurant is halal" and "this restaurant uses halal-certified ingredients" are different claims with different evidence behind them, and collapsing them misleads people.
So we distinguish, in the text:
- restaurant-level certification from ingredient- or product-level certification
- what a certificate covers from what it does not
- what a restaurant has documented from what a restaurant has stated
- an aspirational or ambiguous halal claim from a verified one
We also say plainly when a thing does not exist. There is no federal halal standard in the United States. There is no single database of halal restaurants in America. Where there is a gap, we name the gap instead of writing around it.
5. We assume good faith about restaurants
When a restaurant's halal claim is unverified, that is a fact about the evidence — not an accusation against the owner. Unverified is not the same as dishonest. A claim may be unverified through ignorance, or because it is aspirational, or because restaurant-level certification is simply uncommon in the US.
We report what is documented and what is not, and we let you draw the conclusion. We do not accuse a named business of deception, and we do not imply it through tone.
6. Corrections
If something here is wrong, we want to fix it, and we would rather hear it from you than leave it standing.
Email contact@muslimrestaurant.com with the page and what is inaccurate. If you can point to a source, that helps us move faster.
When we correct a substantive factual error, we fix the text and update the "last verified" date. We do not silently delete a page to make a mistake disappear.
This includes corrections from restaurants. If your establishment is described inaccurately, or your certification status has changed, tell us and we will check it and update it.
7. Independence
Nothing on this site is for sale — not coverage, not placement, and not a favorable verification verdict. How this site is funded, and what commercial relationships do and do not exist today, is set out in full on our How This Site Is Funded page.
8. What we will not do
- We will not present a contested ruling as settled.
- We will not issue religious rulings. We report what sources say; we are not a religious authority.
- We will not claim a restaurant is halal on the strength of a sign in a window.
- We will not pad a guide with filler to make it longer.
- We will not let a page imply it is fresher than it is.
Questions
Questions about how we work, or about a specific guide: contact@muslimrestaurant.com.
Related: Disclaimer · How This Site Is Funded · Privacy Policy