Malaysia Star
Ramadan helps "Muslim market" develop in France By Tom Heneghan, Religion Editor
PARIS (Reuters) - Right on the main aisle, next to the coloured pencils and stuffed toys, a French hypermarket set up a rack of Korans, Muslim prayer collections and books to explain Islam to children.
A few steps away, a mock bedouin tent drew customers to piles of dried fruits, boxes of couscous and a range of French meats from turkey salami to Breton country-style pate, all prepared according to Islam's "halal" dietary rules.
"Today's special offers are dates flown in direct from Algeria for Ramadan," the public address system announced across the vast store that also sells pork, alcohol and racy videos that would be forbidden in a strict Islamic state.
French businessmen say this year's fasting month of Ramadan, which ended last week, marked a new phase in the emergence of a mainstream "Muslim market" among France's five million Muslims, the largest Islamic minority in Europe.
For the first time, the country's main hypermarkets sold the Koran like any other consumer item. Fast-food chains provided special dishes for iftar, the evening meal to break the daytime fast. Arab music stations broadcast special Ramadan evenings.
"This is a market that is just being born," said Mansour Mansour, the Muslim book publisher who got a Ramadan bookstall placed in one of the busiest spots in the Carrefour hypermarket in Saint Denis, a gritty suburb north of Paris.
"We've brought the souk to the hypermarket!" he laughed, conjuring up the image of a chaotic Arab street market in the middle of a European shopping centre. "We want to do Ramandan like the French do Christmas."
Beur FM, a hip Paris radio station aimed at young French Arabs, launched its first special Ramadan schedule this year, replacing its usual music shows with Koran readings, cooking tips and evening discussions among Islamic scholars.
Ramadan, the station's chief executive Nacer Kettane says, "has become like couscous -- it's French".
OUTSELLING HARRY POTTER
The annual fast, the most widely observed Islamic tradition among French Muslims, also inspired American fast-food chains to aim for evening snackers with special evening menus and signs in French and Arabic wishing customers "a good Ramadan".
France's Muslim community, which began decades ago with an influx of North African workers and now makes up 8 percent of the population, had long been too poor and too fractured to be a market of much interest to French retailers.
The Muslim market centred mostly on halal butchers, Arabic bookshops, market vendors peddling "hijab" headscarves and travel agents booking flights back to Algeria or Turkey.
With succeeding generations of French-born Muslims and a growing pride in their roots, their particular consumer needs are starting to attract marketers' attention.
Emmanuel Gacia, manager of the section of the Saint Denis Carrefour selling Mansour's Muslim books, said customers in the mostly Arab and black neighbourhood began asking for Korans three years ago and he stocked some just to see how they'd sell.
"We were the only ones doing it then, but it got around by word of mouth and now our other hyperstores and our competition are doing it," he said as teenage girls in headscarves flipped through Korans and Algerian cookbooks on the nearby stand.
"This is the first year we're selling the Koran in Arabic. The best-seller is a little book of the most common prayers.
"We sell about 100-120 of these Muslim books a week -- that's quite a good pace. Normally 50-60 would be the level for a good seller. Harry Potter only sold 50 the first week here, then slipped back to a cruising speed of about 10-20."
THREATS FROM RADICALS
It took a while for hypermarket Korans to be accepted.
"Some people said we shouldn't put price labels on the Koran. Others complained that girls had stacked them on the shelves or checkout ladies would handle them," said Gacia, recalling his first effort to sell them three years ago.
"Some even complained they were being displayed below the level of a man's waist. But that first year let people get used to buying Korans in a hypermarket. It calmed down the second year and this year we've had almost no comments at all."
Masour, a 33-year-old computer engineer whose father set up the Albouraq publishing house when he brought the family here from Lebanon in 1986, said radical Islamists bullied a woman shopkeeper for several days to remove them before giving up.
"Coming from people in my own community, this was like a knife to my throat," he remarked.
In another store, Muslims protested that Korans sold in the fruit and vegetable section could get dirty until the local manager -- who wanted to keep selling them -- began shrink-wrapping them.
"He was a Muslim and he understood the problem," Mansour remarked. "A Frenchman might have just said 'get rid of them'."
In all, Mansour has placed books in about 60 hypermarkets around France, mostly in the suburbs of large cities where most of the Muslims live. He also sells French-language books to major booksellers such as FNAC and Virgin Megastores.
By far the largest Muslim market in France is the halal meat trade, a disorganised sector which officials estimate is worth about 3 million euros ($3.62 million) annually.
Muslim leaders look enviously at France's Jewish community, which finances some of its organisations from a tax on all kosher meat sold here, but there is no overall control over whether meat sold as halal actually meets that standard.
"We've found that only 20 percent of the meat sold as halal was actually slaughtered under a supervision worthy of the name," Abdelkader Arbi, secretary of the halal commission of France's Muslim Council, said last March.
Copyright (c) 2005 Reuters