From hotels with segregated swimming pools to jelly made from seaweed instead of pig bones, majority-Buddhist Thailand is chasing halal gold as it welcomes Muslim visitors and touts its wares to the Muslim world.
Inside the cavernous dining hall of the five-star Al Meroz Hotel Bangkok in a Muslim suburb, an older man with a wispy beard recites verses of the Koran as a nervous-looking groom awaits the arrival of his bride.
The young man bursts into a smile as his soon-to-be wife appears, clad in a brilliant white dress with matching headscarf.
Illustration: Mountain People
The ceremony is one of dozens of marriages held over the past few months at Al Meroz — the city’s first entirely halal hotel.
Thailand has long been a draw for the world’s sunseekers and hedonists, drawn to its parties, red-light districts, cheap booze and tropical beaches.
However, it has also seen a huge influx of visitors from Muslim countries, part of a quiet, but deliberate strategy by the Southeast Asian nation to diversify its visitor profile.
“Considering there are 1.5 billion Muslims around the world, I think this is a very good market,” said Sanya Saenboon, the general manager of the hotel, one of a growing number of businesses serving a boom in Muslim tourists.
The hotel opened its doors last year, setting itself apart with its attention to all things Muslim.
For a start, there is no alcohol on sale, while the top floor swimming pool and gym have specific times for when men and women can use the facilities.
Everything in the building has been ticked off against a stringent checklist for practicing Muslims, from bed linen washed in a particular way to ensuring toiletries are free of alcohol or animal fat — making everyday goods “permissible” for the faithful.
Sanya, who is Muslim, said such checks give visitors “peace of mind” so clients never have to ask themselves: “Can I eat this?”
Despite a decade of political turbulence, Thailand has seen an explosion in tourist arrivals, from 13.8 million annual visitors in 2006 to a record 32.5 million last year.
Western arrivals have largely remained a constant. The biggest increase in arrivals comes from China, skyrocketing from just 949,000 arrivals 10 years ago to 8.7 million visitors last year.
However, Muslim countries are also sending their citizens.
An analysis of government figures shows visitors from key Muslim-majority nations in the Middle East and Asia rose from 2.63 million in 2006 to 6.03 million last year.
“Thailand was ahead of the curve,” said Fazal Baharden, founder of the Singapore-based Crescent Rating, which rates which countries are most welcoming to Muslim travelers.
Thailand routinely places in the top two for non-Muslim majority nations alongside Singapore in Crescent Ratings’ annual survey of halal destinations.
“They’ve really recognized the Muslim consumer market is worth tapping into,” he said, adding that medical tourism, shopping and high-quality hotels are the primary draws.
The Muslim travel market is one of the world’s fastest-growing, thanks to the growth of cheap flights and booming Muslim middle classes, Baharden said.
The number of Muslim travelers has surged from about 25 million per year in 2000 to 117 million in 2015, he estimated.
However, it is not just at home that Thailand has gone halal.
From chicken and seafood to rice and canned fruit, the country has long been one of the world’s great food exporters.
Now, a growing numbers of food companies are switching to halal to widen their customer base.
Against a backdrop of humming machines churning out butter, Lalana Thiranusornkij, a Buddhist, explains how her family turned their three factories — under the KCG Corp banner — halal to access markets in Indonesia, Malaysia and the Persian Gulf.
However, going halal sometimes required some clever work-arounds, such as how to avoid animal-based gelatin to make jelly.
“In the past we used gelatin from pork, but ... we changed our gelatin from the pork source to be from a seaweed source,” she said.
Thailand’s military junta has set the goal of turning the country into one of the world’s top five halal exporting nations by 2020.
Some outsiders might be surprised to see an overwhelmingly Buddhist nation embrace halal.
However, Winai Dahlan, founder of the Halal Science Center at Bangkok’s Chulalongkorn University, said Thailand was well placed to make the change.
Five percent of its population is Muslim and — outside of the insurgency-plagued southern border region — is well-integrated within the Buddhist majority.
It was local Thai Muslims who first began asking for the country’s halal testing center, a business that scours products for any banned substances and has since boomed.
“Fifteen years ago there was only 500 food plants that had halal certification. Now it’s 6,000,” Winai told reporters, as female lab technicians in headscarves tested food products for traces of pork DNA.
Over the same period, the number of halal-certified products made in Thailand has gone from 10,000 to 160,000, he said.
It has paid off. The government estimates the halal food industry is already worth US$6 billion per year.
As Thailand has quickly learned, there is gold at the end of the halal rainbow.
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of