By Huda Ahmed/Oakland Zemzem Mahmoud stands behind the meat counter of a grocery store barking orders at male employees. She tells them to clean the floors, throw away rotten fruit boxes and where to place incoming deliveries. At 5 foot 2, with light skin and wide black eyes, the Eritarian mother of three knows how to run a smooth operation. With her husband, she owns and operates a Halal market and butcher shop in East Oakland, where they sell meat that has been killed in Islamic manner.

Her daily uniform consists of a beige long sleeved-shirt, cloth pants, a gray apron, a headscarf and a piece of gum that never leaves her mouth. But her responsibilities in the store aren’t about keeping things clean or operating the cash register. Instead, she wields a meat cleaver with a surgeon’s accuracy, and for the last eight years, she has worked as a butcher. But a woman in a Halal butcher shop is a rare sight, and some customers aren’t quite used to the idea.

“We are Muslims and she is a lady,” says Muslih Dabashi, a customer who agreed to talk only outside the store. “The woman should stay at home and the man works. She can work only when it is necessary. If the husband has money, then he can hire someone else.”

The Oakland Halal market is located on the corner of 31st street and Telegraph Avenue. It stands next to another Halal deli store, an Islamic bookstore, an Ethiopian restaurant, a health clinic, and a number retail stores and vacant apartments and office spaces. The area around the store is a heavily Muslim community. Some women dress in loose conservative clothes and some are covered from head to toe. Men wear western clothes or traditional Arab gowns and kuffiya or head cap.

The couple opened the store eight years ago. Inside, there is a long glass cooler counter with trays of fruit and vegetables on both sides. Meat slicers sit in front of a wall covered with posters of Islamic holy places side by side with portraits of president-elect Obama. Red bags of garlic gloves hang from the ceiling. The place is crowded with customers from all over the area who are there to buy Halal (permissible) meat.

Mahmoud goes inside the big freezer, comes out hauling a whole carcass over her shoulder and smiles as she lays it under the electric cutting machine. She cuts the meat very quickly into the precise sizes the customers want.

Mahmoud started working in the store when her husband could not keep up with all the customers. She wanted to be more than just a cashier. “I asked my husband to show me how to cut meat because I wanted to know everything about our business, and he did,” she said. “I began to practice every day, and now I’m a professional butcher for eight years.”

It was a big step for a woman from a Muslim background. Most of the rules that keep women at home caring for the children are more related to culture and tradition than to religion. There is no evidence in Islamic Sharia or Quran that forbids woman from work or study, instead, the Holy Book and Noble Hadeeths (prophet’s sayings) describe both God and his Prophet Muhammad urging women to work beside their husbands in tasks that fit them physically.

She laughs when female customers cringe when they see blood on her gloves as she cuts meat, and they wonder why she does it. “They ask me all the time why I accept this hard work and why I do not let my own husband do it,” she said in her broken English. “I tell them that I like what I’m doing. It is like any other job.”

While some people believe it is an unusual job for a woman, not everyone has a problem with it. Farook Mayet, a Pakistani cab driver, says, “It does not bother me, man and woman are equal. It is okay.”
Employees follow her orders without argument and respect her strength. “She is very strong; she picks up the whole meat herself. I do not see that often,” said Hewlett Broderick, a part-time employee. “She teaches me how to cut meat. She is a great teacher.”

Mahmoud believes women are strong. “Women can do anything they want if they have interest and if their husbands allow them.” According to the Muslims’ Holy Book, men are in charge of women. “If we go back to Ethiopia, I will work there too, but only if my husband lets me. I can not argue with him because we live together.”

While she helps out at the shop, she doesn’t neglect her duties at home. The 34 year-old wife and mother gets up at 6:30 a.m. to make breakfast for the family before dropping off her three children at school. She then goes back to her house in East Oakland to finish housework before heading to her work at the grocery store around noon. She finishes her work around six or seven o’clock and returns home to prepare dinner for her family and prepares for the next day.

She turns around looking at her daughters while they are studying in a rear room of the store and dreams that they may have a better life and education in U.S. than she did when she was in Ethiopia. When asked if she wants her children to learn her profession, she says “I do not mind if they want to help me, only if they are happy to do it. I do not want my children to do the same thing. I want them to succeed, finish college and get the highest degrees. Butchering is a hard work, and I want the best for them.”