As Donald Trump commemorated the 250th day of his second presidential term by ordering the National Guard to invade Portland, over 7000 people gathered in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania to eat halal food. Vendors lined the festival grounds/Islamic center parking lot selling salmon cheesesteaks, Nepali momos, Uzbek samsas, Nashville hot chicken, zabiha smash burgers, modest streetwear, ‘oud-laden ‘itr, and a host of beverages—tingly sweet, highly caffeinated, and bracingly refreshing. Even though the smells, flavors, and sights of halal consumption were front and center at the Philly Halal Food Festival, as Asiyah Jones, the Advocacy Projects Director at CAIR-Philadelphia, told me, this event is “more than a celebration of food—it is a form of public advocacy that affirms halal as a vital public accommodation and a visible expression of Muslim life.”
With every bite of halal food and warm exchange of salaam, the Philly Halal Food Festival brings together diverse Muslims to build networks and amplify positivity despite a political climate of anti-Muslim racism and oppression
With every bite of halal food and warm exchange of salaam, the Philly Halal Food Festival brings together diverse Muslims to build networks and amplify positivity despite a political climate of anti-Muslim racism and oppression. This festival exemplifies one way that Muslims are navigating a highly pressurized U.S. context that renews the surveillance, structural violence, and white Christian nationalism of September 11. Amidst the Trump administration’s scapegoating of Muslims and immigrants (among many targeted communities in America), Muslims have turned to conventional Islamic institutions and mission-driven organizations. But they have also creatively constructed new kinds of institutions—like the halal food festival—that celebrate the diversity of Islamic tradition and bring together fractured Muslim communities.
As Tabish Hoda, one of the organizers told me, many attendees reported that “for the first time they were able to be at an event in the Philadelphia area where you had almost every ethnic background and community represented—you had the African Americans that are deeply rooted in Philadelphia, along with the Indians, Pakistanis, Central Asians, Nepalis, Indonesians, West Africans, East Africans, European Muslims, every kind of Middle Eastern Muslim, and white Muslims. That doesn’t happen very often. Not just in Philadelphia, but in many cities.”
Halal food is central to this project because, as Hoda explained, “food is one of the things that’s non-controversial that tends to bring people together…but, [the food] is a means to an end—it’s the means to accomplish a vision of bringing the community together.” In this way, the Philly Halal Food Festival partakes in a long tradition of Muslims materially and creatively sustaining their communities—whether in the construction of mosques, development of halal cookbooks, or performance of “Muslim cool” by hip-hop artists.
The Stakes of Halal Food Festivals
The proliferation of halal food festivals comes as Muslim communities in the United States navigate a deluge of surveillance, anti-immigrant violence, and political pressure that echoes the so-called “War on Terror” of the mid-2000s. Muslim organizers have convened halal festivals ranging from multi-day events with more than 25,000 attendees in global hubs like New York and Toronto to smaller, halal food-centric gatherings in cities and suburbs throughout North America. These spaces publicly celebrate the material culture of Islam in ways that also advocate the civil rights of Muslims in North America.
It should then come as little surprise that the Philly Halal Food Festival has, from its inception, engaged with Muslims’ pressing political and economic concerns. The very first Philly Halal Food Festival took place five days after October 7, 2023, as Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign in Gaza was in its initial phase. The festival organizers and vendors promoted fundraisers for Gaza throughout the space and partnered with local civil rights organizations like CAIR-Philadelphia, which has carried through all three festivals.
As the Philly Halal Food Festival has become more well-known, they have encountered the now-normalized spectacles of white Christian nationalism of right-wing politics. At the 2025 festival, a January 6th rioter turned Florida congressional candidate traveled to Phoenixville to disrupt the Philly Halal Food Festival with plainly offensive demonstrations that appeared to target social media users more than any festivalgoers. Fortunately, the festival organizers’ collaboration with the Phoenixville Township led to their intervention on behalf of the festival. Hoda joked that “one thing I learned is that we’re a little more popular than we think we are if people are coming from Florida to protest us.”
Philly & the Festival
While the organizers are globally-minded, the Philly Halal Food Festival emerges in response to the needs of Philadelphia’s large, longstanding, and diverse Muslim community. Halal businesses are growing rapidly within the city and metropolitan area as halal restaurateurs expand and innovate the scene, and as Philadelphia’s estimated 200,000 Muslim residents increasingly prioritize halal options. In this landscape, the Philly Halal Food Festival is a space for new and established halal businesses to showcase their goods. The organizers are especially proud of their vendors’ successes, exemplified by the massive growth of businesses like Cousin’s Burger, a halal burger chain that debuted at the first Philly Halal Food Festival and has since grown to five locations. Noor Bowman, another co-founder and festival organizer, said, “Alhamdulillah, there are a lot of businesses that we’ve been able to see grow over the last two years. New businesses, businesses that are now moving into physical locations and things like that. Alhamdulillah. It is beautiful to see people being inspired by success at an event or just this idea of more halal businesses really making a difference.”
Philadelphia also presents challenges, such as what Najah Siddiq, the third co-founder and organizer, observed as the reality that “there are silos—there are a bunch of communities who work to support their own…we don’t work together and partner with those [neighboring] communities to make a larger impact.” Halal businesses and the Muslim communities in which they are situated are just as much fractured by wealth disparities as they are by racial differences, a relationship most effectively described by Malcolm X in 1964 in his well-circulated claim that “you can’t have capitalism without racism.”
The organizers of the Philly Halal Food Festival aspired for their event to intervene in this situation by merging, in Hoda’s words, “spiritual help, socio-economic help, and financial help.” As Bowman told me, the festival could spark economic and social growth by bringing together these siloed Muslim communities and “encouraging Muslims to be entrepreneurial and start these [halal] businesses.”
From a “Whirlwind” to an Institution
So, in 2023, the festival co-founders convened the first Philly Halal Food Festival with the intention to gather Philadelphia’s diverse Muslim communities around halal food. Organizing the first festival was, in Bowman’s words, “a whirlwind.” Siddiq recounted that “it definitely was a lot of legwork in the first halal food festival because, of course, after you do it successfully the first time, people believe in a vision, but trying to convince someone to believe in a vision without the proof on paper is an uphill battle.” Bowman, Siddiq, and Hoda reached out widely to vendors, drew on Hoda’s connections as the creator and manager of the Philly Halal Spots Instagram account, and spread the word through mosques and social networks.
So, in 2023, the festival co-founders convened the first Philly Halal Food Festival with the intention to gather Philadelphia’s diverse Muslim communities around halal food. Organizing the first festival was, in Bowman’s words, “a whirlwind.” Siddiq recounted that “it definitely was a lot of legwork in the first halal food festival because, of course, after you do it successfully the first time, people believe in a vision, but trying to convince someone to believe in a vision without the proof on paper is an uphill battle.”
Eventually, on October 12, 2023, the first festival took place in Phoenixville, a suburb about a 25-mile drive northwest from downtown Philadelphia, in the parking lot of the recently constructed Khair Community Center. The suburban location initially drew criticism from some community members who complained to the organizers and on social media that it should be located within the city limits. Phoenixville was a practical choice that centered on, as Bowman said, the potential “logistical issues” that come with Philadelphia’s sizable bureaucracy. The suburban township has turned out to be more than practically beneficial, as the local township protected the Philly Halal Food Festival when the MAGA-aligned Florida congressional candidate attempted to disrupt the event.
The festival has been by all measures a huge success. In terms of community buy-in, the festival has grown from more than 3,000 attendees that first year, to 6,000 in the second year, to more than 7,000 in the third year. The number of vendors has not only increased by year—from 41 food vendors in the first year to 60 food vendors and 46 non-food vendors by year three—but also diversified in the number of food categories represented. And the festival organizers have received glowing reviews on social media and in news coverage.
Vendor responses have been enthusiastic such that, according to Bowman, “it was way easier recruiting vendors, since people actually came to us this time around; whereas, before, each of us was literally chasing people, convincing them, and messaging them.”Amr Scott, who has run his family’s halal butcher shop Prime Halal Meat since 2000, described the annual festival as an excellent space in which to network with other small halal businesses and connect with new customers. Still, when I asked him about the highlights of the festival, Scott focused on community, telling me that “the festival brought Muslims together for one reason, which is food that they can eat—I think that’s the biggest thing of all.”
Festivalgoers have also spoken highly of the space. Two friends with whom I attended the 2024 Philly Halal Food Festival told me how “refreshing” it was to be in “a place where it was welcome to be Muslim and salaams are given freely without worry about who might be listening.” Both of these friends were here in the United States on visas, and they had become increasingly risk-averse as the 2024 presidential election approached and Republicans centered an anti-immigrant platform. For many festival participants, the Philly Halal Food Festival provided not only food but also a respite from the divisiveness and structural violence that are increasingly normalized in the United States.
The Future of the Philly Halal Food Festival
Moving forward, the main challenge for the Philly Halal Food Festival had been finding a space that can accommodate its expansion. When I asked Hoda about the future of the festival, he told me that, along with praise of the event, the main feedback the organizers received was “we may have outgrown this venue, because there are limitations when it comes to parking, traffic control, and things like that.” The next phase of the Philly Halal Food Festival required a significantly larger yet still affordable space with substantial parking and allowance for open-air grills.
As of June 16, 2026, the festival officially resolved the issue of location. By email and social media, the Philly Halal Festival announced that the King of Prussia Mall will house the fourth annual festival and provide “our vendors and sponsors with a larger platform to showcase their brands while allowing us to welcome more attendees than ever before!”
As of June 16, 2026, the festival officially resolved the issue of location. By email and social media, the Philly Halal Festival announced that the King of Prussia Mall will house the fourth annual festival and provide “our vendors and sponsors with a larger platform to showcase their brands while allowing us to welcome more attendees than ever before!” The festival’s relocation to the largest mall in Pennsylvania not only expands the size of the event but also brings it slightly closer to the city limits of Philadelphia. It remains to be seen how some of the core aspects of the festival—such as the sonorous adhaan and the on-site mosque—translate to its new venue.
Whatever comes next, it will be rooted in the organizers’ vision in which “food serves as a means of unification, as an opportunity to create a platform where different cultures—international and domestic—can all come together under one banner and work together to showcase what our tradition has to offer.”
Max Johnson Dugan is a religious studies scholar who specializes in modern Islamic material and visual culture, embodiment, and emotions. He is the incoming Visiting Assistant Professor of Islam at Trinity University. Currently, he is preparing a book project about the ways that Muslims in Philadelphia enact and negotiate Islamic tradition through halal consumption. Tentatively entitled Feeling Halal Consumption: The Material Transmission of Islamic Tradition in a Gentrifying Philadelphia, this monograph examines halal consumption in Philadelphia using a combination of ethnographic and digital humanistic methods to understand the material interrelations of Islamic tradition with social class, race, gender, and space.
*Unless otherwise noted, all photos are by the author from 2023-2025 iterations of the Festival.